The Geopolitics of Repressions

This thesis studies how geopolitical concerns influence attitudes of a state toward its ethnic minorities. Using data digitized from archival sources on more than 2 million individual arrests by the Soviet secret police, I apply difference-in-differences and synthetic control method to estimate how changing German-Soviet relations influenced repressions of Germans in the Soviet Union. The results of both methods show that there was large and statistically significant increase in arrests of Germans following the German invasion into the Soviet Union in 1941. Furthermore, the impact of war appears to be highly persistent since there is almost no decline in the estimated effect on repressions for nearly 10 years after the end of the war. Keywords repression, geopolitics, Soviet Union, difference-in-differences, synthetic control method, archival dat