Political Economic of Military Mobilization in Authoritarian Russia: Evidence from Big Data Analysis

Relying on a unique “Big Data” dataset containing records of the 306,000 activated Russian reservists, this project provides an in-depth examination of civil-military relations in the authoritarian Russia. The literature on how authoritarian regimes man their armies particularly during the war time is scarce because these events are rare and dictators deliberately obfuscate the process. Russia is not an exception to this rule. When in September 2022 the Kremlin announced partial military mobilization to man its war in Ukraine within less than a month regional officials delivered about 300K reservists to training centers. The process by which these recruits were selected was murky at best because the local authorities retained sufficient degree of autonomy in determining whom to mobilize. Subsequently, several empirically interesting patterns emerged. First, contrary to the narratives propagated in the Russian media, Moscow and St. Petersburg contributed the largest share of reservists. Secondly, contrary to the historical trend in which residents of rural and economically backward areas were over-represented in the Russian armed forces, this time the vast majority of soldiers came from the large urban centers. And finally, non-Slavs comprised the largest shares of the pool of activated reservists. Why and how did the mobilization change the allocation of the costs of war? How do local and regional political and socioeconomic factors constraint the Kremlin’s ability to man the war in Ukraine? The analysis answers these questions by juxtaposing explanations that focus on the horizontal competition between ethnic minorities vis-a-vis ethnic Russians with the explanation based on the vertical competition between the regional and municipal governments for loyalty to the Kremlin. In so doing the paper contributes to the rapidly growing literature on comparative institutional analysis of military institutions and practices in non-democratic regimes where the rulers face the loyalty-competence tradeoffs and use ethnic-based promotions to reduce the risk of coup d’etat (Egorov & Sonin 2011, Talmadge 2015, 2016, Brooks 2019, Paine 2022).