in the campaign “The disarmament of Chechnya: a military operation with artillery shelling and bombing of auls (1925)”
On 25 August 1925 the USSR sent troops into the Chechen Autonomous Oblast to take away the weapons of its inhabitants; the operation was conducted by the army and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) under the overall command of Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai[1]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the forces gathered against the Chechen villages: "In all, about seven thousand Red Army men with 240 machine guns and 24 [artillery] guns were brought in to take part in it. In addition, two aviation detachments and an armored train were at the disposal of the operation's commander. Tactically the troops, as well as the operational groups of the GPU, were divided into seven groupings"[2]. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva gives, from the military documents, a different count: 6183 Red Army men with 137 heavy and 102 light machine guns, 14 mountain and 10 light [artillery] guns, and beyond that 341 OGPU officers assembled from across the whole North Caucasus[1]. Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, recalled that "It was agreed to send two divisions into Chechnya 'for exercises'. The exercises were to include contact with the population, amateur performance evenings, concerts, closeness with the local youth, which was to strengthen still further the trust in Soviet power"[3]; the same legend was scattered from the air - the account of a surviving companion of imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, printed in 1936 in the Warsaw journal Severny Kavkaz, says: "To calm the population, proclamations were scattered from aeroplanes, in which it was written that ordinary maneuvers were taking place and the inhabitants were asked not to worry and to stay in their homes"[4]. The head of Chechnya itself - Eldarkhanov, chairman of the Chechen TsIK (the highest organ of power of the autonomous oblast) - was not informed of the preparations: "The center and the organs of the OGPU did not consider it necessary to inform even the chairman of the Chechen TsIK, T. Eldarkhanov, of the action being prepared. The concentration of troops in Grozny was explained by forthcoming maneuvers"[1]. At the same time the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 wrote the Chechen TsIK into every step of the execution: its representatives enter the surrounded aul together with the command and convene the assembly, sit on the weapons-reception commissions, are obliged to provide profiles of the districts, and after "all the enumerated measures of influence" receive the authority to dissolve village executive committees and install revkoms[5]. Even before the troops went in, the OGPU had described every village: historian E. F. Zhupikova relates - "The organs of the OGPU gathered information about the most influential mullahs and sheikhs, about the honored elders, about the guides without whom it was impossible to penetrate into the mountains"[6]; for every settlement a questionnaire was drawn up with the number of inhabitants and households, the composition of the population by taips (clans) and the quantity of weapons planned for removal[5].