in the campaign “The disarmament of Chechnya: a military operation with artillery shelling and bombing of auls (1925)”
In the two months of the operation of 1925 the USSR arrested and shot the leaders of the resistance of Chechnya and Dagestan. Imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, was arrested by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) on 5 September 1925. His hiding place was given up by the old men held hostage in the Sharoy district under the threat of the shelling of their villages. On the same day Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, reported to Moscow: "The operation in the Sharoy district has ended successfully. After 5 days of repressions and agent work, today at 14 hours a report was received through the aircraft that Gotsinsky has been taken"[1]; he was arrested by an operational group of the GPU under the command of M. Ushaev[2]. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: "N. Gotsinsky was urgently taken to Rostov-on-Don, where on 15 October 1925 he was sentenced to be shot"[3]. Arrests are provided for by the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 as well - it allows "the conduct of arrests of influential persons of the aul, reactionarily disposed", with the proviso to resort to this measure "as an extreme one, with the observance of maximum tact"[4]. Under shelling even the innocent surrendered: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in Urus-Martan, "after the artillery and aviation shelling of the settlement, the sheikhs Solsa-Haji Yandarov and Bilu-Haji Gaytayev surrendered to the authorities - soon, incidentally, released owing to their complete innocence"[2].