Mishina Ekaterina M.,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University, director of “Open lis” project, Moskow, Russia, e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Application of Statistical Methods and GIS Technologies in the Study of Political Repression
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2019-1-10
The article deals with studies which used database technologies and statistical methods in order to study the social portrait of terror victims in different regions. The author gives a brief overview of such works and notes that, in contrast to collectivization and mass operations of 1937–1938, for the period from the murder of S.M. Kirov until the start of the Great Terror almost no research has been done at the regional level. The second part of the article shows the results of the study of the social portrait of terror victims in Altai Region on the eve of the Great Terror. Analysis reveals common and various features in social characteristics of terror victims in other Siberian regions. During the period under review, there was no mass repression, while people were arrested for their “individual” guilts or “spots” in the biography. The analysis showed that the majority of the victims were men aged between 31 and 50 years, semi-literate, low-level employees, collective farmers or workers, people from poor peasants who were not members of political parties. Most of the terror victims were Russians, but more severe sentences were imposed on members of other nationalities. Altai Region stood out because of its agrarian specialization: there the number of collective farmers and individual farmers who were terror victims during the period under review was twice as high as elsewhere in the USSR. With the help of statistical methods – regression and cluster analysis, as well as GIS technologies, the hypothesis about the impact of socio-economic development of regional areas on the level of repression in them is verified and confirmed - the higher the welfare of the population, the higher the level of repression was. The analysis showed that the thesis of the Bolsheviks explaining the economic failures by the actions of “pests” was not confirmed by the practice.
Publishing: 26/02/2019
How to cite: Mishina E.M. Application of Statistical Methods and GIS Technologies in the Study of Political Repression // Historical Courier, 2019, # 1 (3). Article 10. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2019/ISTKURIER-2019-1-10.pdf
Links: Issue 1 2019
Keywords: social portrait of terror victims; Altai Region; database; regression analysis; GIS