The Legacy of Political Violence across
Generations
Noam Lupu
Vanderbilt University
Leonid Peisakhin
New York University–Abu Dhabi
Abstract: Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that v iole nce shapes
the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across generations. Inherited identities then impact the
contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the des cendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological
challenges; to overcome them, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees
died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find that the
descendants of individuals who suffered more inte nsely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly
the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and partic ipate more in politics. But we
find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed
down from the victims of the de portation to their descendants.
Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this arti-
cle are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at:
http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VEPHLS.
S
tates regularly perpetrate violence against their in-
habitants.
1
A conservative official estimate puts the
number of victims of Stalinist repressions at 3.8
million (Zemskov 1991), and an estimated 1.5 million
people died in the countryside alone during China’s Cul-
tural Revolution (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2008).
Moreover, state-sponsored and politically motivated vi-
olence against minority groups remains a defining fea-
ture of contemporary politics. These experiences pro-
foundly shap e how victims interact with the state and
think about politics. Some become politically apathetic
and withdraw from political activity (Benard 1994; Wood
2006), whereas others mobilize into collective action
(Bellows and Miguel 2009). Many develop feelings of vic-
timization and sensitivity to perceived threats as a result of
these traumatic experiences (Canetti-Nisim et al. 2009).
But how long do these effects last?
Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Commons Center, PMB 0505, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville,
TN 37203 (noam.lupu@vanderbilt.edu). Leonid Peisakhin is Assistant Professor of Political Science, New York University – Abu Dhabi,
NYUAD, A5-149, P.O. Box 903, New York, NY 10276-0903 (leonid.peisakhin@nyu.edu).
For their comments and advice, we thank Laia Balcells, Natalia Bueno, Geoff Dancy, Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, Ted Gerber, Francesca
Grandi, Lynn Hancock, Evan Lieberman, Kyle Marquardt, Kristin Michelitch, Monika Nalepa, Richard Niemi, Ellie Powell, Jonathan
Renshon, Luis Schiumerini, Nadav Shelef, Matt Singer, Scott Straus, Josh Tucker, Jason Wittenberg, Libby Wood, three anonymous
reviewers at the AJPS, and seminar participants at American, GW, MIT, NYU-Abu Dhabi, Pontifical Catholic University in Chile, Di Tella,
ITAM, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, and Yale. Rachel Schwartz provided excellent research assistance. This research was approved by Institutional
Review Boards at New York University-Abu Dhabi and University of Wisconsin-Madison. All translations are our own.
1
We use the term political violence to refer to violence caused by political actors.
Political scientists have recently noted that political
experiences can sometimes have long-lasting legacies. In-
stitutions can affect politics long after they cease to exist
(Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001), and politi-
cal identities formed in a particular historical moment
can endure for decades (e.g., Darden and Grzymala-
Busse 2006; Lupu and Stokes 2010; Wittenberg 2006).
But these legacies are often thought to be transmitted
through persistent institutions, economic structures, or
religious communities. Might exper iences of political v i-
olence similarly leave lasting legacies? And if so, might
they be passed down through families from generation to
generation, as suggested by some theories of value trans-
mission (Bisin and Verdier 2000, 2001)?
Answering this question poses empirical challenges.
Victims of political violence are typically targeted be-
cause of their group membership, political attitudes, or
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 61, No. 4, October 2017, Pp. 836–851
C
2017, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12327
836
LEGACY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE 837
behaviors. This makes it difficult for researchers to iden-
tify whether the distinctive attitudes and behaviors of
victims of political violence are caused by their victim-
ization. In addition, victims’ descendants may themselves
be targets of further political violence. As a result, it may
be difficult to discern whether the descendants of vic-
tims hold particular attitudes because of their ancestors’
experiences or because of their own victimization.
This article overcomes these challenges by studying
the Crimean Tatars, a minority Muslim population in
Crimea. We study the legacy of political violence that
took place during the Crimean Tatars’ deportation from
their homeland to Central Asia in 1944. Between one-
fifth and one-half of the deportees perished within a year
of resettlement because of rampant infectious diseases,
starvation, and squalor. Although all Crimean Tatars suf-
fered the violence of deportation, some lost more family
members along the way. Losing a relative during and im-
mediately after deportation is, we argue, an instance of the
broader phenomenon of state-sponsored repression. Our
analysis leverages variation in this additional violence,
which we demonstrate was not politically targeted. The
grandchildren of the deportees were born mostly after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and once their families had
returned to Crimea, then part of Ukraine. The fact that
they had little to no interaction with the Soviet state helps
us to isolate the effect of family socialization.
