Government
An instrument of internal administration and institutional coercion. It comes into use once a territory has already been stripped of international subjecthood and de facto turned into an internal colony. It encompasses the work of the metropole's entire state and bureaucratic apparatus: the issuance of discriminatory laws and decrees, changes to administrative borders, systematic cultural and educational assimilation, social engineering, and the legal formalization of control (through population censuses or imitation referendums).
Techniques Applied
Actors
| ID | Name | Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| G0009 | Russian Empire | 66 |
| G0010 | USSR | 29 |
| G0008 | Tsardom of Muscovy | 27 |
| G0013 | Soviet Russia (RSFSR) | 2 |
| G0011 | Russian Federation | 1 |
Campaigns Conducted
Procedures Carried Out
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy used religious identity and the concept of protecting co-religionists as ideological cover for military expansion: historian Michael Khodarkovsky states that the diplomatic apparatus positioned the tsar as a "universal Christian ruler who 'upheld the true Christian faith'"[1], while invasions were motivated by a "divine obligation to rescue Orthodox Christians from infidel captivity"[1]; as a result, as historian Michael Khodarkovsky summarizes, in the advance into new territories "Moscow's military and political interests could no longer be separated from the ideological and theological rhetoric of expansion"[1], because of which the North Caucasus "became a religious frontier"[2].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy fabricated historical narratives to provide legal justification for the invasion of new territories: historian Michael Khodarkovsky points out that in diplomatic correspondence officials deliberately constructed fictitious claims that the Indigenous peoples of the Caucasus had allegedly, since ancient times, been Muscovite "subjects in the Riazan region, who then fled from Riazan and settled in the mountains"[1].
The occupation administration obliged the subordinated Nokhchi societies to take part in military campaigns: historian E. N. Kusheva points to documents «on the possibility of the participation of Murza Shikh... in a campaign of Russian men-at-arms»[3].
The creation of a specialized agency to govern the autonomy: through the Little Russian Prikaz the tsarist government "exercised control over the political-administrative activity of the hetman's administration and the tsarist voivodes in Ukraine"[4] – the governance of the Hetmanate was embedded into Moscow's prikaz vertical.
Direct extraction of the autonomy's economic resources: "The collection of taxes from the Ukrainian population (except for the Cossack estate) was entrusted to the tsarist administration. The collected funds were channeled into the tsar's treasury"[5].
The legal codification of the territory's division. Moscow deliberately fragmented a once unified country, turning such important regions as Zaporizhzhia into rightless buffer zones under joint administration: "...Zaporizhzhia (which under the treaty of 1667 was under the joint rule of Moscow and Warsaw)"[6].
Having gained political power over the Left Bank, Moscow immediately attempted to seize the right to collect taxes in order to extract resources directly: "the attempts of Russian voivodes... to introduce their own taxation system in Ukraine led only to revolts (for example... the attempted census of 1666...)"[6].
The abolition of the regimental-sotnia administrative order to serve the imperial partition of the lands: the Sejm of 1699 adopted the decision "banning the Cossacks on the Right Bank"[8].
A course toward the complete absorption and destruction of the very name of the Cossack state. In the Bendery Constitution of 1710, Orlyk recorded Moscow's intention "to eradicate the Zaporozhian Host of the Lower Dnipro and to efface its name forever"[6]. Hrushevsky confirms the course was systemic: Mazepa's alliance with the Swedish king merely "gave the Muscovite government occasion… to take up more forcefully the abolition of Ukrainian autonomy. The Muscovite government had pursued this line from the very beginning"[9]. What was at stake was the enslavement of the entire people: the Muscovite state, per the preamble of Orlyk's constitution, managed to "violate and utterly destroy" the rights and liberties "and to cast a slave's yoke upon the free Cossack people, never conquered by it"[10].
Shifting the upkeep of the mobilized onto the subjects themselves: Cossacks dispatched to the imperial construction sites were left without supply and "suffer great want from hunger, having neither food for themselves, nor winter quarters, nor fodder for the horses"[6]. Workers for state construction the tsar simply ordered to be "taken from Ukraine, from those towns that are under your authority"[6], while at the works themselves people perished "from back-breaking labor, hunger and the harsh climate"[4].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy used demonstrative brutal executions to psychologically break the Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov records that the captured leader of the uprising was "hanged by a rib on a hook in accordance with Peter I's order to P.M. Apraksin ('carry out a cruel death penalty')"[11].
