Seizure of Religious Institutions

The colonizer took from the Chechen clergy the donations of their congregations and closed their houses of worship. In the autumn of 1929 in Goity the colonizers were confiscating a mosque over an unfulfilled "grain assignment" - a quota of grain owed to the empire; Shita Istamulov, leader of the uprising in Shali, spoke of it: "Look what an outrage they are committing in Goity; they have announced: until you deliver the grain, we will take away the mosque for that time. What good is this, when the Chechen people is being robbed of its last faith..."^[1]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in 1929 in the Nadterechny district "an experiment begins in removing the mullahs from the distribution of the voluntary donations of Muslims for the benefit of the poor and the clergy - the zakat" - the empire handed the distribution over to its own peasant mutual-aid committees^[2]. The colonizer destroyed the greater part of the mosques of Chechnya - the before-and-after count is given by historian K. G. Dendiev: before the Russian revolution Chechnya had "2,675 mosques, 60 thousand murids [disciples of sheikhs], members of various religious organizations, 38 sheikhs, 850 mullahs and 140 religious schools", - and the count of mid-1937: "401 mosques, not counting the kub ones [small neighborhood mosques]", at which "406 mullahs worked"^[1]. Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, in the district command's report to the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)") on the results of the military operation of spring 1930, named the closing of mosques on the colonizers' orders among the causes for which the Chechen auls had risen in arms^[3].