USSR

On 9 May 1924 the Soviet Union, by a secret resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee (TsIK), gave the OGPU "the right of extrajudicial reprisal against bandits and their accomplices, namely: expulsion from the given locality, confinement in a concentration camp for a term of up to 3 years, and the application of the supreme measure of punishment - shooting", and prescribed that the republics declare localities "unfavorable in respect of banditry", where the GPU organs "are entitled to decide at their own discretion any case of banditry"^[1]. The Chechen authorities already in that same May telegraphed the center: "Sanction the creation of a tribunal or a political troika"^[2]. The troikas that went to work, "composed of an official of the procuracy, the GPU and the first party leader, — as a rule, passed sentences in absentia — on the basis of the submitted documents, often without even questioning the accused. Of any participation of a defense in the proceedings there could be no talk"^[3].

The targeted physical annihilation of the national cultural elite. The official turn was sealed by the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars "On Grain Procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region" of 14 December 1932, signed by Stalin and Molotov: Ukrainization was declared to have been carried out "mechanically," which, in the resolution's own words, "made it easier for bourgeois-nationalist elements, Petliurites and the like to create their legal covers, their counter-revolutionary cells and organizations"^[4]. The term "Executed Renaissance" denotes precisely "the repressive policy of communist Moscow aimed at the physical destruction of the Ukrainian intellectual elite of the 1920s–30s (more broadly – of the entire nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia) and the tabooing of its creative achievements"^[5].

The compulsory introduction of the metropole's language into schools: the resolution of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 13 March 1938 No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" ordered "to introduce the teaching of the Russian language as a subject of study in the schools of the national republics and regions from September 1, 1938" - from the 2nd grade in all non-Russian primary schools and from the 3rd grade in incomplete secondary and secondary schools^[6].

Use of the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR (December 1922) to formally declare a union of equal republics, masking the final centralization of power in Moscow^[7].

Stripping the Ukrainian SSR of control over foreign policy, the army, foreign trade, transport, and communications through the 1924 Constitution of the USSR, transferring them to the jurisdiction of the all-union people's commissariats^[8].

On 31 July 1925 the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR explained the operation being prepared by the properties of an entire people - the order says: "The Chechen oblast is a hotbed of criminal banditry spreading to the districts neighboring Chechnya... In their mass the Chechens are inclined to banditry as the main source of easy gain, which is furthered by the presence of a large quantity of weapons. Mountain Chechnya is a refuge for the most hardened enemies of Soviet power"^[2]. The label from the order passed into the operation's working nomenclature: the instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) for the krai, puts people in one row with rifles and "removes" them with a single verb - point 8 of the instruction reads: "If the conditions of the surrender of weapons are fulfilled, no house-to-house search is conducted, and only the bandit and vicious element is removed"^[9]. Thus criminality was declared a property of the people, and its men - an "element" subject to removal.

On 31 July 1925 the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, in the order justifying the operation to disarm Chechnya, declared the Chechens incapable of proper farming: "The rich lands granted to the Chechens on the plain after the revolution are not used by them in full; they run their agriculture in backward forms, are not industrious"^[2]. The accusation stands in a military order as one of the grounds for sending in troops: the lands were "granted" to the people by the authorities themselves, their way of farming was declared backward by the same authorities, and the conclusion drawn from this assessment was a military operation. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva, who publishes the order, also cites its continuation: "political indications" had ripened - the population's weariness of war and the demand to fight "banditry"^[2] - that is, even by the document's own logic the war was to be waged not on economic backwardness, yet it is backwardness that is set down as a justification.

The documents of its staff described a military operation with artillery shelling as the bringing of peace: the "Main Tasks of the Special Operational Groups of the OGPU in the Operation in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast", approved by Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) for the krai, Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, open with the words that the mass operation "in its final result must bring general pacification to Chechnya and create the appropriate conditions for the peaceful Soviet-economic construction of the oblast"^[9]. The same frame was prescribed to be spoken aloud in every aul: under the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 the representatives of the authorities, having entered a village surrounded by troops, announced to the assembly the purpose of their coming - "the removal of weapons with a view to the Chechen authorities securing a normal working life for the toiling population", and the artillery shelling was given a name within this frame: "warning fire as a measure of influence"^[9]. The organizer of the operation, Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party, brought this picture to its final formula in his memoirs: "It was a brilliant operation without any bloodshed"^[10] - in the same chapter he himself describes the Chechen old men taken hostage by the Chekists and the shelling of a Chechen village by the troops of the USSR.

On 25 August 1925 the USSR sent troops into the Chechen Autonomous Oblast to take away the weapons of its inhabitants; the operation was conducted by the army and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) under the overall command of Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai^[2]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the forces gathered against the Chechen villages: "In all, about seven thousand Red Army men with 240 machine guns and 24 [artillery] guns were brought in to take part in it. In addition, two aviation detachments and an armored train were at the disposal of the operation's commander. Tactically the troops, as well as the operational groups of the GPU, were divided into seven groupings"^[3]. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva gives, from the military documents, a different count: 6183 Red Army men with 137 heavy and 102 light machine guns, 14 mountain and 10 light [artillery] guns, and beyond that 341 OGPU officers assembled from across the whole North Caucasus^[2]. Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, recalled that "It was agreed to send two divisions into Chechnya 'for exercises'. The exercises were to include contact with the population, amateur performance evenings, concerts, closeness with the local youth, which was to strengthen still further the trust in Soviet power"^[10]; the same legend was scattered from the air - the account of a surviving companion of imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, printed in 1936 in the Warsaw journal Severny Kavkaz, says: "To calm the population, proclamations were scattered from aeroplanes, in which it was written that ordinary maneuvers were taking place and the inhabitants were asked not to worry and to stay in their homes"^[11]. The head of Chechnya itself - Eldarkhanov, chairman of the Chechen TsIK (the highest organ of power of the autonomous oblast) - was not informed of the preparations: "The center and the organs of the OGPU did not consider it necessary to inform even the chairman of the Chechen TsIK, T. Eldarkhanov, of the action being prepared. The concentration of troops in Grozny was explained by forthcoming maneuvers"^[2]. At the same time the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 wrote the Chechen TsIK into every step of the execution: its representatives enter the surrounded aul together with the command and convene the assembly, sit on the weapons-reception commissions, are obliged to provide profiles of the districts, and after "all the enumerated measures of influence" receive the authority to dissolve village executive committees and install revkoms^[9]. Even before the troops went in, the OGPU had described every village: historian E. F. Zhupikova relates - "The organs of the OGPU gathered information about the most influential mullahs and sheikhs, about the honored elders, about the guides without whom it was impossible to penetrate into the mountains"^[12]; for every settlement a questionnaire was drawn up with the number of inhabitants and households, the composition of the population by taips (clans) and the quantity of weapons planned for removal^[9].

Over the three weeks of the operation, from 25 August to 12 September 1925, the troops of the USSR took from the inhabitants of Chechnya 25299 rifles, 4319 revolvers and pistols, a machine gun and about 80 thousand cartridges^[3]; the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) reported to Stalin in rounded numbers: "In Chechnya during the operation 24000 rifles, 4000 revolvers, about 70000 cartridges, 2 machine guns were removed"^[13], while Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, counted in his memoirs "more than 30 thousand rifles, more than 10 machine guns"^[10]. By the assessment of historian E. F. Zhupikova, what was removed amounted to "approximately 75% of what the population had before the start of the operation and approximately half of the weapons removed in all the highland oblasts"^[12]. Under the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 the inhabitants were announced "the exact figure of the firearms and ammunition subject to removal", taken from the OGPU questionnaires, and given no more than two hours to surrender them^[9]; Mikoyan describes the same quota with the words "they would present each village with the demand to surrender all weapons in the quantity known from agent intelligence"^[10]. The taking of weapons began even before the troops went in, with the inhabitants divided up by lists: from those entered in the lists of the "vicious element" and their relatives "the local revkoms took the weapons away, while registering those of the remaining inhabitants"^[12]. The inhabitants themselves asked to give up their weapons without shelling: in early September 1925 the delegates of the Goity society Eski Karlagov, Khatu Dobriyev and Dzhabi Otgayev appealed to the district's Revolutionary Military Council with a request: "Now, at the disarmament, which we consider right, we ask that this be taken into account and petition that an exception be made by allowing the voluntary surrender of weapons without the taking of repressive measures"; the answer came by telegram, "most urgent", over the signatures of Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai: "The Red Army knows well the revolutionary services of the village of Goity. The surrender of weapons must be carried out voluntarily on 9 September with delivery of the weapons to Grozny. The weapons necessary for self-defense will be left to the aul of Goity"^[14].

The targets of the artillery and aviation were often not military objectives but inhabited settlements as such: the instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) for the krai, prescribed - "If the population of the aul does not fulfil the demand to surrender weapons in the established time in full, or fulfils it partially, the detachment command, by way of threat, opens artillery fire (or, in the absence of artillery, machine-gun fire) for 10 minutes with high bursts and half-strikes", and added: "depending on the situation the warning fire, as a measure of influence, may be opened several times as well"^[9]; the document names no military objective and no target inside the village at all. Of the 242 disarmed settlements 101 came under rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire, 16 under strikes from the air^[3]; by the count of historian E. F. Zhupikova, "104 one-pud bombs [about 1.7 tonnes] were dropped on the 16 auls where the leaders of the insurgents were hiding"^[12]. A one-pud aerial bomb is about 16 kilograms, the weight of a round of a modern 120 mm mortar; on average six to seven such bombs fell per aul. The aviation was directed by Petrozhitsky, chief of the district's air force, and historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva lists the targets by name: "In the course of the operation the aircraft of the 3rd, and from 6 September also of the 5th aviation detachments delivered air strikes on the auls of Zumsoy, Dai, Tagir Khoy, Akki Bougi, Oshni, Khimoy, Nizheloy, Ragekhoy, Urus-Martan and Nozhay-Yurt"^[2]. What the "warning fire" looked like in a single aul can be seen from the dispatch on Achkhoy-Martan of 25 August 1925: "15 shrapnel rounds were fired at the aul, first four with a high burst, then to strike. After two Chechen women had been wounded, the inhabitants began to hand over their weapons"^[15]. Historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes of the strike on the aul of Dai: "Initially, because of heavy fog, the neighboring settlement of Chubakhkimeroy was mistakenly subjected to the air strike"^[16].

Through the resisting villages the troops moved in raids with house-to-house searches and arrests. The instruction on mass searches, issued for the operation by the staff of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), ordered houses to be cordoned off and everyone found in them to be detained and searched, and speaks of arrests in points 7 and 8: "All who counteract in one measure or another the successful conduct of the mass operation are brought to account and arrested", "Malicious concealers of weapons are arrested"; of what was taken during a search the same document says: "During searches and arrests only all correspondence is taken, including correspondence in the Arabic language, as well as all weapons found during the search"^[9]. The information department of the OGPU, in its "Survey of the Political Condition of the USSR for September 1925" stamped "Top Secret", summed up the operation with the words "On our side losses are 20 men"^[13], and reported nothing about the killed and wounded in the shelled and bombed auls. The count of losses for the operation as a whole is given by historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov from a journal publication of 1995: six killed civilians, 30 wounded, a further 12 killed assigned to the "bandits", with the troops' own losses at five killed and nine wounded^[3].

Disarming Chechnya, the troops of the USSR destroyed the villages that had not met the ultimatum, up to complete demolition: the aul of Khakmedy - more than 300 households - was destroyed entirely, in the aul of Dai 20 houses were destroyed, Urus-Martan stood for three days under artillery fire and air strikes. A surviving companion of imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky - the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, whom the troops pursued into the mountains - related in 1936 in the Warsaw journal Severny Kavkaz: "Then the fire was transferred to the nearest auls, of which the aul of Khakmedy (more than 300 households) was completely destroyed"^[11]. The aul of Dai, the center of resistance of the fifth combat sector, historian A. Yu. Lashkov describes from the documents of the military archive: "From the shelling and bombings the aul of Dai suffered substantially: 20 houses turned out destroyed, there were a small number of human casualties"^[16]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...the aul of Urus-Martan was subjected to artillery shelling and air strikes for three days, the aul of Dai was bombed three times, for two days artillery shelled the auls of the Zumsoy society"^[3].

Even before the operation the village assemblies together with the revkoms (unelected committees installed in place of elected Soviets - campaign C1176) drew up lists of the "vicious element" - inhabitants noted in robberies; historian E. F. Zhupikova writes: "They and their relatives bore material responsibility for all cases of theft on the territory of Chechnya"^[12] - the relatives paid for others' thefts by the fact of kinship and an entry in the list. One could leave the list only by an oath with an obligation to inform: "If the 'vicious element' took an oath that for a year he would not rob and would inform on thieves, he was struck from the list"^[12]. When the troops reached the mountains, the destroyed was counted by the same category: as the result of the bombing of 16 auls "119 houses of the 'vicious element' were blown up"^[12]; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov confirm the number - "119 houses were blown up"^[3]: a house was blown up because its owner was entered in the list.

To get at imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, who was sheltering in the mountains of Chechnya, the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) took old men from the villages and held them hostage under the threat of destroying the villages with artillery. Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, described it himself: "to catch him, the Chekists invited to their quarters old men from the villages where he might be hiding and, declaring them hostages, warned them that if they did not say where Gotsinsky was, they would destroy the villages with artillery, and would arrest them and put them on trial. For a whole day they tried to persuade the old men, but all was without result. Then an aeroplane was sent to that district. They were terribly afraid of the aeroplane. Only after several shells had been fired at the village so that, without destruction of the houses, the inhabitants should feel its power, did the old men say in which gorge Gotsinsky was hiding"^[10]. The word "hostages" is also in the documents of the operation itself: on 4 September 1925 Mironov, head of the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU, reported: "I report: the population is giving up Nazhmudin. I am now conducting negotiations with the representatives. The matter is being conducted through the hostages I have released... Let aeroplanes appear at 15 hours, but not strike. For effect let some 6-7 of them come"^[14]. For the Sharoy district the count of hostages is known from the documents of the military archive: historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes that "the command of the military grouping demanded of the population of the Sharoy district the surrender of the well-known bandit Gotsinsky. In doing so, 40 men from among the honored elders were taken hostage. However, the demand to surrender Gotsinsky was not satisfied within the appointed time, and therefore the troops resorted to intensified repressions. In two days 22 puds of bombs [about 360 kilograms - like 22 rounds of a modern 120 mm mortar] were dropped on the district"^[16]. The surviving companion of Gotsinsky names a different number and adds what is not in the Soviet papers: from the destroyed aul of Khakmedy "105 hostages were taken", and the hostages were threatened with shooting - his account says: "the Bolsheviks wrote of the shooting of the hostages in the event of resistance in their proclamations"^[11]. The word "hostages" is not in the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by the operation's commanders, - it allows only arrests of "influential persons of the aul" as an extreme measure: the hostage-taking was done over and above what was written, and its traces remained in the dispatches of the executors and the memoirs of an organizer.

On 8 September 1925 Soviet aviation dropped eight one-pud bombs - 16 kilograms each, like a round of a modern 120 mm mortar - on Nozhay-Yurt, to force the village to hand over Gibertiev, the former head of the district militia^[17]. Urus-Martan was coerced in the same way: historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes that after artillery fire and bomb strikes "the leadership of Urus-Martan yielded and handed over the bandits on 9 September"^[16]. Of the representatives of the local authorities the instruction on mass searches, issued for the operation by the staff of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), says: they are brought into the removal as those "obliged to point out the dwellings of persons subject to removal, as well as those persons (relatives and others) with whom the person subject to removal may be hiding"^[9] - the community itself was made the executor of the removal. The price of this demand is named by historian E. F. Zhupikova: "By force of the highland custom of hospitality, the population of Chechnya, even if it was hostile to the leaders of the insurgents and the chiefs of the bandits, could not hand them over to the authorities. Breaking the custom would have disgraced the highlander for many generations and would have threatened his clan with blood vengeance from the man he had handed over"^[12].