The liquidation of the autonomy's statehood and international agency as a result of the defeat of the Swedish-Ukrainian forces. The rout at Poltava set off an irreversible process of dismantlement: "In the hundred years after the famous Pereiaslav Council, Ukraine traveled the path from the 'Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky'… to the de facto liquidation of the autonomy and the hetmanate, to the country's transformation into an ordinary province of the Russian Empire"[6].
Entrenchment of tsarist control over the autonomy's foreign policy: the articles "fully preserved the previously established control of the tsarist regime over… foreign policy"[12].
Preservation of the center's control over the region's finances: the articles "fully preserved the previously established control of the tsarist regime over local financing"[12].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy consolidated militarized settlements on the border with the lands of the Nokhchi to strengthen control: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov states that in 1711–1712 "the small Greben Cossack towns along the Terek were merged, by order of Tsar Peter I, into 5 stanitsas - from Chervlyonnaya to Kurdyukovskaya"[11].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy organized expeditions to study and inventory natural resources in the territories of the Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov records the 1717 "survey of mineral springs and other natural riches of the Terek River (including the Bragun warm springs) by Doctor Gottlieb Schober on the assignment of Peter I"[11].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy organized attacks on the territories of the Nokhchi for the mass capture of prisoners and booty: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov states that in 1718 there took place a "predatory expedition of detachments of Don Cossacks and Kabardian princes allied with Peter I into the 'Chechen uezd' along the Sunzha and the Argun"[11], as a result of which "800 prisoners were captured, not counting 'belongings'"[11], and in 1721 the Astrakhan governor A. P. Volynsky "invited the Don Cossacks and, together with the Terek Cossacks, organized raids to the Agrakhan and Aksai rivers against the Kumyks and Chechens"[11].
The introduction of censorship over book printing by Peter I's decree of 5 October 1720: "no new books whatsoever are to be printed except previous church editions, and even those old church books… are to be corrected before printing"[14].
The ruler's direct decree against the very language of the local population in print: the same decree of Peter I ordered books to be checked against Muscovite ones, "so that there be no discord or distinct dialect in them"[14].
The government of the Russian Empire justified expansion with ideas of enlightening undeveloped societies: historian Michael Khodarkovsky states the ambition of the metropole's officials "to bring both Christianity and civilization to the 'wild and uncivilized' peoples along its borders"[1].
The government of the Russian Empire deliberately constructed an image of the Indigenous population as criminal savages: historian Michael Khodarkovsky records that in administration documents the highlanders were labeled as "inconstant and treacherous," while their actions were explained by references to their "predatory craft, to which they are predisposed by their very nature and upbringing"[2].
The government of the Russian Empire fabricated historical accounts to provide legal justification for invasion: historian Michael Khodarkovsky points out that in 1748 and in the 1770s officials deliberately constructed fictitious claims that the Indigenous peoples of the Caucasus had allegedly been Christians in the past, in order to contest the claims of other empires and "legitimize their efforts at their 're-Christianization'"[2].
The introduction of the collegium as a parallel organ of power to seize judicial and fiscal functions from the hetman's administration: it acted "as the highest appellate instance and administrative-controlling organ"[4], and "the Little Russian Collegium for the first time channeled Ukrainian finances into the tsar's treasury in full"[4].
The government of the Russian Empire purposefully organized military actions to punish the defiant Indigenous population: historian Sh. B. Akhmadov points out that on August 4, 1722, by decree of Peter I, "a punitive expedition was carried out for a second time against the rebellious Chechens and Andreevtsy"[15].
The government of the Russian Empire dispatched specialists to collect data on the lands and population of the Nokhchi: historian Sh. B. Akhmadov points out that in 1728 the officer I. G. Gerber "on the government's assignment... compiled a description of the localities and population... as well as a map of this area"[15].
Rejection of the treaty format: instead of a bilateral agreement – the tsar's "decisive" resolutions upon the hetman's requests, issued in the form of a decree. The autonomy ceased to be a party to a treaty and received its rules of existence from above.
