Hostages of the state: Russia rehabilitates Stalin-era tactic of using dissidents’ family members as bargaining chips

RU

Despite heavy censorship, widespread persecution, and the blocking of independent online platforms, vocal critics of Vladimir Putin’s political and military actions continue to reach Russian audiences. In response, the Kremlin is turning to increasingly aggressive — and legally dubious — methods to suppress dissent.

Leonid Gozman, a political analyst well-known to viewers on YouTube, recently announced that he would be suspending his public activities. Gozman’s career dates back long before the digital age. In the 1990s, he served as an advisor to Yegor Gaidar and later as an aide to Viktor Chernomyrdin. He was also the leader of the long-since defunct “Union of Right Forces” party and held senior management roles at Russia’s energy grid operator RAO UES and state-run nanotechnology corporation Rosnano. Over time, he shifted from official politics to the opposition, became a vocal supporter of Ukraine, emigrated, and was labeled a “foreign agent.” He later faced criminal charges back home and was convicted in absentia. Until recently, it seemed nothing could deter Gozman from his relentless political and social engagement.

That changed on October 3, 2024, when his 72-year-old wife, Marina Yegorova, was detained in Moscow. She had traveled to the city to deliver a series of lectures on psychology. Her arrest was based on accusations of smuggling “cultural assets,” which referred not to historical treasures, but to family silverware — forks and spoons — that Gozman had reportedly taken abroad. Authorities claim these utensils constitute cultural valuables, and Yegorova now faces charges of smuggling as part of an alleged organized group. She remains in Moscow, where she lives under house arrest.

Simply put, Marina Yegorova was taken hostage in order to pressure her husband into abandoning his public activities.

Hostage-taking, which only a few decades ago was primarily associated with non-state actors, has long been incorporated into the toolkit of state-sponsored terrorists. One of the key figures in a recent prisoner exchange was also a hostage — journalist Evan Gershkovich. In the spring of 2023, he was detained and accused of espionage while on a standard reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, Russia. Shortly after that, Vladimir Putin announced his intention to exchange Gershkovich for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian intelligence officer serving a life sentence in Germany for the assassination of a Chechen field commander. Although Gershkovich was not being used to pressure a relative, his detention provided the Kremlin with leverage over the U.S. government, making him a valuable bargaining chip for facilitating a swap.

The practice of taking hostages for use in exchanges is a long-standing tradition of the Soviet security services, predating Gershkovich or, in another recent example, basketball player Brittney Griner, whose arrest proved instrumental in freeing arms trafficker Viktor Bout from an American prison. Rewinding to the Brezhnev era reveals similar operations, such as the exchange of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky for Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalán.

Bukovsky, sentenced in 1972, had spent over a decade in the Soviet dissident movement. He endured punitive psychiatry for his views and later fought against the practice for many years. Initially, he was more of a prisoner of conscience than a hostage. However, when Western human rights groups began drawing significant attention to his persecution, the Kremlin realized that troublesome individuals could not only be imprisoned or institutionalized, but also used as “bargaining assets” in place of Western spies — who, naturally, were harder to catch. This shift quickly made its way into Soviet folk verse (which in Russian actually rhymes):

We swapped a hooligan

For Luis Corvalán;

But what kind of @$*!#

Would it take to trade Brezhnev for?

Of course, the criminal charges used to replenish this “exchange pool” have changed over the years. Under Brezhnev, people were imprisoned for “anti-Soviet activities,” whereas Vladimir Putin's regime adapts its charges to fit the situation. The underlying constant, however, remains unchanged: foreign nationals or prominent dissidents are taken hostage to be traded for someone valuable to Russia’s security services.

The criminal case against Leonid Gozman’s wife deviates from this pattern. While figures like Gershkovich and Griner were used to achieve foreign policy objectives — forcing Western nations into exchanges — Yegorova’s case is a purely “domestic matter.” It represents an instance of direct pressure on a prominent Russian public figure who commands a significant audience. Does this suggest that such “domestic” hostage-taking is becoming a standard tool of the repressive system, to be used as widely as it is in Belarus?

In fact, this shift has already occurred. To see this, we must look back to 2014 — a pivotal year not only for Ukraine’s security, but also for Russia’s citizens. That year, Oleg Navalny, the brother of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sentenced in the so-called “Yves Rocher case.” Even then, the verdict was universally recognized as hostage-taking — an attempt to pressure a prominent opposition figure who had just officially garnered more than one in four votes in the Moscow mayoral election despite having minimal resources at his disposal.

