The Legacy of State Repression on Contemporary Trust: Indiscriminate versus Targeted Repression in Soviet Russia

Indiscriminate state repression leaves long-term negative consequences on interpersonal trust and in institutions. In this paper, we investigate whether a variation density of Soviet police forces, which governed the level selectivity execution, lead to heterogeneity response repression. Similar other studies, find that both horizontal vertical are negatively associated with indiscriminate exposure past. However, our results suggest magnitude effect diminishes executed more selective fashion proxied by intensity perpetrator’s deployment. Surprisingly, might even inverse positive localities where had been accompanied presence at extremely high levels, i.e., when could ensure highly Overall, findings propose legacy totalitarian regimes depend state’s capacity execute or less precision against perceived enemies.