In the two months of the operation of 1925 the USSR arrested and shot the leaders of the resistance of Chechnya and Dagestan. Imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, was arrested by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) on 5 September 1925. His hiding place was given up by the old men held hostage in the Sharoy district under the threat of the shelling of their villages. On the same day Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, reported to Moscow: "The operation in the Sharoy district has ended successfully. After 5 days of repressions and agent work, today at 14 hours a report was received through the aircraft that Gotsinsky has been taken"^[16]; he was arrested by an operational group of the GPU under the command of M. Ushaev^[3]. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: "N. Gotsinsky was urgently taken to Rostov-on-Don, where on 15 October 1925 he was sentenced to be shot"^[2]. Arrests are provided for by the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 as well - it allows "the conduct of arrests of influential persons of the aul, reactionarily disposed", with the proviso to resort to this measure "as an extreme one, with the observance of maximum tact"^[9]. Under shelling even the innocent surrendered: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in Urus-Martan, "after the artillery and aviation shelling of the settlement, the sheikhs Solsa-Haji Yandarov and Bilu-Haji Gaytayev surrendered to the authorities - soon, incidentally, released owing to their complete innocence"^[3].

The instruction on mass searches, issued for the operation by the staff of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), establishes that until the end of the investigation the arrested are concentrated at the staffs of the OGPU district groups, and of what follows point 19 says: "The procedure for conducting the investigation and the further routing of the arrested is provided for in the regulations on the troikas for the extrajudicial examination of cases"^[9]. The "Main Tasks of the Special Operational Groups of the OGPU", approved by Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, include the same procedure directly in the list of tasks: "The removal of the counter-revolutionary, bandit and other criminal anti-Soviet element... the registration of the same, the conduct of the investigation and the extrajudicial examination of their cases and their transportation to the place of destination"^[9]. Through this procedure passed 183 of the more than three hundred arrested in the course of the operation - the investigation of their cases ended in extrajudicial shooting^[3]. The OGPU had received the right of extrajudicial reprisal a year earlier - by a secret resolution of the Presidium of the TsIK of 9 May 1924 (campaign C1176); the operation's instruction applied it to the arrested.

The USSR shot nearly all those arrested in the course of the operation of 1925 - people already in the hands of the troops and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The total number of arrested exceeded 300. Of the total number of arrested, 105 were shot on the spot; against 183 an investigation was opened, which also ended in extrajudicial shooting; 21 were exiled"^[3]. Even the OGPU's own count found few "active" ones among them: the survey submitted to Stalin names 50 "active bandits and prominent counter-revolutionary figures", while "In all, 400 bandits and elements abetting them have been arrested"^[13] - those shot were mostly not leaders but rank-and-file detainees whose guilt was established by no court. So was killed the operation's chief prisoner as well: imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky - the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, detained on 5 September 1925 and sentenced in Rostov-on-Don - was shot, in the words of a highlander emigre writing in the Paris journal Prométhée in 1930, "Il fut fusillé sans jugement dans les souterrains du Guépéou de Rostov" - without trial, in the cellars of the GPU in Rostov^[18].

A "kulak" was what the colonizers called a peasant they deemed "well-off". In Chechnya officials entered a person into the "kulaks" without any trial, and the colonizer then stripped him of his rights. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "To limit the political influence of the kulaks such a measure was applied as deprivation (temporary or permanent) of voting rights. In 1926, 1.3% of the voters were thus barred from taking part in the elections, and in 1927 - already 4.5%"^[3]. The report on the inspection of the party organization of the Chechen Autonomous Oblast, sent on 7-9 March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, states: "The lishentsy [people stripped of the vote] in the re-election campaign of 1928/29 numbered 11,279 people, on average 6.8% across the oblast; in some settlements of the okrugs the percentage reached 30, and in the Galanchozh okrug up to 40%"^[19]. In January 1930 the leadership of the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)"), preparing a resolution on the expulsion of peasant families, wrote into the draft: "subject to expulsion are exclusively those deprived of voting rights, and also kulaks who by chance have not been deprived of voting rights"^[20]. Officials drew up the lists of "kulaks" at random, and the party's own oversight admitted it. Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, reported in February 1930: in Avtury and Shali, "of the 18 households listed for individual taxation [a punitive higher tax], 4 households turned out to be not kulak at all: one poor-peasant and three middle-peasant"; in Kurchaloy 12 poor-peasant and 7 middle-peasant households were entered into the "kulak list", while 89 households that the colonizer himself counted as well-off in his own tax rolls did not make it into the "kulak list"^[21]. Larin also named the purpose of the "grain assignments" - the quotas of grain the colonizer ordered the auls to hand over: "The aim was benign: to introduce stratification into the mountain auls by these assignments, but what came of it was exactly the opposite"^[21]. Peasants entered as "kulaks" and middle peasants were put on trial by the colonizer for failure to deliver grain and pay taxes - and even the imperial courts found no guilt in those cases: by Larin's count, 40% ended in what amounted to acquittal. Up to November 1929 "265 cases against kulaks were heard, and 132 against middle peasants"; of the 265 cases against "kulaks", "30 were acquitted and 26 sentenced conditionally", another 58 people received forced labor, and such verdicts Larin also counted among the acquittals: "40% were acquitted"^[21]. The empire vetted even its own village soviets - the organs it had planted in the auls in place of Chechen self-government - and expelled from them Chechens with the "wrong" past. Larin reported: "In 5 mountain okrugs, 215 persons of clearly alien element have been found in the composition of the village soviets. There are kulaks, and traders, and former elders, and former policemen, and former bandits, and clergy"; the resolution of the oblast party conference, which had proclaimed "the complete cleansing of the composition of the village soviets from alien and kulak elements", he corrected: "To put it mildly, that was said incautiously"^[21]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "If in 1928 62 kulaks were repressed across the whole of Chechnya, a year later the number of the repressed reached 356 people... As a result of these repressions, by the end of 1931 the number of kulak households in Chechnya had shrunk threefold compared to 1929"^[3]. Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, who fought against the insurgent Chechens, in his report to the krai committee of the party named among the causes of the uprising "the incorrect disenfranchisement of middle peasants, and in a number of cases of poor peasants as well", which in the Itum-Kali okrug had become mass practice^[19].

The colonizer outlawed the Chechen courts by legislative acts and installed its own judicial system. Until 1927 the sharia courts - courts of Islamic law - were the judicial system of the Chechen people and heard all its cases: criminal, land, labor and family. The occupation power at first recognized the Chechen court: in April 1921 the congress of Soviets of the Mountain Republic - the Soviet autonomy into which the empire had then included Chechnya - resolved to recognize the sharia court system. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov call this "a manifest (and temporary) concession to the Muslim clergy"^[3]. Just a month later, in May 1921, the leadership of that same republic stripped the sharia courts of budget money and of the support of its organs^[3]. But the courts went on working. In December 1925 the party leadership in Chechnya set out to discredit them, and, as historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, that attempt "failed completely"^[3]. And in 1927 "the sharia courts were curtailed in their rights by an act of will, at the direct demand of the procurator of the Supreme Court of the USSR... Criminal and land cases and labor disputes were removed from their competence, state financing was terminated, and Soviet organs were directly forbidden to apply to the sharia courts"^[3]. In their place the colonizer installed its own organs: historian K. G. Dendiev writes that in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast "the all-Union judicial system is introduced, with the subsequent abolition of sharia legal proceedings"^[22]. Despite this, the Chechens preferred to settle disputed cases in their own courts. Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, reported in February 1930 that in the Urus-Martan okrug "land disputes are resolved not in the judicial-land commissions" but before the aul elders, of whose influence he said: it is "still not undermined to any more or less significant degree"^[21]. In December 1929 the insurgents in Benoy established their own organ of power and sent their demands to Moscow. The fourth point there read: "Abolish the 'people's' courts introduced by order from above, and restore the sharia organs of justice"; the fifth - "End the interference of regional leaders and figures of the central organs of power in the internal affairs of the 'Chechen Autonomous Oblast' and restore the powers of political decision of the Chechen Congress"^[22].

The colonizer took from the Chechen clergy the donations of their congregations and closed their houses of worship. In the autumn of 1929 in Goity the colonizers were confiscating a mosque over an unfulfilled "grain assignment" - a quota of grain owed to the empire; Shita Istamulov, leader of the uprising in Shali, spoke of it: "Look what an outrage they are committing in Goity; they have announced: until you deliver the grain, we will take away the mosque for that time. What good is this, when the Chechen people is being robbed of its last faith..."^[22]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in 1929 in the Nadterechny district "an experiment begins in removing the mullahs from the distribution of the voluntary donations of Muslims for the benefit of the poor and the clergy - the zakat" - the empire handed the distribution over to its own peasant mutual-aid committees^[3]. The colonizer destroyed the greater part of the mosques of Chechnya - the before-and-after count is given by historian K. G. Dendiev: before the Russian revolution Chechnya had "2,675 mosques, 60 thousand murids [disciples of sheikhs], members of various religious organizations, 38 sheikhs, 850 mullahs and 140 religious schools", - and the count of mid-1937: "401 mosques, not counting the kub ones [small neighborhood mosques]", at which "406 mullahs worked"^[22]. Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, in the district command's report to the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)") on the results of the military operation of spring 1930, named the closing of mosques on the colonizers' orders among the causes for which the Chechen auls had risen in arms^[19].

By prohibitive acts of 1925-1929 the Russian colonizer destroyed the children's schools of the Chechen people. The khyuzhar is the elementary school at the mosque: a mullah (clergyman) or a qadi (judge of Islamic law) taught children to read the Quran, to write in Arabic and to count; no permit was needed to open one, and the school lived on parents' money and believers' donations^[23]. Such a school stood in nearly every settlement, and the people had no other. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "Literally at every mosque there operated schools teaching the Arabic language and script, as well as the basics of arithmetic"^[3]; and of the first Soviet years: "while religious schools at the mosques existed in the overwhelming majority of settlements, the secular school had yet to be created anew, since the few 'highlander' schools that had existed in the Terek oblast before the revolution had closed"^[3]. The ministries of internal affairs and of education of the RSFSR, by a secret instruction on the teaching of the Muslim creed of 21 August 1925, permitted the Muslim creed to be taught "only in mosques" and "exclusively to persons who have reached the age of 14", with a separate permit from the local imperial organ for each case and with particulars on every teacher - down to his social estate before the revolution; as for the teaching of general subjects under the guise of the creed, the ministries ordered it watched for and prevented^[24]. For a school that took children and taught them writing and counting, this was a ban on working. The Chechens did not submit and went on building schools. Nagayev, chairman of the krai commission that inspected the Chechen oblast, in a secret memorandum to the presidium of the North Caucasus krai executive committee of 4 August 1928 cited the tally: on 1 January 1927 Chechnya had 138 Arabic schools with 2,068 pupils, on 1 January 1928 - 180 schools with three thousand pupils, against 105 Soviet schools; the growth of the Arabic schools Nagayev called "the most serious political question"^[19]. The Chechens also thwarted closures by force - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "attempts to close the schools at the mosques by force provoked protests of the population, often accompanied by a refusal to build Soviet schools, as happened in the auls of Gudermes and Achkhoy-Martan"^[3]. The supreme organ of the occupation power and the government of the RSFSR, by the resolution "On religious associations" of 8 April 1929, forbade religious associations to hold children's gatherings, groups and circles "for the teaching of religion" and resolved: "The teaching of any religious creeds whatsoever in state, public and private educational and upbringing institutions is not permitted"^[25]. Displacing the khyuzhar at once did not succeed: by May 1930, 168 religious schools were still operating in Chechnya and Ingushetia^[3]. In the khyuzhar's place the USSR installed its own school and shifted it to the Russian language - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "If in the 1928/29 school year 79.8% of all schoolchildren in Chechnya were taught in their native language, in 1930/31 it was already only half"^[3]. Historian K. G. Dendiev places the closing of the religious schools in one row with the imposition of income tax on the mullahs, the abolition of the sharia courts and the handover of mosques "for economic needs"^[22]; the colonizer also handed over the zakat - the Muslims' donations on which the school lived - from the mullahs to its own committees in 1929.

The USSR took livestock and land from the Chechen peasants. In one year of the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization") Chechnya lost 184 thousand head of livestock. The report on the inspection of the party organization of the Chechen Autonomous Oblast, sent on 7-9 March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, carries a table of oblast statistics: total livestock in the oblast in 1929 - 993,200 head, in 1930 - 809,063. The report admits: "The growth of livestock numbers in all categories that had begun in 1929 found no continuation in 1930; on the contrary, a significant decline in numbers occurred, sparing only the horses"^[19] - and the cause is named right there: the decline occurred "chiefly in the spring of 1930, when the kulaks, offering frenzied resistance to the growth of kolkhoz construction, predatorily destroyed the livestock"^[19]. That is how the colonizers described the peasants' actions: people slaughtered their own livestock rather than hand it over to the kolkhozes. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov put the loss higher still: "Forced to join the kolkhoz, the peasants strove to shelter at least part of their household from socialization, and if that failed, simply rid themselves of it. Thus collectivization was accompanied by a sharp reduction of livestock numbers - in the single year 1930 they shrank in Chechnya by almost 300 thousand head"^[3]. The Central Committee of the party (the "TsK VKP(b)") likewise admitted that the livestock was being taken by force: in the resolution "On the forced socialization of livestock" of 26 March 1932 it recorded that "in a number of districts a practice is observed of socializing the cows and small livestock of individual kolkhoz members by in fact coercive methods", and demanded that such attempts be "cut short"^[26]. The colonizer took land from the Nokhchi as well. In the redistribution the Russians called "land settlement", write Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, "in the Vedeno, Itum-Kali and Shatoy okrugs about 1.5 thousand hectares of land were seized from the kulaks and the mosques"^[3]. The directive to "curtail" the Chechen peasants declared well-off when seizing land stands in the same VTsIK report^[19].

The USSR ruined the Chechen peasants with taxes and forced deliveries of grain and meat. Officials taxed those entered as "kulaks" at a higher rate by a special list ("individual taxation"), and Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, held in February 1930 that too few households made the lists: in the Vedeno okrug, "of 8,513 households only 80 households were taxed on the individual basis"; in Tsentoroy "of 464 households, 406 are exempted from the unified agricultural tax", in Belgatoy 295 of 335, in Dargo 439 of 501. The tax struck at random, to the point of absurdity - of the village of Day Larin said: "a kulak in Day was assessed at 4 kopecks, while a Komsomol member there was assessed at 4 rubles 39 kopecks"^[21]. The colonizer laid "grain assignments" - delivery quotas of grain - on the mountain auls, though there was hardly any grain there. Larin reported: the oblast committee of the party gave the Nozhay-Yurt okrug an assignment of 15,000 poods - about 240 tonnes of grain; further in Larin: "and on the spot they raise it to 25,000, and on the single aul of Benoy, where there are hardly 5 thousand poods to be had at all, fall 5 thousand poods"; for non-delivery the colonizers inventoried property for confiscation and imposed fines - in Shali, Larin reported, "a decision was passed to fine 60 households"^[21]. In 1932, write historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, on top of the confiscated livestock "a meat procurement plan was also handed down, which meant, in essence, the confiscation of a significant part of the livestock"^[3]. The colonizer taxed the clergy as well: historian K. G. Dendiev places the imposition of income tax on the mullahs as the first step of their displacement from the life of Chechnya^[22].

