At a Kremlin reception on 7 November 1937, Stalin declared that enemies should be eliminated as kinship groups: “And we will eliminate every such enemy [of the state and peoples of the USSR]… . we will eliminate his entire lineage (rod), his family! … Here's to the final extermination of all enemies, both themselves and their clan (rod).”Footnote ¹ In the Soviet Union, political enemies were rounded up in groups of kin, family ties marked people as disloyal, and “counterrevolutionary” charges against one person threatened also his or her relatives. The Soviet security police or OGPU-NKVD issued detailed instructions regarding the punishment that should be assigned to the spouses, children, siblings, parents, and even ex-wives of state enemies. Campaigns against anti-Soviet elements rounded up kinship groups, whether these counterrevolutionaries were identified as so-called kulaks, enemies of the people, or traitors to the motherland. To be sure, the collective punishment of kin did not accompany every act of Stalinist repression. The regime's draconian criminal legislation also constituted a form of terror, yet persons sentenced under such laws as those punishing theft of socialist property were dealt with individually; their relatives were not targeted. Only the “politicals,” that is, people accused of disloyalty, treason, or other counterrevolutionary activities experienced terror as family units. It was the collective punishment of kin that made political repression under Stalin truly a mass phenomenon.

Historians and memoirists alike have catalogued the ways in which Stalinist terror affected family members, and a few scholars have analyzed the particular interface of kinship and terror.Footnote ² Nonetheless, those of us who study Soviet political violence tend to focus on the larger categories of “bourgeois classes,” “enemies of the people,” and “enemy nations.” This broad perspective has highlighted changes in repressive policy (new targets, new political motives) and the differences between various purges of political enemies. As a result, some of the striking threads of consistency among terror campaigns have not been stressed. Recently, a number of important studies have shed light on the experiences of women and children who, at different times, became classified as enemies solely as a consequence of their kinship ties to persons arrested.Footnote ³ Yet no scholar has taken a broad look at this practice of collective punishment or viewed decades of Stalinist terror through the lens of kinship. This study seeks to do just that. My purpose here is to demonstrate the centrality of kinship in Stalinist repression and to explore the implications of kinship-based purging for our understanding of Soviet political violence. I consider the principal terror campaigns under Stalin—repression against “class enemies” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, against “enemies of the people” during the Great Terror of 1936–1938, and against traitors, particularly ethnic minority groups condemned as “enemy nations,” prior to and during World War II. In each case, enemies of the state were imagined and apprehended as kinship groups. Stalinist terror against political enemies reveals a remarkable obsession with kinship, whether the populations under attack represented classes, nations, or other types of so-called counterrevolutionaries.

It is through the lens of kinship that the logic of Stalinist political violence reveals itself. First, we see that Bolshevik habits of terror were highly gendered. Party leaders typically constructed the political enemy as a head of household and pursued these individuals, largely men, along with their kin, mostly women and children. Official instructions referred to kinship using various descriptors but mostly through such code words as “financial dependents” and “co-inhabitants,” which typically signaled wives, elderly parents, and children, but also allowed the regime to capture extended and symbolic kin. Second, attention to kinship exposes the lifecycle of terror campaigns, for the peak involved the widespread use of collective punishment and the end was consistently signaled by a repudiation of policies that required sanctions against the enemy's kin. Women and especially children had the advantage of ambiguous identities as both enemy and victim, so rehabilitation policies applied to them first. Finally, an examination of political violence through the lens of kinship highlights the degree to which personal networks represented the target of Stalin's terror policy.Footnote ⁴ Whether or not these networks were actually kinship-based, they were described as such, as when Stalin attacked “family circles” of comrades. In the Stalinist imagination, political enemies were cast as actual or metaphorical families.

FamiLy Ties: Collective Punishment and the Socialist Collective

Why did the communist party punish political enemies collectively as groups of kin? Kinship groups frequently represented the targets of political repression in Russia, well before the Bolsheviks seized power. In the fifteenth century, the tsar Ivan the Terrible eliminated the old aristocrats of Muscovy, the Boyars, as clans and not individuals, and Peter the Great also initiated an assault against powerful families.Footnote ⁵ The practice of punishing family members for the actions of individuals probably derives in part from the Russian tradition of krugovaia poruka. Often translated as “joint responsibility” or “circular control,” the term describes the widespread and enduring Russian custom that assigns collective responsibility to a group for the actions of individual members.Footnote ⁶ In Russia, the practice dates back to the Mongol invasion when under Genghis Khan “kinship groups—especially members of the nuclear family—bore joint liability for a wide range of obligations and offenses.”Footnote ⁷ In a vast territory penetrated by few state officials, collective responsibility became a fundamental tool of governance. The practice of joint responsibility and mutual protection continued well into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Members of defined groups were expected to provide aid and assistance to each other, to guarantee the financial obligations of individual members, and to maintain discipline and social order by policing deviant behavior.Footnote ⁸

The Stalinist practice of targeting state enemies as family units derived, too, from a desire to use relatives as hostages in political conflict.Footnote ⁹ In 1921, the new Soviet government tried to suppress the peasant uprising in Tambov province by setting up concentration camps for accused bandits plus their families, and using the family members as hostages to coerce the bandits' surrender. As Soviet officials described at the time, the Red Army seized as hostages the “closest relatives of people who participated in the bandit gangs as well as their entire family without reference to sex or age. A large number of children are entering the camps, from the youngest ages, even infants.”Footnote ¹⁰ In later years, this practice of incarcerating family members as hostages continued. The NKVD often took relatives into custody in order to force confessions from their kin, and Stalin arrested the family members of many prominent party and cultural figures as a way of enforcing discipline and control.

