Masha Gessen: Taking Children from their Parents is a Form of State Terror

Masha Gessen makes the following assertion in The New Yorker:  “Taking Children from their Parents is a Form of State Terror.”

“Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is ‘Requiem,’ a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In ‘Seventeen Moments of Spring,’ a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry.”

Gessen writes about the Russian government’s recent arrests of protesters, in which the arrests seemed to specifically target youth. She also connects the events in Russian to the federal government’s recently enacted policy of systematically separating parents from their children following border apprehensions.

-JKoh