Hostage-Taking

Hostages were taken not as punishment for a rising but on suspicion - before an aul had done anything. On 9 January 1842 the commander of the Sunzha Line, in a report to general Olshevsky, commander of the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), described his order for the Kumyk plain (the lowland to the north-east of Chechnya): ""I instructed Colonel Freitag... if there is a suspicion that some village wants to flee, then at once to take from it a large number of amanats, so that the inhabitants themselves should feed them"" (an amanat is a person whom the empire took from a community as a hostage; the threat of reprisal against the one taken held the family and the whole aul in submission)^[1]. The same report admits what the empire holds the people with: ""Winter and the amanats restrain them, at the present time, from fleeing to Chechnya""^[1]. Hostages from Vainakh communities were also taken by the empire's civil administration in Georgia - on the mere news of a defection to the resistance. On 26 May 1841 the civil governor of Georgia-Imereti reported to Brayko, administrator of the civil department of the Transcaucasian region, that on news of the defection of the Kistins (a Vainakh community on the border with Georgia) to the side of Shamil (the imam, leader of the resistance of the highlanders of Dagestan and Chechnya to the Russian conquest), provincial secretary Limmerman instructed the district assessors (officials of the district administration) ""to detain here, under a plausible pretext, all the Kistins who wintered in Tusheti and on the Alvani field"" (Tusheti and the Alvani field are a mountain region and a plain in north-eastern Georgia)^[1]. Those detained were not the ones who had defected but those who had come for the winter; the pretext for the detention is called ""plausible"" by the document itself.