in the campaign “The Great Terror in Chechen-Ingushetia (1937-1940)”
An extrajudicial organ - the "troika" - passed sentences in Chechen-Ingushetia under operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937, and Yezhov confirmed the troika's composition in the text of the order: "I confirm the following personal composition of the republican, krai and oblast troikas: ... Chechen-Ingush ASSR: chairman - Dementyev; members Yegorov, Vakhayev"[1] - Dementyev, People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic; Yegorov, first secretary of the oblast committee of the party; and Vakhayev, second secretary. The historian G. I. Kakagasanov describes the institution: "An extrajudicial organ created for carrying out punitive policy... Its composition included: the head of the OGPU, the secretary of the party organization, the prosecutor of the republic, krai or oblast"[2]. The troika's procedure and its regime of secrecy are prescribed in the text of the order: the troikas examine "the materials on each arrested person or group of arrested persons", and first-category sentences are carried out "with the obligatory full preservation in secrecy of the time and place of the carrying out of the sentence"[1]. The NKVD (the People's Commissariat (ministry) of Internal Affairs - successor of the OGPU and a predecessor of today's FSB) did not inform the families of the condemned of the execution; Kakagasanov writes: "More often this took place under the formula 'convicted without the right of correspondence', which meant 'execution by shooting'"[2]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov describe also "conviction by albums" - sentencing in absentia on a brief docket, "without acquaintance with the criminal case itself"[3]: that procedure was set by the orders of the "national lines" of the terror, beginning with NKVD order No. 00485. The investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted, by the count of the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov - a contemporary of the events who wrote in emigration - exactly three years[4]. The Chekists chose not to try 137 people in a single trial and split the "center" into three groups: into the first they gathered the Soviet-party leadership of the republic - Ali Gorchkhanov, Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Khasi Vakhayev, Khamid Okuyev and Tuchaev; into the second - non-party men whom the investigation called the cultural-ideological leadership - Khalid Yandarov, Akhmat Matsiev, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, D. Malsagov, Magomed Mamakayev; into the third - a "terrorist group", into which "the Chekists gathered, by the logic of things, young people alone"[4]. The groups came before the military tribunal of the North Caucasus Military District; Avtorkhanov writes: "of the roughly 120 people who reached the trial alive, only one - the former mullah Akhmat Tuchaev - admitted his guilt. All the rest declared with one voice that all the crimes imputed to them were an invention, and their 'sincere confessions' false and fabricated from beginning to end", "The entire charge and the evidence in the case were built exclusively on this personal testimony extracted by torture", "There was no other material evidence or witness testimony to substantiate the charge" - and the tribunal passed its guilty verdict on the first group "solely on the basis of the testimony of one defendant – A. Tuchaev"[4]. The tribunal sentenced Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Ali Gorchkhanov and Tuchaev to be shot, the rest - to prison terms of 7 to 25 years[4]. From the death cell Tuchaev submitted a petition for clemency addressed to Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and wrote in it: he had confessed to crimes he had not committed because only so had the NKVD promised to free his family and spare his life[4]. Moscow commuted the death sentences of all three and reduced the terms of the others; the "terrorist group" the same tribunal released in its entirety, the case of the "culture-ideologists" it "did not accept for proceedings at all", and those who sat without "cases" the Chekists put through the Special Board - the NKVD's own departmental "court", which passed sentences with no trial and no defendant present[4].