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)”
In the pogrom of Chechnya of 1852 the victims among the inhabitants ran into the hundreds. On 18 January 1852 on the Goyta river operated the detachment of Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi): imperial historian Volkonsky, a participant in the march, summed up the day - "on that day we... destroyed up to two thousand households"; the count in people he recorded thus: "Only ten prisoners were taken - and even those were barely torn by force from under the daggers of the Cossacks. Apart from the highlanders who fell in the battle proper, the number of victims who perished in the auls on the Goyta reaches two hundred people"[1]. On the raid against the aul Gurdali of 11 August 1852 the sources diverge: historian N. I. Pokrovsky conveys Baryatinsky's report of 21 August 1852 - he "slaughtered its entire population, except for 52 people taken prisoner"[2]; Volkonsky, who described the same day, asserts that the aul did not fall, the detachment withdrew with heavy losses, and regrets: "If we had really devastated and burned Gurdali, slaughtered its entire population... the affair would have come out both more substantial and more useful"[1] - Baryatinsky's report and Volkonsky's account describe one and the same day in mutually exclusive ways. The annihilation of people was also a declared plan: Vorontsov, viceroy and commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, in a letter to the Emperor of 1-20 March 1854, formulated the task of the past winter - "the final subjugation and annihilation of the remaining unpacified in the environs on the plain"[3] ("unpacified" in the imperial lexicon means those who had not submitted to the empire).