We argue that political violence shapes the core iden-
tities of its victims, generating ethnic parochialism, and
that these psychological responses are transmitted from
parent to child, informing their contemporary political
attitudes and behaviors. To test this, we conducted a
multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatar families liv-
ing in Crimea in 2014. We interviewed three generations
of respondents in 300 families. To our knowledge, this
is the first multigenerational sur vey on the legacies of
political violence, and one of very few such sur veys ever
conducted in the developing world. Whereas prior studies
rely on respondents’ accounts of the violence suffered by
their ancestors (Balcells 2012; Grosjean 2014), this design
allows us to measure an ancestor’s exposure to violence
as related by the surv ivors themselves.
Consistent with our expectations, we find that the de-
scendants of survivors who were exposed to more violence
are more likely to self-identify as victims, be more fear-
ful of potential threats, and have higher levels of ingroup
attachment. They also take stronger political positions in
favor of Crimean Tatars, are more hostile toward Rus-
sia,
2
and participate more in politics. Contrary to some
2
Technically, the perpetrator of the violence was the S oviet state.
From the perspective of minority nationalities, the Soviet Union
studies of victims, we find no intergenerational effect of
victimization on radicalization or religiosity. To probe the
mechanisms by which these effects are tr ansmitted across
generations, we offer suggestive evidence that victimiza-
tion affects the identities of first-generation respondents
and that they transmit these through the family to their
children and gr andchildren.
Violence, Historical Legacies,
and Family Socialization
Violence h as powerful consequences for politics. Wartime
violence may break down s ocial institutions and lock
countries into conflict traps (Walter 2004). Whereas some
scholars argue that violence fragments communities and
damages social cohesion (Walter and Snyder 1999), others
find that violence can force communities to overcome dif-
ferences (Bellows and Miguel 2009; Fearon, Humphreys,
and Weinstein 2009; Gilligan, Pasquale, and Samii 2014).
Inthelastdecadeorso,scholarshavebeguntostudy
how violence affects individual political behavior and at-
titudes. The balance of findings suggests that victims of
political violence become more resilient and more politi-
cally engaged (Blattman 2009; Wood 2003), although the
empirical record is mixed (Balcells 2012; Benard 1994;
Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik 2015). In a recent
meta-analysis, Bauer et al. (2016) find substantial ev i-
dence that exposure to wartime violence increases proso-
cial behavior. They also find suggestive evidence that this
prosocial behavior is biased toward ingroups. However,
few studies define ingroups and outgroups consistently.
Whether violence induces ethnic parochialism remains an
important open question; if it does, it could help explain
why countries fall into cycles of repeated civil conflict.
Psychologists have documented extensively why ex-
posure to violence might affect political attitudes and
behavior. Traumatic experiences are linked to psycho-
logical disorders like depression, anxiety, and posttrau-
matic stress (e.g ., Hobfoll, Cannetti-Nisim, and Johnson
2006; Johnson and Thompson 2008). By heightening vic-
tims’ fears of future threats from the perpetrator, trau-
matic experiences often also engender stronger ingroup
attachments, hostile and exclusionist attitudes toward
outgroups, and self-identities as vict ims (Beber, Roessler,
and Scacco 2014; Berrebi and Klor 2008; Canetti-Nisim
et al. 2009; Cassar, Grosjean, and Whitt 2013). These ef-
fects, in turn, shape victims’ attitudes about transitional
promoted the interests of ethnic Russians. Russia’s leaders also
foster the view of post-1991 Russia as a successor to the Soviet
Union.
838 NOAM LUPU AND LEONID PEISAKHIN
justice and reconciliation after conflicts (Nalepa 2012).
Scholars have also argued that in some circumstances,
victimization fosters religiosity (Chen and Koenig 2006).
In other cases, it appears to induce radicalization and
extreme hostility toward the perpetrator (Horgan 2008;
McCauley and Moskalenko 2008).
Most research on the individual-level effects of vi-
olence focuses exclusively on the survivors of political
violence themselves, typically shortly after their victim-
ization and sometimes while violent conflicts are ongo-
ing (Bauer et al. 2016). Yet, there are good reasons to
expect that exposure to violence would affect victims’ de-
scendants too (see Rozenas, Schutte, and Zhukov 2017).
Indeed, recent studies have demonstrated that political
attitudes associated with certain institutional practices
persist long after the institutions themselves have disap-
peared (Darden and Grzymala-Busse 2006; Nunn and
Wantchekon 2011; Peisakhin 2012; Wittenberg 2006).