More fundamentally, the practice of collective punishment reflects a certain understanding of kinship, one in which the family and the state appear in conflict and family ties look potentially subversive.Footnote ¹¹The Communist Manifesto called for the abolition of the traditional family which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed was based on exploitation—the enslavement of wives by husbands and children by parents.Footnote ¹² Bolshevik revolutionaries viewed the traditional family with hostility as a site of so-called bourgeois, backward, and patriarchal power. Party leaders also feared that citizens' loyalty to kin could undermine their loyalty to the state. As anthropologists have noted, kinship represents more than a personal relationship based on descent or marriage. Conceptions of kinship in any society define rights and obligations between people, and affect the ways in which they understand political authority and accept political domination.Footnote ¹³ For the Bolsheviks, strong personal attachments appeared as “unsocialist” feelings. Instead, these sentiments had to be directed at Soviet comrades, such as fellow workers, party or komsomol members, and other collective farm peasants.Footnote ¹⁴ The feminist and Bolshevik theorist, Alexandra Kollontai, wrote in 1918, “the narrow, closed family” with its “habit of thinking only about the well being of relatives, cannot educate the New Person” whose primary loyalty is to the collective.Footnote ¹⁵

Nonetheless, despite an ideological and political hostility to the traditional nuclear family, Soviet leaders recognized the importance of the family for the maintenance of social order and economic stability.Footnote ¹⁶ For this reason, Stalin rehabilitated the traditional family in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁷ Prompted by concerns over population decline and social instability, the party leadership promoted what Leon Trotsky called “Thermidor in the family” by encouraging motherhood, banning abortion, and making divorce more difficult.Footnote ¹⁸ According to David Hoffmann, the Soviet government began to view the family as a tool of state mobilization, an instrument for curing social problems and serving modern state goals such as population growth and social discipline.Footnote ¹⁹ In contrast to the position of Kollontai nearly two decades earlier, official state policy now promoted strong families and stressed the importance of the family for raising children and providing a proper upbringing.

The Bolsheviks also embraced the family as a metaphor for their new political community.Footnote ²⁰ Proletarian writers viewed their factories as “close and familial” while the party platform noted that pro-Soviet members of the intelligentsia would be accepted “into our family.”Footnote ²¹ Maxim Gorky's Mother, the classic socialist realist novel, described the family of revolutionaries.Footnote ²² Bolshevik revolutionaries did indeed constitute an extended family: Stalin's son, Vasily, married Semyon Timoshenko's daughter, Lev Kamenev married Trotsky's sister, Gorky's granddaughter married Lavrenty Beria's son, and Anastas Mikoyan's son married Nikolai Kuznetsov's daughter; Stalin wanted his daughter, Svetlana, to marry the son of one of his comrades (either Sergo Beria, Stepan Mikoyan, or Yuri Zhdanov), and she eventually married Yuri.Footnote ²³ Soviet leaders used kinship ties to reinforce political loyalties. The family became a metaphor for the polity and more than just a metaphor for the party elite.Footnote ²⁴

At the same time, the political symbolism of the family was reconfigured under Stalin. Party propaganda in the late 1930s stressed that the nuclear or “little family” should serve the Soviet nation or “great family.”Footnote ²⁵ In her examination of the Soviet novel, Katerina Clark identified a shift in Soviet political symbolism from the 1920s to the 1930s in which the axis of kinship metaphors changed from the horizontal to the vertical, that is, from an emphasis on the big family of brothers and sisters to a hierarchy of exceptional fathers (namely, the Soviet leaders) and sons.Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, Svetlana Boym describes the cultural transformation of Soviet society from a communal brotherhood in the 1920s to a patriarchy in the 1930s: “If in the 1920s the discourse of communality is sharply directed against the family and in favor of collective camaraderie, in the 1930s the family metaphor is back, with Stalin in the roles of lover, father, husband, and grandfather of the people.”Footnote ²⁷ Loyal citizens would be those who viewed their comrades as brothers and the party as father, and whose emotional bonds extended first to the motherland. As Katherine Verdery has shown, the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union represented zadruga states in which the party functioned as parent. Individual nuclear families in socialist society “were bound into a larger familial organization of patriarchal authority with the ‘father’ Party at its head.”Footnote ²⁸ The Soviet state as a metaphor for the family placed party leaders in the role of parents. When Vladimir Lenin died not only did Trotsky claim that he had been orphaned, but so too did workers in a Moscow rubber factory: “Our party has been orphaned, the Soviet people have been orphaned, the working people of the world have been orphaned.”Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, the creation of a zadruga state involved an assault on the old patriarchy of the nuclear family. Socialism “broke open the nuclear family” and “usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities …”Footnote ³⁰ The state occupied the private sphere, transforming traditional relationships within the nuclear family and shaping citizens into dependents of a paternalist regime. The Stalinist regime promoted the family as both political metaphor and policy instrument, but the kind of family it endorsed was altogether different.

