in the campaign “The disarmament of Chechnya: a military operation with artillery shelling and bombing of auls (1925)”
The targets of the artillery and aviation were often not military objectives but inhabited settlements as such: the instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, and Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) for the krai, prescribed - "If the population of the aul does not fulfil the demand to surrender weapons in the established time in full, or fulfils it partially, the detachment command, by way of threat, opens artillery fire (or, in the absence of artillery, machine-gun fire) for 10 minutes with high bursts and half-strikes", and added: "depending on the situation the warning fire, as a measure of influence, may be opened several times as well"[1]; the document names no military objective and no target inside the village at all. Of the 242 disarmed settlements 101 came under rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire, 16 under strikes from the air[2]; by the count of historian E. F. Zhupikova, "104 one-pud bombs [about 1.7 tonnes] were dropped on the 16 auls where the leaders of the insurgents were hiding"[3]. A one-pud aerial bomb is about 16 kilograms, the weight of a round of a modern 120 mm mortar; on average six to seven such bombs fell per aul. The aviation was directed by Petrozhitsky, chief of the district's air force, and historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva lists the targets by name: "In the course of the operation the aircraft of the 3rd, and from 6 September also of the 5th aviation detachments delivered air strikes on the auls of Zumsoy, Dai, Tagir Khoy, Akki Bougi, Oshni, Khimoy, Nizheloy, Ragekhoy, Urus-Martan and Nozhay-Yurt"[4]. What the "warning fire" looked like in a single aul can be seen from the dispatch on Achkhoy-Martan of 25 August 1925: "15 shrapnel rounds were fired at the aul, first four with a high burst, then to strike. After two Chechen women had been wounded, the inhabitants began to hand over their weapons"[5]. Historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes of the strike on the aul of Dai: "Initially, because of heavy fog, the neighboring settlement of Chubakhkimeroy was mistakenly subjected to the air strike"[6].