in the campaign “Forest clearings and famine: Yevdokimov's conquest of Chechnya (1857-1859)”
Historian N. I. Pokrovsky writes of Lesser Chechnya (the lowland-piedmont western part of Chechnya): its inhabitants "as early as the beginning of the fifties had been driven by Russian troops into the mountain wilds and doomed to starvation" (campaign C1166)[1]. The clearings continued the same work: "The clearing of the Gekhi proseka gives Yevdokimov the opportunity to lay waste the fields of those of the Lesser Chechnya people who had not yet brought submission, hiding in the mountains"[1]. The choice the policy left open is formulated in the report of General Yevdokimov, who commanded the Chechen Detachment, of 25 March 1857: flight into the mountains - or coming out "to us onto the glades"[2]; famine in the mountains made the first path lethal.