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)”
Burning and famine drove Chechen families from their land under the empire's power - and the empire kept count of those carried off. On 23 March 1852 the column of General Baklanov carried off the inhabitants of two auls: imperial historian Volkonsky counts - "There were two hundred fifty-eight souls of both sexes and all ages: fifty-one families from Mazlagash and sixteen families from Gurdali"[1]; the mechanics of the choice he conveyed in the words of contemporaries about the naibs - deputies of Imam Shamil: "the naibs pluck them, we pluck them and will go on plucking... they resolved to choose the lesser of two evils, i.e. to resettle to us"[1]. After the destruction of Khan-Kala in December 1852, Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), counted in a report of 10 February 1853: of roughly 500 inhabitants, 350 were brought to the Groznaya fortress, "the total loss of the inhabitants must be put at around 100 people" - the fate of that hundred, by the report's own admission, "is not known with exactness"[2]. In January 1854, after the devastation of the auls along the Dzhalka, "418 families of Chechens" were evicted[3], and the order of General Muravyov, commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, of 19 July 1855 counts the result: "more than 1 thousand Chechen families have resettled into our submissive auls"[3]. The plan for 1856 posed the choice bluntly: the Chechens were "to choose one of two things - to submit, or to move out farther into the interior of the Black Mountains"[3].