in the campaign “"Neither plow nor sow": the pogrom of Chechnya, organized famine, the buying-up of elites and the institutions of subjugation (1852-1857)”
The period 1852-1856 passed in series of punitive sorties across Greater Chechnya (the lowland eastern part of Chechnya) and its fringes. On 4 January 1852 the detachment of Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), assembled in the Vozdvizhenskaya fortress: imperial historian Volkonsky, a participant in the march, counts "over ten thousand bayonets, about one and a half thousand cavalry, 24 guns," and conveys the task thus - "to smash the enemy hordes, destroy all means of subsistence of the inhabitants and the enemy, and then act according to circumstances"[1]. Farther east the sorties continued until 1856: General Baklanov recorded in his memoirs a "hard fight at the annihilation of the auls Dengi-Yurt and Ali-Yurt" on 25 February 1853[2]. The award mechanics of the marches was exposed from inside by imperial officer Poltoratsky: the soldiers of the Kabardinsky regiment took the trenches abandoned by the Chechens on the Michik without losses, and they "were sent the same day to take the auls Gurdaloy and Asa-Yurt, where they managed to lose several killed and wounded, which was necessary, since the storming of the trenches had cost them not a single scratch"[3] - the auls were attacked for the sake of losses for an award recommendation.