Remembering Repression: Charting the Political Legacies of Soviet Repressions
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
- 39 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Isabelle DeSisto
Valentina[1] was born in exile in Krasnoyarsk, the second-largest city in Siberia, to an ethnic German father and a Moldovan mother, both of whom had been deported from their homes under the orders of Josef Stalin. Valentina returned to Moldova – then the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) – in the 1960s. Because of her background, she was not allowed to study law at university. Nevertheless, she told me in our interview, “I received a good education thanks to my parents, who taught me … to be an optimist.” Agriculture was the only faculty that would accept Valentina, but she made the best of it, learning as much as she could. She also studied topics like law and history on her own. “My father said to me, ‘If the laws are in front of you, then nobody will knock you down,’” Valentina recalled. “So I studied everything: I studied the civil code, I studied the penal code, I even studied international law.” But her parents were careful not to openly criticize the Soviet government, even at home. “We figured out [their real opinions] ourselves from their stories. They didn’t talk because they were afraid,” she said.
Experiencing discrimination and limitations because of her background motivated Valentina to work harder. “The discrimination made us stronger, more courageous,” she told me. She was an active participant in the protest movements that erupted in the late 1980s during the period of glasnost’ and perestroika. In 1989, she – along with about one sixth of the Moldovan population – attended a demonstration to demand that authorities elevate the status of the Romanian language, on which the Soviets had imposed the Cyrillic alphabet and called “Moldovan” in an attempt to differentiate it from the language spoken across the Prut river, in Romania. In 1990, she took her young children to the Bridge of Flowers demonstration, when inhabitants of Romania were allowed, for the first time, to cross that river without passports or visas to visit loved ones in the MSSR.
Valentina also encouraged her children to pursue their education, and to do things that she had not been able to. “When I gave birth to my children I said, ‘My girls will do what I didn’t do,’” she told me. “My daughter finished law school - what I wanted to do … I invested in her so she could do what I didn’t do.”
In my dissertation research, I study how Soviet repressions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia influence the political behavior of victims and their descendants. I designed a three-country study that combines large-scale public opinion surveys with in-depth interviews of individuals who experienced repression, such as deportation or arrest, during the Soviet period, as well as their family members. I selected Moldova, Estonia, and Kazakhstan as my research sites: three countries that share a Soviet past marked by violence – as well as resistance – but whose political contexts and, consequently, memorialization practices differ considerably. At the time of writing, I have conducted multiple surveys and approximately 75 interviews across Moldova and Estonia. I am now in Kazakhstan finishing the third stage of my fieldwork.
My interview with Valentina suggests that her family’s experience of repression galvanized her into political action, though not necessarily right away. It soon became clear that Valentina’s experience, while insightful and moving, was not unique. The more interviews I conducted in Moldova, and later Estonia, the clearer it became that for many people, the hardships their family members endured decades earlier continued to serve as a source of strength and personal motivation. These experiences also had a profound impact on individuals’ political attitudes, engendering a deep suspicion toward both the Soviet Union and contemporary political parties whose platforms took a softer stance toward Russia.
My interviews also took place in the broader context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. Moldova shares a long land border with Ukraine, as Estonia does with Russia. The threat of Russian aggression loomed large in both countries as I conducted my interviews. Many people I spoke to told me that since the full-scale war began, memories of what their families endured under Soviet occupation have gained heightened salience. Watching reports about the criminal actions of Russian forces in occupied Ukrainian territories, the parallels between past and present were clear: arrests of local authorities, deportations to Russia, indoctrination campaigns in schools. As one Estonian interviewee, Eike, told me: “When you see what's happening in Ukraine, I think many people in Estonia are like, ‘We told you so! This is going to happen again.’ And when you see what's happening there – it's the same book. You can just switch dates, but it's the same book that's happening now.”[1]
Eike’s family suffered severe repression under Soviet occupation: in 1941, her great-grandfather was deported to Siberia along with his wife, who died en route; a decade later, her grandfather was falsely accused of a crime, convicted in a sham trial, and sent to a labor camp in northeastern Russia. Miraculously, both men survived imprisonment and returned to Estonia after Stalin's death. But, Eike told me, fear of further repression haunted her grandfather his entire life. His bags were always packed so that if there were to be another wave of deportations, he would have the necessities ready to go. Nearly 70 years after her grandfather returned from the Gulag, Eike watched with horror as the Russians laid siege to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol’. Instinctively, she found herself packing a bag. “That’s where the muscle memory kicked in,” she told me, “to prepare, to be ready for the worst.” Eike did not mince words: “If they manage to take Ukraine, Moldova [and] Baltics will be next,” she said gravely.
