Choosing Sides: The Price of Battlefield Loyalty Under Autocracy

Abstract 

Are there long-term benefits to military service under authoritarian rule?

This paper examines whether wartime service or demonstrated loyalty during a civil war protects veterans from repression when a new regime takes power. Using geo-referenced data on World War I veterans, personnel records from the White and Red Armies, and Stalin-era secret police archives, I examine whether veterans of the Russian Empire and Civil War were treated differently during Stalin’s purges. Veterans were systematically targeted regardless of which side they fought on, and formal recognition for battlefield valor increased vulnerability to repression. Three mechanisms account for this pattern: revolutionary regimes perceive veterans as organizational threats; they view loyalty as contingent and untrustworthy; and they rely on bureaucratic records, making veterans legible as targets. For revolutionary autocracies capable of retrospective surveillance, these findings reveal that the very qualities making soldiers indispensable in wartime marked them as liabilities once power was consolidated.