Why Fight? Causes and Consequences of Joining a Tyrant's Army

Abstract

The military is a vital institution of the state. Why individuals join the military service and what downstream consequences the army experience has for these individuals and their families - especially in authoritarian settings, are essential for unpacking the dynamics of state-society-military relationships. This dissertation comprises three papers addressing the political implications of individuals joining and fighting for the army of an authoritarian leader. I explore theoretical linkages between interstate and intrastate war by examining the impact of marginalization across social boundaries before enlistment and the role of military service on individuals' willingness to support the state in the short and long run. To do so, I address the following questions: (1) Under what conditions do marginalized citizens of an authoritarian country join the military in wartime?; (2) Why do some army veterans turn their weapons against the state after military service?; and (3) Does the army service - the ultimate sacrifice toward a state - exempt citizens from future repressions?

I argue that participating in autocratic leaders' war-making efforts are calculated choices marginalized citizens make, within their long-term survival strategies, to advance their ability to change the system. This theoretical framing suggests three important implications: first, when an autocrat targets the population indiscriminately, individuals will strive to join the military to gain transferable skills for future challenges; second, an autocratic leader will face a trade-off that involves a choice between fighting an imminent external threat with a weaker army or mobilizing and exposing aggrieved individuals to important skills that can be used against the leader in the future; and third, authoritarian leaders will rarely reward veterans for their wartime service in post-war settings. To assess these implications, I track the life path of marginalized individuals in an authoritarian state from the time they join the army to fight an external enemy until they demobilize and re-mobilize internally against the state while also exploring the state's treatment of these war veterans decades later and under a new political system. I explore the state-military-society triangular relationship using multiple original, micro-level datasets on individual participation and state repression across Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union from the late 1890s through the 1950s and find substantial support for my theory.

The findings suggest that marginalized individuals strategically use military service to advance their ability to challenge the state and achieve their long-term survival priorities. However, while effective for mounting successful challenges against the state in the short term, this high-risk decision is not an effective long-term strategy for avoiding exposure to violence or exempting family descendants from similar mistreatment at the hands of the state. This dissertation makes several contributions to our understanding of military service in authoritarian settings by investigating how a state's exclusionary treatment of its minority groups before military service generates anti-regime behavior among marginalized individuals, the effects of which extend beyond the battlefield. First, it demonstrates that to better understand the short and long-term effects of participation in the war, we must consider how army service interacts with the past lived experiences of soldiers. Second, this dissertation is one of a few empirical attempts to investigate the relationship between military service and citizenship status. The datasets constructed for this dissertation are the most comprehensive data to date on individual participants of World War I and the Russian Civil War.