in the campaign “The disarmament of Chechnya: a military operation with artillery shelling and bombing of auls (1925)”
The USSR shot nearly all those arrested in the course of the operation of 1925 - people already in the hands of the troops and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The total number of arrested exceeded 300. Of the total number of arrested, 105 were shot on the spot; against 183 an investigation was opened, which also ended in extrajudicial shooting; 21 were exiled"[1]. Even the OGPU's own count found few "active" ones among them: the survey submitted to Stalin names 50 "active bandits and prominent counter-revolutionary figures", while "In all, 400 bandits and elements abetting them have been arrested"[2] - those shot were mostly not leaders but rank-and-file detainees whose guilt was established by no court. So was killed the operation's chief prisoner as well: imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky - the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, detained on 5 September 1925 and sentenced in Rostov-on-Don - was shot, in the words of a highlander emigre writing in the Paris journal Prométhée in 1930, "Il fut fusillé sans jugement dans les souterrains du Guépéou de Rostov" - without trial, in the cellars of the GPU in Rostov[3].