‘The Full Weight of the State’: The Logic of Random State-Sanctioned Violence

The literature on political violence has advanced some hypotheses concerning the forms and the causes of state-sanctioned violence and terror: why some governments make more widespread use of violence than others. However, one aspect of this question that has scarcely been considered concerns the conditions under which state violence achieves its goal, that is, to secure citizens’ submission to the state. This article offers an analysis of the conditions of success of a certain form of state violence: random repression by the state. It shows that random repression usually does not prevent a shift in popular support from the regime to the opposition. But under certain circumstances, if the state resorts to random violence but at the same time mimics, to a certain extent, the behaviour of a non-arbitrary repressor, this form of political violence by the state can achieve success. This explanation is illustrated with various cases of random state-sanctioned violence, including occupied Europe during World War II, El Salvador in the 1980s, present-day Israel and, especially, the terror in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period. The Soviet regime combined random violence, through the imposition of quotas of arrests on each region, with signals about the legality of the arrests both before and during the terror process. These signals included the 1936 Soviet Constitution and the extraction of confessions of imaginary crimes. This strategy was largely successful.