Complete diplomatic isolation of the autonomy: "Article 19 forbids the hetman relations with other countries. He was to acquaint the tsar's resident with letters received from abroad, forward their translations to the tsar's court, and meanwhile detain the envoys"[12].
Embedding the autonomy's finances into the imperial system: the revenues from the indukta (duty on imported goods) "were to be transferred to the tsar's treasury"[12], while the host treasury was managed by two general treasurers – a Ukrainian and an appointed Russian.
The Government of the Russian Empire organized an armed raid to physically punish the insurgent Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov points out that General Douglas «halted the movement of the main forces and sent toward Chechen-Aul a detachment of dragoons under Colonel Koch, totaling 300 soldiers and 200 Cossacks»[11].
Targeted demographic assimilation under Anna's secret decree of January 31, 1734 to governor Shakhovskoy: "that you with your skill, secretly and quietly, take special pains to divert the Little Russians from kinship… and to encourage them and skillfully bring them into kinship with… the Great Russian people"[16].
The final elimination of the office of the autonomy's leader: after Rozumovsky's forced abdication, Catherine II's decree of November 10, 1764 handed power to the Little Russian Collegium, whose president was instructed to act "with a governor's authority, that is, as our special plenipotentiary"[17]. Catherine II's instruction to procurator-general Vyazemsky (1764) stated the goal openly: "and when there is no hetman in Little Russia, one must strive that the very age and name of hetmans vanish"[18].
The establishment of a direct imperial organ – the Second Little Russian Collegium: four Great Russian members, four Little Russian ones, headed by Rumyantsev with the powers of a governor-general; the Zaporozhian Sich was also transferred to its jurisdiction: "the Zaporozhian Sich, which was under the hetman's jurisdiction, shall now be administered by this Little Russian government"[17].
The monarch's secret instruction on the cultural digestion of the land: "Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by the privileges confirmed to them… These provinces, as well as Smolensk, must by the easiest means be brought to the point where they become Russified and cease looking to the forest like wolves"[18].
The liquidation of Cossack administrative units and the introduction of imperial division: the report of the Shakhovskoy-Panin commission confirmed by the empress on December 16, 1764 and Catherine II's manifesto of July 28, 1765[19][20] – "On the basis of the Sloboda regiments the Sloboda-Ukrainian Governorate was formed"[12].
Lowering the social status of the indigenous population for the purpose of economic extraction: "The Cossacks and their helpers were turned into military settlers and taxed with the poll tax," and those with the right to distill horilka "now had to pay… 95 kopecks per soul to the treasury"[21].
The Russification of teaching in the country's principal institution of learning: from 1784 metropolitan Samuil Myslavsky introduced new classes of geography and history at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with an order to conduct them "in pure Russian," and by his order of 26 October 1784 demanded that teachers and students observe "the rules of orthography proper to the Russian language" - teachers faced dismissal for lapses, and students expulsion from the clerical estate[22]. The unification was completed by the order of February 13, 1786: "to adopt immediately for the Kyiv Academy the mode of instruction legalized for all schools in the All-Russian Empire"[23] – the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was transferred to the empire-wide mode of teaching.
The issuing of Catherine II's August manifesto, officially erasing the very memory of the Sich: it was destroyed "with the extirpation for the future of the very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks," for the empire resolved "to destroy the Zaporozhian Sich and the name of the Cossacks derived from it"[24]. Hrushevsky: "The Sich was destroyed, and on 3 August a tsarist decree announced its abolition, 'with the annihilation of the very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks'"[9].
The abolition of the Cossack regimental order and the division of the Left Bank into imperial viceroyalties: the Kyiv Viceroyalty was established by the nominal decree to the Senate of September 16, 1781 (PSZRI, coll. 1, vol. XXI, no. 15,228; execution ordered from November)[25][26], "which finally abolished the remnants of the Hetmanate's autonomy and its regimental-sotnia administrative-political and military order"[27]; the same decree established the Chernihiv and Novhorod-Siverskyi viceroyalties.
The secularization and confiscation into the imperial treasury of the lands of Ukrainian Orthodox monasteries: "in 1786, during the secularization, the monastery was closed, and its property and lands passed to the state treasury"[12] – the fate of the Sviatohirsk monastery is typical of the entire 1786 campaign, which deprived the local church of its economic base.