The survey data I collected from both Moldova and Estonia confirmed the insights gleaned from my interviews. I asked over 1,000 respondents in each country a range of questions about their past political participation and attitudes toward a range of political and historical issues. I also asked them a detailed set of questions about their family history, including whether any family members had been subjected to repressions – such as politically motivated arrest or deportation from their homeland – under Soviet rule. I found that individuals whose family members experienced repression are considerably more politically active than the rest of the population: they are more likely to have voted in the most recent elections and to have participated in a range of less conventional political activities, like attending a demonstration or signing a petition. Moreover, these individuals tend to report lower trust in Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and greater trust in Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.[2]
Fig. 3 (left panel) shows the percentage of Moldovan respondents in my survey who reported that they engaged in some form of political activity in the past 4 years. The activities included: sent a letter to a newspaper or left a comment on a website about politics; contacted a politician or a political official, in writing or by another means; participated in an electoral demonstration; participated in another kind of demonstration; and participated in activities associated with an NGO. The right panel shows the percentage of Moldovan respondents who said they voted in the 2024 presidential election. Respondents are grouped as 0 (no family repression), 1 (family repression), or NA (don’t know / refused). For political-participation items, non-responses are coded as 0 and included in the totals. The figures show that Moldovans with repressed family members were both more likely to engage in political activities and more likely to have voted in the 2024 presidential election, compared to those who said none of their family members had been repressed.
Fig. 4 shows the same data for respondents in Estonia: the left panel shows the percentage who engaged in at least one of the political activities listed above since 2022, and the right panel shows the percentage who voted in the most recent parliamentary election. The figure shows a similar pattern regarding descendants of people who experienced Soviet repression: those who said that a family member was repressed were significantly more likely to have participated in a political activity than those who said they did not have a family member who was repressed. Estonians who reported having a repressed family member were also more likely to have voted in the 2023 parliamentary elections compared to those who reported no repressed family members.
As my research is ongoing, these results are preliminary. I have yet to fully unpack my findings, particularly when it comes to differences in the effects of repression across generations, ethno-linguistic groups, and political regimes. However, I feel confident that it offers at least two broad conclusions.
The first conclusion is that political violence casts a long shadow, influencing not only the behavior of those it affects directly, but also their children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. It does so in large part through memories and stories that are passed down across generations and carry with them warnings about the dangers of governments that abuse power and thus the importance of fighting to preserve rights and freedoms today. This leads me to a second major conclusion: the people whose experiences I study may have been victimized, but they are not simply victims. In the long run, the mass repressions of the Soviet period seem to have largely backfired, in that rather than creating generations of compliant, broken citizens, they have galvanized people to action. This leaves me with a feeling of optimism: the horrors of the past, rather than an impediment, may actually contribute to developing robust democracies with strong civil societies and citizens who understand the price of freedom.
Isabelle DeSisto is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Isabelle’s dissertation examines the long-term effects of Soviet repressions on political participation. In other ongoing research projects, she studies public opinion, local governance, and revolutions. You can find more about her work at her website, isabelledesisto.com.
[1] Interview with author, September 13, 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia.
[2] These strong correlations between past repression and current political participation hold in a number of statistical tests in which I control for socio-demographic characteristics (confounders), like education, which differ across individuals with and without a history of repression in their families and likely influence political behavior.
[1] Interview with author, July 26, 2024 in Chișinău, Moldova. Unless otherwise noted, I use my interviewee’s real first names, with their permission.