Memory Lanes: Ancestral Famine Exposure and Street Renaming in Wartime Ukraine

Can war activate a historical identity formed nearly a century earlier? We study whether Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion prompted Ukrainian local councils with more members born in regions affected by the 1932-33 Holodomor famine to rename Russian-linked streets more quickly. We construct a council-level bootstrap counterfactual of the 2020 local elections that estimates how many members from famine-affected regions would be seated by electoral chance alone. Using a regression discontinuity design around this benchmark and a novel monthly panel of street names across Ukrainian communities, we find that councils with marginally more members from high-famine areas remove Russian-linked street names substantially faster after the full-scale invasion. By contrast, the famine intensity of the hromada itself has no effect on renaming. Our findings show how war can reactivate historically rooted identities and shape political choices generations after those identities were formed.  'Can war activate a historical identity formed nearly a century earlier? We study whether Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion prompted Ukrainian local councils with more members born in regions affected by the 1932-33 Holodomor famine to rename Russian-linked streets more quickly. We construct a council-level bootstrap counterfactual of the 2020 local elections that estimates how many members from famine-affected regions would be seated by electoral chance alone. Using a regression discontinuity design around this benchmark and a novel monthly panel of street names across Ukrainian communities, we find that councils with marginally more members from high-famine areas remove Russian-linked street names substantially faster after the full-scale invasion. By contrast, the famine intensity of the hromada itself has no effect on renaming. Our findings show how war can reactivate historically rooted identities and shape political choices generations after those identities were formed.