Selection into Revolution and Terrorism – Drivers of Radicalization in the Russian Empire

Talk by Gerda Asmus-Bluhm (University of Hohenheim) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

What drives individuals to rebel against autocratic governments despite the high personal risks? We contrast two explanations: (i) rebellion as a response to material grievances and (ii) rebellion as the product of revolutionary ideas diffused through peer networks. We test these mechanisms analyzing left revolutionary movements in the late Russian Empire. Under a rigid Tsarist autocracy, Russia witnessed a rise of left revolutionary movements -- populists, Marxists, anarchists --accompanied by a wave of terrorist attacks between Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. To study this episode, we digitize eleven volumes of collective biographies of (compiled by Soviet historians between 1927–34) covering the population of revolutionary activists. The resulting micro-data give unparalleled detail on ethnicity, social status, occupation, revolutionary roles, and trans-regional ties of left activists in the Russian empire, enabling us to gauge how gender, class, and minority status shaped rebellion across the country. We also link these activists to exile hubs—London, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva capturing the transnational spread of radical ideas. Using these data, we explore radicalization on the left as a two-step selection process. First, we identify the factors that lead individuals to join the opposition. Second, we examine why some radicals escalate from relatively peaceful activism to terrorist violence. The data let us quantify personal traits, network effects, perceived punishment risk, and surveillance intensity, yielding the first micro-level test of grievance versus idea-driven activism under late Tsarism.