Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that large scale violence can have an intergenerational impact on...

Utilizing over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II, we study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting three complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers from places with higher levels of pre-war...