Rational dictators and the killing of innocents: Data from Stalin’s archives

Gregory, Paul R.; Schröder, Philipp J. H.; Sonin, Konstantin

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2010.12.001

Cited by 52 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…37 A chilling political rationale for the Great Terror of 1937-1938 -in terms of maintaining a supportive constituency by simply eliminating 'enemies' -has been developed by Gregory et al (2006Gregory et al ( , 2011; and a political-economy account of the command regime is provided in Harrison (2002Harrison ( , 2008.…”

Section: Political Survivalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Initial 'limits' for arrests and executions and the duration of the campaign had to be rapidly revised upwards to meet requests by local officials -many of whom were later punished for exceeding targets." (Gregory et al, 2011). 21 In 1937.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Incentives for officials also promoted opportunism: "the NKVD itself opportunistically selected victims with large apartments that became a part of the NKVD inventory" (Gregory et al 2011: 40, citing Vatlin, 2004. 30 As Gregory and Harrison (2005: 739) note, "A broken-down commuter bus could make criminals of scores of hapless workers.…”

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confidence: 99%

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In the shadow of the Gulag: Worker discipline under Stalin

Miller

Smith

2015

Journal of Comparative Economics

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An 'efficiency wage' model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted in the context of Stalin's Russia, with imprisonment -not unemployment -acting as a 'worker discipline device'. The threat of imprisonment allows the state to pay a lower wage outside the Gulag than otherwise, thereby raising the "surplus" left over for investment: this externality provides a reason for coercion over and above the direct productivity of those in custody.Just how credible the threat of imprisonment was under Stalin is documented using archival data now available; but the enormous scale of random imprisonment involved is, we argue, attributable not to economic factors but to Stalin's insecurity in the absence of a legitimate process for succession.We develop a model of demand and supply for industrial labour in such a command economy. To get more resources for investment or war, the state depresses the level of real wages; to avoid incentive problems in the wider economy, the harshness of prison conditions can be intensified. This is the logic of coercion we analyse.

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Section: Political Survivalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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In the shadow of the Gulag: Worker discipline under Stalin

Miller

Smith

2015

Journal of Comparative Economics

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“…Stalin favoured investment over consumption when possible, but returned the priority to consumption when intelligence reports warned him that he risked violating the workers' fair wage constraint (Gregory 2004;Gregory and Harrison 2005). He preferred selective repression when possible, but switched to mass killing when internal threats became less well defined (making selection more difficult) and when external threats increased (making the neutralization of internal threats more urgent) (Harrison 2008b(Harrison , 2011bGregory et al 2011). New work by Markevich (2011) points in the same direction: In his general approach to business, Stalin aimed for efficient control, not for control at all costs.…”

Section: Figure 1 Optimizing Secrecymentioning

confidence: 99%

Secrecy, Fear and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War

Harrison

2013

Europe-Asia Studies

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This paper is about the costs of doing business under a harsh, secretive dictator. In 1949 the Cold War was picking up momentum. The Soviet state had entered its most secretive phase. The official rationale of secrecy was defense against external enemies. One of the Gulag's most important secrets was the location of its labour camps, scattered across the length and depth of the Soviet Union. As this secret was guarded more and more closely, the camps began to drop out of the Soviet economic universe, losing the ability to share necessary information and do business with civilian persons and institutions without disclosing a state secret: their own location. For some months in 1949 and 1950, the Gulag's camp chiefs and central administrators struggled with this dilemma and failed to resolve it. This episode teaches us about the costs of Soviet secrecy and raises basic questions about how secrecy was calibrated. Secrecy, Fear, and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold WarWe had to write an essay on "the economic level of security." Total security led to paralysis, for only if no one said or did anything could nothing be given away. Too little security led to disaster. Where was the golden mean? It was as good, or as pointless, a subject for debate as the medieval argument about how many angels could sit on the head of a pin (Frankland 1999, p. 83; the assignment was part of his training for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1958).A colleague of mine used to quip "Got an access denied? Good, the security is working." That means that security administration is fundamentally opposed to network administration -they are, in fact, conflicting goals … Essentially, the tradeoff is between security and usability. The most secure system is one that is disconnected and locked into a safe (Johansson 2004).When it comes to the costs of doing business, it would seem that an autocrat has many advantages. Leaders that do not have to account for their decisions may decide without counting costs; in the absence of procedural checks, they rule by fiat. Democratic leaders, in contrast, must uphold the constitution that gives them legitimacy, respect checks and balances, listen to public and private lobbies, build and maintain coalitions of voters, factions, and parties, ensure transparency of the process that leads to their decisions, and so share ownership of the decisions that result with others. 1 Or, if they do not, they are likely to pay a price in the loss of office or the ruin of their reputation.1 "Process," writes a former permanent secretary in the UK Ministry ofDefence (Quinlan 2004, p. 128), "is care and thoroughness; it is consultation, involvement and co-ownership; it is (as we were reminded by the failure of international process in the run-up to the Iraq war) legitimacy and acceptance; it is also record, auditability and clear accountability. It is often accordingly a significant component of the outcome itself; and the more awkward and demanding the issue -especia...

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“…As it was costly to investigate every single scholar-official for having potentially subversive views and because the imperial administrative faced severe agency problems, it was preferable to single out a small number of individuals to be investigated and punished. Gregory et al (2011) study the Stalin-era purges to examine why a rational dictator has an incentive to persecute individuals who are not genuine enemies in the presence of low quality information. Like the Stalin-era purges, the literary inquisitions of the Qing period were not so much targeted as specific individuals guilty of wrong-doing, but rather aimed at overawing the entire class of scholar-officials into submission by demonstrating that any of them could be persecuted.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Literary Inquisition: The Persecution of Intellectuals and Human Capital Accumulation in China

Koyama

Xue

2015

SSRN Journal

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Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To explore the long-run impact of literary inquisitions we employ a model to show that persecutions could reduce the provision of basic education and have a lasting effect on human capital accumulation. Using the 1982 census we find that literary inquisitions reduced literacy by between 2.25 and 4 percentage points at a prefectural level in the early 20th century. This corresponds to a 69% increase in the probability of an individual being illiterate. Prefectures affected by the literary inquisition had a higher proportion of workers in agriculture until the 1990s.

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Rational dictators and the killing of innocents: Data from Stalin’s archives

Cited by 52 publications

References 11 publications

In the shadow of the Gulag: Worker discipline under Stalin

In the shadow of the Gulag: Worker discipline under Stalin

Secrecy, Fear and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War

The Literary Inquisition: The Persecution of Intellectuals and Human Capital Accumulation in China

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