Family Members as Hostages

"Hostages” were allowed from the first days of Bolshevik power. Lenin's Red Terror Decree of September 2, 1918, ordered the secret police (called then the Cheka): "to arrest as hostages prominent representatives of the bourgeoisie: merchants, industrialists, traders, counter-revolutionary priests, and officers who are enemies of Soviet power and confine them in concentration camps.”15 Under the hostage principle, relatives of those committing crimes were held criminally responsible—a principle widely applied to army deserters fleeing across the border.

During Stalin's purges of the party elite, family members were automatically repressed. Wives and children were executed along with their husbands and parents. Promising that family members would be spared was an effective device to extract confessions. (The promises were extended but usually not honored).

Ezhov's directive concerning family members was surprisingly restrained: They were to be spared unless they themselves engaged in anti-Soviet activity or happened to live in major cities or in border areas. In all cases, they were to be "registered and placed under systematic observation.”

4.  The families of those sentenced according to the first or second category will, as a rule, not be repressed.16

Ezhov listed as exceptions family members capable of active antiSoviet activities, and families of persons repressed in the first category living in border regions or in major metropolitan areas, who should be jailed or deported.

This leniency changed two weeks later with NKVD Decree No. 00486, "About the repression of wives and the placement of children of those convicted of betrayal of the motherland,” which ordered the wives of those convicted of counter revolution to the Gulag along with "socially dangerous children” except for pregnant women and wives who turned in their husbands. Underage children were to be sent to NKVD orphanages for upbringing.17