in the campaign “"Military-Popular Administration": the Colonial Regime of the Terek Oblast (1858-1917)”
On 15 March 1873 the coat of arms of the Terek oblast was approved: "In a black shield, a silver wavy bend to the right. An Imperial standard on a golden staff. The shield is crowned with the ancient Tsar's Crown and surrounded by golden oak leaves joined by the Alexander ribbon"[1]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova reads the meaning of the sign thus: the silver bend is the Terek, which had long been a border, and now "both its banks were united by the Imperial standard, and the Terek became fully Russian - such is the basic meaning of this coat of arms"[1]. The draft coat of arms of the city of Grozny was made by B. V. Köhne, an official of the Heraldry Office: on an azure shield a silver mountain between two golden sea lilies, and in the dexter canton - the arms of the Terek oblast[1], so that the city's emblem carried the imperial symbol of the oblast. The land was marked with the figure of the conqueror as well. The first monument to Yermolov in Grozny was "the carefully preserved dugout in which he lived during the founding of the Groznaya fortress"[1], and later a bronze bust of the general was set up by the dugout. What this sign meant, Ibragimova puts thus: the bust recalled the most tragic years of the conquest of the Caucasus and was a symbol of the dramatic fate of the mountain peoples, and the monument to the general who "with barbaric cruelty exterminated whole peoples in the name of the conquest of the Caucasus" became for Chechens "a kind of 'eyesore'"[1]. The sign outlived the empire: under Soviet rule the monument "was blown up by night with enviable regularity and just as regularly restored by night"[1].