in the campaign “The Great Terror in Chechen-Ingushetia (1937-1940)”
Torture of the arrested was officially sanctioned by the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the TsK VKP(b)). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...against all those arrested under political articles torture was widely applied, officially permitted as measures of 'physical influence'"; Stalin's letter, circulated to party organs in January 1939, said: "The TsK VKP(b) explains that the application of physical influence in the practice of the NKVD was permitted from 1937 with the sanction of the TsK VKP(b)"[1]. One of the executors in the republic was Porubay, named in a 1938 memorandum of the oblast committee of the party as deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic. After the change of course he was put on trial - the charge: he "applied perverted methods of conducting the investigation and coerced the arrested into giving knowingly false testimony", and on the cases he falsified the troika passed death sentences[2]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that the investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted three years, and describes its methods: "The investigation was conducted with the application of the physical tortures usual for the whole USSR, with a certain supplement for the specific 'national character'"[3]. Avtorkhanov names those whom the Chekists tortured to death: "During this investigation there were tortured to death: the former chairman of the oblast executive committee D. Machukayev, the former head of the obkom culture-and-propaganda department M. Gisayev, the former secretary of the Ingush obkom VKP(b) Idris Zyazikov, and others"[3]. He writes also of those whom torture drove to suicide: "Unable to endure the regime of torture, the following committed suicide: the chairman of the planning commission of the republic M. Islamov, the secretary of a district party committee M. Bektemirov"[3]. Avtorkhanov writes of the result: "By way of this unheard-of inquisition, named the 'preliminary investigation', the Chekists forced up to 90 percent of the members of the 'bourgeois-nationalist center' to sign and even to compose 'sincere confessions' of crimes they had, of course, not committed"[3]. Abdul-Khalim Salamov, deputy chairman of the government of the republic, under torture signed "sincere handwritten testimony" about the delivery into the republic from England through Turkey of 50 mountain guns, 1,000 machine guns, 200 thousand rifles, 5 million cartridges, 10 thousand shells and grenades for an armed uprising; there too he wrote that England had promised to support that uprising from the air. He also named the exact place where the weapons were buried in the mountains; Avtorkhanov writes: "the Chekists dug up all the indicated mountain gorges. Naturally they found nothing, but the beatings continued, with demands to point out the true place where the weapons were buried"[3]. The defendants showed the tribunal the marks of torture; Avtorkhanov writes: "The defendants, pointing to the scars of inflicted wounds, to knocked-out teeth, to mutilated parts of the organism (one had even been castrated during interrogation), declared that they had signed their false testimony under the influence of these physical tortures and in the hope that the day of trial, or of death, would thus be brought nearer"[3].