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)”
Famine was the planned aim of the policy of 1852-1857 - the empire wrote about it in orders and reports. On 29 July 1852, near the aul Belgatoy, the column, by the record of imperial historian Volkonsky, "finding there the same stores of hay as the day before, annihilated them to the last stalk"[1]. Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), in a letter to Vorontsov, viceroy in the Caucasus, of 16 August 1852, calculated the effect on the Dagestani cavalry of Imam Shamil, leader of the highlanders' resistance of Dagestan and Chechnya to the Russian conquest: "in the coming winter expedition Shamil can have almost no Tavlin cavalry in Chechnya, because there will be nothing to feed it with"[2]. The doctrine was sealed by Vorontsov in an official letter (otnosheniye) to Minister of War Chernyshev of 28 August 1852: the Chechens, deprived of crops and hay, "must - either resettle into our bounds, or go into the very depth of the mountains"[3]. General Olshevsky summed up the practice in his notes: "The destruction of grain crops... compelled the Chechens to submit to us sooner than any other measures, resettling into our bounds"[2]. The result was recorded by historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov: "in 1856-1857 a famine set in in Chechnya such as the Chechens had almost never known"[4].