The party's campaign to promote the family did not overshadow official suspicions of private loyalties and family ties. Rather, the two tendencies coexisted. This apparent paradox is explained by Yuri Slezkine's assertion that “all radical attempts to remake mankind are ultimately assaults on the family.”Footnote ³¹ The Stalinist project of social transformation sought both to destroy families of enemies and to forge new socialist families. Nonetheless, even this new socialist family remained suspect. Private life, whether bourgeois or socialist, was by its nature concealed, confidential, and thereby potentially dangerous. In the Bolshevik imagination, where hidden conspiracies, behind-the-scenes intrigues, and covert plots were omnipresent, the enemy's home constituted the central locus of subversive activity.Footnote ³² As Cynthia Hooper describes, the inclination of Soviet officials in the 1930s was “to see the family as a key site of potential political corruption” and “a source of dissension and divided loyalty.”Footnote ³³ The party leadership maintained a profound suspicion of the private sphere.Footnote ³⁴ Soviet officials assumed that the hostile thoughts and activities of political enemies were shared with family members or with those who lived together under the same roof. In 1930, when Stalin demanded the arrest of N. N. Sukhanov for anti-Soviet activities, the dictator insisted: “Sukhanov's wife should be probed (she's a Communist!): she couldn't help but know about the outrages going on at their house.”Footnote ³⁵

Kinship and Class War

Class war did not begin with Stalin, but it was under his leadership that two of the most brutal attacks against so-called class aliens were waged—disenfranchisement and “dekulakization.” Soviet legislation identified people marked for disenfranchisement as the “bourgeois classes” and these included private traders and middlemen, religious clerics, agents of the former tsarist police and security forces, former noblemen, and White Army officers. The disenfranchised or lishentsy lost all rights in Soviet society and became effective outcasts; millions were deported or sent to forced labor camps in the Far North and Siberia.Footnote ³⁶ Dekulakization coincided with the collectivization of agriculture and represented a wave of terror against the so-called kulaks or the wealthy peasant class. The campaign resulted in assassinations, large-scale deportations, and starvation for millions of peasants.Footnote ³⁷ From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the repressive campaigns of disenfranchisement and dekulakization affected many of the same people. Kulaks were automatically placed among the ranks of the disenfranchised and the categories of people marked for disenfranchisement, such as clerics and White Army officers, were often swept up by the dekulakization campaign. These two extensive assaults against “class enemies” targeted kin groups. If one member of the family were disenfranchised or dekulakized, spouses and children became similarly stigmatized.

This most intense period of class war under Stalin coincided with the First Five-Year Plan of rapid industrialization and collectivization. The economic transformation involved a radical reorganization of social life, as private economic activity was all but eliminated and replaced by public-sector employment and state control over goods distribution.Footnote ³⁸ According to Ken Jowitt, the purpose of collectivization was to undermine the social, economic, and political power of the peasant extended household. Non-familial hierarchies and relationships, such as the brigade and team, were supposed to displace the “familialism” of the peasant family work unit.Footnote ³⁹ The assault on the peasant family that became synonymous with collectivization constituted an essential component of Stalin's revolution from above. In its decrees on kulak deportations, the Politburo used the terms kulak household or farm (kulatskie khoziaistva) and kulak family (kulatskie semeistva) interchangeably.Footnote ⁴⁰ Kulaks were deported in family units consisting of the head of household plus economic dependents.Footnote ⁴¹ As Lynne Viola writes, “Dekulakization had been aimed at the entire kulak household, not just heads of families.”Footnote ⁴²

During the terror campaigns of disenfranchisement and dekulakization, official instructions described kinship largely in economic terms. Soviet legislation on disenfranchisement hardly used the language of kinship at all, noting instead, “the financial dependents of persons disenfranchised” would also be subject to the loss of rights.Footnote ⁴³ Although spouses and children were not explicitly identified as targets of disenfranchisement, those who implemented the policy understood “dependents” as a code word for family. As one local official simply stated, “You know, we disenfranchise a peasant along with his family.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the official emphasis on financial dependency rather than marriage or descent gave individuals some space to prove their financial independence and thereby avoid punishment, it also allowed the regime to capture relationships of affinity as well as kinship. This was especially desirable in a society where non-kin or distant kin were often treated as nuclear family.Footnote ⁴⁵ The party leadership went after practical kinship as Pierre Bourdieu defined it, that is, relationships that were “oriented towards the satisfaction of material and symbolic interests” and “whose boundaries and definitions are as numerous and varied as the users and the occasions on which it is used.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In later years, the Stalinist leadership would explicitly target particular kin (spouses, parents, children) in addition to financial dependents and co-inhabitants.

The collective punishment of kin greatly magnified the effects of class warfare, and this multiplier effect was especially pronounced in the case of kulaks. A 30 January 1930 Politburo decree, “On measures for the liquidation of kulak households in the districts of complete collectivization,” called for the punishment and exile of entire kulak families.Footnote ⁴⁷ Following the publication of this law, the Politburo established a quota of 49,000–60,000 people to be sent to the camps and 129,000–154,000 to be exiled. According to Oleg Khlevniuk, “Since the families of these 200,000 ‘kulaks’ also had to be exiled, a total of 1,000,000 people were destined for repression.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1930, the Northern region had the largest number of peasant exiles—46,562 families for a total of 230,065 people (of which 87,912, or 38 percent, were children)—consistent with the standard Soviet calculation of five members to a family.Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, the sharp increase in the number of disenfranchised people in the late 1920s coincided with the government's inclusion of family members as a target group. In the republic of Ukraine in 1927, nearly half of all the disenfranchised were deprived of rights as “family members of persons disenfranchised.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1929, across the Russian republic, dependents, usually women and children, constituted 35 percent of the disenfranchised in urban areas and nearly half of all the rural disenfranchised.Footnote ⁵¹