From 1930 to 1936 the USSR expelled peasant families from Chechnya by the orders and lists of the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)"), of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) and of the NKVD that replaced it. In January 1930 the leadership of the krai committee of the party, apportioning among the okrugs the expulsion of 20 thousand households of peasants declared well-off, assigned Chechnya 500 households; a household was expelled whole - the family with all its members^[20]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the same expulsions counting people, not households: "At the beginning of 1930, 1,500 peasants declared kulaks are expelled from Chechnya"^[3]. Historian G. I. Kakagasanov gives, from published documents, the count for the first half of 1935 - 1,553 families were expelled from the national districts of the North Caucasus krai, and he specifies: "Of these, 473 families (2,112 people) were expelled from Chechnya" - four to five people per family^[27]; for 1935 the count of Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov is briefer: "in 1935, 450 kulak families were expelled from Checheno-Ingushetia, another thousand families were expelled from Chechnya and Dagestan in 1936"^[3]. On 22 May 1936 the head of the NKVD of the USSR Yagoda, by telegram No. 56379, ordered Dagin, head of the krai NKVD directorate: "to carry out the resettlement beyond the borders of the krai" of five hundred peasant households from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Oblast and five hundred from Dagestan, finishing "no later than October 1936". In the telegram this thousand families is divided between the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Uzbekistan) and the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Kyrgyzstan). Yagoda also wrote the norms into the telegram: belongings per family - "of a total weight up to thirty poods per family" [about 490 kilograms], loading "from 32 to 35 people" per railcar; able-bodied men he permitted to be arrested "10 days before their dispatch" - "with the aim of preventing their flight"^[28].

The Nokhchi rose in arms three times against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"), and all three times the USSR sent troops against the auls. In December 1929 Shali, Goity and Benoy revolted. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, names the leaders of the uprising: in Shali it was headed by Shita Istamulov, in Goity - by Akhmat-Mullah and Kuriev, in Benoy - by Yaroch and Khodzhas. Shita Istamulov explained why he was taking up arms: "we cannot look on while the Chechens' grain is taken away, while they are ruined and their last property is taken. Fines, searches - if the authorities keep all this up, they will force me to come out with weapon in hand... If we keep looking on at this, they will take everything, down to your last trousers, and kill you naked. Better to die, at least you will know you will be buried in trousers"^[22]. Avtorkhanov writes of the first days of the uprising: "The insurgents occupied all the village and district institutions, burned the state archives, arrested the district authorities, including the chiefs of the GPU [the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB], in Benoy they also seized the oil fields, and established a provisional people's power"^[29]. The insurgents sent their demands to Moscow. As the first point they demanded "Stop the unlawful confiscation of peasant property", as the second - "End the trial-less arrests of peasants", as the third - "Recall the heads of the GPU from Chechnya, replacing them with a civil administration"; by two more points - to abolish the "people's" courts introduced by the Soviet power, with the return of sharia justice, and to restore the powers of the Chechen Congress. They agreed to lay down arms if these conditions were met^[22]. The first attempts of the Soviet troops to seize the auls failed - Shali and Goity fought them off; the staff of the North Caucasus Military District admitted in its memorandum on the first operation of 30 March 1930 that "the successful armed resistance to the local authorities in the auls of Shali and Goity during the seizure of inventoried property served as the final push" toward calling in field units^[19]. The OGPU recorded in its survey of the political condition of the USSR for December 1929: on 7 December "two teips [clans] of the aul of Goity, led by the son of Sheikh Khadzhiev, shut themselves in their quarters, posting an armed guard", and "on 8 December in the village of Shali, over the inventorying of the property of kulaks [peasants declared well-off], the militia was disarmed"; the OGPU calls Shita Istamulov "the former Minister of War of the government of Uzun-Haji" [the North Caucasus emirate of 1919-1920]; the arrest count in the same survey: "220 people arrested in Shali and 144 in Goity. The leaders of the Shali and Goity outbreaks Istamulov, Khadzhiev and Kuriev have gone into hiding"^[30]. The Russian command moved against the peasants, disarmed four years earlier, a detachment formed in Grozny. At its head stood Burichenko, former head of the Vladikavkaz infantry school. After the first failures the command reinforced the detachment with battalions, an artillery divizion and a "detachment of airplanes". On 11 December the troops seized Shali, on the morning of 12 December - Goity, and from 20 to 27 December they attacked the mountain auls of Benoy, Tsentoroy and Zandak. The staff memorandum states: "in the operation as a whole there took part, together with the units of the VOGPU [OGPU troops], 1,904 fighters with 75 heavy and light machine guns"; artillery pieces and seven airplanes are named there as well; the outcome, in the same document: "Over the operation 450 bandits were seized. Up to 60 people killed and wounded"; the troops' losses - 43 men, of them 21 killed or dead of wounds^[19]. On the end of the uprising the sources diverge: in the staff memorandum the seizure of Shali and Goity is dated 11 and 12 December 1929, while the historians place the fall of both centers in mid-January 1930; of the leaders' fate some sources write that they escaped, others - that the insurgent staff in Goity perished^[29]. In the spring of 1930 the mountain okrugs rose again, and the Soviet troops again marched on the auls, now in greater force. The occupation command of the district admitted the scale of the outbreak in its report to the krai committee of the party (the "kraikom VKP(b)"): "In Chechnya, as in Karachay, we had not isolated bandit counter-revolutionary outbreaks, but a direct uprising of entire districts (Galanchozh), in which almost the whole population took part in the armed action"^[19]. By the district staff's memorandum on the second operation in Chechnya, by 14 March rifle battalions with batteries, cavalry divizions and an aviation flight had been massed into Chechnya: "in all, 3,920 fighters with 16 [artillery] pieces were drawn into the operation"^[19]. By the final report of Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the district, to the krai committee of the party, 1,500 units of weapons were seized across Chechnya, 122 people arrested, 19 insurgents killed^[19]. Avtorkhanov describes the end of the march on Benoy: "At the end of March 1930 Belov, having received fresh units from Transcaucasia, unfolded a large mountain offensive with the task of taking the insurgents' last point - Benoy. After two months of heavy fighting and great losses, in April 1930, Belov entered Benoy, but found not a single inhabitant in the aul: all of them, including women and children, had evacuated further into the mountain wilds. The victor Belov sent envoys to the insurgents with an offer of honorable peace: to all who voluntarily returned to the aul with the surrender of weapons, an amnesty was declared. The insurgents replied that they would return to their auls only when Belov left with his troops"^[29]. In March 1932 the Nozhay-Yurt district revolted; the uprising was led by Mutsu Shamilev (the Nokhchi know him as Motsu of Shuani), Ibragim Ninakhadzhiev, Usman Ushkhaev, Khusein Istamulov and Dada Kebetov; on 20 March, 300-400 insurgents attacked the oil extraction site on Mount Sterch-Kertch, another 700-800 dug in on the mountain ridge, covering the uprising's district from the direction of Khasav-Yurt, a town in neighboring Dagestan^[3]. Kashirin, commander of the occupation troops of the district, in a memorandum of 31 March 1932 reported to the Minister of War of the USSR Voroshilov: "The band is headed by a certain 'imam' Mutsu from the aul of Shuani"^[19]. For nine days the district remained in the insurgents' hands. Units of the 28th Mountain Rifle Division and the national cavalry regiment approached the district on 26-27 March, fighting began at midday on 28 March, and by 29 March the Soviet troops had seized the district. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "the number of killed reached 333, of wounded - 150. The units of the Red Army and the operational groups of the GPU lost in all 27 men killed and 30 wounded"^[3].

Hostages figured as a separate accounting line in the final report on the punitive operation of 1930: Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, reported to the krai committee of the party (the "kraikom VKP(b)") verbatim: "Seized across Chechnya: of active counter-revolutionary and bandit element, 122 people, of them ringleaders - leaders of the movement - 9; ringleaders who appeared voluntarily - 7; hostages - 35. Rank-and-file participants who appeared voluntarily are not counted, they number hundreds"^[19]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov quote this line of the report: among those arrested in the course of the operation - "leaders of the insurgent movement - 9, hostages - 35"^[3]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described why the Chekists took hostages and what awaited them: "To the old tsarist system of taking 'amanats' (hostages) to force 'bandits' to surrender the Chekists resorted constantly, and on a wider scale", but "in the history of Soviet Checheno-Ingushetia there was not a single case of the 'amanats' being released when the 'bandit' appeared"; of the fate of both Avtorkhanov writes: the man who appeared voluntarily, "contrary to the solemn promise to spare his life, - was shot, while the 'amanats' were exiled to Siberia, including women and children"^[29].

The USSR arrested, exiled, disenfranchised and hounded the authorities of the Chechen people - the sheikhs, the mullahs, the revered elders. The national commission of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party resolved on 28 June 1927: "The sheikhs in most cases are themselves kulaks and traders... they not only economically enserf the poor and middle peasants but, using the religious prejudices of the masses, exercise their political influence as a kulak stratum over a significant part of the toiling masses"^[31] - thus the party designated the people's spiritual mentors "kulaks", class enemies. In the summer of 1927 the USSR broke off relations with Great Britain and expected war - and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested sixteen religious authorities across Chechnya. Yevdokimov, the OGPU plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus, in his secret report for 1927 tied the arrests to the war scare: "The days of military danger of the summer period unusually inspired the Chechen musduh [Muslim clergy] in the sense of bold and open agitation for aid to external forces, for the preparation of an uprising", - and explained the operation thus: "The c/r [counter-revolutionary] propaganda of the clergy, which was shaping a panicky-defeatist mood in the Chechen peasantry, obliged our organ to be forestalled into a mass operation against the most active religious top layer. Rarely subjected to repressions and confident in the strength of his influence over the broad public - the Chechen mullah found himself caught unawares. The removal of 16 reactionary representatives of the Chechen religious world therefore made an enormous impression on him and for a time paralyzed his activity"^[32]; "removal" was what the empire called a person's arrest. Yevdokimov measured success by the disintegration of the spiritual stratum: "a whole series of mullahs began to renounce their rank (up to 30 cases), and a number of religious authorities, compromised by a/s [anti-Soviet] sabotage in the past, to hide from the authorities"^[32]. The Chechens answered with intercession, and the report admits: "the campaign for organizing public petitions on behalf of the arrested had significant success"^[32]. Among those under arrest was Sheikh Gaysumov of Shali - one of the most revered men of Chechnya; Yevdokimov wrote: "The exception was the sect of Sheikh Gaysumov, whose activists, in connection with the latter's arrest, acted very energetically in the field of mobilizing public sympathy"^[32]. The assembly of the village of Shali - 800 people - vouched for the arrested man: "to confirm that citizen Gopsumov Sungant [thus is Gaysumov recorded in the document], aged 107, has been an honored elder in the present village and has never been noted in anything discreditable, either criminal or political"^[19]; Nagayev, inspector of the North Caucasus krai executive committee, filed this assembly into his report as evidence - "in the person of these 'assemblies', led by the kulaks and the clergy, the outlines of a real organization opposing our party are beginning to crystallize"^[19]. The empire entered the intercession for an old man into its own file of incriminating material. In the autumn of 1927 the Prague journal "Volnye Gortsy" ["The Free Highlanders"] printed a letter from the Caucasus about the same wave: "The Bolsheviks, striking the pose of saviors of our national freedom, are in fact little by little killing all the living forces in the country, tearing from our ranks the most capable - our intellectual forces"; "Such an explosion of new terror took place here after the Anglo-Soviet rupture. Numerous arrests of the intelligentsia, the clergy and even whole families took place in almost every locality on the highlanders' territory. The GPU is working flat out"^[33]. The OGPU in the same report named the next target as well: "the national-democratic movement appears to us as that new kind of highlander c/r [counter-revolution] with which we shall have to contend in the coming years and months"^[32]. The empire struck at the authorities' rights as well: at the elections of 1928/29 in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast it disenfranchised 11,279 people, and in the breakdown of the lishentsy stand the lines: "Servants of religious cult, 1,569" and "Members of lishentsy families, 5,658"^[19]. By 1930 the colonizer had counted the whole stratum head by head - the report on the inspection of the oblast party organization, sent in March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, states: "The strength of the mullahs in the Chechen aul is still enormous. On 1 May 1930 there were in Chechnya... communal mullahs - 450, kub mullahs - 800, sheikhs - 34... descendants of Muhammad and other religious authorities - 250, folk healers - 150"; the conclusion, in the same place: "In order to wage a struggle against such a huge army of mullahs, sheikhs and the like, it is necessary to have trained cadres"^[19]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the arrests of the authorities became mass; the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes: the killing "was the beginning of a large GPU operation in Chechnya for the liquidation of 'kulak-counter-revolutionary elements and mullah-nationalist ideologues'"^[29]. The Grozny and Rostov krai GPU, Avtorkhanov writes, set the arrest quotas, and the government of the USSR confirmed those quotas^[29].

The USSR fought the auls that revolted in December 1929 not only with troops but with false promises; the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and wrote in emigration, described this mechanism. For the "peaceful liquidation" of the uprising a government delegation arrived from Moscow - it included Nikolayeva, member of the Central Committee of the union party (the "TsK VKP(b)"), and Ryskulov, deputy head of the government of the RSFSR, - and the "peace commission" of religious authorities it created declared to the insurgents in Shali: "responsibility for the events that have occurred lies exclusively with the local functionaries, who acted contrary to the directives of the party and the government", and in the name of the government delegation an address to the Chechen people was read out: "the internal Chechen affairs will henceforth be decided by the Chechen people itself"^[29]. The insurgents, Avtorkhanov writes, "found these explanations satisfactory and agreed to return to their homes"; the GPU detachment (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) that arrived next spent three days arresting local Soviet functionaries - just as had been promised; Avtorkhanov continues: "and toward one o'clock in the morning of the fourth day they surrounded the house of the former leader of the insurgents, Shita Istamulov"^[29]. The seizure failed - the Chechens fought Shita Istamulov free; Avtorkhanov writes: "To the ultimatum to surrender without a fight, however, Shita and his brother Hasan replied with fire. Part of Shita's house was engulfed in flames and Hasan gravely wounded when, toward dawn, help arrived: about a hundred armed Chechen horsemen surrounded the very part of the GPU troops that had invested Shita's house. After perhaps an hour of hand-to-hand fighting the GPU detachment, numbering up to 150 men, was almost entirely destroyed"^[29]. Avtorkhanov continues: "Freed by his friends, Shita Istamulov called all Chechens to a 'holy war' for the restoration of the 'Imamate of Shamil' and the expulsion of the 'infidels' from the Caucasus. Following this call, Shali, Goity and Benoy rose again"^[29]. The second deception was the amnesty; Avtorkhanov writes: "To all participants of the uprising, including the leaders of the uprising, an amnesty was declared in the name of the central government" - Shita Istamulov returned to Shali and "on instructions from above" was even appointed chairman of the Shali rural consumers' society (a cooperative for manufactured goods)^[29]. Avtorkhanov describes the denouement thus: in the autumn of 1931 Shita Istamulov "was summoned to Baklanov, head of the district GPU, to be handed the official act of amnesty from Moscow. Handing him the act with one hand, Baklanov with the other, from under the counter, emptied an entire Mauser clip into him. The gravely wounded Istamulov managed to stab the treacherous Baklanov to death with his dagger. The outside guard finished Istamulov off"^[29].