The colonization of the steppes adjacent to Crimea with settlers to create a loyal rear: as early as 1752, New Serbia was formed from Serbs – "officially – to guard the southern frontiers from Tatar and Turkish raids, but in fact – to subdue the Zaporozhians"[12], and in 1776 Potemkin directly ordered "not to return fugitives"[8], accelerating the settlement of the south.
The erasure of the historical names of the Cossack southern territories used as a springboard for the annexation of Crimea: Catherine II's manifesto of 3 August 1775 extirpated "the very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks" and poured their lands into an imperial construct – "assigning them as convenient to the Novorossiysk Governorate"[24].
The apparatus of the Russian Empire constructed an image of the Indigenous population as savages: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov points out that pre-revolutionary historiography described the highlanders' struggle as «the actions of barbarians devoid of 'civilized' notions of independence and freedom»[15], while the imperial historian and participant in the events V. A. Potto cites the words of General A. P. Yermolov, who declared that «the cruelty of the local mores cannot be tamed by mercy»[28]. In his «Notes», General Yermolov wrote of the Nokhchi: «the Chechens, the most vicious of the brigands, attacking the line», their land a refuge where «the villains of all other peoples, abandoning their own land on account of some crimes, were received amicably», while Chechnya itself «may justly be called the nest of all brigands», «were less filled than others with brigands who had previously taken part in all the raids of the Chechens on the line. In them predators gathered and took cover…»[29].
The erasure of historical borders and the introduction of the imperial vertical: "The governor-general concentrated the entire fullness of administrative power: he was endowed with the right of legislative initiative, determined the degree to which all-Russian laws extended within the governorate-general, and controlled the activity of state institutions, including judicial ones"[4].
In 1804-1811 the Russian Empire erected a cast-iron Monument of Glory in the center of Poltava in memory of its victory over the army of Charles XII on 27 June 1709 - with the city's own money and to a design sent from St. Petersburg. By the imperial decree to the Senate of 11 September 1804, "On leaving the villages formerly owned by the city of Poltava under state administration and on releasing the income collected from them to the local Governor-General for the erection in Poltava of a monument in memory of 27 June 1709," the city's revenues were assigned to the monument: "the community of Poltava citizens, through a petition submitted to Governor-General Prince Kurakin, has designated all these revenues for the construction in Poltava of a monument in memory of the day unforgettable for Russia, 27 June 1709, and so we command: the revenues now due for payment, as well as those henceforth collected in favor of this city, shall be released to the local Governor-General until the monument that has been begun is completely finished"[30]. By a second act, the imperial rescript of 9 May 1805 to the Governor-General of Little Russia, "On the erection of a monument in commemoration of the victory won at Poltava by Emperor Peter the Great," the emperor sent a ready-made design and ordered construction to begin: "I forward to you herewith the plans for this monument, drawn up here, charging you... to proceed with its erection on site, except for the bronze ornaments belonging to it, which will be made separately here and delivered to their destination"[30]. That is, Poltava pays, while Petersburg decides what the sign on its land will look like - down to the bronze, which is cast there and shipped ready-made. The monument was founded on 27 June 1804, the cast-iron column was raised in May 1809 under the direction of Moskvin, an engineer of the Luhansk works, and the whole ensemble was opened on 27 June 1811, for the next anniversary of the battle[31][32]. On the medallion of the upper square of the pedestal, inside a serpent ring between two quivers, stood "June the 27th, 1709," and on the opposite side - "Finished in 1809"[31]: the date of someone else's victory was made into the date of the place itself. Both inscriptions, together with the bronze bas-reliefs, disappeared in 1901 - the pre-revolutionary survey records it tersely: "This inscription and the preceding one were destroyed in 1901, and at the same time the bronze bas-reliefs that surrounded them were taken by persons unknown"[31]; they were restored only during the capital repairs of 1953[32]. The monument still stands in Poltava: as of August 2026 it is listed as a monument of national significance under heritage protection number 160010-Н[33], the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance recommended dismantling it in a letter of 29 July 2024[34], but decisions on monuments of national significance are made by the government, and the list of such decisions as of 20 May 2026 does not include the monument[35].