In the Bolshevik imagination, class enemies not only came in family groupings but it was their loyalty to kin that made them appear subversive. Kulaks and other class enemies were described as people who placed the interests of their own family above the collective. Bruce Grant quotes from an official 1932 Nivkh textbook entitled Cuz Dif (New World) in which children are taught the definition of a class enemy. A kulak is someone who disregards his fellow comrades because his primary loyalty rests with his own kin: “What is a kulak? … he takes fish for himself, his wife and his little children, but he doesn't give enough to the workers to feed their wives and children.”Footnote ⁵² The New Soviet Person was supposed to privilege the interests of the socialist collective over personal bonds of kinship. Class enemies, such as kulaks, did not. The party sought to break the family ties of class enemies and, where possible, to reconfigure them such that one's strongest loyalty would be to the collective and not to kin. To illustrate this ideal, the party held up the example of Pavlik Morozov. Perhaps the most striking counter-example of the class enemy, this young man became a Soviet hero and martyr after he denounced his own father as a kulak. As the official Soviet version of events emphasized, the murders of the fifteen-year-old Pavlik and his nine-year-old brother were orchestrated by members of his family—the victims' cousin, grandparents, and uncles. Like a good communist who put party loyalty ahead of his familial attachments, Pavlik declared at his father's trial (referring to the Soviet agent as symbolic kin): “Uncle Judge, I am acting not as a son, but as a Pioneer!”Footnote ⁵³ The New Soviet man would, like Pavlik, subordinate actual kinship ties to the metaphorical family of party and state, even to the point of denouncing family members as anti-Soviet elements. However, as Sheila Fitzpatrick notes, few people actually did this because denouncing a family member essentially meant turning state scrutiny upon oneself as someone with dangerous kinship ties.Footnote ⁵⁴

Under NKVD control, young kulaks were separated from and turned against their parents and other contaminating kin. The 30 January 1930 Politburo decree expressed the hope that young kulak exiles might reject their families; in such cases, this group would be subject to cultural-social measures (kul'turno-bytovye meropriiatiia) of reeducation.Footnote ⁵⁵ With regard to kulak families deported to the Northern region in 1930, the OGPU reported, “the younger generation (molodniak) represents the majority of deported kulaks. Their mood is good… . The young curse their fathers for the fact that they have had to suffer because of them.”Footnote ⁵⁶ One year later, the OGPU would be instructed to “separate the youth” for better treatment and “not subject them to the strict regimen that applies to the head of the family.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Kulak children represented a privileged category for the purposes of official rehabilitation.Footnote ⁵⁸

Stalin's repudiation of the collective punishment of kin signaled the end of militant class war. In response to a young and politically loyal combine operator who identified himself as the son of a kulak, Stalin made his famous remark in December 1935: “The son is not responsible for the father.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The children of class enemies would no longer face formal restrictions against their access to higher education, the komsomol, or trade unions because of their parents' social origin, although discrimination against them would continue for many years. Stalin's statement regarding fathers and sons also reflected the regime's hierarchy of potential danger. The most threatening class enemies were male wage earners while their dependents had the advantage of an ambiguous identity. Women and children could appear as both adversary and victim. They were necessarily tainted because of their kinship ties to the class enemy, but they also represented the victims of bourgeois exploitation. Patterns of rehabilitation illustrate the importance of age and gender. In particular, sons and daughters (people like Pavlik Morozov) were deemed more corrigible than their parents. As early as 1926 the Soviet government extended the possibility of rehabilitation to disenfranchised children only, those who were minors before 1925, and had lost their rights as financially dependent on a disenfranchised parent.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although Stalin's 1936 constitution declared the USSR to be a classless society, the stigma of the class enemy would remain for years. After publication of the new constitution, kulak special settlers could have their rights restored, but they were not allowed to leave their place of settlement.Footnote ⁶¹ In October 1938, the Soviet government ended hereditary exile for kulak settlers by specifying that certain children of labor settlers could be released from exile once they turned sixteen.Footnote ⁶² The preferences extended to young people reflected the party's contention that only the children of enemies could be truly redeemed. This would change as the wartime emergency granted a conditional amnesty to political offenders young and old in order to deploy them to the front.Footnote ⁶³ “Counterrevolutionaries” such as kulaks were allowed to serve in the military and thereby earn rehabilitation for themselves and their family.Footnote ⁶⁴

Enemies of the People “and their Clan”