The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) fabricated the "Chechen nationalist center" - an underground organization that did not exist - and convicted thousands of Chechens in the case. Thus the empire "explained" the uprisings against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"): it was not hunger and devastation that raised the people, but a secret conspiracy. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the mechanism of the fabrication: "The logic of the Chekists suggested that the culprits and organizers of all the anti-Soviet uprisings should be sought in some single 'nationalist center', into which, undoubtedly, by the same logic, representatives of the internal and foreign Chechen emigration must belong"^[29]. The work, by his words, was taken up by the krai organ of the OGPU under Kursky and Fedotov and the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU under Kraft: "They created this 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center' so skillfully and plausibly that even many of the Chechens believed in its existence"^[29]. The "evidence" was letters in the name of the Chechen émigré, oil industrialist Tapa Chermoev - with calls to prepare an uprising; they came to Chechen public figures in Grozny from Istanbul, Paris and London through intermediaries whom the OGPU had obliged to hand the letters over to it. Avtorkhanov concludes: "the version of Chermoev's letters was a lie, and the letters themselves - forgeries of the OGPU. But it was precisely these letters that served as 'material evidence' against the 'nationalist center'"^[29]. In the autumn of 1932 the OGPU arrested the entire "group" of the addressees, followed by mass arrests across the Gudermes and Nozhay-Yurt districts - the very one that had revolted against the kolkhozes in March 1932; Avtorkhanov writes: "In all, up to 3 thousand people were arrested in the case of the 'Chechen nationalist center'. The arrested were charged with creating a 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center of Chechnya for the preparation and carrying out of an armed uprising'"^[29]. There was no trial - Avtorkhanov writes: "Almost all the arrested were convicted through the collegium of the GPU. Of the members of the 'center', Abdulkadirov, Shamilev, Kurbanov, Motsa-Hadji Sotaev and Beymurzaev were shot. Others received 10 years each. How many of the rank and file were shot is impossible to establish"^[29]. With the fabricated case the empire justified itself publicly as well: Yevdokimov, secretary of the krai committee of the party, at the krai party conference of 1934 cited "the letters of the millionaire Chermoev" as proof of the preparation of an uprising with the money and weapons of the Western powers^[29]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov confirm the scale: repression "in connection with the case of the so-called 'Chechen nationalist center'" befell, "by some data, up to 3 thousand people"^[3].

The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) passed sentences on arrested Chechens by "troikas" - commissions of three: without trial, without defense counsel, up to execution by shooting. In Chechnya the extrajudicial procedure had operated since the 1920s: Kraft served as deputy head of the Chechen oblast department of the GPU - the oblast link of the political police - and worked with troikas as early as 1924: on 20 August the leadership of the Chechen oblast executive committee, on his report, resolved "to deem necessary the extension of the term of functioning of the troika for extrajudicial hearing by two months"^[22]. On 2 February 1930 deputy chairman of the OGPU Yagoda signed order No. 44/21 "On measures for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" - "kulaks" was what the colonizers called peasants they themselves declared well-off^[20]. Under this order the OGPU created troikas: cases in them were examined without trial, and the panel was made up of representatives of the krai committee of the party, of the procuracy, and Chekists^[22]. The troikas received the cases of the "first category" - the peasants whom the supreme organ of the occupation power (the "Politburo of the TsK VKP(b)"), by its secret resolution of 30 January 1930, had consigned to concentration camps, up to execution by shooting^[20]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the GPU carried out a wave of mass arrests across Chechnya. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes of the trial of the arrested: "The arrested were convicted by an extraordinary 'troika' of the GPU specially created for the purpose, chaired by its chief G. Kraft", and "few of them ever returned to freedom"^[29]. The count of the arrested diverges among the sources: the historians give up to 35 thousand, while by the OGPU's own memorandum of 31 July 1931, 20,230 people passed through the extrajudicial troikas of the whole North Caucasus krai in 1930^[20]. The troika worked after the March 1932 uprising in the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya as well: Yevdokimov, head of the OGPU for the North Caucasus krai, at a secret conference of the secretaries of the national oblast committees of the party in Rostov on 15 December 1932, reported the tally of the Chekists' "work" on the results of the uprising: "...745, of them 386 screened out, 359 brought before the troika, 100 people sentenced to 10 down to 3 years, 188 conditionally, 166 released"^[22].

The USSR shot arrested Chechens - including captured leaders of the uprisings. In March 1932 the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya revolted against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"); historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The five captured leaders of the uprising were soon shot"^[3]. Next the Chekists came for the clergy - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov continue: "Arrests befell some well-known Chechen sheikhs, and Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was shot in April 1933"^[3]. Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was a spiritual mentor of Muslims (a sheikh) from the village of Lakha-Nevre, today's Nadterechnoye; researcher A. Dukhaev, quoted by historian K. G. Dendiev, writes of him: "He was arrested for the last time on 17 March 1933, at the age of 85... and on 9 April of the same year sentenced to the supreme measure of punishment. The sentence was carried out on 10 May 1933. In 1990 Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was rehabilitated"^[22]. The sources diverge on the date of the execution: April or 10 May 1933. The count of those shot is not limited to the top: the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that in the case of the "Chechen nationalist center", fabricated by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), rank-and-file people were shot as well - how many, it is impossible to establish^[29].

Forcible seizure of land, livestock, and agricultural implements from peasants as part of forced collectivization under slogans of socialist modernization^[8].

Mass dispossession and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of resisting peasants (the so-called "kurkuls") to remote special settlements in Siberia and the North^[8].

Mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants ("kulaks") and their family members to Siberia and remote northern regions of the USSR^[8].

Mass arrests of peasants during the dekulakization campaign: according to the 1930 directives, in addition to deportations, tens of thousands of people were sent directly to concentration camps for isolation^[8].

Use of dekulakized peasants, sent into the emerging GULAG system, as forced unpaid labor for heavy state projects^[8].

Confiscation of absolutely all food, including the extraction of seed stocks, through the mechanism of crushing grain procurement quotas, which led to mass deadly famine^[8].

The introduction of the "blackboard" regime - a total economic blockade of settlements. The resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and the CC of the CP(b)U of December 6, 1932, signed by Chubar and Kosior, prescribed "the immediate cessation of the delivery of goods, the complete cessation of cooperative and state trade on site, and the removal of all available goods from the respective cooperative and state shops," as well as "a complete ban on kolkhoz trade both for kolkhozes and kolkhoz members and for individual farmers"^[34].

Deliberately starving millions of Ukrainian peasants to death as a direct result of Moscow's state policy^[8].

Systematic psychological suppression through public show trials of "saboteurs" and the introduction of the punitive law on the protection of socialist property (the "law of five ears of grain")^[8].

Sealing off the starving region: peasants who tried to escape from the blockaded villages were intercepted on roads and at railway junctions. The directive sealed off precisely Ukraine and the Kuban: "all peasants who had managed to leave Ukraine and the North Caucasus were subject to return to their places of residence," while permits to leave were denied even "to the national districts of the krai, where there was no famine at all"^[8]. Within 50 days "219.5 thousand peasants were detained, including 38 thousand in the Ukrainian SSR, 47 thousand in the North Caucasus, 44 thousand in the Central Black Earth region, 5 thousand in the Western oblast, 65 thousand on the railways"; of these, "186.5 thousand were sent home under convoy, almost 3 thousand were convicted, and all the rest awaited trial or were under investigation in filtration camps"^[8]. The point of the operation lay not in sentences but in marching people back into the starving villages: the coded telegram "documentarily attests to his intention to organize absolute famine in the rural areas of Ukraine"^[8].

Lethally dangerous exploitation of the labor of Ukrainian peasants, convicted en masse under the "law of five ears of grain" and exiled to corrective labor camps during the Holodomor^[8].

Creation of an atmosphere of total paralyzing fear in society through the fabrication of cases (for example, the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine") and the staging of public show trials^[8].

Mass confiscation and destruction of literature declared "nationalist," and rigid control over the printed word and the arts^[8].

The forced orthography reform of 1933, aimed at artificially bringing Ukrainian grammar and terminology closer to the Russian language^[8].

Mass closure and destruction of churches, as well as repressions against clergy, aimed at the complete destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC)^[8].

Physical annihilation and isolation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, writers, and scholars, as well as of the party opposition (national communists), in the course of targeted repressions. Fabrication of cases (including the "UNC" case) and driving representatives of the national elite to death, including the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the writer Mykola Khvylovy, and People's Commissar Mykola Skrypnyk^[8].

Institutional destruction of national historical scholarship, closure of research schools, and removal of the works of Ukrainian historians from scholarly circulation^[8].

The construction of a new Soviet-imperial historical canon to supplant the Ukrainian past: "from the late 1930s a thesis took hold in the historical scholarship of the USSR," proclaimed in the works of B. Grekov, K. Huslystyi, and F. Yastrebov, "of Kyivan Rus as the 'common cradle' of the history of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian peoples," and "in 1939 B. Grekov advanced the proposition of the ethnic unity of the 'Rus people' in the era of Kyivan Rus"^[35]. This scheme displaced M. Hrushevsky's conception and denied the independence of Ukraine's history.

The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes: "At the beginning of October 1937, accompanied by a large Chekist staff, there arrived in Chechen-Ingushetia a candidate member of the Politburo, chairman of the Party Collegium of the KPK under the TsK and Yezhov's deputy – Shkiryatov"^[29]. Shkiryatov convened an enlarged plenum of the oblast committee of the party in the Lenin House of Culture in Grozny - by the archival protocols the plenum ran on 8-10 October 1937, with 194 participants^[22] - and summoned there also the senior officials of the city and the districts. Avtorkhanov continues: "Shkiryatov gave the order to arrest all Chechens and Ingush who were members of the Chechen-Ingush oblast committee"^[29]. The Chekists arrested them right there, in the hall of the plenum. Avtorkhanov writes of what followed: "Then Shkiryatov's order was extended to all Chechen-Ingush officials, from the chairman of the republic's government down to the chairman of a village soviet"^[29]. In October and November 1937 the NKVD (a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested Ali Gorchkhanov, chairman of the government of the republic; Abdul-Khalim Salamov, his deputy; Khasi Vakhayev, second secretary of the oblast committee; Magomed Mamakayev, head of the culture and propaganda department of the oblast committee; Khamid Okuyev, People's Commissar (minister) of education; Musa Khaniev, chairman of the Supreme Court; Khasan Mekhtiev, prosecutor of the republic; and Said Baduev, chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers. Avtorkhanov writes also of the lower floors: "Arrested were also the chairmen of the district executive committees (in the Chechen-Ingush republic there were up to 28 districts), almost all chairmen of village Soviets, of kolkhozes, and their party organizers"^[29]. Of the 23 heads of the district NKVD departments only Goytiev was a Chechen, and the NKVD arrested him too. The NKVD arrested, and the party organs removed from office - historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "In all, in October 1937, 30 of the 76 members and candidate members of the Chechen-Ingush obkom were repressed, including all the Chechens and Ingush; 20 of the 28 secretaries of district party committees; 77 members of district committees and 192 senior officials of the rural districts of the republic"^[3]; in 1938 the colonizer removed almost all heads of the district land departments, 19 chairmen of district executive committees and 22 secretaries of district committees^[3].

From the summer of 1937 to November 1938 the NKVD (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested people in the republic by the categories and numbers assigned in operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the beginning of the operation: "On the night of 31 July to 1 August 1937, by lists drawn up beforehand by the NKVD, the so-called 'general operation for the removal of anti-Soviet elements' was carried out across all auls and districts"; the Chekists hauled the arrested to Grozny - to the central garage of "Grozneft", to the Stalin club, to the pre-trial detention house of the republic's militia^[29]. Avtorkhanov names "up to 14 thousand people" arrested in the first wave; the published operational summary on the course of the operation gives, for mid-August, about 2.4 thousand arrested across the whole republic, divided in it by the assigned categories: 888 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off"), 831 "criminals", 682 of the "counter-revolutionary element"^[22]. Gridasov, head of the Gudermes district department of the NKVD, answered an officer who asked how to arrest a man when there was no material on him: "Material will always be found, so long as he wears a Caucasian hat!"^[29]. The arrests went on until November 1938: in the autumn of 1937 Moscow raised the number assigned to the republic to 3,200 people, and on 1 March 1938 assigned a new one - 10,108 people, of whom the troika convicted 6,767^[22]. On 8 September 1937 the newspaper "Pravda" printed an article by its special correspondent Kuzovkin under the headline: "The Bourgeois-Nationalist Tangle in Chechen-Ingushetia"^[22]. Avtorkhanov relates its content: the author of the article "proved that in Chechen-Ingushetia 'bourgeois nationalists' sit in the party leadership and at the head of the government, leading the Chechen-Ingush people down an anti-Soviet path", and the newspaper and the author called on a judge not named by name: "to untangle the bourgeois-nationalist tangle to the end"^[29]. Avtorkhanov writes of what the investigators manufactured out of the arrested: "Over the course of three years the Chekist investigators created the case of a 'bourgeois-nationalist, counter-revolutionary-insurgent, Bukharinite-Trotskyite, terrorist-espionage, anti-Soviet, wrecking organization' – literally so ran the many-storeyed formula of the charge for the top layer of the arrested"^[29]. Into this "top layer", which the Chekists named the "bourgeois-nationalist center of Chechnya and Ingushetia", the investigation wrote 137 former senior officials of the republic. The investigation entered among these 137 also Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, who was then studying in Moscow: it wrote people into the case regardless of where they were and what they did^[3]. To each of them the investigation imputed Article 58 - treason against the Motherland, preparation of an armed uprising, wrecking, terrorist acts, diversion, anti-Soviet agitation, membership in an anti-Soviet organization, and sabotage. According to the charge, the "center" acted in alliance with identical "centers" of Dagestan, Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay, Adygea and Circassia and was preparing, as Avtorkhanov writes, "the proclamation of a 'North Caucasus federative republic' under the protectorate of Turkey and England", with the "Moscow inter-national center" holding the liaison between them all^[29].

The colonizer repressed almost the entire Union of Writers of Chechen-Ingushetia. On 20 November 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party (the "obkom VKP(b)") dissolved the board of the writers of the republic - the resolution's wording: "as having proved clogged with hostile bourgeois-nationalist elements /Arsanov, Mamakayev, Aiskhanov and others/"^[22]. One of the convicted, Khalid Oshaev, wrote in 1961 to the Ossetian writer Khadzhi-Murat Muguev: "of the 12 members of the union of writers of Chechen-Ingushetia 9 people were arrested, 7 convicted, 4 shot. I myself, a member of the Union of Writers since 1934, spent 13 years in confinement, and for 2 years was held in solitary confinement"^[36].

On 13 November 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party (the "obkom VKP(b)") approved two lists not subject to disclosure: No. 25/97 - on the removal of literature published in the republic - and No. 31/107 - on the mandatory removal of books from libraries and the book trade; the ban covered the works of 29 authors, among whom the historian K. G. Dendiev names D. Madayev, Kh. Yandarov, N. Muzayev, D. Malsagov and Kh. Oshaev^[22]. The first Chechen literary works had appeared in the early 1920s^[3] - the colonizer was removing and banning a literature not yet twenty years old.

