Unrest and Opposition Media in Autocracy: Evidence from Tsarist Russia

The last 20 years of the Russian Empire were characterized by social and political internal crises. Radical leftist movements were gaining popularity, while peasant uprisings and worker strikes were becoming much more frequent. In my thesis, I analyze the relationship between radical political leftist periodicals and the popular unrest of the period. Using gravity model, I found a statistically and economically significant positive correlation between worker strikes and the leftist press, while there was no such correlation for peasant revolts. I also found evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the presence of correlation in the case of workers was due to their higher literacy rate compared to peasants. Thus, the propaganda of the leftist parties either had no effect on the illiterate peasants or, thinking strategically, the leftist parties did not distribute their periodicals among peasants at all.