Among the least understood areas of research on vi-
olence are the social legacies of conflict (Blattman and
Miguel 2010). Very few studies examine the intergener-
ational effects of political violence on political attitudes
and behaviors. In Spain, Balcells and colleagues (Aguilar,
Balcells, and Cebolla-Boado 2011; Balcells 2012) find
a correlation between ancestor victimization and both
political identities and attitudes regarding transitional
justice, but no relationship with political participation.
Grosjean (2014) finds that Europeans with ancestors
killed or wounded in wars exhibit lower levels of trust
and diminished belief in the efficacy of national political
institutions. Psychologists have also widely documented
posttraumatic psychological disorders among the descen-
dants of war veterans and Holocaust survivors (e.g., Lev-
Wiesel 2007; Weiss and Weiss 2000). Yet, these studies rely
on respondents’ accounts of the violence suffered by their
ancestors, with obvious potential for bias. They also focus
on violence that may have been politically targeted, mak-
ing it difficult to isolate the effect of violence. We improve
upon this by studying violence that was not politically
targeted and by measuring victimization as it is reported
by the generation of survivors themselves.
Research on intergenerational legacies also rarely
demonstrates how identities, attitudes, and behaviors are
passed down from generation to generation. Studies of
historical legacies sometimes hypothesize family social-
ization (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011; Voigtl
¨
ander and
Voth 2012), but they rely on aggregate data that mea-
sure outcomes for localities or entire regions. As a re-
sult, most existing studies cannot rule out the possi-
bility that local institutions or communal networks—
rather than families—sustain the observed legacies. On
the other hand, survey data have shown how family
socialization shapes certain political views, but these stud-
ies focus almost exclusively on partisan and religious
identities in advanced democracies (Bisin, Topa, and
Verdier 2004; Jennings and Niemi 1981; Jennings, Stoker,
and Bowers 2009; Zuckerman, Dasovic, and Fitzgerald
2007). Instead, this article focuses on a broader set
of political identities—and their associated attitudes
and behaviors—in a semi-authoritar i an and less devel-
oped context. Our research design and multigenerational
survey allow us to better isolate the effect of family
socialization.
Hypotheses
Building upon prior research on the effects of violence,
we expect that violence exper ienced by first-generation re-
spondents in our study (i.e., those who themselves expe-
rienced the deportation) induced them to identify more
strongly with their ethnic group and as victims made them
more hostile toward outgroups,especiallytheperpetrator,
and instilled a more acute fear of possible future threats.
More specifically, we expect something like a monotonic
relationship between exposure to violence and changes
in political identities. This follows directly from findings
in psychology and political science that individuals ex-
posed to more violence exhibit more pronounced effects
(Blattman 2009; Johnson and Thompson 2008).
Just as families socialize partisan and religious iden-
tities, we expect parents to als o transmit ethnic and political
identities to their children. On the one hand, this means
that the effects of political violence will persist across
generations, consistent with studies of historical legacies,
but with the locus of transmission being the family. On
the other hand, theories of intergenerational transmis-
sion highlight that the family often competes with other
sources of socialization, such as formal education or so-
cial groups (Bisin and Verdier 2000, 2001). We therefore
also expect that the legacies of violence transmitted through
the family will diminish across generations.
Finally, we expect inherited political identities to in-
form the contemporaneous political attitudes and behaviors
of the descendants of survivors. Parents may directly so-
cialize some specific political attitudes and behaviors in
their children, but most of the socialization effec t is likely
indirect, mediated through the transmission of identities.
This is most likely when the political context changes, as
it did, dramatically, for the Crimean Tatars. Political en-
gagement, for instance, was all but irrelevant for the sur-
vivors themselves, living in the Soviet Union. But for their
grandchildren, who came of age in independent Ukraine,
an inherited ethnic identity likely induces political
participation as a defense mechanism to protect their
LEGACY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE 839
social group.
3
We anticipate that the intergenerational ef-
fects of violence on political identities in turn shape the
contemporary attitudes and behaviors of descendants.
Evidence from Crimean Tatars
Over the course of May 18–20, 1944, days after the So-
viet Union recaptured the Crimean Peninsula from Nazi
Germany, the Red Army deported all Crimean Tatars
(a population of roughly 190,000) mostly to Uzbekistan
on charges of collaborating with the Nazis (Bugai 2004;
Williams 2016).
4
Deportation came as a complete sur-
prise to Crimean Tatars, who had no prior warning from
the authorities. Families were given 10–15 minutes to col-
lect what few belongings they could carry by hand, often
in the middle of the night (Aleshka et al. 2010). As one
Soviet officer recalled, “people became flustered, grabbed
unnecessary things and we pushed them with our rifles
toward the exit” (quoted in Uehling 2004, 89).