Torture of the arrested was officially sanctioned by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the TsK VKP(b)). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...against all those arrested under political articles torture was widely applied, officially permitted as measures of 'physical influence'"; Stalin's letter, circulated to party organs in January 1939, said: "The TsK VKP(b) explains that the application of physical influence in the practice of the NKVD was permitted from 1937 with the sanction of the TsK VKP(b)"^[3]. One of the executors in the republic was Porubay, named in a 1938 memorandum of the oblast committee of the party as deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic. After the change of course he was put on trial - the charge: he "applied perverted methods of conducting the investigation and coerced the arrested into giving knowingly false testimony", and on the cases he falsified the troika passed death sentences^[22]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that the investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted three years, and describes its methods: "The investigation was conducted with the application of the physical tortures usual for the whole USSR, with a certain supplement for the specific 'national character'"^[29]. Avtorkhanov names those whom the Chekists tortured to death: "During this investigation there were tortured to death: the former chairman of the oblast executive committee D. Machukayev, the former head of the obkom culture-and-propaganda department M. Gisayev, the former secretary of the Ingush obkom VKP(b) Idris Zyazikov, and others"^[29]. He writes also of those whom torture drove to suicide: "Unable to endure the regime of torture, the following committed suicide: the chairman of the planning commission of the republic M. Islamov, the secretary of a district party committee M. Bektemirov"^[29]. Avtorkhanov writes of the result: "By way of this unheard-of inquisition, named the 'preliminary investigation', the Chekists forced up to 90 percent of the members of the 'bourgeois-nationalist center' to sign and even to compose 'sincere confessions' of crimes they had, of course, not committed"^[29]. Abdul-Khalim Salamov, deputy chairman of the government of the republic, under torture signed "sincere handwritten testimony" about the delivery into the republic from England through Turkey of 50 mountain guns, 1,000 machine guns, 200 thousand rifles, 5 million cartridges, 10 thousand shells and grenades for an armed uprising; there too he wrote that England had promised to support that uprising from the air. He also named the exact place where the weapons were buried in the mountains; Avtorkhanov writes: "the Chekists dug up all the indicated mountain gorges. Naturally they found nothing, but the beatings continued, with demands to point out the true place where the weapons were buried"^[29]. The defendants showed the tribunal the marks of torture; Avtorkhanov writes: "The defendants, pointing to the scars of inflicted wounds, to knocked-out teeth, to mutilated parts of the organism (one had even been castrated during interrogation), declared that they had signed their false testimony under the influence of these physical tortures and in the hope that the day of trial, or of death, would thus be brought nearer"^[29].

An extrajudicial organ - the "troika" - passed sentences in Chechen-Ingushetia under operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937, and Yezhov confirmed the troika's composition in the text of the order: "I confirm the following personal composition of the republican, krai and oblast troikas: ... Chechen-Ingush ASSR: chairman - Dementyev; members Yegorov, Vakhayev"^[37] - Dementyev, People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic; Yegorov, first secretary of the oblast committee of the party; and Vakhayev, second secretary. The historian G. I. Kakagasanov describes the institution: "An extrajudicial organ created for carrying out punitive policy... Its composition included: the head of the OGPU, the secretary of the party organization, the prosecutor of the republic, krai or oblast"^[27]. The troika's procedure and its regime of secrecy are prescribed in the text of the order: the troikas examine "the materials on each arrested person or group of arrested persons", and first-category sentences are carried out "with the obligatory full preservation in secrecy of the time and place of the carrying out of the sentence"^[37]. The NKVD (the People's Commissariat (ministry) of Internal Affairs - successor of the OGPU and a predecessor of today's FSB) did not inform the families of the condemned of the execution; Kakagasanov writes: "More often this took place under the formula 'convicted without the right of correspondence', which meant 'execution by shooting'"^[27]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov describe also "conviction by albums" - sentencing in absentia on a brief docket, "without acquaintance with the criminal case itself"^[3]: that procedure was set by the orders of the "national lines" of the terror, beginning with NKVD order No. 00485. The investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted, by the count of the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov - a contemporary of the events who wrote in emigration - exactly three years^[29]. The Chekists chose not to try 137 people in a single trial and split the "center" into three groups: into the first they gathered the Soviet-party leadership of the republic - Ali Gorchkhanov, Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Khasi Vakhayev, Khamid Okuyev and Tuchaev; into the second - non-party men whom the investigation called the cultural-ideological leadership - Khalid Yandarov, Akhmat Matsiev, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, D. Malsagov, Magomed Mamakayev; into the third - a "terrorist group", into which "the Chekists gathered, by the logic of things, young people alone"^[29]. The groups came before the military tribunal of the North Caucasus Military District; Avtorkhanov writes: "of the roughly 120 people who reached the trial alive, only one - the former mullah Akhmat Tuchaev - admitted his guilt. All the rest declared with one voice that all the crimes imputed to them were an invention, and their 'sincere confessions' false and fabricated from beginning to end", "The entire charge and the evidence in the case were built exclusively on this personal testimony extracted by torture", "There was no other material evidence or witness testimony to substantiate the charge" - and the tribunal passed its guilty verdict on the first group "solely on the basis of the testimony of one defendant – A. Tuchaev"^[29]. The tribunal sentenced Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Ali Gorchkhanov and Tuchaev to be shot, the rest - to prison terms of 7 to 25 years^[29]. From the death cell Tuchaev submitted a petition for clemency addressed to Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and wrote in it: he had confessed to crimes he had not committed because only so had the NKVD promised to free his family and spare his life^[29]. Moscow commuted the death sentences of all three and reduced the terms of the others; the "terrorist group" the same tribunal released in its entirety, the case of the "culture-ideologists" it "did not accept for proceedings at all", and those who sat without "cases" the Chekists put through the Special Board - the NKVD's own departmental "court", which passed sentences with no trial and no defendant present^[29].

On the morning after the night arrests of 31 July 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party resolved: to hold meetings in all kolkhozes "with an explanation of the political situation in the countryside", and by 5 August - district and Komsomol meetings "on the results of the operation"^[22]. On 3 August 1937 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the TsK VKP(b)), by telegram No. 1178, obliged the oblast committees of the party: to organize "in each oblast, by districts, 2-3 open show trials" of assigned "wreckers of agriculture" - "covering the course of the trials widely in the local press"^[22]. The newspaper "Groznensky Rabochy" ["The Grozny Worker"] covered the open trials from August 1937 - on 20 August under the headline: "The Trial of the Former Managers of Chechingtorg"^[22]. From 11 September 1937 the same newspaper printed denunciations in waves, day after day: 11 September: "Untangle the Bourgeois-Nationalist Tangle" - with a report on a meeting at which "of the 587 members and 132 candidate members of the party present at the meeting... 520 people spoke"; 15 September: "Enemies of the Chechen-Ingush People: Root Out and Smash to the End the Band of Bourgeois Nationalists"; 16 September: "Enemies of the People Have the Run of Chechingizdat: the Wolf Pack Is Headed by the Dyed-in-the-Wool Nationalist Arsanukayev"; 17 September: "Expose and Smash the Vile Band of Bourgeois Nationalists! - Such Is the Common Voice of the Party Organizations of Chechen-Ingushetia"; the newspaper denounced people by name - Gorchkhanov, Salamov, Mekhtiev, Vakhayev, Okuyev, Khaniev, Matsiev, Yandarov^[22]. On 27 September the newspaper printed an announcement: "Wreckers of Grain: Toward the Coming Trials" - three days before the report on the trial itself; on 12 October, under the headline: "The Trial of the Wreckers from the Artemovsky Elevator" - the newspaper reported: "the workers and housewives who filled the hall met the verdict with stormy applause"; on 3 November, under the headline: "The Trial of the Wreckers of the Second Oil Refinery"^[22]. In March 1938 the participants of a rally in the Oktyabrsky district of Grozny demanded of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR the shooting of "rabid fascist dogs"^[22], "Groznensky Rabochy" on 11 March printed an open letter of the Pioneers of Grozny school No. 3 demanding "the physical annihilation of the bestial enemies of the people"^[38], and of the trial of 16-26 March the historian K. G. Dendiev writes: the proceedings in the case of the "Bourgeois-nationalist Trotskyite-Bukharinite counter-revolutionary group of Abastov, Kebiev, Zarmayev and others" "were heard in open session, with the participation of a state prosecutor and an organ of the defense", and the indictment was printed by "Groznensky Rabochy"^[22].

On 11 July 1937 the occupation authorities approved the number of people "subject to shooting" in Chechnya: 862 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off") and 555 "criminals" - 1,417 people in all^[22]; operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July records for the ChIASSR: 500 people - to be shot (the order's "first category")^[37]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the executed writers: "of the 12 members of the Chechen-Ingush Union of Writers 9 were arrested, 7 convicted, among them four - S. Baduev, A. Dudayev, Sh. Aiskhanov, S. Oziev - sentenced to be shot"^[3]. The NKVD (a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested one of those four - the writer Abdi Dudayev - on 24 November 1937 "without the prosecutor's sanction", on the standard charge of "anti-Soviet agitation", and on 2 December, by decision of the "troika under the NKVD of the ChIASSR", the Chekists shot him - eight days from arrest to killing; the finding on his case of 13 May 1958 states: "The investigation of Dudayev's case was conducted in violation of the law; confrontations with witnesses were not held"^[22]. Moscow personally confirmed the lists of detainees for shooting: Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov signed the list of 7 December 1937, and on 28 December the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR passed 32 death sentences on it^[22]; on 12 September 1938 the Politburo confirmed a new list of those subject to its court: of the 61 under investigation, 50 went under the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center", and 55 of them stood "in the shooting article"^[22]. On 29 June 1938 the Military Collegium sentenced a large group of the republic's technical intelligentsia to various terms, and 30 people to be shot - the Chekists shot them the same day^[22]. The indictment in the case of Porubay - deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, put on trial after the change of course - states: "Falsified the investigative cases of Khamzatkhanov, Aliev, Khasiev, Kadilov, Ukhuev, Mutushev; all these persons were sentenced by decision of the troika to VMN" - "VMN" meant execution by shooting^[22]. The Chekists dumped the bodies of the killed into two trench-pits at the central cemetery of Grozny - the historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: there, "in October, November and December 1937", they dumped "the bodies of the shot"^[22]. A. Bozhedomov opened the burial in the summer of 1990 - by excavations with the participation of members of the Chechen-Ingush "Memorial" and staff of the museum of local history^[22].

The conduct of secret mass "national operations" of the NKVD for the physical annihilation of members of ethnic minorities^[39]. The mechanism was set by the operational orders of people's commissar Yezhov: No. 00485 of 11 August 1937 opened the Polish operation - "to begin, from 20 August 1937, a broad operation aimed at the complete liquidation of the local organizations of the 'POW'" with completion "within a three-month term"^[40], - and No. 00439 of 25 July 1937 the German one^[41]; the Greek, Bulgarian and other operations followed their template^[39]. The scale is recorded in the perpetrator's own accounting: according to the summary figures of the 1st Special Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR dated 30 August 1938, 94,659 people were arrested in the republic under orders Nos. 00485, 00593 and others (54,011 on the Polish line, 23,036 on the German, 5,642 on the Greek), of whom 61,683 had been convicted by 1 July 1938; in all, of the 197,945 people convicted by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR over the reporting period, 122,274 were sentenced to be shot - nearly two out of every three^[42]. Across all the "national lines" of the USSR, 335,513 people were convicted, and 73.66% of them were shot^[43].

The forcible closure of all national councils, pedagogical institutes, theaters and cultural institutions of ethnic minorities in the Ukrainian SSR^[44]: the national districts and village soviets were liquidated by the resolution of the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 24 January 1938^[45], and the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U of 10 April 1938 reorganized the national schools and colleges and turned the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute into an institute of foreign languages^[46].

On 24 January 1938 the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), by its resolution "On the Liquidation of National Schools and National Sections in Schools," closed non-Russian schools throughout the Union, liquidating the national districts and village soviets on the same day^[47][45]; on 13 March the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the USSR Council of People's Commissars No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" made the metropole's language a compulsory subject in all schools of the republics^[6]. Kyiv executed the decision on 10 April 1938: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, "proceeding from the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)," declared "the further existence of special national schools inexpedient and harmful" and resolved to reorganize the German, Polish, Czech, Swedish and other schools and technical colleges "into Soviet schools of the ordinary type," to liquidate national sections and classes at ordinary schools, colleges and universities, and, where there was nowhere to transfer the pupils, to transfer the institutions themselves to ordinary school curricula - "with instruction in Ukrainian or Russian"; the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute was turned into an institute of foreign languages, and all the work was ordered finished by 1 August 1938^[46]. The Politburo wrote its justification into the resolution itself: "enemies of the people - Trotskyites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists operating in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR - implanted special national German, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Greek and other schools, turning them into hotbeds of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on children"^[46]. The decision was given the form of a state act by the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in its resolution of 29 June 1938 on the reorganization of special national schools, colleges and the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute: by 1 August 1938, 766 national primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools were subject to reorganization into ordinary schools with (predominantly) Russian and Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and another 122 were merged with Russian and Ukrainian ones on the territorial principle - the count of the historian Liudmyla Yakubova^[48].

The partition of Eastern Europe behind the backs of its peoples: the secret protocol established that "in the event of a territorial-political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the boundary of the spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR shall run approximately along the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San"^[49]. Half a century later the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR "recognizes the secret protocols as legally untenable and invalid from the moment of their signing"^[50]. The invasion was covered by Molotov's note to the Polish ambassador Grzybowski (17 September 1939): "the Polish state and its government have in fact ceased to exist"^[51].

The direct armed invasion of Polish territory by the Red Army on September 17, 1939 for the military occupation of the western Ukrainian lands; the seizure was consolidated by "the treaty of the USSR with Germany (September 28, 1939)," which "confirmed the incorporation of the western Ukrainian lands into the USSR"^[52].

The staging of a no-alternative "People's Assembly" under the control of occupation troops to give the seizure legal form: "On October 27 in Lviv, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine of 1939 adopted the Declaration on the reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR, and on November 1 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed the law admitting Western Ukraine, as part of the Ukrainian SSR, into the USSR"^[53].

The official annexation of the occupied lands: the western Ukrainian lands were incorporated into the USSR under the treaty with Germany of September 28, 1939^[52], and "after the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna at the end of June 1940, on August 2, 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR annexed Northern Bukovyna and the Khotyn, Akkerman, and Izmail districts of Bessarabia to the Ukrainian SSR"^[53].

Mass forced resettlement by quota: "under the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of December 5, 1939 and March 2, 1940, subject to administrative resettlement were the employees of the former state institutions, courts, police, army, merchants, Polish settlers, landowners, owners of plants and factories, and their families"; in total "up to 1,250,000 people were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[54]. The waves were separate: the osadniks were deported under the USSR Sovnarkom resolution of December 5, 1939, no. 2010-558ss - its text remains in the closed Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (fond 93), while the mechanics of the operation are known from the NKVD Instruction approved on December 29, 1939^[55]; the families of officers, policemen and prison guards were deported under the resolution of March 2, 1940, no. 289-127ss^[56].

The neutralization of the politically active stratum through mass arrests: immediately after the "People's Assembly" came "the arrests of leading figures of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, by lists prepared in advance, drawn up in the Soviet consulate"^[57]; "in all, in 1939—1941 the NKVD organs arrested 21,982 Poles, 23,163 Ukrainians and 13,160 Jews"^[57], and those arrested faced execution, prison or the GULAG camps: "in total, during 1939—1941, between 16 and 35 thousand OUN members were shot or imprisoned"^[57].

The transfer of hundreds of thousands of people into special settlements and camps as a system of forced labor: in under two years "up to 1,250,000 people (about 10% of the population) were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[54] – the deportees were assigned to labor in remote regions with no right to leave.

The sign of the new order goes up within the very first weeks: Soviet troops took Lviv on 22 September 1939^[58], and already in October, in the city center, on the islet in the middle of today's Svobody Avenue, rose the monument to the Stalin Constitution - a huge vertical composition of columns entwined with red banners, on a wooden frame, with five sculptural groups (a Red Army soldier, a worker, a mother with a child, a female student, and an old Hutsul with a boy) and inscriptions in Ukrainian, Polish and Yiddish symbolizing the "friendship of peoples" according to the articles of the Stalin constitution^[59][60]. The sign has named authors: the sculptor Serhii Lytvynenko and the Kyiv artist Mykhailo Dmytrenko, who arrived in Lviv in 1939 in the "landing party" of Soviet artists whose task was the implantation of socialist realism; possibly the authors merely adapted to the site a design produced in Moscow, and it was executed by the sculptors Yevhen Dzyndra and Andrii Koverko^[59]. The monument stood until 30 June 1941 and vanished with the arrival of the Germans^[59].