Following the December 1934 murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov, a wave of arrests in the city affected both perceived enemies and their family members. The purge in Leningrad in early 1935 largely included class enemies such as clergy, tsarist officials, private traders, and landowners. The NKVD Special Council sentenced 4,833 heads of household and 6,239 family members to camps, exile, and relocation—a total of 11,072 people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As was the case during dekulakization, family members constituted the majority of persons rounded up in this wave of arrests. The police operations in Leningrad are often identified as the harbinger of Stalin's Great Terror. Like state enemies of earlier years, victims of the terror were punished collectively as families of enemies. However, the first order governing the mass operations appeared ambiguous regarding the collective punishment of kin. NKVD order no. 00447 of 30 July 1937, “On the repressive operation against former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements,” specified that “as a rule” the family members of these individuals would not be punished, although the order listed exceptions to the rule. Family members “capable of active anti-Soviet activities” would be sent to camps while others could be deported; all family members of these anti-Soviet elements would in the least be “registered and placed under systematic observation.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In two weeks, things changed dramatically and kinship itself became punishable, regardless of one's anti-Soviet capabilities. NKVD order no. 00486 of 15 August 1937 detailed the repressive measures to be taken against the family members of “traitors to the motherland,” members of “right-Trotskyist spying-sabotage organizations,” and others sentenced by military tribunals.Footnote ⁶⁷ The NKVD USSR issued specific instructions concerning the fate of wives and children, but it gave local NKVD organs discretion in deciding what to do about “parents and other relatives who are dependent on and live with the person under arrest.”Footnote ⁶⁸ According to this lengthy directive, the secret police was required to gather extensive data on the family members of those taken into custody. This included the names along with detailed information on each person, compromising material on the wife of the accused, data on elderly parents and children who require care, plus information on whether the arrested person's children over the age of fifteen are “socially dangerous and capable of anti-Soviet actions.” The order specified in no uncertain terms that “henceforth the wives of unmasked traitors of the Motherland and right-Trotskyist spies should be arrested with their husbands” and subject to labor camp detention for “no less than five to eight years,” depending on the degree to which they were deemed “socially dangerous.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The Stalinist regime now cast a wide net when it came to the collective punishment of kin. In the case of class war, Soviet legislation rarely mentioned particular kin such as spouses and children, but instead referred to the family members of bourgeois enemies as financial dependents. To a large degree, this appears related to the nature of the enemy. The bourgeois enemy represented an exploiter and thief, and his dependents, according to official propaganda, lived off this “unearned” income. By contrast, the “enemies of the people” during Stalin's Great Terror constituted traitors and saboteurs, so family members appeared as dangerous co-conspirators. If class war punished family members as non-laboring elements, the Great Terror attacked kin as co-plotters and enemy sympathizers. Family ties continued to be defined by dependency, but added to this was cohabitation, as if persons residing under the same roof would be likely collaborators. The targeting of co-inhabitants reveals the regime's suspicion of those in close proximity to the enemy, and shows how the private sphere emerged as a place of conspiracy and intrigue. NKVD order no. 00486 defined the family members of enemies as “all persons who are dependent on and who live with the person under arrest.” Not only were wives subject to arrest but ex-wives too, if the NKVD authorities believed that ex-wives took part in or had knowledge of the counterrevolutionary activities of the accused.

During the mass operations, the Soviet security police treated all relatives severely, but male kin were more likely to receive a death sentence. Mikhail Tomsky's two sons were shot, as were all the male relatives of Trotsky (with the exception of one nephew). On the other hand, the daughters of the purged military leaders Mikhail Tukhachevskii and Yan Gamarnik lived in a special children's home with the children of other purged officers; later, they were each arrested as teenagers and sent to a labor camp.Footnote ⁷⁰ Despite its gendered treatment of enemies, the security police hardly granted women and children leniency. Children were seized after an arrest warrant for the mother was issued, and women were sent to camps even if they were pregnant or nursing. Once babies reached the age of one or one-and-a-half, they were separated from their mothers and directed to an orphanage. None of the children's personal papers (such as birth certificate and educational documents) remained with the parents. As distinct from the period of class war, the separation of enemy families was intended to be complete. The NKVD took possession of children and their personal documents upon the parents' arrest.Footnote ⁷¹

Depending on their age, the degree of danger they posed, and their ability to “remake” themselves, these stigmatized children were either sent to NKVD camps, corrective labor colonies, or to special regime orphanages run by the republican Commissariat of Education (Narkompros).Footnote ⁷² Those under three lived in orphanages close to home. Children between three and fifteen years old were directed to orphanages in other republics and regions. If classified as “socially-dangerous children,” then those fifteen to seventeen were held in special NKVD camps, separated from adults, denied the right to send letters or see visitors, and subject to intense “cultural education.”Footnote ⁷³ Regardless of their age, the children of enemies carried a profound stigma. They could not be settled in the major urban centers of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Minsk, nor in border or coastal cities. Many of these so-called “children of repressed enemies of the people” appear to have been neglected by both the republican NKVD organs and Narkompros and often became victims of abuse.Footnote ⁷⁴

NKVD order no. 00486 also specified that relatives who have not been subject to repression and who were willing to take in these orphans “would not be hindered.”Footnote ⁷⁵ But such adoptions presented no small risk to family members. In order to adopt so-called “children of repressed parents,” relatives had to appeal directly to NKVD authorities and register themselves with the agency.Footnote ⁷⁶ The NKVD would then “conduct systematic inspections on the state of the children's upbringing by the guardian, the mood of the children, their behavior and circle of friends, and also all influences on the children by those who have taken them into their care.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Such total surveillance by officers of the Soviet secret police would hardly encourage relatives to step forward and assume guardianship of these children. Indeed, if NKVD inspectors acquired “compromising data” on the adoptive parents, the child could be seized or transferred to the care of other relatives. Some family members did indeed become guardians for these children, subjecting themselves to constant NKVD scrutiny and the danger of arrest.

Moreover, despite the risk, many who had not been arrested as family members of “enemies of the people” appealed vigorously for their relatives' release. As a way of discouraging this barrage of complaints and appeals, the NKVD told family members that their relatives received a ten-year sentence without the right of correspondence when, in fact, they had been shot.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet the news did not deter many from writing. Throughout the years of the Great Terror, people flooded Soviet institutions and party leaders with letters concerning the fate of their relatives. Moreover, the family members of persons arrested appealed for their relatives' release by reproducing the metaphor of the “great family” and stressing the importance of keeping the “little family” intact. The children of one man sent the following telegram to Stalin in 1936: “Our dear father, you have made our childhood happy, yet today a great misfortunate has come upon us. We decided to share this with you as a friend. Because of our father's mistake, a court has decided to end his life. We are pioneers and ask you to spare his life for us… .”Footnote ⁷⁹ Far from maintaining its subordinate position, the “little family” often challenged the “great family.”