Then the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent strengthening of Russia’s security apparatus gave rise to entirely new categories of criminal cases. Among them, in the post-Crimea period, accusations of treason and espionage began to spread on a massive scale. This was also the time when Russian security forces introduced the practice of taking relatives of Crimean Tatar activists as hostages.

One early, striking example is the case of Hayser Dzhemilev — son of Soviet dissident, Ukrainian MP, and Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev. Unlike others mentioned here, Hayser was not entirely uninvolved in wrongdoing: a year before the annexation, he accidentally shot and killed a person. However, since the incident occurred on Ukrainian territory, he should have been handed over to Ukrainian authorities.

Instead, Russian security services transferred Hayser from occupied Crimea to the Krasnodar Region, and he served his sentence in a penal colony in the city of Astrakhan. This occurred despite the European Court of Human Rights — whose decisions Russia was obligated to comply with — demand that the younger Dzhemiliev be extradited to Ukraine. The Kremlin’s maneuvers had an obvious goal: to put pressure on Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was barred from entering Russia and was therefore unable to visit his son during his imprisonment.

It is crucial to highlight an uncomfortable truth: anyone, even someone who has committed a crime, can become a hostage of a terrorist. These individuals still have legal and human rights, and these rights must be upheld.

The practice of “domestic” hostage-taking reached its peak in the early 2020s, as the state apparatus, preparing for war, began purging its public space of dissidents. On Feb. 17, 2022, exactly one week before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine commenced, Yuri Zhdanov, the father of Alexei Navalny’s close associate Ivan Zhdanov, was sentenced to three years in prison. The clear aim was to target his son, who had already fled Russia due to political persecution.

In Chechnya, security forces took hostage Zarema Musayeva, whose sons are vocal critics of Ramzan Kadyrov. Lawyer Igor Sergunin found himself in the reverse situation: his underage daughter became a hostage after he was detained and placed in custody, leaving her without a legal guardian.

It is important to remember that the key element of pressure in hostage-taking is not merely the deprivation of freedom, but the victim's total vulnerability to the captor. A state that disregards the rule of law can arbitrarily place a hostage in stricter conditions, open new criminal cases to extend their imprisonment, subject them to torture, inflict severe health damage, or even simply kill them — a reality that adds certain credibility to the threats contained in the lesser awful punishments.

Zarema Musayeva, who suffers from diabetes with multiple complications, should legally be released for health reasons. However, a Chechen medical commission downgraded her diagnosis to a milder one, allowing her to remain in the penal colony. Despite being unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair, she remains imprisoned, and her health continues to deteriorate by the day.

The elderly Yuri Zhdanov was held in an unheated cell during the winter months. To avoid freezing to death, he surrounded himself at night with bottles of hot water that he warmed up using an immersion heater in his cell. The prison administration refused to provide him with even an adequate blanket.

Alexei Navalny, who voluntarily returned to Russia out of principle, was also exploited by the regime as a hostage. He was subjected to repeated acts of torture until his eventual death — all of it aimed at forcing his associates to abandon their political activities.

Examining this wave of state terror leads to two observations. First, while hostage-taking has been practiced for many years, it was previously an exceptional tactic. Now, security forces employ it regularly and without hesitation, and the risks to those caught in the abuse of state power have significantly increased. For the relatives of public figures, time spent in Russian prisons increasingly resembles captivity under ISIS — though drawing a direct equivalence would still be premature.

Secondly, as with all other repressive tools, the threat of hostage-taking is gradually extending to ever-wider groups of citizens. Ten years ago, the brother of a young, popular politician — one who possessed his own political infrastructure, independent funding sources outside Kremlin control, and broad electoral support — was taken hostage. Today, the relatives of individual critics of the government — of activists, media personalities, or even lawyers working on dissidents’ cases — are becoming targets. It is no longer necessary to be the regime’s primary adversary; it is enough to be merely inconvenient to those in power — and to have access to a sufficiently large audience.

It is not hard to picture where this path might lead, given that our country has already traversed a similar one once before. The concept of a “family member of a traitor,” enshrined in the infamous Article 58 of Soviet Russia’s Criminal Code — also known as the “counter-revolutionary” statute — first appeared in Leon Trotsky's orders. It later became one of the defining symbols of Stalin’s terror, during which the relatives of so-called “spies,” “traitors,” and “counter-revolutionaries” were regularly sent to labor camps along with the accused.

However, the persecution of dissidents' relatives in modern Russia is somewhat different — at least for now. This practice has not yet become truly widespread. Its aim is not so much to intimidate society as a whole, but to exert pressure on specific individuals identified by the regime as enemies.

Despite the horrors of what is happening, there is still a chance for Russia to avoid repeating the darkest pages of its history — provided, of course, that the current regime ceases to exist in the sufficiently near future.