Family Members of a Traitor to the Motherland

Origins

Punishing people for their kin appeared already in the early Soviet period. On 2 November 1919 Trotsky's Order No. 163, titled 'Death to traitors', called for arresting the families of defectors and panic-mongers; its language was that of 'traitors to the revolution', and the word 'Motherland' was not used.

The norm's codified form was Article 58-1 of the 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code. A resolution of the USSR Central Executive Committee of 8 June 1934 directed the introduction of the treason provisions, and Articles 58-1a to 58-1g were actually added to the criminal code and entered force by a decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of 20 July 1934 (SU No. 30, art. 173). The amended Article 58-1v provided punishment not only for the perpetrator but also for members of his family: in the case of a serviceman's flight or escape abroad, adult family members who facilitated or knew of the treason but did not report it were punished by 5-10 years' deprivation of liberty with confiscation, while other adult family members living with him or dependent on him lost electoral rights and were exiled to remote Siberian areas for five years. The category rendered 'family member of a traitor to the Motherland' took shape in this article, in the 1942 State Defense Committee resolution and in other Soviet normative acts.

NKVD Order No. 00486 of 1937

Operational Order No. 00486, signed on 15 August 1937 by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov as General Commissar of State Security, was titled 'On the Repression of Wives and the Placement of Children of Convicted Traitors to the Motherland'. It directed repression against the wives of members of right-Trotskyist spy-sabotage organizations convicted by the Military Collegium and military tribunals under the first or second category dating back to 1 August 1936, and the corresponding parts of Article 58 of the Criminal Code were modified accordingly. Wives were sentenced to camps for not less than 5-8 years according to their degree of social danger, and their cases were considered by the Special Council of the NKVD. Children classed as 'socially dangerous' were placed in labor camps, corrective labor colonies or special-regimen orphanages, while the remaining children were placed in ordinary orphanages or with non-convicted relatives. A 1937 Politburo decision likewise regulated the imprisonment of the wives of traitors to the Motherland and of party oppositionists (Trotskyists, Zinovievists, rightists and others) in camps for 5-8 years, a practice that ultimately extended to all other categories of the repressed.

Contraction and Renewed Extension

In the rollback phase of the Great Purge, NKVD Order No. 00689, signed by Lavrenty Beria on 17 October 1938, ordered that wives were no longer to be arrested automatically together with their husbands but only after consideration by a single NKVD officer; only wives deemed 'politically untrustworthy or socially dangerous', or who knew of their husbands' 'counter-revolutionary activity', were to be arrested.

In 1940 a Politburo decree 'On prosecution of traitors to the Motherland and their family members' and related acts provided for the exile to the Far North, for 3-5 years with confiscation, of family members of traitors who had fled across the border. This primarily concerned the populations of territories newly acquired by the USSR: the Baltic states, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine taken from Poland, and Northern Bukovina taken from Romania.

On 24 June 1942 the State Defense Committee adopted top-secret resolution No. 1926ss 'On the Family Members of Traitors of the Motherland', signed by Stalin, restoring parts of the original wording. Adult family members of persons sentenced to capital punishment under Article 58-1a for espionage for Germany, going over to the enemy, treason, aiding the German occupiers or service in occupation organs were subject to arrest and exile to remote areas of the USSR for five years. Family here meant father, mother, husband, wife, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters living with or dependent on the traitor. The original typescript of the resolution, bearing Stalin's autograph signature, is held in RGASPI (F. 644, Op. 2, D. 72, L. 95-96).

Character and Distinctions

The measure grossly violated the principle of personal responsibility and guilt: criminal liability was applied to persons not guilty of the crimes imputed to others.

As collective punishment on grounds of bloodline or status, the regime stands alongside and is distinguished from several other practices. It is discussed together with the nine familial exterminations of China, the Sippenhaft under which Nazi Germany detained the relatives of political offenders, 'bloodline theory' and guilt by association.

Despite the title's word 'Motherland', the 1919 Trotsky order that first introduced family repression used the language of 'traitors to the revolution' and never the word 'Motherland'. The Russian Wikipedia classifies ChSIR among Stalin-era repression categories tied to Article 58, alongside categories such as 'enemy of the people', 'socially dangerous element' and 'anti-Soviet agitation'. The starting point also depends on which date is chosen: the codified origin is the 1934 amendment of Article 58-1, while mass implementation of kin punishment began with Order No. 00486 in 1937, which is why this dictionary dates the regime from 1937.

Examples

ALZhIR (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland) in Kazakhstan was one of the largest women's camps in the USSR; more than 20,000 women passed through it, transported from all over the Soviet Union, their only fault being their relation to those branded 'enemies of the people'. The first prisoners arrived on 6 January 1938, when a convoy transported 1,600 women from Moscow's Butyrka prison. Over time the camp housed women of 62 nationalities, among them 4,390 Russians, 855 Jews, 740 Belarusians and 146 Georgians, with only 87 Kazakh women. Women were sent there for being the wife, mother or daughter of a public official, government figure, or prominent artist or writer, and were stripped of their freedom for three, five, eight or even ten years regardless of age or nationality. Many were educated professionals and university graduates.

Among the ALZhIR prisoners were the wives of Kazakh intellectuals. Guljamal Mailina, wife of Beimbet Mailin, served a five-year sentence (four years in ALZhIR and one year in Karaganda), while her children were raised in orphanages in Semey and Osakarovsky district. Aziza Ryskulova, wife of Turar Ryskulov, received eight years; she arrived with her one-month-old daughter Rida, and her older daughter Saule was sent to an orphanage near Odessa.

Children of the repressed were separated from their parents by force. A. A. Perevedentseva, whose father was executed in 1937 as a 'traitor to the Motherland', recalled that after her mother's arrest she and her brother passed through an NKVD distribution center in Kharkov and then an orphanage in Volchansk, where conditions were intolerable and children were beaten. In these orphanages children of the repressed, deemed 'socially dangerous', were under constant NKVD surveillance, forbidden to leave the grounds and denied contact with their peers.