The Russian Empire funneled the Nokhchi's supply of grain and salt through trading points under its control, making vitally important goods dependent on its administration. The sale of grain and salt to the Chechens was permitted only through barter yards under quarantine, established «for the peaceful Chechens in Naur… for the mountain Chechens in Lashchurin», with a duty paid to the treasury and disputes adjudicated through an imperial pristav (overseer)[36][15].
The Russian Empire shifted the blame for the devastation it had wrought onto the victimized people itself. In a proclamation to the inhabitants of the Chechen land, the commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, General Tormasov, presented the pogrom of 1807 as a consequence of the inhabitants' own actions: «the raids and depredations that you carried out within the borders of Russia brought upon you righteous wrath… you yourselves were the cause of the misfortune that befell you three years ago» — and threatened a new invasion, «to bring sword and flame upon the guilty», offering «mercy» in exchange for submission[36].
The abolition of traditional local self-government: "The final liquidation of Magdeburg law… in the cities of Central and Left-Bank Ukraine – in 1831 (in Kyiv – 1834)"[4] – the cities were transferred to the empire-wide municipal order.
The displacement of the native language from the official sphere of the cities: with the liquidation of the remnants of Magdeburg self-government, the last institutional support for the local legal tradition disappeared – Ukrainian-language court proceedings had been curtailed as early as the extension of the all-Russian judicial system in the 1780s[4].
The liquidation of the independent spiritual structure on the Right Bank in 1839: "in connection with the tsarist regime's liquidation of the Union in this region (1839), the monastery was closed, and its buildings destroyed"[12].
In the summer of 1865 a fifth of the Chechen people left Chechnya - and almost half of those who left perished. The first families set out from Vladikavkaz on 28 May 1865; the last crossed the border on 10 September[37]; the historian D. A. Khozhayev draws up the tally: "23,057 people (5 thousand families) of Chechens, Karabulaks and Ingush leave their native land for Turkey"[38]; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov reckon "up to 23 thousand Chechens," of whom more than 4.5 thousand families were inhabitants of Lesser Chechnya and the Ichkerinsky okrug, and in all in the 1860s "up to 20% of the total number of Chechens" were expelled[39]. The dying began at once: the historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova writes - "In the course of the resettlement about 40,000 highlanders of the Terek oblast perished, which was slightly less than half of all those who had left"; according to the dispatches of the Russian consul, in Trebizond in 1864 some 180-250 people were dying each day, in Samsun - 200[37]. The lands allotted for settlement "were unfit for agriculture – stony and barren"[37]; the colony of Ras al-Ayn, where mainly Chechens had been settled, shrank by 1878 from 4-5 thousand families to 500[37]. The muhajirs themselves - as those who left were called, from the Arabic "muhajir," a migrant - wrote to the head of the Terek oblast: "We have learned that Mussa deceived us... A third of us have already perished as it is" (Mussa is General Kundukhov; they called him by his first name)[37].
The head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov, set out the plan: "...the Chechen population had to be herded into one place... This population, cut off on one side from the mountains by the new stanitsas... would no longer dare to threaten us with an uprising and would not escape the most vigilant surveillance"[39]. The land of those who left was taken by the treasury: "many auls emptied completely; the untended lands became overgrown with weeds. These lands were confiscated for the benefit of the treasury"[37], and it was allotted "to Russian officers, the local nobility and, chiefly, to the Cossack hosts"[37]. The replacement proceeded stanitsa by stanitsa: in 1861-1865 alone, 81 Cossack stanitsas were founded on the emptied lands of the North Caucasus[40]. In Chechnya this can be seen step by step: in 1868 the resettlement of the Chechens was directly subordinated to the stationing of the Sunzha Cossack regiments - there was an option of leaving the inhabitants on the right bank of the Sunzha, "but the Cossack host laid claim to these lands, so the Chechens were moved to the left bank of the Terek and the Sunzha, and their lands were taken by the 1st and 2nd Sunzha regiments"[37]. From 1863 to 1885, 112 settlements were founded in the Terek oblast, mostly of Russian settlers, while the Terek Cossack Host occupied a third of the oblast's area while making up a fifth of its inhabitants[37]. The difference shows in the allotments: a Cossack family received on average from 57 to 90 desiatinas (a desiatina is slightly more than a hectare)[41], whereas in the Chechen auls a family had "0.5 – 10 desiatinas... that is, no more than 2 desiatinas per head"[40].
Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The principal means of driving out the highlanders became depriving them of their main source of existence – the land. The transfer of vast lands on the plains to Cossack stanitsas left thousands of highlanders without means of subsistence"[39]. Imperial statistics recorded the result: "each family in the auls has 0.5 – 10 desiatinas... With such crowding not only the development of farms, but even the existence of the people cannot be considered secured" (a desiatina is slightly more than a hectare)[40]. Meanwhile the operation's own executors were reporting the opposite. The head of the Argun okrug, Major A. Ippolitov, wrote to the head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov: "I can positively tell Your Excellency that the people are not even thinking of voluntary resettlement to Turkey; at a general assembly they declared to me that they would go only when the whole of Chechnya leaves to the last man, or when they are ordered to go"[37]. Colonel Bellik on 25 March 1865 reported to the same Loris-Melikov the words of a Chechen: "we will not go to Turkey and will not let those go who are preparing to; in Turkey death awaits us, and it awaits us here too, but here it is more pleasant, because here is our homeland and here lie our fathers, slain by the Russians"[37].
The Viceroy of the Caucasus and commander-in-chief of the Caucasus Army Baryatinsky - on the Chechens who wished to leave: "...it is perhaps no bad thing that all this rabble, which is only a burden to us, will leave. Do not stop them, let them go to Mecca or wherever they wish. And I will take care to present this matter to the Sovereign in the proper light..." - to the emperor the matter was presented as "a voluntary movement of the Chechens themselves"[39]. The head of the Kuban oblast, General Yevdokimov, who carried out the expulsion of the highlanders of the Western Caucasus, formulated the principle: "Philanthropy first of all to our own; as for the highlanders, I consider myself entitled to grant them only what remains for their share after the last of Russian interests has been satisfied"[39]. The optic in which such decisions were taken was also articulated by imperial scholarship: Berzhe, who headed the Caucasus Archaeographic Commission for 22 years and compiled the first ten volumes of the "Acts"[42], grounded distrust of the highlanders in their nature: "The eight-hundred-thousand-strong highland population of the Terek and Dagestan oblasts forms here an almost solid mass... Permeated by Muslim fanaticism, inflamed by the long war, it continues to hate us as still-recent sworn enemies, as infidels, and will preserve this feeling as long as we remain giaours in its eyes"[40]. This is not an order but the voice of the epoch - the language in which the expulsion looked natural.
The head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov, stressed in a special dispatch to the Main Staff of the Caucasus Army: "For the success of the affair it is necessary that the highlanders not only not know of our desire to assist the resettlement, but the local authorities must, on the contrary, as it were dissuade them from this intention"[39]; its execution was entrusted to the head of the Middle Military Division, Tumanov, and he reported on it to Loris-Melikov himself: "The first and indispensable condition for arousing in the Chechens the desire to resettle to Turkey I consider to be not revealing that this desire comes from the government... consequently, all this must remain in the deepest secrecy; on our skill it will depend to complete the great [work] without bloodshed or particular disorders…"[37]. In Chechnya "forged proclamations were circulated, purporting to come from the Turkish government, in which the migrants were promised a cordial welcome and good material provision"[39] - Loris-Melikov himself asked in writing to be sent samples of Turkish proclamations "for circulation among the population"[37]. Agents frightened the people with the future: they "spread provocative rumours that not a single Chechen would receive a scrap of land, that all the young men would be given up as soldiers, that the Muslim religion would sooner be banned and everyone would become Christians"[37].
