Hostage-Taking

To get at imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, who was sheltering in the mountains of Chechnya, the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) took old men from the villages and held them hostage under the threat of destroying the villages with artillery. Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, described it himself: "to catch him, the Chekists invited to their quarters old men from the villages where he might be hiding and, declaring them hostages, warned them that if they did not say where Gotsinsky was, they would destroy the villages with artillery, and would arrest them and put them on trial. For a whole day they tried to persuade the old men, but all was without result. Then an aeroplane was sent to that district. They were terribly afraid of the aeroplane. Only after several shells had been fired at the village so that, without destruction of the houses, the inhabitants should feel its power, did the old men say in which gorge Gotsinsky was hiding"^[1]. The word "hostages" is also in the documents of the operation itself: on 4 September 1925 Mironov, head of the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU, reported: "I report: the population is giving up Nazhmudin. I am now conducting negotiations with the representatives. The matter is being conducted through the hostages I have released... Let aeroplanes appear at 15 hours, but not strike. For effect let some 6-7 of them come"^[2]. For the Sharoy district the count of hostages is known from the documents of the military archive: historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes that "the command of the military grouping demanded of the population of the Sharoy district the surrender of the well-known bandit Gotsinsky. In doing so, 40 men from among the honored elders were taken hostage. However, the demand to surrender Gotsinsky was not satisfied within the appointed time, and therefore the troops resorted to intensified repressions. In two days 22 puds of bombs [about 360 kilograms - like 22 rounds of a modern 120 mm mortar] were dropped on the district"^[3]. The surviving companion of Gotsinsky names a different number and adds what is not in the Soviet papers: from the destroyed aul of Khakmedy "105 hostages were taken", and the hostages were threatened with shooting - his account says: "the Bolsheviks wrote of the shooting of the hostages in the event of resistance in their proclamations"^[4]. The word "hostages" is not in the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by the operation's commanders, - it allows only arrests of "influential persons of the aul" as an extreme measure: the hostage-taking was done over and above what was written, and its traces remained in the dispatches of the executors and the memoirs of an organizer.