Putin Regime Increasingly Using Stalinist Tactic of Taking as Hostages Family Members of Its Opponents, Pavlov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 25 – In the first years of Putin’s rule, Russian security services occasionally made use of the Stalinist tactic of taking as hostages family members of their opponents; but in the last several, Ivan Pavlov says, this practice has become so widespread as to be almost routine.
    So far, the Russian lawyer says, the Putin regime has sought to intimidate this or that individual into silence or cooperation rather than to frighten the entire society as Stalin did with his jailing of relatives of those it judged to be “enemies of the people.” But there is a great danger that Putin’s moves could grow into that (theins.ru/opinions/ivan-pavlov/276418).
    Pavlov suggests Russia “still has a chance to avoid a repetition of the blackest pages of its history, at least if the current regime quite quickly comes to an end.” Anything short of that, including exposure of the crimes the Putin regime is committing, is unlikely to force the Chekist leader to change his ways.  
    To make his case that this practice has a long history in the Soviet Union and Russia and that it is expanding again under Putin, the Russian lawyer points to a number of cases involving the arrest of wives of prominent dissidents like Leonid Gozman and the arrest of those that the regime hopes to exchange with the West for its own agents.
    Some of the cases are well-known in the West including the arrest of the brother of Aleksey Navalny but many have taken place without the kind of attention that might dissuade at least some in the Russian power structures from using a technique most often associated with international terrorists than with governments.
    Unfortunately, as Pavlov documents, the Putin regime is now acting in this regard the same way as such terrorist groups do and is better classified as a terrorist organization than a state like any other.