in the campaign “Collectivization of Chechnya (1927-1936)”
The USSR arrested, exiled, disenfranchised and hounded the authorities of the Chechen people - the sheikhs, the mullahs, the revered elders. The national commission of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party resolved on 28 June 1927: "The sheikhs in most cases are themselves kulaks and traders... they not only economically enserf the poor and middle peasants but, using the religious prejudices of the masses, exercise their political influence as a kulak stratum over a significant part of the toiling masses"[1] - thus the party designated the people's spiritual mentors "kulaks", class enemies. In the summer of 1927 the USSR broke off relations with Great Britain and expected war - and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested sixteen religious authorities across Chechnya. Yevdokimov, the OGPU plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus, in his secret report for 1927 tied the arrests to the war scare: "The days of military danger of the summer period unusually inspired the Chechen musduh [Muslim clergy] in the sense of bold and open agitation for aid to external forces, for the preparation of an uprising", - and explained the operation thus: "The c/r [counter-revolutionary] propaganda of the clergy, which was shaping a panicky-defeatist mood in the Chechen peasantry, obliged our organ to be forestalled into a mass operation against the most active religious top layer. Rarely subjected to repressions and confident in the strength of his influence over the broad public - the Chechen mullah found himself caught unawares. The removal of 16 reactionary representatives of the Chechen religious world therefore made an enormous impression on him and for a time paralyzed his activity"[2]; "removal" was what the empire called a person's arrest. Yevdokimov measured success by the disintegration of the spiritual stratum: "a whole series of mullahs began to renounce their rank (up to 30 cases), and a number of religious authorities, compromised by a/s [anti-Soviet] sabotage in the past, to hide from the authorities"[2]. The Chechens answered with intercession, and the report admits: "the campaign for organizing public petitions on behalf of the arrested had significant success"[2]. Among those under arrest was Sheikh Gaysumov of Shali - one of the most revered men of Chechnya; Yevdokimov wrote: "The exception was the sect of Sheikh Gaysumov, whose activists, in connection with the latter's arrest, acted very energetically in the field of mobilizing public sympathy"[2]. The assembly of the village of Shali - 800 people - vouched for the arrested man: "to confirm that citizen Gopsumov Sungant [thus is Gaysumov recorded in the document], aged 107, has been an honored elder in the present village and has never been noted in anything discreditable, either criminal or political"[3]; Nagayev, inspector of the North Caucasus krai executive committee, filed this assembly into his report as evidence - "in the person of these 'assemblies', led by the kulaks and the clergy, the outlines of a real organization opposing our party are beginning to crystallize"[3]. The empire entered the intercession for an old man into its own file of incriminating material. In the autumn of 1927 the Prague journal "Volnye Gortsy" ["The Free Highlanders"] printed a letter from the Caucasus about the same wave: "The Bolsheviks, striking the pose of saviors of our national freedom, are in fact little by little killing all the living forces in the country, tearing from our ranks the most capable - our intellectual forces"; "Such an explosion of new terror took place here after the Anglo-Soviet rupture. Numerous arrests of the intelligentsia, the clergy and even whole families took place in almost every locality on the highlanders' territory. The GPU is working flat out"[4]. The OGPU in the same report named the next target as well: "the national-democratic movement appears to us as that new kind of highlander c/r [counter-revolution] with which we shall have to contend in the coming years and months"[2]. The empire struck at the authorities' rights as well: at the elections of 1928/29 in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast it disenfranchised 11,279 people, and in the breakdown of the lishentsy stand the lines: "Servants of religious cult, 1,569" and "Members of lishentsy families, 5,658"[3]. By 1930 the colonizer had counted the whole stratum head by head - the report on the inspection of the oblast party organization, sent in March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, states: "The strength of the mullahs in the Chechen aul is still enormous. On 1 May 1930 there were in Chechnya... communal mullahs - 450, kub mullahs - 800, sheikhs - 34... descendants of Muhammad and other religious authorities - 250, folk healers - 150"; the conclusion, in the same place: "In order to wage a struggle against such a huge army of mullahs, sheikhs and the like, it is necessary to have trained cadres"[3]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the arrests of the authorities became mass; the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes: the killing "was the beginning of a large GPU operation in Chechnya for the liquidation of 'kulak-counter-revolutionary elements and mullah-nationalist ideologues'"[5]. The Grozny and Rostov krai GPU, Avtorkhanov writes, set the arrest quotas, and the government of the USSR confirmed those quotas[5].