General Kundukhov, until then himself head of the Chechen okrug, received from the Viceroy "a most delicate assignment – to conduct unofficial negotiations with the Turkish government on carrying out a mass resettlement of the Chechens" and a written instruction "to proceed to arouse among the Chechen population a striving to leave for Turkey"[39]. For the agitation he received 5 thousand rubles from the treasury[39]; the historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova writes of 10 thousand "for the 'discreet remuneration' of three or four persons most popular among the population, that is, for bribing influential figures"[37]; Kundukhov personally was paid 45 thousand rubles "ostensibly for property left behind in Russia," with the treasury's total expenses exceeding 130 thousand[39]. Kundukhov himself described in his memoirs the recruitment of the Chechen leadership in February 1865: having invited the naib (an administrator of a district installed by the authorities) of Lesser Chechnya Sadulla Osmanov (in other sources - Saadula Osmayev) and the elder of the Karabulak society Tsugov, he achieved that "They all agreed to resettle without the slightest objection... and swore to prepare for resettlement"[38]. Osmanov was no outside appointee: in the consolidated list of the Imamate's naibs he stands as "Saadulla Osmanov of Nikhaloy (naib of Lesser Chechnya)"[39] - a man who had fought alongside Shamil, and who for an imperial salary and land drove his own people to Turkey. The price of the purchase is visible on him too: he governed his naibstvo for eight years, received 550 desiatinas of land for his service, swore on the Quran to assist the resettlement "to the end" and undertook to lead the second wave of those departing - going ahead of the first was a condition of payment of the reward[37]. He worked in such a way that even the head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov, admitted the naib was "overdoing it," spreading distorted rumours, and wanted to rid himself as soon as possible of the too-hotheaded agitator[37].
The empire's answer to the pleas of those who returned was fixed in a formula "at the very highest level": "Of any return migration of the highlanders there can be no talk"[39]. Under the rules approved in June 1861 by the chief of the Main Staff of the Caucasus Army, General Kartsov, highlanders who had entered Turkish subjecthood or overstayed their passports were "resolutely forbidden" to return[37]. By November 1865, 2,600 people had gathered at the border, ready to accept Orthodoxy for the sake of returning - "However, the Russian leadership even on such terms was in no hurry to let them through the border... they no longer had anywhere to return to; their ancestral lands had been either confiscated or sold"[37]. Those who tried to return secretly were caught for years: in 1867, 162 people were detained; in 1868 - 663; in 1869 - 369; in 1870 - 1,263; "Over ten years, from 1862 to 1872, 5,964 highlanders (mostly Chechens) managed to return to the Terek oblast, of whom 2,315 the authorities forcibly expelled to Turkey once again"[39]. Even those permitted were not allowed home: the returning Karabulaks (a Vainakh society kindred to the Chechens) "were not admitted to their native lands, but settled as a single aul, Sagopshi, on the lands of the Chechen village of Psedakh"[39].
The liquidation of education in the native language: in 1859–1862 the intelligentsia and students founded 111 Sunday schools in Ukraine to teach adults literacy, with instruction conducted in Ukrainian; in 1862 the authorities closed these schools "for the alleged presence of revolutionary propaganda"[5].
The closure of the national press: the Ukrainian socio-political and literary journal "Osnova" (St. Petersburg, January 1861 - October 1862) came to an end: the plans to reorganize the publication were thwarted by the minister of internal affairs Valuev, who refused to sanction its publication under a renewed program[5].
Valuev's secret circular to the censorship committees (18 July 1863), which halted printing in the native language: "the clearance of books in the Little Russian language, whether of religious content, educational, or generally intended for the people's elementary reading, is to be suspended"[43].
The official refusal to recognize the language and identity – the formula of Valuev's circular (1863): "there was not, is not, and cannot be any distinct Little Russian language, and their dialect, used by the common folk, is the same Russian language, only spoiled by Poland's influence upon it"[43].
The introduction of bonuses for the policy of denationalization: by decrees of the tsarist administration of 1869 and 1886, officials "in the ten South-Western governorates - persons of Russian origin, excluding, however, local natives" - were assigned bonuses for successes in the Russification of Ukraine[44] - part of the authorities' systematic plans to strengthen the "Russian assimilatory potential" of the Western krai after the Polish uprising of 1863, which included material benefits for Russian officials and teachers[45].
The systematic imposition of the metropole's logic of superiority. Researchers reconstruct Katkov's logic thus: "a nation must be a tribe capable of creating a state; only a state nation can establish order in a given territory; tribes incapable of creating a state have to submit to the state nation"[46]. Katkov himself wrote: "In the recognition of a nation the question of power, of government, of the state is decided"[46]. Hrushevsky records both the thesis and its reach: Valuev invoked an imaginary "majority of Little Russians" who allegedly "know neither a Ukrainian nationality nor language, only one Russian people and tongue," while the ideology's mouthpieces carried it to the formula "there are no Ruthenians — there is only one 'Russian people' from the Carpathians to Kamchatka"[9].