During the Great Terror, Stalin also went after what he described as “family circles” (semeistvennosti) or networks of patronage and mutual protection.Footnote ⁸⁰ Once again, state enemies represented kinship groups, real or imagined. The security police not only targeted the relatives of persons identified as “enemies of the people,” but friends and work associates of these enemies became vulnerable to punishment too. Such networks may or may not have been kinship-based. Nonetheless, the language here reveals how Stalin's suspicion of family ties extended to bonds that resembled kinship, that is, personal ties of loyalty that offered mutual protection and could undermine one's primary loyalty to the state. Even symbolic kinship suggested political deviance. In remarks to the Party Central Committee plenum in March 1937, Stalin condemned local officials who surrounded themselves with loyal clients or a family (semeika) of people who were especially close to them. He asserted that this “family situation” (semeistvennaia obstanovka) worked to protect officials from criticism because members of the loyal family circle “do not offend one another, do not take rubbish out of the hut” but instead “praise each other and from time to time send empty and nauseating reports about [local] successes to the center.”Footnote ⁸¹ In fact, the Stalinist leadership encouraged popular denunciations of Soviet bureaucrats as a means of disrupting personal networks of mutual protection.Footnote ⁸² The practice of collective punishment became more expansive and explicit, as Soviet leaders grew increasingly suspicious of a diverse population of both actual and practical kin.

Moreover, during the Great Terror Stalin routinely arrested or threatened to arrest the family members of his close associates in a practice that appears similar to hostage taking. The wives of Mikhail Kalinin, Semyon Budenny, Alexander Poskrebyshev, and Vyacheslav Molotov were either executed or exiled, or languished in the Gulag while their husbands served Stalin in prominent positions. In the typical ritualistic fashion, these men were forced to condemn their spouses. Molotov apologized to Stalin in a top-secret memo after the Central Committee voted to exclude his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, from the party. He confessed his “political error” for not initially supporting the action, and stated that his wife's punishment was in fact “in the interests of the party and the state.”Footnote ⁸³ The kinship transformation that Boym and Clark identified in Soviet culture apparently played out in the Kremlin. By arresting their kin, Stalin forced members of his inner circle to subordinate horizontal kinship loyalties in favor of a vertical bond to him.

As in the case of class warfare, it was a change in the regime's policy regarding the collective punishment of kin that first signaled the reduction of terror. On 9 January 1938, the Politburo declared that the relatives of persons who had been arrested on counterrevolutionary charges should not be fired from their jobs solely on account of their kinship ties.Footnote ⁸⁴ NKVD USSR order no. 00689 of 17 October 1938 explicitly ended the practice called for in NKVD order no. 00486, in which wives were necessarily punished with their husband.Footnote ⁸⁵ One month later, the party leadership put an end to the bloodiest purge of the Stalin years with a decree that criticized the fabrication of cases against “innocent people.”Footnote ⁸⁶ After the dictator's death, a lengthy report on the Great Terror was circulated to members of Khrushchev's party presidium that sharply criticized order no. 00486 for punishing innocent family members.Footnote ⁸⁷

Ethnic Difference, Treason, and Kinship

Under Stalin, repression against various categories of enemies—so-called kulaks, enemies of the people, bandits, counterrevolutionaries, and other anti-Soviet elements—disproportionately affected certain ethnic groups.Footnote ⁸⁸ Bolshevik perceptions regarding the kinship ties of ethnic minorities often made these populations especially vulnerable to repression. Among the Turkic nomadic tribes of Oirotiia, party officials and ethnographers characterized kinship networks and “clan survivals” as obstacles to socialist construction that only strengthened the position of local kulaks and other class enemies. Such enemy exploiters were believed to be infiltrating the collective farms “through their followers, through family members, and through relatives.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Communist officials who sought to dekulakize the natives in Kamchatka and other northern territories insisted that mutual aid among kin disguised exploitation and kulak activity.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Stalinist regime also condemned Kazakh “feudal society with patriarchal survivals” because the Kazakhs identified so strongly with their tribes and clans.Footnote ⁹¹ Given the importance of kinship in their communities, the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities were often perceived as resistant to socialist transformation or harboring anti-Soviet elements.

Despite the best efforts of the regime, years of Sovietization did not eradicate the important social functions of kinship across the USSR or produce a displacement of the family by the socialist collective. With respect to the peoples of the Soviet south, Ron Suny writes, “loyalty is given first to kinship groups or intimate friends… . So powerful are the obligations to one's relatives and friends that the shame incurred by non-fulfillment was, for many in the southern tier of Soviet republics, much more serious than the penalties imposed by law.”Footnote ⁹² Collective farms in Tajikistan were organized according to traditional kinship networks and work brigades consisted largely of relatives.Footnote ⁹³ Stalin's campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture produced “clan kolkhozes” as collective farms in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East were organized along traditional kinship lines.Footnote ⁹⁴ The custom of “adoptive brotherhood” among certain ethnic groups such as the Georgians and Kazakhs illustrates how some nationalities maintained a broad definition of kinship and a vast network of kinship loyalties.Footnote ⁹⁵ Buryat families continued to possess important social functions in the Soviet period. Kinship ties were used as a safety net, for the exchange, distribution, and consumption of income, to gain control over labor, to secure employment or education, and to acquire and maintain political or social status.Footnote ⁹⁶

As Hildred Geertz notes, in certain communities “a person without a strong network of family, neighbors, or patronage is at a considerable political and social disadvantage.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This was the case beyond the ethnic territories, since kinship was not necessarily more relevant in the minority regions of the Soviet Union. The proverb, “A Russian cannot live without relatives” (Russkii chelovek bez rodni ne zhivet) captured a certain reality.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the Soviet Union, as Alena Ledeneva writes, “Not only immediate but also extended kin networks were main channels for redistributing goods and services.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Across various populations of the USSR, family networks both facilitated and undermined formal channels of goods distribution dictated by the centrally planned economy. Yet party officials often focused on the potentially subversive nature of kinship ties, and this prejudice appears most pronounced in the case of non-Russian populations. Since family circles and bonds of kinship were often perceived as potential threats to Soviet power, national groups became especially vulnerable to political purges.