The journey in cattle trains from Crimea to Central
Asia lasted 3 weeks (Bekirova 2004, 30). Food and water
were scarce, sanitary conditions were abysmal, and dis-
eases spread quickly. According to official estimates, sev-
eral thousand deportees perished in transit, mainly from
starvation, dehydration, and infectious diseases (Williams
2016).
5
An estimated 16,000 more deportees died in the
first 6 months in Central Asia. Government statistics re-
port that about 20% of Crimean Tatar deportees perished
in 1944–45 (Bugai 2002, 114). In contrast, data collected
by Crimean Tatar activists in the 1960s suggest that 46%
3
Here, we depart from prior studies. Balcells (2012) finds no effect
of ancestor violence on political participation; Blattman (2009)
does, but argues that violence induces engagement as a result of
posttraumatic g rowth.
4
NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) troops were
stationed in every Crimean Tatar village several days beforehand,
and NKVD operatives had the residential addresses of Crimean
Tatar families reconfirmed in ethnically mixed villages and in urban
centers. Table A1 in the supporting information lists the location of
Crimean Tatars in 1953; the vast majority (roughly 80%) had been
deported to Uzbekistan. In our sample, 86% of first-generation re-
spondents said they had been deported to Uzbekistan, and another
4% to other Central Asian Republics (Kazakhstan and Tajikistan).
Only 10% of our respondents spent deportation in Russia, under
somewhat different conditions. Excluding them from our analysis
does not substantively change our results ( Table A12).
5
Most deportees were loaded onto trucks to take them from their
village to the train depots. The vast majority of the trains went to
Tashkent, and deportees were sent on to different Uzbek provinces
from there (Williams 2016). We found no statistically significant
relationship between the region our first generations were deported
from and the intensity of their victimization (Table A5). We also
found no statistically significant associations between the republic
they were deported to and victimization (Table A6).
of the Crimean Tatar population died during or right after
deportation (Bekirova 2004).
According to Bekirova (2004, 31), “Those who sur-
vivedthefirstyearsofexilereportthattheseyearswerethe
hardest. Witness accounts are remarkably uniform and
differ only with regardto minor detail. Commonalities are
many—constant unbearable hunger, illnesses (malaria,
dysentery, typhus), exhausting labor, and deaths.” Con-
ditionsforCrimeanTatarsweresopoorthatevenlocal
Soviet officials complained to their superiors. Health of-
ficials in Tashkent wrote to Uzbekistani authorities in
December 1944:
People were housed in stables, barns, dugouts,
and other unsuitable quarters. . . . From the out-
set, [their] diet was unbalanced with regards
to content and insufficient as to calories. Over
the course of June–September [they] received
eight kilograms of flour per person [per month].
No fats or proteins were consumed. (quoted in
Gabrielian et al. 1998, 68)
Eventually, Crimean Tatars moved into more p ermanent
housing and began to participate in the local economy.
Until 1956, they were not permitted to leave their settle-
ments without authorization and were surveilled heav-
ily. They were also prohibited from returning to Crimea
until 1989 and subjected to professional discrimination
throughout the Soviet period (Bugai 2004).
The Stalinist repressive system did not sing le out in-
dividuals within the Crimean Tatar community for de-
portation or especially harsh treatment; rather, the whole
ethnic group was deported wholesale and placed in sim-
ilarly harsh conditions. There were hardly any excep-
tions. Even the former head of Yalta’s party committee—
one of the most senior Crimean Tatar communists—was
not permitted to return to Crimea (Bekirova 2004, 41).
Red Army veterans were treated the same way as sus-
pected Nazi collaborators.
6
Indeed, some Crimean Tatar
Red Army soldiers were fig h ting at the front while their
relatives were deported. When the war ended, about 9,000
demobilized s oldiers (including 524 officers and 1,392
sergeants) were sent to Central Asia to join their families
(Williams 2016).
Crimean Tatar families also experienced a massive
disruption when it came to material wealth. Deportation
thrust all Crimean Tatars—regardless of wealth, educa-
tion, or political leaning s—into equally harsh conditions.
Upon arr ival in Central Asia, all Crimean Tatars were
6
In our survey, 86% of first-generation respondents said that they
had a family member who had served either in the Red Army or in
Soviet partisan battalions.
840 NOAM LUPU AND LEONID PEISAKHIN
equally destitute. This meant that little, if any, material
wealth could be transferred across generations.
