A venerable body of sociological literature asks who gets purged in illiberal societies and organizations and why they’re targeted. Leading accounts include a Durkheimian, ideational thesis that says purges target ideological “deviants” and, in so doing, reproduce the old order; and a cohort-based alternative that treats purge as a radical mechanism of organizational innovation—one that targets older generations to make way for their successors. But these arguments have had minimal interaction and neither has been examined using individual-level, longitudinal data in a concrete historical context. 

An event-history analysis of the careers of 789 Soviet sociologists at risk of purge between the field’s crystallization in the postwar era and the unravelling of state socialism in the late 1980s reveals: first, that cohort membership is the primary, if not the only, predictor of protracted victimization and disproportionately affected “cohorts of deviants” who occupied intermediate positions in the life course of the field; second, individuals adhering closely to prevailing social codes and directly contributing to regime security were less vulnerable to purge-induced turmoil regardless of cohort; and finally, rehabilitations that are ignored by the existing literature are not only common but reshape the overall patterns of victimization. 

The results offer a demographically and temporally sensitive synthesis of the Durkheimian and cohort-based approaches; explain why protracted purges likely result in “organizational retrogression” while swift ones lead to more mixed outcomes; and shed light on how emergent orders balance change and stability more generally.

An article derived from this project is currently under second-round review at Social Forces.