in the campaign “The Great Terror in Chechen-Ingushetia (1937-1940)”
From the summer of 1937 to November 1938 the NKVD (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested people in the republic by the categories and numbers assigned in operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the beginning of the operation: "On the night of 31 July to 1 August 1937, by lists drawn up beforehand by the NKVD, the so-called 'general operation for the removal of anti-Soviet elements' was carried out across all auls and districts"; the Chekists hauled the arrested to Grozny - to the central garage of "Grozneft", to the Stalin club, to the pre-trial detention house of the republic's militia[1]. Avtorkhanov names "up to 14 thousand people" arrested in the first wave; the published operational summary on the course of the operation gives, for mid-August, about 2.4 thousand arrested across the whole republic, divided in it by the assigned categories: 888 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off"), 831 "criminals", 682 of the "counter-revolutionary element"[2]. Gridasov, head of the Gudermes district department of the NKVD, answered an officer who asked how to arrest a man when there was no material on him: "Material will always be found, so long as he wears a Caucasian hat!"[1]. The arrests went on until November 1938: in the autumn of 1937 Moscow raised the number assigned to the republic to 3,200 people, and on 1 March 1938 assigned a new one - 10,108 people, of whom the troika convicted 6,767[2]. On 8 September 1937 the newspaper "Pravda" printed an article by its special correspondent Kuzovkin under the headline: "The Bourgeois-Nationalist Tangle in Chechen-Ingushetia"[2]. Avtorkhanov relates its content: the author of the article "proved that in Chechen-Ingushetia 'bourgeois nationalists' sit in the party leadership and at the head of the government, leading the Chechen-Ingush people down an anti-Soviet path", and the newspaper and the author called on a judge not named by name: "to untangle the bourgeois-nationalist tangle to the end"[1]. Avtorkhanov writes of what the investigators manufactured out of the arrested: "Over the course of three years the Chekist investigators created the case of a 'bourgeois-nationalist, counter-revolutionary-insurgent, Bukharinite-Trotskyite, terrorist-espionage, anti-Soviet, wrecking organization' – literally so ran the many-storeyed formula of the charge for the top layer of the arrested"[1]. Into this "top layer", which the Chekists named the "bourgeois-nationalist center of Chechnya and Ingushetia", the investigation wrote 137 former senior officials of the republic. The investigation entered among these 137 also Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, who was then studying in Moscow: it wrote people into the case regardless of where they were and what they did[3]. To each of them the investigation imputed Article 58 - treason against the Motherland, preparation of an armed uprising, wrecking, terrorist acts, diversion, anti-Soviet agitation, membership in an anti-Soviet organization, and sabotage. According to the charge, the "center" acted in alliance with identical "centers" of Dagestan, Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay, Adygea and Circassia and was preparing, as Avtorkhanov writes, "the proclamation of a 'North Caucasus federative republic' under the protectorate of Turkey and England", with the "Moscow inter-national center" holding the liaison between them all[1].