Research
Dissertation:
“Industrialization, Land Inequality and Unrest: Evidence from the Late Russian Empire”
(The winner of the 2021 Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award for the best doctoral dissertation in institutional and organizational economics)
My award-winning dissertation examines the influence of economic development on conflict in the context of persistent land inequality and agrarian backwardness. It addresses an important and understudied problem: distributional consequences of economic development and their implications for social and political stability. Apart from unambiguous material gains, modernizing economic transformations, such as industrialization, create both losers and winners, potentially provoking social unrest. Better understanding of political-economic trade-offs lying at the heart of these processes is indispensable for their proper analysis both in contemporary and historical contexts.
I consider the case of the Russian Empire in the last decades of the XIX – early XX century as a late industrializer undergoing rapid socio-economic transformation and grappling with mounting popular discontent. The focus is on the pervasive rural conflict that had far-reaching consequences: it revolutionized the countryside in 1905–1907, undermined prospects of stable democratic representation, and facilitated the downfall of the Tsarist regime in 1917, which was followed by a mass takeover and redistribution of privately-owned land by peasant communes.
Analyzing determinants of peasant unrest with the help of quantitative and qualitative evidence based on originally collected data, I show that the prevalence of industries heavily reliant on locally sourced raw materials (e.g., sugar production) could provoke peasant unrest and make it more sensitive to land inequality, whereas the opposite was true for externally sourced industries (such as cotton manufacturing), which could provide local rural inhabitants with additional employment opportunities without competing with them for the use of agricultural inputs.
My theory is motivated by a detailed exploratory case study of a large-scale peasant uprising in 1902 in Poltava province, which draws on numerous published archival documents and statistical surveys. In order to test the theory, I perform a yearly district-level panel data analysis for 1879–1904, which utilizes an original dataset covering the European part of the Russian empire. In particular, I use yearly data on peasant unrest coded from published “chronicles of the peasant movement” and enterprise-level data (aggregated by district) on industrial employment and output taken from industrial censuses and surveys at six time periods over the four decades of 1879–1908. Another empirical exercise, largely confirming and reinforcing the findings of the district-level analysis, examines determinants of peasant disturbances in a selected province (Kursk gubernia, an agrarian region in Southwest Russia) at a lower level of observation in 1905–1906, at the peak of the revolutionary movement which was launched by exogenous events and swept over the whole Empire.
Selected Publications:
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
[7] "Is Post-Communism Over? What Is and Is Not Distinctive about Eastern Europe and Eurasia Three Decades after Communism" (with Anton Shirikov and Yoshiko Herrera),
Problems of Post-Communism, 2024, 1-15.
[6] "Sources of Authoritarian Resilience: New Perspectives on Power-Sharing and Popular Support" (Review Article)
Comparative Politics, 2024, 56(2): 243-264.
[5] "Encouraged to Cheat? Federal Incentives and Career Concerns at the Sub-National Level as Determinants of Under-Reporting of COVID-19 Mortality in Russia" (with Alexander Libman, Vladimir Kozlov and Nikita Zakharov),
British Journal of Political Science, 2022, 1–26.
[4] "Eurasia and Postcommunism: Weasel Words?" in "Weasel Words and the Analysis of Postcommunist Politics: A Symposium" (with Yoshiko Herrera and Anton Shirikov),
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 2020, 34(2): 288–295.
[3] "Career Incentives in Political Hierarchy: Evidence from Imperial Russia" (with Gunes Gokmen),
European Review of Economic History, 2019: 1–24.
[2] "Ukrainian Nationalist Parties and Connective Action: an Analysis of Electoral Campaigning and Social Media Sentiments" (with Larisa Doroshenko, Tetyana Schneider, Michale A. Xenos, Dietram A. Scheufele and Dominique Brossard),
Information, Communication, and Society, 2019, 22(10): 1–20.
[1] "(Good) Land and Freedom (for Former Serfs): Determinants of Peasant Unrest in European Russia, March – October 1917" (with Evgeny Finkel and Scott Gehlbach),
Slavic Review, 2017, 76(3): 710–721.
