Imposition of Its Own Picture of Reality

At the beginning of 1844, after the defeats of the imperial army in 1843, general Neidhardt, head of the empire's troops in the Caucasus, issued a proclamation to the highlanders that inverted the picture of the war: the invader in it is not the imperial general who brought the troops, but Shamil (the imam, leader of the resistance of the highlanders of Dagestan and Chechnya to the Russian conquest). The proclamation paints Shamil as a man "who preaches equality and the extermination of all hereditary authorities with the sole aim of seizing the inheritances of the khans and beks" and who "has filled your auls with hated murtazigats... has burdened you with heavy taxes..." (murtazigats - mounted warriors of the Imamate's standing army)^[1]. The result of the proclamation historian N. I. Pokrovsky described briefly: "But the wails did not help" - by wails he means these imperial exhortations themselves^[1].