in the campaign “Collectivization of Chechnya (1927-1936)”
The colonizer outlawed the Chechen courts by legislative acts and installed its own judicial system. Until 1927 the sharia courts - courts of Islamic law - were the judicial system of the Chechen people and heard all its cases: criminal, land, labor and family. The occupation power at first recognized the Chechen court: in April 1921 the congress of Soviets of the Mountain Republic - the Soviet autonomy into which the empire had then included Chechnya - resolved to recognize the sharia court system. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov call this "a manifest (and temporary) concession to the Muslim clergy"[1]. Just a month later, in May 1921, the leadership of that same republic stripped the sharia courts of budget money and of the support of its organs[1]. But the courts went on working. In December 1925 the party leadership in Chechnya set out to discredit them, and, as historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, that attempt "failed completely"[1]. And in 1927 "the sharia courts were curtailed in their rights by an act of will, at the direct demand of the procurator of the Supreme Court of the USSR... Criminal and land cases and labor disputes were removed from their competence, state financing was terminated, and Soviet organs were directly forbidden to apply to the sharia courts"[1]. In their place the colonizer installed its own organs: historian K. G. Dendiev writes that in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast "the all-Union judicial system is introduced, with the subsequent abolition of sharia legal proceedings"[2]. Despite this, the Chechens preferred to settle disputed cases in their own courts. Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, reported in February 1930 that in the Urus-Martan okrug "land disputes are resolved not in the judicial-land commissions" but before the aul elders, of whose influence he said: it is "still not undermined to any more or less significant degree"[3]. In December 1929 the insurgents in Benoy established their own organ of power and sent their demands to Moscow. The fourth point there read: "Abolish the 'people's' courts introduced by order from above, and restore the sharia organs of justice"; the fifth - "End the interference of regional leaders and figures of the central organs of power in the internal affairs of the 'Chechen Autonomous Oblast' and restore the powers of political decision of the Chechen Congress"[2].