Persistence of Xenophobic Views: from the Russian Empire until Now

In this paper, I look at the persistence of xenophobic views from the Russian Empire to modern times. I employ pogroms in the Russian Empire and 1 – turnout in the 1917 elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly as two historical proxies for xenophobia and connect them to elections, hate crimes, and xenophobic sentiments in a representative survey through spatial mapping. While those results only suggest correlations and cannot be considered as causal, I find that most of the proxies have a positive connection and thus indicate persistence. The most robust and significant results show that one standard deviation increase in the 1917 election proxy is associated with a 0.13 standard deviation increase in the share of people who would want to restrict entrance to foreigners, and being twice as close to pogroms is connected to an increase in the share of "xenophobic" responses by 5% to 10% of their mean. Break of persistence is not observed in the territories more affected by WWII; however, it was shown that proposed historical measures might capture different aspects of xenophobia, as pogroms are related to persistence of xenophobic views in the cities that were not occupied by Nazi Germany, while the opposite holds for the second measure.