Book Chapters:
``What is Eurasia and Eurasianism'' (with Yoshiko M. Herrera),
in Alexander Libman and Evgeny Vinokurov (eds.), The Elgar Companion to the Eurasian Economic Union,, 2024, Edward Elgar Publishing: 13–26 .
"Sovereignty and Regionalism in Eurasia" (with Anton Shirikov and Yoshiko M. Herrera),
in Anssi Paasi, John Harrison, and Martin Jones (eds.), Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories, 2018, Edward Elgar Publishing: 395–406.
Blogs:
"Peasants, Industrialization, and Conflict", in Broadstreet Blog, 2021, Aug 20.
Work in Progress:
This paper examines the long-term effect of past compulsory labor institutions on conflict, considering the case of serfdom in the Russian Empire. A village-level analysis of conflict in Kursk province in 1905--1906, based on a novel rich dataset and employing matching and instrumental variables methods, shows that during half a century after the 1861 emancipation of serfs, villages populated by former serfs were about three times more likely to be affected by disturbances than non-serf peasants. The unrest was typically provoked by disputes over land and other agricultural assets. The effect of serfdom cannot be fully explained by uneven land distribution or underdevelopment. The perceived unfairness of post-emancipation land division between landlords and emancipated serfs set the ground for unrelenting peasant discontent, reinforced by conducive institutional and economic environment. Former serf peasants tended to attack the very estates to which they and their ancestors belonged before the reform.
Contact, Threat, and Violence During Political Upheaval: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the 1905 Russian Revolution (with Paul Castañeda Dower, Scott Gehlbach, and Steven Nafziger)
What drives violent confrontation between groups in multi-ethnic and multi-confessional societies? Why do some communities in such societies experience conflict, while others remain peaceful? We explore these questions in the context of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which triggered numerous anti-Jewish pogroms. Using newly digitized data on the religious composition of all Jewish and non-Jewish settlements with more than 500 inhabitants in the Pale, we examine the relationship between the size of the Jewish population and change in pogrom incidence in 1905, after publication of the October Manifesto, which promised an elected legislature and granted basic civil and political rights. The appearance of the Manifesto was accompanied by antisemitic propaganda and increased feelings of political threat among many non-Jews. We show that the sharp increase in pogroms after October 1905 was smaller in settlements with relatively large Jewish populations, which means that the relative size of minorities can play a role in insulating communities from the violence that often accompanies momentous political change.
Nation as Reaction: The Political Mobilization of the Far Right in Imperial Russia (with Carles Boix)
Military defeat abroad results in most cases in two conflicting developments in modern autocracies: the collapse of their political institutions and the rise of a reactionary ideological movement to restore the old regime, purifying it from those elements and groups thought to be behind its demise. This project focuses on the causes of the rise and the nature of Russia's far right during the first breakdown of autocracy in 1905-07, concomitant with its defeat at the hands of Japan in the 1904-05 war. We take advantage of previously untapped published archival data on the local organizational presence of monarchist far-right parties and organizations in the Russian Empire in 1907. Russian reactionaries appealed to the values of tradition and nation, understood around the principles of religious Orthodoxy and the preeminent position of the Russian nation in the empire, and aimed to restore order at home and the status of great power abroad. They embraced modern politics, establishing parties and competing in elections, and mobilized those sectors that felt threatened by liberalism, the socialist movement, and ethnic minorities: landowners facing rural disturbances, Orthodox populations in regions with significant non-Orthodox minorities, and Russian nationalists.
Democratization and Redistribution: The Case of the 1870 Self-Governance Reform in Towns of the Russian Empire
When does democratization cause redistribution through taxation and public goods provision? I take advantage of a large-scale natural experiment that took place in the 19th century Russian Empire: the introduction of urban self-governance institutions, which was launched in 1870. It involved a transition of about six hundred urban settlements from a bureaucratic to a limited representative rule, with the franchise extended to about 10% of population on average. Cities and towns were granted rights to determine taxes and expenditures via newly instituted elected legislatures deciding on the budget and other local affairs. In order to identify the reform effect, I plan to apply a staggered Difference-in-Differences design comparing budget revenues, expenditures, and actual public goods provision before and after the reform, and see how the size of the effect depends on structural characteristics of towns.
