Violence and Regime Pathology: Mass Shootings and the Changing Russian State

• In Event: Violence and Intimidation in Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

What do mass shootings say about regime pathology? This study uses an original dataset of politically oriented mass shootings in Russia from 1992 to 2022 to examine the relationship between violence and the evolution of political institutions. In doing so, I establish a conceptual basis for mass shootings as political violence and theorize the institutional correlates of Russian mass shootings. The data for this study was gathered via open-source collection of archived reporting and official government statements, online encyclopedias, and journalistic material on the open web. To support the partially qualitative nature of the dataset, I use descriptive statistics and graphical representation to visualize Russian mass shootings, and use institutional analysis to interpret their correlation to features of the Russian state. My use of mass shootings to isolate transformations in the post-Soviet Russian state is novel—recent scholarship of localized violence is weighted toward such violence in intrastate conflict, and there are almost no studies in political science literature that utilize mass shootings data to evaluate how regimes change over time.

My original dataset identifies more than 30 mass shootings in Russia during the years 1992 to 2022, a majority of which were carried out by members of Russian armed forces. However, since 2012, there has been a notable increase in school mass shootings and violent offenders inspired by the Columbine High School shooting. Having identified the mass shooting as a type of violence that exhibits political characteristics, I discuss what political violence says about the regimes in which it occurs. To this end, I propose three necessary, but insufficient, structural pre-conditions of regimes that enable the emergence of mass shootings: a relative lack of state infrastructural power that facilitates the advent of institutions that are favorable to mass shootings; an ineffective government or political system, the pathology of which contributes to the emergence of mass shootings; and a society that is fragmented or lacking cohesion, in which the absence of traditional communal safety nets leads to greater violence. I then evaluate the extent to which Russia has experienced these pre-conditions, and how changes to the Russian state in the past three decades have changed the form its mass shootings take.

Finally, I argue that the prevalence of mass shootings in the armed forces is associated with institutionalized abuse, made possible by an ineffective Russian government that, particularly in the 1990s, had little capacity or desire to intercede in military affairs. As the Russian state coalesced around Vladimir Putin and transformed into a fully-fledged autocracy in the 2000s, its greater coercive capacity allowed for the pursuit of policies that reduced the number of mass shootings at military facilities. The government eventually walked back some of the policies that decreased violence in the military, and mass shootings at military sites resumed in the 2010s. From 2012 to the present, the Russian state’s growing political repression has fostered marginalized communities that have, among other demonstrations of discontent, carried out public acts of mass violence that are rarely seen in authoritarian regimes. In an effort to squeeze the political life out of society, the Russian state created the conditions for a form of violence—the school mass shooting—that had never before existed in Russia.

Author

• Eric D'Angelo, University of California, Irvine