The empire destroyed the auls and hamlets of Lesser Chechnya (the lowland-piedmont western part of Chechnya) blow after blow. In November-December 1847 Golen-Goyta and the aul of naib Saib-dula (a deputy of Imam Shamil, leader of the highlanders' resistance to the Russian conquest) were destroyed: imperial officer Poltoratsky, a participant in the winter expedition of 1847-1848, wrote of the burned highlander houses (saklias) - "the charred skeletons of saklias and, on the ground, blackened thick pools of blood and human corpses scattered everywhere recalled the rich aul of Golen-Goyta that had existed so recently," and of the aul of Saib-dula: the column "took the aul by storm, annihilated everything in it and burned it to the ground"[1]. On the night of 17 February 1850, under an order of the commander-in-chief in the Caucasus conveyed by the journal of military events of General Ilyinsky - "to annihilate there the dwellings of the harmful population stubborn in its insubmission" - the detachment of Colonel Sleptsov burned the hamlets of Muzuroyev and Nekhloyev and the aul Yasan-yurt: "Few of the inhabitants managed to save themselves... Having finished the annihilation of the hamlets and the aul in two hours' time, Colonel Sleptsov began his withdrawal"[2]. On 15 June 1851 "a series of hamlets and auls" of the Gekhi gorge was annihilated[3], and on 16 November 1851 - the aul Dakhin-Irzau: General Kozlovsky's report notes "the turning to ashes of the aul Dakhin-Irzau with enormous stores of grain and hay"[2].