For the Stalinist leadership, the presence of strong kinship ties undermined the loyalty of ethnic populations to the Soviet state. The most trusted members of ethnic groups were often those with the shortest kinship network. Douglas Northrop describes how the party consciously promoted within its ranks orphans and others without strong kinship ties in Uzbekistan. Both male and female Uzbek communists tended to lack extensive family connections.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The fear that kinship ties were potentially subversive led to the deportation of the entire Korean population. Yezhov's top secret memorandum of 1937 on the deportation of Koreans documented the repression in terms of the number of families affected: “In total, 124 trains with Koreans have departed, containing 36,442 families, or 171,781 people… . The Koreans sent to the Uzbek SSR number 16,272 families, or 76,525 people. Those Koreans sent to the Kazakh SSR number 20,170 families, or 95,256 people.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As high as these numbers appear, the NKVD leadership later decided to deport the whole Korean community. Officials believed that offenses against family would generate deep hostility among the Koreans because of their strong kinship ties. The importance of not leaving any Korean behind was stressed by the assistant head of the NKVD, Vasily Chernyshev, in a memo to Yezhov: “To leave these few thousand Koreans in the Far Eastern krai, when the majority have been deported will be dangerous, since the family ties of all Koreans are very strong. The territorial restrictions on those remaining in the Far East will undoubtedly affect their mood and these groups will become rich soil for the Japanese to work on.”Footnote ¹⁰² The stronger the kinship ties, so it was believed, the greater the chance that repression against one would turn others into anti-Soviet elements.

The threat from Hitler's Germany intensified fears within the party over the presence of internal enemies who collaborated with foreign governments, and such enemy traitors were punished together with their family members. In June 1934, Pravda published a front-page article and TsIK USSR decree on the punishment of dangerous criminals such as so-called counterrevolutionaries and traitors. Among other things, the law specified that members of the traitor's family (chleny sem'i izmennika) would be punished with deprivation of freedom and exile from five to ten years plus confiscation of all property.Footnote ¹⁰³ During World War II, a decree of the State Defense Committee entitled “On the Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland” stated that adult (sovershennoletnie) family members of military personnel and civilians sentenced to death as spies, traitors, or collaborators would be subject to arrest and exile. Unlike similar pronouncements from state security organs in earlier years, this decree defined a traitor's family in very broad terms: “Family members of traitors to the Motherland include: the father, mother, husband, wife, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters if they lived with the traitor to the Motherland or were dependent on him [or her] at the time the crime was committed or at the moment of [the person's] mobilization into the army at the start of the war.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Although minority groups were not mentioned in these decrees, non-Russians became especially vulnerable to the charge of treason.

Ethnic deportations began in the early 1930s but intensified leading up to and during the war.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As in the case of dekulakization, the security police relied on estimates of family size when it conducted operations to deport the various national minorities. Kate Brown describes how, in the late 1930s, national groups purged from the Ukrainian borderlands were deported to Northern Kazakhstan, yet “nearly twice as many deportees arrived in Kazakhstan than the number estimated. The NKVD had planned on three people for each of the 15,000 households deported; instead, the average family had five members. Rather than the planned 45,000 settlers, 70,000 people arrived.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Whether the security apparatus counted five- or three-member families, its accounting by family unit remained the same.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The NKVD managed and moved ethnic populations in kinship groups, routinely recording on internal memoranda not only the number of people transferred but also the number of families. To be sure, Stalin's ethnic deportations often involved the wholesale transfer of ethnic populations, so extended families became victims by definition. The kulak deportations, by contrast, did not target entire peasant communities; rather, the NKVD singled out certain people and often did not deport parents, siblings, or other relatives of the kulak head of household. This distinction highlights some of the differences between class and ethnic terror that scholars have identified.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Yet the very charge of treason is also significant here. Repression against ethnic minorities coincided with attacks against traitors of all kinds, and the family members of perceived traitors—Russian and non-Russian—were routinely punished with exile.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Most notoriously, the Stalinist regime classified entire ethnic populations as traitors. Diaspora nationalities or ethnic groups that constituted majorities in independent states abroad, such as Germans, Poles, Latvians, Greeks, and Koreans, became subject to mass deportations on suspicions that their strongest loyalties were reserved for their homeland and countrymen abroad. The Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, Tatar, and other national groups were also suspected of collaborating with the Germans and punished with deportation. The party branded such populations as counterrevolutionary “enemy nations” and forcibly transported them to settlements in Central Asia and Siberia. For example, the Soviet government initiated mass deportations of its ethnic German population shortly after Germany's invasion of the USSR. In the city of Moscow and the surrounding region of the Moscow oblast', nearly 8,500 people were deported in just two weeks in September 1941.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By November, as many as 607,327 ethnic Germans had been deported to settlements in Kazakhstan and Siberia, and many of these deportees were children and elderly family members.Footnote ¹¹¹ In October 1941, children constituted nearly half of the 2,725 Germans deported from the Crimean autonomous republic and the Krasnodarsk krai.Footnote ¹¹² Like “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” “enemy nations” came in units comprised of a head of household plus kin.