The 1941 scorched-earth tactic under the directive of the USSR Sovnarkom and the Central Committee of 29 June 1941: "In the forced withdrawal of Red Army units, drive off the rolling railway stock, leave the enemy not a single locomotive, not a single railcar"^[61]; the Dnipro hydroelectric station was "destroyed at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War… (see the Directive of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of June 29, 1941)"^[35].

The total removal of industrial equipment and food supplies into the interior of the USSR: "550 industrial facilities were moved into the interior of the USSR (190 of all-Union and 360 of republican subordination)"; "From the Right Bank to the left bank of the Dnipro were ferried 4,498 tractors, 680 combines, 690 motor vehicles"^[62].

The mass conscription by field draft offices of the population of just-liberated territories: "'Chornosvytnyky' or 'black infantry' – such was the unofficial name given to men and youths mobilized by field military commissariats, and in fact by the commanders of formations, units, and detachments in 1943–1944 after the Red Army's liberation of enemy-occupied territories"^[63].

The use of untrained conscripts as expendable material: they were "thrown into combat often at once, without undergoing military training in reserve units, sometimes unarmed, not even changed into military uniform (hence the name)"^[63]. The scale is visible from a single episode: "after the Red Army first took Kharkiv in the spring of 1943, about 15 thousand people aged 15 to 45 were mobilized into it and sent to the front without training," with "1 rifle per 5-10 men"^[63].

In early November 1941, waging a military operation against the "uprising" it had itself declared, the USSR bombed with combat aircraft mountain auls of Chechnya in which there was neither this invented "uprising" nor the real protest. The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: for the suppression of the protest, "besides the operational groups and internal troops, three flights of combat aircraft were brought in," and "the operation proved poorly prepared in the military respect and was accompanied by heavy losses among the peaceful population. Bombs rained down on auls whose population did not even suspect any 'uprising'"^[3]. The historian S. P. Arenin, who wrote from the documents of the NKVD Department for the Struggle against "Banditry" (a predecessor of today's FSB), writes of the operations of 28 October - 3 November 1941: they were carried out by "chekist-military groups, to which three flights of aircraft were attached"^[64]. In the spring of 1942, according to memoirs, Soviet aircraft repeated the strikes on a larger scale - the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who wrote about these events in emigration, testifies: "in the spring of 1942 Soviet aviation twice subjected all of mountain Checheno-Ingushetia to bombing," and "in the auls of Shatoy, Itum-Kale and Galanchozh the inhabitants killed by aerial bombing and by the Bolsheviks' artillery shelling outnumbered those left alive"^[29]. Avtorkhanov adds: "In those days, when Stalin was arranging this hell over his own people, not a single German had yet set foot in the Caucasus"^[29]. The report of the 141st Regiment on the military operation of 30 October - 15 November 1941 counts only its own men and "bandits" - "killed: bandits — 36... Regiment losses: killed — 6, wounded — 7"^[19]; there is not a line in it about killed or wounded villagers. On the Galanchozh district the testimonies and the documents diverge: the historians cite data gathered from those who were in the mountains - that "absolute calm was observed" there, "and the bombing of peaceful auls by Soviet aviation came as a shock even to the district leadership"^[3], while Khalukhaev's report names the Galanchozh district among those engulfed by the uprising^[19].

The USSR declared the economic protest of the Chechens an "uprising" organized by "fascist agents". The party organs of the Soviet colonial administration of Checheno-Ingushetia, "at the prompting of the NKVD-NKGB", gave the protest of late October 1941 a name the historians render as: "an open anti-Soviet 'kulak-bandit uprising'"; the events themselves, as the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, bore "features of social protest"^[3]. This version became fixed in the documents: in the report of the commander of the 141st Regiment of the NKVD Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), Lieutenant Colonel Khalukhaev, dated 26 June 1943, October 1941 is described thus: "an armed counter-revolutionary uprising was raised by German-fascist agents"^[19]. The count kept by the secret services contradicted the picture they were imposing: over the whole of 1941 the NKVD organs eliminated 12 "bands" with a total strength of up to 100 men, recording four "bandit incidents" in which nine people died^[3]. There is no uprising behind these figures: all the "bands" the NKVD counted and eliminated over the year held up to a hundred men for the whole of Chechnya, and nine people died in the clashes. The desertion the colonizer imputed to the Chechen people was the desertion of recruits, not of frontline soldiers - the certificate of Dementyev, head of the Grozny Region directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, dated 1956, states: during the first mobilization "450 men deserted en route to the dispatch point, 269 men evaded the call-up"^[19], and the historians confirm: the detained deserters were "by no means from the front, but from units being formed in Grozny or passing through it"^[3]. On frontline desertion Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "over the first six months of the war, 38 known cases of desertion from the front line"; at the same time, they write, in Checheno-Ingushetia "they began to count as 'deserters' also those who fled death in the 'labor army' or evaded mobilization into it," and they also write about the bookkeeping: "A man was counted as an 'evader', or even a deserter, if he failed to appear at the recruitment stations at first summons, even by reason of disability or of his own death"^[3]. The historians note that the assessments rested "on the data of the central apparatus of the NKVD of the ChIASSR exclusively," and that "the only real thing here was the bombing of Chechen auls and hamlets by Soviet aviation. Everything else is open to question"^[3]. The military commissariats carried out three call-ups: 29 August - 2 September 1941 (8 thousand men were subject to call-up), in October 1941 (4,733 men) and on 17-25 March 1942: "14,577 men were subject to call-up, of whom only 4,395 were called up"^[19] - people evaded the call-up en masse. In April 1942 the USSR cancelled the call-up of Chechens and Ingush altogether - Dementyev's certificate states: "In connection with this, in April 1942 there followed an order of the NKO of the USSR cancelling the call-up of Chechens and Ingush into the army"^[19] (the NKO - the USSR ministry of defense). The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writing in emigration, dates the release from service to February 1942 and renders the order's motivation in the words "the Chechens and Ingush, by religious conviction, refuse to eat pork"^[29]. The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that it was the NKVD organs (a predecessor of today's FSB) that obtained the halt of the call-up in March 1942, and render the official motivation thus: "the halt of the call-up was motivated all but by care for the Chechens and Ingush, even by the impossibility of providing their nourishment with meat (the highlanders did not eat pork, and there was practically no mutton or beef laid in as canned food)"^[3]. Two years later the USSR accused the people it had itself removed from the call-up of evading service and going over to the enemy; on this accusation the colonizer built the decree deporting the people from its own lands in 1944, known as Operation "Chechevitsa" ("Lentil") (campaign C1180) and later recognized as genocide of the Chechen people: by Russia in 1991^[65], by the European Parliament in 2004^[66] and by Ukraine in 2022^[67].

In September 1941 the USSR created special departments for the struggle against "banditry" within the local NKVD organs (a predecessor of today's FSB), including in Chechnya, and permanent operational groups in the Shatoy, Galanchozh and Itum-Kale districts, whose task the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov render in the words "to quickly suppress any manifestations of banditry"^[3]. The first came the military operation of 30 October - 15 November 1941 across the districts of the declared "uprising": according to the report of the 141st Regiment of the NKVD Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), 36 people recorded as "bandits" were killed and 251 detained - "insurgents — 127, bandits — 7, bandit-insurgents — 13, deserters — 104"^[19]. On 5 December 1941, in the village of Gikhi in the Urus-Martan district, the regiment in a two-hour battle destroyed a group of ten people that the report calls the "cadre band" of Kaidov Azak: three were killed, seven detained^[19]. In the same December, to support the operational groups, the USSR formed the 178th Motorized Rifle Battalion in Chechnya, expanded the following year into the 141st Regiment of NKVD troops (in the commander's report the regiment is called a rifle regiment, by the historians - a mountain-rifle one)^[3]. The regiment's count for 1941, from 25 October to 1 January 1942: 59 people killed, 390 detained^[19].

In 1941 the USSR forcibly herded up to 13 thousand Chechens deemed unfit for military service into the "labor army" - construction battalions sent to build defensive lines: the people were carried toward the front without weapons and without soldier status. The mobilization, as the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, was carried out by the local military commissariats "by practically forcible methods"^[3]; the historian M. K. Osmayev writes: "People were seized right on the streets without being served call-up papers and without preliminary explanation of the purpose of the mobilization," and among the mobilized "there were not a few old and sick men"^[68]. The historians write about the position of the mobilized: they "were on the footing of servicemen but were not counted as Red Army soldiers"^[3]. The historians describe the outcome: "The mobilized masses were loaded into trains and in September 1941 found themselves in the frontline zone, where no one needed their labor. The army was retreating in haste. Over 10 thousand unfortunate citizens of Checheno-Ingushetia died of cold, hunger and bombing, owing to the criminal negligence of the military officialdom"^[3]. M. K. Osmayev cites another version of the fate of the mobilized: before even reaching their destination, "they were scattered by German aviation," and, by different sources, from 1,200 to 2 thousand people made it to Rostov-on-Don, whom a special commission of the colonial administration of Checheno-Ingushetia took back to Grozny^[68]. The survivors the colonizer declared "deserters of the labor front"; the historians write: "They were barely saved from execution by a government commission from Checheno-Ingushetia that traveled to Rostov-on-Don in response to complaints"^[3].

The USSR put Chechen-Ingush volunteers into the line, but denied them weapons, supply and an army number - and on 3-4 August 1942 threw them, with sabers and miscellaneous rifles, against German tanks at Kotelnikovo. Chechens and Ingush went to fight without any imperial coercion: already in the first year of the war over 18 thousand were at the front, by the third year - 32 thousand, by other accounts up to 50 thousand^[3]. After the USSR cancelled the call-up of Chechens and Ingush, Chechen-Ingush officers of the Soviet army obtained permission to recruit volunteers; their requests to arm the recruits properly, army-style, went unanswered. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who wrote about these events in emigration, names them one by one: "On the initiative of the Chechen Soviet general Supyan Mollaev, the Ingush colonel Abadiev, Major Visantov, Captain Akhtaev and others, the Soviet government permitted the Chechen-Ingush republic to recruit volunteers"^[29]. Two divisions gathered, an active one and a reserve one; after the evacuation of Kerch the active division went to the Southern Front. In Krasnodar the commander of the Southern Front, Marshal Budyonny, drew it up facing the division that had retreated from Kerch and addressed the retreaters, as Avtorkhanov renders it, with these words: "Look at them, the highlanders: their fathers and grandfathers, under the leadership of the great Shamil, fought bravely for 25 years and defended their independence against the whole of tsarist Russia. Take them as your example of how to defend the Motherland!"^[29]. Neither of the two divisions was taken onto the supply rolls of the Soviet army or received an army number. Avtorkhanov writes: "They were uniformed by the Chechen-Ingush republic itself, and from there they received their provisions as well"^[29]. Of the fighters' weapons and footwear he writes: "the entire armament of these divisions consisted of sabers alone and of chance rifles of the most varied systems"^[29]; "Many of the fighters were barefoot, as their homemade highland chuviaki had long worn out"^[29]. The officers asked Budyonny to take the divisions into the army and arm them army-style. Avtorkhanov continues: "Budyonny promised to think it over. While Budyonny was thinking, the Germans crossed the Don, and the Chechen-Ingush division, in the same condition, without any support, was thrown literally under the hurricane fire of German tanks racing toward Stalingrad. At Kotelnikovo, on 4 August 1942, German tanks rolled over the corpses of many fighters of this division. A small part was taken prisoner; another, led by the staff, managed to break out of the encirclement and retreated. But the rout of this division, together with the rout of whole corps and armies of the Southern Front, served as a bad attestation for the entire Chechen-Ingush people"^[29]. The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov describe the events differently: a single 114th Chechen-Ingush Cavalry Division was being recruited - volunteers came a thousand over the establishment of 4.5 thousand - Moscow disbanded it, and the 255th Chechen-Ingush Cavalry Regiment of Major Movlid Visaitov, created on its base, was thrown by the USSR toward Stalingrad^[3].

The USSR built its accusations of Chechen "banditry" on falsified statistics: an inspection by the central apparatus of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) in the summer of 1943 showed that of 213 "bandits" reported killed, only 22 people had ever been on file; at the end of August 1943 the files listed 359 members of "bandit groups" for the entire Checheno-Ingushetia^[3]. On 9 November 1943 Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Kobulov submitted to People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria a report "On the Situation in the Districts of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR" "with deliberately false figures alleging a mass presence of active bandits and deserters. 'Kobulov! A very good memorandum,' Beria noted on the report, and set in motion the preparation of Operation 'Chechevitsa'"^[3]. Beria lied in his final report as well - he informed the leadership of the USSR that the deportation had passed "without serious instances of resistance or incidents"; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "In his report to the country's leadership the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs lied outright: the deportation of the Chechens was accompanied by numerous incidents and mass killings of peaceful residents"^[3]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writing about this in emigration in 1952, took the official version apart point by point. The motive announced by the decree of 25 June 1946 he quotes verbatim - "Many Chechens and Ingush, incited by German agents, voluntarily joined formations organized by the Germans and, together with the German armed forces, took up arms against the Red Army... Therefore the Checheno-Ingush Republic is to be liquidated and its population deported" - and calls it calculated "for the ignorance of the Soviet people and the unawareness of the West"^[29]. Against this version he sets two facts: "during the Second World War not once did a German soldier set foot on the territory of the Checheno-Ingush Republic, save for the brief occupation of the border settlement of Malgobek, populated by Russians," and "the Chechens and Ingush were physically unable to join German formations, since there was no compulsory conscription in Checheno-Ingushetia"^[29].

On 29 January 1944 People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria approved the principal document of Operation "Chechevitsa" - the "Instruction on the Procedure for the Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush"^[19]; on 31 January the State Defense Committee of the USSR issued two resolutions on the deportation and the destinations^[3]. The first laid out the reception of the deported at the places of exile: the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) was instructed to send "in February-March of this year, for resettlement, up to 400 thousand people to the Kazakh SSR and up to 90 thousand people to the Kirghiz SSR," and in every destination district it was prescribed "to organize troikas consisting of the chairman of the district executive committee, the secretary of the district party committee and the head of the district branch [RO] of the NKVD"^[69]. The second resolution prescribed that people be transported "at the tariff for the transportation of prisoners"^[70]. On 7 February, at a meeting with Beria, "concrete tasks were set for organizing the deportation of 459,486 Chechens and Ingush - 97,635 families," and the date was fixed: 22-23 February^[71]. The colonizer massed in the republic, write historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, "up to 19 thousand officers of the NKVD and NKGB and 100 thousand combat-ready soldiers of the internal troops... over 15 thousand railway wagons and hundreds of locomotives, 6 thousand trucks"^[3] - under a cover story: "rumors were spread about large-scale tactical exercises in the mountains of Chechnya and Ingushetia"^[71]. On 23 February, the Soviet military holiday ("Red Army Day"), NKVD troops rounded up the men - historian Z. S. Isakieva writes: "Instead of the clubs, the men were driven (and marched) to assembly points under reinforced armed guard"^[71]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of a Russian student eyewitness, printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949, about the evening of 23 February in the auls: "That evening the Red Army men lit fires on the aul squares and began singing and dancing. The aul residents, suspecting nothing, gathered at this festivity as spectators. When in this way most of the residents had assembled on the square, all the men were arrested. Some Chechens had weapons, and shooting broke out in many places... The men arrested on the squares were locked in barns, and a hunt began for those who had not been on the square. The whole action was carried out in two or three hours"^[29]. "By 11 o'clock of the first day of the deportation more than 94 thousand people had been taken out of various settlements"^[3], and by the morning of 24 February - more than 333 thousand. The NKVD hauled the people in 180 trains: following a "rationalization" proposal the agency packed the loading tighter - "densification of the loading of the special contingent" in its papers - from 24 to 45 people per wagon; historians write: "In reality up to 80 people were crammed into the freight 'teplushka' wagons"^[3]. En route, according to the official figures of the Soviet NKVD, 1,361 people died^[3]; the eyewitness Ametistov, later a judge of the Constitutional Court of Russia, recalled: "I saw them [the Chechens] brought in in wagons - and half were unloaded already as corpses. The living were thrown out into 40-degree frost"^[3]. "The last train with deported Chechens and Ingush pulled up for unloading in the Kazakh steppe on 20 March 1944"^[3]. A. G. Avtorkhanov recorded how it looked to the people: "On 23 February 1944... within literally 24 hours the entire population of the Checheno-Ingush Republic was placed under arrest, and its loading into prisoner trains began, for dispatch to an unknown destination," while the decree liquidating the republic "was published backdated" - two years and four months later^[29].

