Will purges make America great again?
There are important historical lessons for the US administration in its mission to purge US government ranks, writes UNSW Business School's Pauline Grosjean
While President Trump makes thunderous statements about Canada, Gaza, or Greenland, before backtracking and then doubling down, causing alarm, panic and dread in newsrooms and chancelleries, a genuine purge is taking place in American administrations in relative silence.
Under the guise of economic efficiency (the rallying cry of Elon Musk and his team of DOGE enthusiasts) and witch-hunting against diversity, equity and inclusion, entire government agencies, notably the development aid agency USAID (whose website no longer even works), are seeing their actions blocked and their staff dismissed or at least ordered to stop working. Research grants are simply being cancelled, cutting off funding to hundreds of researchers, and data (particularly data on climate, health – and even official employment statistics) is being deleted. The President recently announced that his administration is now turning its attention to the armed forces and announced the abolition of external boards of military academies.
The European far-right recently gathered in Madrid under the promise of "Make Europe Great Again" by following in Trump's footsteps. Although the exact era of this past European greatness that the far-right hopes to recapture isn't specified, we too can look to Europe's past in the 1930s (who knows? perhaps this is also the era to which the far-right aspires?) to understand the dynamics of administrative purges and grasp their consequences. This is what political economist Alexei Zakharov and University of Chicago Professor Konstantin Sonin examined in a recent working paper, The Anatomy of the Great Terror: A Quantitative Analysis of the 1937-38 Purges in the Red Army.
Authors Sonin and Zakharov examine the purges of 1937 and 1938 in the Red Army. The two economists base their work on a detailed review of historical studies and on collecting comprehensive archival data on the 1864 members of the Red Army who held the rank of general in 1936, when the repression began. The authors illustrate their analysis with a theoretical model that delivers a simple message: if purges truly aim to unravel a conspiracy, they should target officials connected to key participants in this conspiracy. In their paper, they give the example of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a high-ranking officer accused of treason for collusion with Germany, who was executed in 1937. If, on the contrary, purges are preventive and aim to stifle any potential form of opposition, they will target officers at random.
The statistical analysis of the fates of the 1864 generals, two-thirds of whom were arrested and 42% executed, reveals that the purges were primarily preventive. They targeted not officers connected to Tukhachevsky but the most competent and youngest officers, as well as those from ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union. Did these purges serve the interests of the State? On the contrary: the loss of these most competent officers probably explains to a large extent the rout of the Red Army in the initial phase of the German invasion in 1941.
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The personal example of Konstantin Sonin illustrates how purges can impoverish a country. An economics professor in Moscow, a renowned researcher on authoritarian systems and former vice-rector of the Higher School of Economics, he was forced to resign in 2013. Exiled to the United States, he has been subject to a Russian arrest warrant since February 2024. Let's hope his position at the University of Chicago protects him from future purges.
Pauline Grosjean is a Scientia Professor of Economics at UNSW Sydney, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Her research studies the historical and dynamic context of economic development. In particular, she focuses on how culture and institutions interact and shape long-term economic development and individual behaviour. This article was originally published in Le Monde, and was translated from French to English for republishing.