PI: Mary Shiraef, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Notre Dame
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies
Project Abstract: Did communist-era policies toward minority groups decisively engineer contemporary identity landscapes? This paper examines personal and political identity production processes sparked by Soviet-era ethnic identity engineering. Stalinist border-making departed sharply from the “melting pot” model of the Western world by recognizing minority groups within regimes’ borders. These policies allowed for and even resourced minority identities, but also disregarded or repressed them in territories deemed for the majority ethnic group. The recognition policies provide a control comparison for this study’s goal to learn the long-term impacts of coerced assimilation in Soviet contexts. I hypothesize that ethnic engineering effectively resulted in transmission trends of minority groups away from their ancestral identities in both the communist-era public record and in private-public gravestones in the post-communist period––albeit to a far lesser extent. In terms of long-term back-lash of the policy, I posit that those who complied publicly with the ethnic designation of the regime––but not in the long-term––were also more likely in the post-communist period to carry anti-socialist political attitudes than those recognized as in the minority. I test these hypotheses at the southern border of Albania with Greece, where the communist leader’s recognition of minority groups was long enough in duration and applied strictly enough to expect divergence in the resulting populations’ identities. I draw my analysis from a differences-in-differences design applied on a hand-coded dataset from Albania’s internal communist records and from cemeteries throughout Albania’s districts neighboring the Albania-Greece border, paired against pre-communist data for the same districts.