The Geopolitics of Repressions

• Thesis title in Czech: Geopolitika represí
• Thesis title in English: The Geopolitics of Repressions
• Key words: represe, geopolitika, Sovětský svaz, rozdíl v rozdílech, metoda syntetické kontroly, archivní data
• English key words: repression, geopolitics, Soviet Union, difference-in-differences, synthetic control method, archival data
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2017/2018
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Institute of Economic Studies (23-IES)
• Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Julie Chytilová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned by the advisor
• Date of registration: 31.05.2018
• Date of assignment: 31.05.2018
• Date and time of defence: 11.06.2019 09:00
• Venue of defence: Opletalova - Opletalova 26, O314, Opletalova - místn. č. 314
• Date of electronic submission: 09.05.2019
• Date of proceeded defence: 11.06.2019
• Opponents: Mgr. Michal Paulus

References

Abadie, Alberto, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller. 2010. “Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 105 (490): 493–505.
Abadie, Alberto, and Javier Gardeazabal. 2003. “The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country.” American Economic Review 93 (1): 113–32. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282803321455188.
Blaydes, Lisa. 2018. State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Princeton University Press.
Davenport, Christian. 2007. State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace. Cambridge University Press.
Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. 2016. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions And State Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lupu, Noam, and Leonid Peisakhin. 2017. “The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations.” American Journal of Political Science 61 (4): 836–851.
Martin, Terry. 1998. “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing.” The Journal of Modern History 70 (4): 813–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/235168.
Mylonas, Harris. 2013. The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities. Cambridge University Press.
Polian, Pavel. 2003. Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Rozenas, Arturas, Sebastian Schutte, and Yuri Zhukov. 2017. “The Political Legacy of Violence: The Long-Term Impact of Stalin’s Repression in Ukraine.” The Journal of Politics 79 (4): 1147–1161.
Zhukov, Yuri M., and Roya Talibova. 2018. “Stalin’s Terror and the Long-Term Political Effects of Mass Repression.” Journal of Peace Research 55 (2): 267–283.

Preliminary scope of work in English

Research question and motivation
What determines the attitude of a state toward ethnic minorities within its borders? Why are some minorities accommodated or assimilated and others are politically excluded and repressed? Furthermore, why does the position of a state toward its minorities change in time?

Mylonas (2013) argues that geopolitical concerns play an important role. Specifically, a state is likely to choose repression and exclusion if the ethnic minority's country of origin is seen as a geopolitical enemy. The minority is then viewed by the state as unreliable and as a potential fifth column of the foreign country.

I will test this hypothesis on the case of the German minority in the Soviet Union. In 1933, Hitler’s rise to power changed Germany from a neutral actor to an ideological and geopolitical enemy in the perspective of the Soviet Union. This enables us to estimate how the repression of Germans in the USSR changed before and after 1933 and compare it with other minorities. In particular, I plan to use the individual arrests by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) as a dependent variable and employ the difference-in-differences strategy.

Contribution
Existing literature on repressions has focused mostly on their consequences and legacies (Rozenas, Schutte, and Zhukov 2017; Lupu and Peisakhin 2017; Zhukov and Talibova 2018). As far as the strategic use of repressions by the state is studied, it is usually in relation to domestic factors such as institutions and economic shocks (Davenport 2007; Greitens 2016; Blaydes 2018) with less attention being given to external forces. An exception to this is a study by Mylonas (2013) which tests his theory with data on the post-World War I Balkans. However, his cross-sectional regression might suffer from omitted variable bias and reverse causality and my approach hopefully offers cleaner identification.

My bachelor thesis can also contribute to the literature on the origins of Soviet ethnic repressions. Although many scholars argue that a perceived connection to hostile external powers has played a role (Martin 1998; Polian 2003), the evidence has been mostly qualitative and anecdotal.

Methodology
My main source of data will be replication files from Zhukov and Talibova (2018) who use lists of victims of Soviet political repressions aggregated by Russian NGO Memorial. The difference-in-differences strategy will be used to estimate the impact of change German-Soviet relations caused by Hitler’s rise to power on arrests of Germans in the USSR.

However, the parallel trends assumption, which is necessary for unbiasedness of difference-in-differences, can in some cases be violated. As a robustness check, I plan to apply the synthetic control method which constructs a synthetic control group as a linear combination of untreated units (in our case ethnicities) based on matching of pre-treatment trends and time-invariant covariates (Abadie and Gardeazabal 2003; Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller 2010).

Outline
1) Introduction
2) Literature review
3) Historical background
4) Data
5) Methodology
6) Results
7) Conclusion