Kinship ties of the German deportees represented a central concern of the NKVD leadership, as these relationships determined who would be deported, which family should be classified as “German,” as well as the registration, management, and policing of this population of outcasts. Once again, the deportation of the German “enemy nation” illustrates how terror practices under Stalin were gendered. The male head of household (and only he) transmitted his enemy status to kin. According to the instructions of NKVD chief Beria, families considered German for the purposes of deportation were only those in which an ethnic German represented the male head of household or husband. A Russian man with a German wife would not have his family subject to deportation.Footnote ¹¹³ Moreover, deportees were managed in family units, and the male head of household shouldered responsibility for policing his family. Deportees were to be registered with the state as family units (they were issued a family ID or semeinaia kartochka)Footnote ¹¹⁴ and the authorities had to “warn the head of the family of deportees upon registration that he bears responsibility for all deported members of his family.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In an example of krugovaia poruka, any transgression by a member of the family would result in criminal sanction for the male head of household and the punishment of other family members as well.Footnote ¹¹⁶ When arranging the transfer of Germans to settlements—“without noise and panic,” Beria insistedFootnote ¹¹⁷—Soviet authorities were also supposed to take into account the number of families subject to deportation and the size of each family with the presumed goal of keeping families together. NKVD authorities paid special attention to this as many tried to flee settlements in order to reunite with family members. Relatives who were hospitalized or otherwise unable to be deported at the time of the family's transfer would be joined with the family at a later date. Cargo was also grouped by family, and a maximum weight for personal belongings was assigned not to individuals, but to each family unit.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The security police managed “enemy nations” as kinship groups, not only for the purpose of arrest and deportation, but also for rehabilitation.

As in the terror against “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” the end of repression against “enemy nations” was first signaled by a change in policy with respect to family members. Just as the children of deported kulaks were the first to be granted the reinstatement of rights under certain conditions, the younger generation among the ethnic populations that had been punished with deportation was also placed at the head of the queue. Following Stalin's death, the slow process of rehabilitation began for members of deported “enemy nations.” On 5 July 1954, the Council of Ministers released all children under sixteen from the special settlements, including German, Karachay, and Kalmyk youth. The parents and adult relatives of these youth would have to wait a few more years for their release.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Conclusion

Prominently situated one step below the larger constructions of “bourgeois classes,” “enemies of the people,” and “enemy nations,” was the sub-category of the family that, I argue, constituted the basic “unit” of terror under Stalin. A look at Stalinist terror through the lens of kinship reveals the degree to which political enemies were imagined and punished as family networks, real or symbolic. Whether the Soviet security police described its target as economic dependents or co-inhabitants or explicitly mentioned specific kin, it considered people responsible for (if not complicit in) the crimes of those close to them. Under Stalin, terror became directed at intimate relationships and social interactions, and political danger was assessed in terms of one person's proximity to the next. Stalinist terror made kinship relevant in various ways. There was hardly an incidence of terror that did not punish family members, and such attacks intensified over time, as descent and marriage, in addition to economic dependency and co-habitation, became explicitly punishable offenses. The consequences were not insignificant. A wife condemned for being financially dependent on a class enemy could appeal for the reinstatement of rights once she established economic independence, but a wife arrested as the wife of a traitor had no such recourse. From one campaign of terror to the next, it is apparent that the stigma of kinship becomes more severe and immutable. For the Soviet Marxists, clan and not class often mattered most.

To be sure, the arrest of one person on anti-Soviet charges did not necessarily result in the punishment of kin. The sheer randomness and irregularity of the Soviet terror system precludes such assertions. Some kulaks were released from exile as wrongly deported. Some children of enemies of the people did not face discrimination, but lived relatively normal lives in the care of grandparents who were also largely unaffected by the arrest of kin. Some German citizens of the USSR were not deported during World War II because they were too old, had family members in the Red Army, or were prominent specialists. The Soviet case does not offer a good example of the totalizing treatment of enemy categories. Nonetheless, since the party viewed kinship ties and those resembling them as potentially subversive, Soviet political violence was applied to the family unit in a remarkably persistent manner. An enormous population—often the majority—of victims of political repression was condemned solely as family members of marked enemies. The Stalinist leadership imagined and apprehended not individual enemies but families of enemies, and this practice of punishing kin collectively demonstrates that the eradication of undesirable elements constituted a fundamental goal of party policy. As Amir Weiner writes, attacks against families of enemies illustrate the “exterminatory character” of Soviet terror campaigns.Footnote ¹²⁰ Stalin's statement at the beginning of this article makes such intentions clear; the goal was to wipe out the enemies' entire lineage, their relations, and their clan.

Many were eliminated but others were not. Enormous populations of perceived state enemies moved from the “big zone” of Soviet society to the “little zone” of the Gulag, the most notorious of all Stalinist institutions. When we look at the impact of collective punishment, it becomes apparent that a cultural practice informed this important penal and economic system in fundamental ways. The arrest of entire families produced a situation in which the OGPU-NKVD managed a broad demographic of prisoners, including women, elderly parents, children, and juveniles. The very practice of collective punishment dramatically extended the reach and functions of the penal apparatus. Those under OGPU-NKVD control resided in a vast network of assorted detention facilities, from labor camps and colonies to settlements and special regime orphanages, each with its own unique demographic.Footnote ¹²¹ As the basic unit of terror, the family became grafted onto the larger penal apparatus. The security police managed families: processing the petitions of family members, policing kinship ties, identifying family structures, enforcing familial krugovaia poruka, and meting out punishment or extending rehabilitation to persons consistent with their position within the patriarchal family hierarchy. Only the significance of a cultural practice like collective punishment can explain why Stalin's Gulag system, whose primary functions were disciplinary and economic, spent so much energy on the incarceration of underage, elderly, less productive, and highly vulnerable populations.