Vladimir died in prison on April 28, 1939. His mother, serving her Gulag sentence, was unaware of the fate of her husband (already executed) and three sons (the eldest in prison, the two younger at least initially in NKVD orphanages). She wrote to NKVD head Lavrenty Beria on September 9, 1939, half a year after Vladimir's death, the following plea:
In the camp, I asked about the fate of my sons and it was communicated to me in March of 1938 that two sons, the fifteen-year-old Vladimir and the nine-year-old Aleksandr, are in the orphanage in Annenkovo in the Kuznetsk region. They did not tell me anything about my eldest son, Samuil. I turned many times to the Moscow NKVD with requests to tell me about my eldest son. Finally, at the end of May 1939, the Moscow NKVD told me that both Samuil and Vladimir had been arrested. They did not say when and for what reason. It is also unclear why a youth, who is held in Kuibyshev province in an orphanage, has been arrested by the NKVD of Moscow.
My eldest son finished the tenth grade.
My second son, Vladimir, a student of the eighth grade, received the highest marks and was a young pioneer, with exemplary behavior.
All this information speaks to the fact that they could not have committed crimes independently that would have been subject to arrest by the NKVD. I presume that my sons, like me, were subject to repression as members of the family. But taking into consideration the directives of the party and of Stalin personally—children in no circumstances should answer for the sins of the father—this directive of the Leader, pronounced on several occasions, gives me the right of a mother to direct to you, Citizen Commissar, a petition—to demand an examination by the Moscow NKVD into the charges against my sons.
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