During the deportation the punitive forces of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) killed on the spot those Chechens who could not be brought to the trains - the gravely ill, the old, women with children: in the agency's papers they were listed as "untransportable." On 27 February 1944 in the aul of Khaibakh, Galanchozh district, the punitive forces, according to historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, killed "over 700 people": Colonel Gvishiani, as the historians write, "ordered the 'untransportable' residents of Khaibakh and the surrounding hamlets locked... in the stable of the local collective farm named after L. P. Beria, after which the stable itself was piled round with hay and set on fire"^[3]. An eyewitness - Dziyaudin Malsagov, Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Justice of the republic - testified: "When the stable was engulfed in flames, the huge, heavily reinforced gates collapsed under the press of people, and through the fire a crowd of maddened people surged out. Gvishiani commanded: 'Fire!' Automatic and machine-gun bursts rang out from dozens of barrels... No one broke through the fire and the gun cordon. No one was saved"^[3]; Gvishiani received from People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria, the historians write, "a personal commendation, a recommendation for a decoration and a promotion in rank"^[3]. The punitive forces killed the "untransportable" throughout the mountain districts: "47 gravely ill people were put to death and buried in a single pit on the grounds of the Urus-Martan district hospital... several dozen old people, women and children were burned in Tsori, Targim and Guli. Many of those who fled that day from the villages into the mountains or forest were shot on the spot without warning"^[3]; "in the Itum-Kale district... houses were packed with the sick and pelted with grenades and bottles of incendiary mixture"^[3]. Historian Z. S. Isakieva writes: at the end of March 1944 NKVD troops "shot" the residents of mountainous Malkhista, whom they had failed to reach in February because of snowfall^[71]. The Chekists recorded the shootings of the sick in their own correspondence: on 28 May 1944 the head of the Galanchozh operational sector Gransky reported to Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of State Security Kobulov about the "unauthorized shootings of the elderly Chechen women, the sick and the crippled who remained after the resettlement" - in the Nachkhoevsky village soviet alone the "sick and crippled" shot numbered "up to 60 people"^[72].

Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write about the days of the deportation of the Chechens: "over the two or three days that the deportation lasted, killing one or two people here and there, the punitive forces destroyed in total no less than a thousand people. And it was announced loudly and distinctly, in Russian: for attempted escape - execution, for failure to obey an order - execution, for expressing protest - execution"^[3]. The Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes that the threats "were announced in Russian, though many did not understand the language," and the toll of reprisals began within the first hours: "On the Chechen plain hundreds of people (men, women, children and the old) were shot within a few hours"; in the mountains, where people were driven to the roads on foot, "more often than on the plain, they shot down stragglers, the enfeebled, those who misunderstood an order, or simply - 'attempting to escape'"^[73]. Historian Z. S. Isakieva writes about the columns from the mountain villages: "Those who could not walk were led out of the column and shot, without even permission to bury them"^[71].

In April-May 1943 officers of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB), led by Kolesnikov, Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, in the course of "anti-banditry operations" detained Chechens "suspected of ties with bandits" and shot them "unlawfully, without trial or investigation" - 25 people in two months, "citizens guilty of nothing whatsoever": in the village of Bachi-Yurt, on the orders of cavalry platoon commander Volosov, the convoy shot 17 of 19 detainees, among them a 15-year-old girl; in the village of Belty a convoy headed by Soviet militia section commander Dubasov shot four people "without any pretext whatsoever" and delivered their corpses to the district branch of the NKVD; at the Kuloi hamlet Meishvili, a battalion commander of the NKVD troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), shot the brothers Baisar and Baim Bataev, Dzhamalani Pitalov and Mavla Chebiev^[19]. The executioners wrote the shootings off as "attempted escape," and Kolesnikov issued "findings that the use of weapons had been proper"; all this was established by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office following a letter from the Chechen Dokhtukaev, written from exile - the results were reported in 1957 to Bulganin, head of the government of the USSR, but no one was ever brought to court: the ten-year statute of limitations had expired^[19].

During the deportation - Operation "Chechevitsa" - the troops of the Soviet NKVD (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) burned the mountain auls of the Chechens as soon as they had driven the residents under convoy to the trains bound for Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (today's Kyrgyzstan) and had driven off their livestock. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of a Russian student of the Grozny Petroleum Institute who was sent to one of the auls on the day of the deportation: "In the mountain auls this action was carried out differently. All the livestock was evacuated from there, and then the auls were burned, to deprive the 'bandits' of a base for existence. For days on end one could watch auls burning in the mountains"^[29].

The USSR lured out by deception the Chechens who were hiding in the mountains from the occupation regime, promising freedom - in the NKVD's (predecessor of today's FSB) papers this was called "legalization." Those who believed the promises were arrested or deported together with their compatriots to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (today's Kyrgyzstan) in the course of the genocidal Operation "Chechevitsa." The report of Dementiev, head of the Grozny Oblast internal affairs directorate (1956), states: in September-October 1943 alone "30 bands were legalized, comprising 183 men, plus 60 lone bandits"^[19]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: the NKVD files "listed 1,300 so-called legalized bandits, that is, men who had come forward, by mutual agreement, with a confession and been released from repression for it. All or nearly all of them were arrested shortly before the deportation or in its course"^[19]. In the days of the deportation the troops announced clemency for those who had gone into the mountains - and deported those who came out. A Russian student eyewitness from Grozny, whose testimony was printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949 and is cited by the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writes: "At the same time an amnesty [a promise not to punish] was announced for those who had gone into the mountains, if they came forward voluntarily. Some of them did in fact come forward, but were deported all the same…"^[29]. In the summer of 1944 the colonizer repeated the deception: historian P. M. Polian writes that in June "tried and tested" religious authorities, deported in February, were brought from Kazakhstan to Grozny, and they induced hundreds of Chechens in hiding "toward legalization and, hence, deportation"^[19].

The colonizer cut the Chechens off from medical care from the first day of the deportation: the Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes that the troops, driving people out of their homes, "threw the sick off their hospital beds"^[73]. Typhus broke out in the trains - the certificate of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) of 7 April 1944 on those brought to Kirghizia states: "412 people died and 278 were hospitalized"^[74]. With no quarantine and no medicine at the destinations the epidemic spread: by 1 April 1944 about 4,800 people had fallen ill in Kazakhstan, over 2,000 in Kirghizia^[3]. The colonizer forbade local residents, on pain of arrest, to help the dying Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov writes: "The local population was categorically forbidden to render help to the dying by giving food, water or medicine. Even a simple display of human sympathy for the perishing women and children was punished with arrests"^[29].

The USSR, deporting the Chechens and Ingush from their native land, made no provision for food at the places of exile - and from famine and disease in exile almost a third of the deported died within four and a half years. The colonizer had taken the people's livestock and food back home: by the resolution of the State Defense Committee of the USSR of 31 January 1944 the people's commissariats (ministries) were obliged "to accept in the North Caucasus from the special settlers livestock and agricultural produce... issuing exchange receipts for what was accepted," while from the confiscated livestock 350 horses "fit for cavalry service" were handed over to the cavalry units of the Soviet militia^[70]. Pchelkin, People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the Kirghiz SSR, reported to People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria on 22 April 1944: the food the exiles had brought with them "is running out," "the established ration is critically insufficient," the collective farms are "in no position to help for lack of it, as a result of which in some districts there are instances... of the eating of roots and grasses"^[19]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: for lack of food, shelter and fodder the exiles in Kirghizia "had to slaughter up to 90%" of the livestock issued "in compensation for that left behind in their former places of residence," while the funds allocated to them were handed out by local bosses to others - in the Kazalinsk district "one ton of bread was issued to the local party activists," and in the collective farms of the Bazar-Kurgan district "food was issued only to able-bodied special settlers, while those unfit for work were deprived of rations"^[19]. In exile the Chechens and Ingush died by the tens of thousands: by the end of 1944 the number of exiles ("special settlers" in the colonizer's terms) had fallen by about 11.5 thousand in Kirghizia and by more than 46 thousand in Kazakhstan^[3]. In 1945, among the North Caucasus exiles, 44,652 children died - 2,230 were born; no fewer than 80 thousand people were starving^[3]; in the winter of 1948-1949 in the Kazakh SSR (today's Kazakhstan) up to 118 thousand were starving, and 418 people died of hunger^[3]. By October 1948 about 146.9 thousand North Caucasus exiles had died in exile; historians put the direct losses of the Chechens and Ingush at 145.7 thousand people, and together with the unborn - at 300 thousand; the people recovered its pre-war numbers only by 1959^[3].

The Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) obliged the exiled Chechens and Ingush ("special settlers" in the colonizer's terms) over 12 years of age to report monthly to the special commandant's office - the agency's surveillance post at the place of exile; from age 16 the commandant's office opened personal files; the colonizer forbade them to join the Bolshevik party, its youth league (the "Komsomol") and the trade unions, and did not take them into the army^[71]. From January 1945 the commandant could, without trial, arrest "offenders" for up to 5 days or fine them up to 100 rubles^[3]. By the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 26 November 1948 the deportation was declared eternal: the Chechens and Ingush were "exiled in perpetuity," with up to 20 years of hard labor for escape and up to 5 years of prison for aiding escapees^[3].

The colonizer locked the exiled Chechens and Ingush into their places of settlement: the commandant's offices forbade absences without their permission, and the mutual surety of the "ten-yard groups" was in force - ten neighboring households answered for one another^[3]. People fled anyway: from the spring of 1944 to the end of 1950 - over 20.6 thousand escapes, and the chekists caught nearly all the escapees^[3]. In 1948 the colonizer forbade the exiles to live within 100 kilometers of the USSR border and forcibly resettled over 6 thousand people deeper into Kazakhstan^[3].

The colonizer abolished the very republic of the Chechens and Ingush and carved up their land among its neighbors: on 7 March 1944 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued the decree "On the Liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR and the Administrative Organization of Its Territory"^[71]: lowland Chechnya went into the newly created Grozny Okrug of Stavropol Krai - a month later the colonizer transformed it into Grozny Oblast^[19]; the mountain part was divided between the Georgian SSR (today's Georgia) and the Dagestan ASSR (today's Dagestan within Russia), and the Ingush lands were handed to North Ossetia^[3]. The abolition was given legal form by the law of 25 June 1946^[71].

On 23 February 1944 the colonizer mobilized students and housewives not employed at factories in Grozny and from six in the morning drove them out to the Chechen auls, from which, half an hour after their arrival, the troops took away the arrested Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of one of the mobilized - a Russian student of the Grozny Petroleum Institute: "Thus we were, according to a carefully worked-out plan, distributed among the auls, 20-30 people per aul"^[29]. The student writes about the work they were given in the auls: "The task of the students was to keep the farms in order until the arrival of the settlers from Kursk and Oryol oblasts. We were to gather the livestock, feed it, take in the grain, the implements, and so on"^[29]. By mid-May 1944 settlers had arrived in Grozny Oblast numbering 40% of the deported Chechens, including 6,800 families from Stavropol Krai^[3]. Into the districts handed to Dagestan the colonizer resettled 65 thousand people from 224 mountain villages of Dagestan^[3]. The settlers died too: in the Aukh district in 1944-1947 about 2 thousand - nearly a third - of the resettled Laks, one of the mountain peoples of Dagestan, died of disease^[3].

On the land emptied by the deportation of the Chechens the colonizer destroyed the urban markers of their history: it ransacked the republican local history museum and blew up the monument to the Chechen commander Aslanbek Sheripov^[3].

The colonizer ravaged the shrines and graves of the deported Chechens. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...on the orders of the party-soviet organs even mosques and cemeteries were plundered... The grave churts (stones) went into the foundations of factories and livestock farms; they were used to pave city streets and edge sidewalks"^[3]. The colonizer destroyed the city mosque of Grozny^[3].

Having deported the Chechen people in February 1944, the colonizer burned its books and manuscripts. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "On the squares and streets of Grozny bonfires of books blazed up. All literature and textbooks in Arabic, Chechen and Ingush were burned"^[3]. Historian D. A. Khozhaev writes about the clan chronicles - the tyaptars: "For three days and three nights a bonfire burned in the center of Grozny, in whose flames were destroyed nearly all the Chechen tyaptars, as well as all the manuscript and printed literature devoted to the history and culture of the Chechens"^[75]. From the auls, writes D. A. Khozhaev, open trucks carried "ancient manuscripts, religious-philosophical treatises, Arabic-language books on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, historical hadiths, ancient legends of the Chechens and Ingush in Arabic and in Chechen (in Arabic script), secular belles-lettres. All these books and manuscripts were dumped in Grozny straight onto the snow by the public toilet in the square adjoining the Palace of Pioneers"^[73].

The colonizer erased Chechen and Ingush names from the map. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "Streets, settlements, auls and districts were hastily renamed"^[3]. Historian P. M. Polian writes of the Ingush lands handed to North Ossetia: "all the Ingush place names were repressed as well; they were replaced with Ossetian or Russian ones" - by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of 29 April 1944 the Psedakh district became Alansky, Nazran district - Kosta-Khetagurovsky, Achaluki district - Nartovsky, and by the decree of 30 August 1944 the colonizer renamed "all the districts and their centers" of Grozny Oblast^[19]. The Chechen lands that had gone to Georgia the colonizer named the Akhalkhevi district^[3].

Deporting the Chechen people in February 1944, the colonizer looted its emptied homes. The Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes: "In the days of the deportation, parallel to the human stream, columns of military trucks moved toward Grozny in an unbroken flow, loaded with the valuables looted from the emptied homes of the Chechens and Ingush. The items the guards deemed most valuable - carpets, burkas, Caucasian mounted belts, weapons ornamented with gold and silver (daggers, shashkas, flintlock rifles made by Chechen masters of the last century), jewels - were carried in canvas-covered vans"^[73]. Drozdov, head of a brigade of the People's Commissariat (Ministry) of State Control of the RSFSR, who inspected the districts handed to Dagestan in August 1944 on the instructions of the government of the RSFSR, reported "unrestrained theft and squandering of the property of the special settlers," begun "soon after the deportation": Yusupov, acting chairman of a district soviet, "fully outfitted himself at the expense of the property of the special settlers" - he was short four hand-operated and four treadle sewing machines, 26 rugs, 30 carpets and 6 bicycles; Khashaev, prosecutor of Dagestan, received a house, an orchard, a vegetable garden and an "ownerless" cow; people's judge Suleimanov formalized his haul with a receipt: "Goods received, money not paid, to which I hereby subscribe"^[73]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov sum up: "Implicated in the unrestrained theft of other people's goods was the entire party-economic and militia top brass of Grozny Oblast, Dagestan, Stavropol, North Ossetia and Georgia"; those caught were dismissed and tried, but "in the end the arrests had to be abandoned, since no one would have been left at liberty to govern"^[3].

