CANCELED: Mass Repression and Political Loyalty: Evidence from Stalin's "Terror by Hunger"

The lecture scheduled for tomorrow, March 22, by Yuri Zhukov is CANCELLED, due to the winter storm on the East coast and resulting flight cancellations. We will work to get Professor Zhukov back to campus another time.

press release: 206 Ingraham Hall. Feb 22 4:00-5:30 pm 

Speaker: Yuri Zhukov, assistant professor, political science, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

What is the net effect of mass repression on the behavior of citizens? In their research, Yuri Zhukov and Arturas Rozenas address this question by studying the political legacy of Stalin’s coercive agricultural policy and collective punishment campaign in Soviet Ukraine, which led to the death by starvation of over three million people in 1932-34. Using unusually rich data on eight decades of local political behavior, they find that this act of mass repression inflamed opposition to Moscow, but only when the threat of renewed violence was absent. When such threat was present, communities more exposed to ‘terror by hunger’ behaved more loyally toward the regime.