Neutralization of the Opposition

The USSR persecuted the religious leaders of the deported Chechens through the courts and the secret police. By its verdict of 1-7 July 1952 the Supreme Court of the Kirghiz SSR sent to the camps ten leaders and elders of religious brotherhoods - Naqshbandi, Kunta-Haji, Avdy and Chimirza - for terms of 8 to 25 years; the community leader Nurid Dzhabrailov was charged with having "under the cover of religious convictions conducted sharply anti-Soviet agitation" and "called on the masses of special settlers not to work in the collective farm," the head of the Kunta-Haji brotherhood Yusup Akhmatov - with having "categorically forbidden the murids [his followers] to attend cultural and educational institutions" and "forbidden children to attend school"; the outcome: "to 25 years of deprivation of liberty to be served in an ITL [corrective labor camp], with subsequent loss of electoral rights for a term of 3 years and confiscation of all property, each"^[1]. The secret police "worked up" the clergy - that was its own term for covert surveillance: a secret file was opened on a person or a group, informers were set to watch them and material was gathered for an arrest. Historian V. A. Kozlov writes: two "most characteristic" such files on Chechens, opened in 1952 by the MGB (predecessor of today's FSB) directorates of the regions of the Kazakh SSR, "received highly eloquent code names: 'The Stubborn' and 'The Fanatics.' Both cases were run under the coloring 'Muslim clergy'" (the coloring - what the secret police called the subject of a file)^[1]. The minister of state security of the Kazakh SSR Byzov reported on 12 August 1950 on the same kind of files, "Bloc," "Avengers" and "Caucasians" - under the last of them the secret police was likewise running a file on former leading officials of Chechen-Ingushetia - and gave the number of those arrested: "In all, in Kazakhstan, for anti-Soviet activity the organs of the MGB arrested in 1949 and 7 months of 1950 874 deportees"^[1].