Regular chekist-military operations by the NKVD and MGB to sweep western Ukrainian villages: the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR T. Strokach personally "directed and coordinated operational-chekist operations to liquidate the underground of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and mass deportations of the population in Western Ukraine"^[5]. Already "on April 5, 1944, on the basis of a directive of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR, a scheme of arrests and deportation of OUN–UPA members was worked out"^[54].

Extrajudicial killings of civilians in the course of suppressing the insurgency: the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee itself admitted, in its resolution "On the Political and Economic Situation of the Western Oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR" of May 26, 1953: "From 1944 through 1952, up to 500 thousand people in the western oblasts of Ukraine were subjected to various kinds of repression, including over 134 thousand arrested, over 153 thousand killed, and over 203 thousand deported forever from the Ukrainian SSR"^[76][35] – the authorities did not divide the killed into insurgents and civilians, and already on July 2, 1953, after Beria's arrest, the resolution itself was revoked as conducive to "the activization of bourgeois-nationalist elements"^[76]. Terror was also waged by disguised MGB "special groups" acting under the guise of the UPA: the military prosecutor of the MVD troops of the Ukrainian district, Kosharsky, in his report to Khrushchev (February 15, 1949), cited "examples of beatings, rapes and robberies of the population" by agent-fighters and stated: "the actions of the so-called MGB special groups are of a pronounced bandit, anti-Soviet character and, of course, cannot be justified by any operational considerations"^[77].

The creation of an atmosphere of total fear through the bloody provocations of NKVD special groups operating in the guise of the UPA: People's Commissar Strokach "initiated the formation of special groups of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR from former partisans for the struggle against the UPA" and "personally interrogated the captured leaders of the OUN networks of Western Ukraine"^[5]. The terror was also demonstrative: "one of the forms of struggle was the policy of intimidating OUN and UPA members and the local population: open trials and executions, putting the bodies of the dead on public display, and destroying insurgent graves"^[78].

The coordination of actions with the pro-Soviet government of Poland to destroy the Ukrainian underground: Operation "Vistula," "as a deportation action, was elaborated in detail and carried out by the Polish authorities," but its execution "was coordinated with the party-Soviet organs of power of the USSR" - the Soviet command transferred "from Lviv oblast one tank division and special NKVD units, and blocked the Ukrainian-Polish border with border troops"^[53].

The forcible removal of insurgents' families to Siberia and the deportation of the Ukrainians of Zakerzonnia: the removal of "bandit accomplices" with their entire families began at once - already in the summer of 1944 "more than 17,000 people were carried off to Krasnoyarsk Krai"^[54]; in all, in 1944–52, 203,662 people were removed to special settlements, among them "representatives of the families of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and their sympathizers — 182,543 people"^[54]. Operation "Vistula" was carried out in order to "deprive it of socio-economic and moral-psychological support from the local Ukrainian population," and ended in the scattering of the community: the authorities rid themselves of the Ukrainian population, "dispersing about 150 thousand people"^[53].

Mass arrests of UPA fighters, OUN members, and those suspected of aiding them, followed by dispatch to the GULAG camps, upon which the regime placed "the isolation of 'unreliable elements'" as one of its key tasks^[35]. During Operation "Vistula," for civilians suspected of assisting the underground there was provision for "the introduction of courts-martial and concentration camps, in particular at Jaworzno"^[53]. By 1951 Ukrainians had become the second-largest nation of the GULAG: according to the agency's own statistics, the "National composition of GULAG prisoners (as of January 1, 1951)" counted 506,221 Ukrainians out of some 2.5 million prisoners - about 20%^[79].

The use of captured resistance members and deportees as free labor: the tasks of the GULAG included "using them as cheap labor and transferring them, as needed, from place to place"^[35]; deportees from Western Ukraine were sent to special settlements and hard labor - in the summer of 1944 alone "more than 17,000 people were carried off to Krasnoyarsk Krai"^[54].

Total ideological control over art and the press, the banning of works and the vilification of writers for alleged "bourgeois nationalism." The campaign culminated in the verdict in the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee: "on July 18, 1952 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court passed death sentences on 13 people, including 5 natives of Ukraine, well-known Jewish writers and poets"^[62].

The staging of public political persecution (attacks on Rylsky, Sosiura, Yanovsky, the campaign against "cosmopolitans"), instilling an atmosphere of fear. Its outcome was the execution of the defendants in the JAC case: "on August 12, 1952 they were all executed"^[62].

Fabricated repressions against figures of the Ukrainian and Jewish intelligentsia: in the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, "on July 18, 1952 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court passed death sentences on 13 people, including 5 natives of Ukraine, the well-known Jewish writers and poets D. Bergelson, D. Hofshtein, L. Kvitko, P. Markish, I. Fefer. On August 12, 1952 they were all executed"^[62].

Use of regular troops and tanks to suppress revolts of Ukrainian political prisoners in the concentration camp system. In Kengir, tanks crushed the unarmed: "About 200 Ukrainian women joined hands and marched against the tanks. But the tanks did not stop and one by one overcame the living phalanx. And the MVD men rushed to the barracks, shooting everyone they encountered"^[80].

Mass killings of prisoners during the forcible suppression of the uprisings. In Norilsk, "about 100 people were killed and more than 200 wounded"^[81]; in Kengir, "during the suppression of the uprising, about 700 prisoners were killed or wounded"^[80].

A state campaign to construct a historical myth: the "Theses on the 300th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia," approved by the CPSU Central Committee, declared that "by this historic act was completed the long struggle of the freedom-loving Ukrainian people against foreign enslavers for reunification with the Russian people in a single Russian state"^[82] – the annexation of 1654 was retroactively rewritten as the goal and outcome of a national struggle.

The imposition of a concept of unbreakable unity instead of recognizing a distinct nation: per the Theses, "by the act of reunification the Ukrainian people consolidated its close and unbreakable historical bond with the Russian people, in whom it found a great ally, a faithful friend and defender"^[82]. The celebrations and the transfer of Crimea "taking into account the commonality of the economy, territorial proximity, and close economic and cultural ties"^[83] served the same frame.

The redrawing of internal borders by the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium's resolution of 19 February 1954: "To approve the joint submission of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on the transfer of the Crimean oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic"^[83] – the decision was taken in Moscow, without any expression of will by the peninsula's inhabitants. Behind the "commonality of the economy" stood the desire to shift the peninsula, ruined by deportation and war, onto the books of the Ukrainian SSR: "Moscow admits ever more openly: the Crimean region is a problem territory that the union center does not know how to sustain"^[84].

The jubilee was fixed with a material sign in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, on the very square where the rada had taken place in 1654. The sign went up in the course of the jubilee reconstruction of the town ordered by the republic's authorities: "in connection with the preparation for the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia," the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR allocated 20 million rubles for the reconstruction of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, the reconstruction plan was developed under the direction of the architect Volodymyr Zabolotnyi, and in May 1954, "on the square where the historic Pereiaslav Rada took place (now Reunification Square), an obelisk with a memorial plaque was erected"^[85]. On the plaque, beneath a relief of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a text is cast: "On this square, on 8 (18) January 1654, the Pereiaslav Rada took place, which, expressing the will of the Ukrainian people, unanimously adopted the historic decision on the reunification of Ukraine with Russia"^[86]. The sign did not merely mark the spot: it declared the decision unanimous and expressive of the people's will, fixing this version in bronze on the very square where it all happened.

The legislative transfer of schools through "freedom of choice": the union Law of December 24, 1958 left the language of instruction to the republics^[87], and the Law of the Ukrainian SSR of April 17, 1959 wrote into Article 9: "Instruction in the schools of the Ukrainian SSR is conducted in the pupils' native language. It is for the parents to decide to which school, with which language of instruction, to send their children" - the study of a language not taught in a given school became optional^[88].

The ideological course toward erasing nations: the Third Program of the CPSU, adopted by the 22nd Congress in October 1961, announced "a new stage in the development of national relations in the USSR, characterized by the further drawing together of nations and the achievement of their complete unity," and called "the effacement of national distinctions, especially of language distinctions," merely "a considerably longer process than the effacement of class boundaries"^[89].

The material sign of the "merging of nations" was erected in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, the city of the Pereiaslav Rada: "on 8 October 1961, a majestic monument in honor of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia was unveiled on B. Khmelnytsky Square"^[85]. The authorities unveiled the sign themselves: according to the newsreel Radianska Ukraina No. 49, the opening rally was addressed by Petro Shelest, first secretary of the Kyiv obkom of the CPU, and Pankratov, a secretary of the Moscow obkom of the party - the metropole spoke at the unveiling in its own voice^[90]. The composition consisted of two female figures representing Ukraine and Russia and three bas-reliefs with medallions: "a torch, 1654; a hammer and sickle in the rays of the sun, 1917; the Order of Victory, 1945"^[91]. The sign's purpose is recorded in its own protection passport: "The monument is a symbol of the eternal, unbreakable friendship and the indestructible monolithic unity of the fraternal peoples - Ukrainian and Russian…"^[92]. Four years after the unveiling, the sign was taken under state protection by the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR of 21 July 1965 No. 711 "On the approval of the list of monuments of art, history and archaeology of the Ukrainian SSR"^[93][94]. The pedestal bore the inscription "Forever together - forever with the Russian people"; in early December 2021 it was removed by unknown persons^[95], and the monument itself was dismantled on 7 July 2022 - by an order of the Ministry of Culture that struck the monument, protection No. 5894-Ko, off the register "due to the loss of the subject of protection"^[96].

Targeted arrests of the new Ukrainian intelligentsia, dissidents, and protest participants (including after the premiere of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors") to suppress the nascent resistance^[97].

Use of political trials, interrogations, and administrative pressure by the KGB on the signatories of the "Letter of 139" to create an atmosphere of fear in cultural circles: "Administrative repressions against the 'signatories' began, along with KGB pressure. Rumors spread across Kyiv and Ukraine about the existence of an underground terrorist Banderite organization run by Western intelligence services"^[98].

Mass arrests of members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the fabrication of criminal cases: Vasyl Stus was "arrested on January 12, 1972 together with other Ukrainian writer-human rights defenders: I. Svitlychny, Ye. Sverstiuk, Ihor and Iryna Kalynets," and after joining the Helsinki Group in October 1979 he was "arrested a second time on May 14, 1980" and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile^[5]. He "died in the punishment cell of special-regime camp VS-389/36" and was buried "in a nameless grave under No. 9 in the camp cemetery"^[5].

Use of state healthcare institutions for the politically motivated diagnosing of dissenters (the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia") and their indefinite confinement in psychiatric hospitals^[99].

Administration of destructive pharmaceutical drugs (neuroleptics) as a means of physical and psychological pressure on healthy human rights defenders in closed institutions^[99].

Administrative pressure on schools: pursuant to the resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers of 13 October 1978 No. 835, the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, by its resolution of 2 November 1978 No. 518, obliged the ministry of education of the Ukrainian SSR to introduce, from the 1980/81 school year, the study of the Russian language in the first grades of general-education schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction^[100].

The ideological exaltation of the metropole's language: the all-Union scientific-theoretical conference "The Russian Language — the Language of Friendship and Cooperation of the Peoples of the USSR" (Tashkent, 22–24 May 1979) adopted detailed recommendations on Russification - from organizing "the study of the Russian language in the senior groups of preschool institutions" to "the use of the Russian language in lessons in other school subjects" in the senior grades of national schools^[101].

Financial privileges for teaching in the metropole's language: pursuant to the resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers of 26 May 1983 No. 473 "On additional measures for improving the study of the Russian language in general-education schools and other educational institutions of the union republics," the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, by a resolution of 10 June 1983 - signed by Shcherbytsky and Liashko, stamped "Not for the press" - raised from 1984 by 15 percent the salary rates of teachers of Russian language and literature and allowed classes of more than 25 pupils to be split into subgroups for Russian lessons^[101][102].

Deliberate concealment by the union leadership in Moscow of the scale of the Chornobyl NPP disaster from its own population and international organizations, depriving Ukrainians of information about the level of the radiation threat^[103].

Creation of an artificial picture of radiological well-being and the criminal, forced marching of people into the May Day demonstrations in Kyiv under radioactive fallout to mask the catastrophe^[103].

The use of brute force by party activists against Rukh activists: when Rukh members attempted to install a cross on the grave of those executed near Bazar, "the activists were not allowed into the village" "with the help of KGB men and provocations about the Rukh members' 'Banderite' intentions"; some participants "were dragged out of the car, beaten, and the flags were torn to shreds," while the role of "protesting peasants" was played by men in disguise: "in reality these were communist party activists from nearby districts"^[104]. The political prisoner Vasyl Ovsienko ended up in the hospital: "the communists thrashed me near Bazar on November 17"^[105].

The forcible neutralization of movement activists at the hands of the security structures and party apparatus: the dispersal of commemorative actions with beatings ("dragged out of the car, beaten") with the participation of the KGB and the militia^[104], the hospitalization of the beaten political prisoner Vasyl Ovsienko^[105], and the death of Rukh member Yevhen Melenivsky - after a "conversation" at the regional MVD directorate he "died on his way home"^[106], and later - the law enforcement bodies' demonstrative disinterest in solving crimes against Rukh functionaries: they "demonstratively displayed disinterest in solving the crime"^[107].

The forced disappearance of a key functionary of the movement: "on the night of January 15–16, 1994, two armed unknown men burst into the NRU secretariat in Kyiv, took some documents, and searched for Boichyshyn" - Mykhailo Boichyshyn, head of the Rukh secretariat, was never seen again. The investigation was sabotaged: law enforcement "at first was in no hurry to accept the report of the politician's disappearance, and then demonstratively displayed disinterest in solving the crime," and "the investigators were interested not so much in the circumstances of the attack on the Secretariat and Boichyshyn's disappearance as in the party's financing"^[107].

A referendum with a vague formulation to legitimize union control: the ballot of the 17 March 1991 referendum asked voters to endorse "the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics"^[108] – even though the content of the "renewed federation" was nowhere defined, while the result was then used as a mandate for a new union treaty.

The union center deployed an international platform against Ukrainian sovereignty: Bush publicly called the striving for independence a "suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred"^[109] – the speech went down in history as the "Chicken Kiev speech."

An armed seizure of power: the GKChP statement of 18 August 1991 announced the transfer of the USSR president's powers: "In connection with the impossibility, for reasons of health, of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev performing the duties of President of the USSR and the transfer… of the powers of the President of the USSR to Vice-President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev… to form the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR"^[110]. The putsch was timed to derail the treaty-based reconstitution of the Union: "The formation of the GKChP was preceded by the so-called Novo-Ogaryovo process - negotiations begun on April 23, 1991 by USSR President Gorbachev at his suburban residence of Novo-Ogaryovo with the leaders of the union republics on the signing of a new Union Treaty"^[111] - the coup cut this process short.

The immediate elimination of the independent press: GKChP resolution No. 2 of 19 August 1991 ordered "to temporarily limit the list of published central, Moscow city, and oblast socio-political editions to the following newspapers: 'Trud,' 'Rabochaya tribuna,' 'Izvestia,' 'Pravda,' 'Krasnaya zvezda,' 'Sovetskaya Rossiya,' 'Moskovskaya pravda,' 'Leninskoye znamya,' 'Selskaya zhizn'"^[112] – anything not on the list could not appear.