in the campaign “Collectivization of Chechnya (1927-1936)”
The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) passed sentences on arrested Chechens by "troikas" - commissions of three: without trial, without defense counsel, up to execution by shooting. In Chechnya the extrajudicial procedure had operated since the 1920s: Kraft served as deputy head of the Chechen oblast department of the GPU - the oblast link of the political police - and worked with troikas as early as 1924: on 20 August the leadership of the Chechen oblast executive committee, on his report, resolved "to deem necessary the extension of the term of functioning of the troika for extrajudicial hearing by two months"[1]. On 2 February 1930 deputy chairman of the OGPU Yagoda signed order No. 44/21 "On measures for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" - "kulaks" was what the colonizers called peasants they themselves declared well-off[2]. Under this order the OGPU created troikas: cases in them were examined without trial, and the panel was made up of representatives of the krai committee of the party, of the procuracy, and Chekists[1]. The troikas received the cases of the "first category" - the peasants whom the supreme organ of the occupation power (the "Politburo of the TsK VKP(b)"), by its secret resolution of 30 January 1930, had consigned to concentration camps, up to execution by shooting[2]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the GPU carried out a wave of mass arrests across Chechnya. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes of the trial of the arrested: "The arrested were convicted by an extraordinary 'troika' of the GPU specially created for the purpose, chaired by its chief G. Kraft", and "few of them ever returned to freedom"[3]. The count of the arrested diverges among the sources: the historians give up to 35 thousand, while by the OGPU's own memorandum of 31 July 1931, 20,230 people passed through the extrajudicial troikas of the whole North Caucasus krai in 1930[2]. The troika worked after the March 1932 uprising in the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya as well: Yevdokimov, head of the OGPU for the North Caucasus krai, at a secret conference of the secretaries of the national oblast committees of the party in Rostov on 15 December 1932, reported the tally of the Chekists' "work" on the results of the uprising: "...745, of them 386 screened out, 359 brought before the troika, 100 people sentenced to 10 down to 3 years, 188 conditionally, 166 released"[1].