At the collapse of the Sov iet Union in 1991, Crimea
became an autonomous republic within independent
Ukraine. Reputable estimates suggest that roughly 90%
of Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea by the early 2000s
(Zaloznaya and Gerber 2012).
7
The 277,000 Crimean
Tatars living in Crimea in 2012 made up about 12% of
the Peninsula’s population.
In March 2014, the Russian government seized upon
political instability in Ukraine and occupied Crimea.
Within days, Russia held a referendum on annexing the
Peninsula and won overwhelming support. In September
2014, elections for the new Crimean Parliament were held
in which Russia’s ruling political party won over 90% of
the seats.
Virtually all Crimean Tatars had been deported to
Central Asia in 1944, but some suffered more intense
violence than others. Some lost family members either
during the deportation or shortly thereafter to starvation
or disease. Historical accounts suggest that this varia-
tion within the population of deportees was unrelated to
politics (Bekirova 2004; Bugai 2004; Uehling 2004). The
elderly and the infirm would have been more susceptible
to disease. But particularly in the early years in which
deportees lived in inadequate housing at close quarters,
infectious diseases would have spread in nonsystematic
ways (Mollison 1995). There is no reason to think that
death from starvation or disease was correlated with ide-
ological or religious convictions, and there is a strong
case to be made that assignment of the violence of a fam-
ily member’s death was exogenous to people’s existing
attitudes and behaviors. This means that we can make
causal inferences about the effects of this particular type
of violence,
8
even though all Crimean Tatars suffered the
violence of deportation. Although death from disease and
malnutrition can be thought of as indirect violence, our
fieldwork made it very clear that Crimean Tatars with-
out any hesitation assign responsibility for it to Soviet
authorities.
Another methodological advantage of studying this
particular population is that the grandchildren of liv-
ing Crimean Tatars who personally experienced deporta-
tion have themselves had little or no interaction with the
7
In apilotsurvey we conducted in July 2014, only 4% of respondents
said they had relatives who had stayed behind in Cent ral Asia.
8
Spillover effects in this population are very likely: People who
witnessed the deaths of other Crimean Tatars’ relatives were likely
themselves affected by that experience. Such spillovers should di-
minish the differences in our sample between those who lost their
own relatives and those who did not, making it harder to detect the
kinds of effects we do uncover.
Soviet state.
9
This means that the fact that their gr and-
parents had been vic timized is unlikely to have affected
their own personal interactions with politics. They were
not themselves targeted by the state for further victim-
izationbecausetheirancestorshadbeenmorevictim-
ized.
10
As a result, any relationships we uncover between
the victimization of their ancestors and their own identi-
ties, attitudes, or behaviors are likely the result of family
socialization.
11
The Survey
We conducted a face-to-face, multigener ational survey
of Crimean Tatars living in Crimea between November
2014 and January 2015. We began with a stratified sam-
ple of Crimean settlements in which at least 10% of the
population was Crimean Tatar. Interviewers r andomly
sampled households until they found a Crimean Tatar
respondent over 73 years old, meaning he or she was at
least 3 years old at the time of the deportation.
12
Af-
ter interviewing each first-generation respondent, we fol-
lowed the family chain down.
13
Within each family, two
9
Half of our sample of third-generation respondents was born after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and another 45% was less than
10 years old when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Limiting our
analysis to only those born after the Soviet Union’s collapse does
not substantively change our results (Table A13).
10
Crimean Tatars were subjected to discrimination or harassment
under Ukrainian authorities as well. However, there is no reason
to think that Ukrainian authorities specifically targeted Crimean
Tatars whose ancestors suffered more intense violence during and
shortly after deportation.
11
A possible alternative is that more victimized families cluster to-
gether upon returning to Crimea, but Table A5 shows little evidence
of this. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatar media
and Ukrainian schooling discussed the deportation, undoubtedly
helping to preserve awareness among the younger generation. But
this too cannot account for variation since all young Crimean Tatars
were equally exposed to these messages.
12
Research in psychology has shown that children are especially
traumatized by violence (Bauer et al. 2014), suggesting that our
first-generation respondents—relatively young at the time of the
deportation—might have been especially affected by the loss of
relatives. In future studies, we intend to focus on more recent
violence to see whether we find similar effects among adults.
13
One could imagine how this unavoidable sequencing might have
primed responses. But our results are consistent when we limit
our sample to families who do not live in the same settlement
(Table A15) or those interviewed on the same day (Table A16),
within one day of each other (Table A17), or within two days of
each other (Table A18). Both geog raphic distance and temporal
proximity make it less likely that grandparents primed their grand-
children after they took our survey.
