Roots of Courage: Persistence of Past Repression and Anti-War Dissent

Abstract

Many autocratic regimes have a history of mass repression. We ask whether their political legacies backfire when an autocrat starts a war of aggression. We study Russia’s 2022–2025 invasion of Ukraine and exploit spatial variation in exposure to one of the twentieth century’s largest systems of repression: the Soviet Gulag. Combining the historical geography of 474 Gulag administrative centers with granular modern data on (i) anti-war detentions and (ii) 23 waves of geo-located public opinion surveys, we document systematically stronger anti-war dissent in municipalities closer to former camps. These municipalities experience more anti-war detentions, and their residents are more likely to express explicit opposition to the war in surveys. All effects are concentrated among younger cohorts, who never experienced Soviet repression directly but learned about Stalinist crimes in their formative years. To probe this memory channel, we use novel data on online searches and show that people living in the immediate vicinity of Gulag sites more often search for terms associated with Stalinist repression around 30 October, the official Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repression. This pattern indicates sustained interest in the dark side of Soviet history in locations where the physical traces of the camps remain visible, partially via memorials. Our findings contribute to the literature on the persistence of political violence by showing that historical mass repression can constrain an autocrat’s ability to generate a wartime “rally-around-the-flag” effect and that public commemoration of past injustices is associated with greater resistance to contemporary unlawful military interventions.