A total legislative ban on the language: "Not to permit the import into the empire… of any books whatsoever published abroad in the Little Russian dialect"; "To forbid likewise any stage performances, texts to musical scores, and public readings in the same dialect"[47].
A concession that was in fact a choice between two alien orthographies: the 1881 revision allowed dictionaries to be printed, but "on condition of their being printed in conformity with all-Russian orthography, or with the orthography used in Little Russia no later than the 18th century"[48]. That is, either the metropole's orthography or an archaic one was admissible - contemporary Ukrainian orthography was not allowed in any form. The same document permitted stage texts to musical scores to be printed only "on condition of generally accepted Russian orthography," and made Ukrainian-language performances dependent on administrative permission: "dramatic plays, scenes and couplets in the Little Russian dialect... may be performed on stage, each time, however, with the special permission of the governors-general, and in localities not subordinate to governors-general - with the permission of the governors"[48].
The censor's refusal to consider national manuscripts: "On a Ukrainian grammar prepared in Russian, the censor wrote the resolution: 'It would be naive to hope for permission to print the grammar of a language that must not exist'"[23].
The ideological justification of the censorship refusal – the language was declared nonexistent by definition: the censor's resolution about "the grammar of a language that must not exist"[23].
The theater was banned not as repertoire but as an institution: the third point of the 1881 revision prescribed "to completely forbid the establishment of a specifically Little Russian theater and the formation of troupes for performing plays and scenes exclusively in the Little Russian dialect"[48]. Individual plays remained permissible - with administrative permission for each staging. The ban struck not at the text but at the very possibility of a permanent company existing: performing occasionally was allowed, being a Ukrainian theater was not. The report with this point was submitted by the minister of internal affairs Ignatiev; the emperor's assent followed on 8 October 1881[48].
The ideological justification of a war of conquest by religion and Pan-Slavism: per Dostoevsky, "by Russia's insistence and blood the Slavs have already been liberated… the Turkish empire no longer exists and… the Balkan peninsula is free and lives a new life"[49] – the war was given the status of a sacred mission of liberating co-religionists.
On the pedestal of the Khmelnytsky monument (1888) the empire cast a programmatic statement about the past: on the front side stood the phrase "We will to be under the tsar of the east, the Orthodox one," attributed to the Pereiaslav Rada, and on the right - the imperial formula "To Bohdan Khmelnytsky – one and indivisible Russia"[50]. Brought together, they presented the events of 1654 as a voluntary and final choice in favor of a single Russian state, and the entire history of the Hetmanate as the road to that choice.
On 11 July 1888 the Russian Empire unveiled the Bohdan Khmelnytsky monument on Sophia Square in Kyiv - a sign of "unity" with Moscow: on the left side of the pedestal stood the dates "1654-1888," counting the city's history from the Pereiaslav Rada[50]. The committee for its construction was headed by Mikhail Yuzefovich[50] - an official of the Kyiv educational district and author of the memorandum that formed the basis of the Ems ukase of 1876[51]. The conference convened over that memorandum, sitting with Yuzefovich's participation, resolved "not to permit the import into the empire, without special authorization of the Main Administration for Press Affairs, of any books or brochures whatsoever published abroad in the Little Russian dialect," and "to forbid the printing and publishing in the empire of original works and translations in that dialect, with the sole exceptions of: a) historical documents and monuments and b) works of belles-lettres" - the latter permitted only in Russian orthography and from a manuscript reviewed by the censorship[48]. Under the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR of 7 May 1919 on removing from squares and streets the monuments erected to tsars and tsarist minions, two of the three inscriptions were knocked off the pedestal; the remaining one was ordered removed by Hrynko, chairman of the Kyiv gubernia executive committee - academician Yefremov recorded this in his diary on 6 February 1925 - and in the end the side plaques were replaced with blank ones, while "Bohdan Khmelnytskyi 1888" was carved on the front stone[50].
The Ukrainian regions became the empire's main raw-materials donor: "In 1910 coal extraction amounted to 1 billion poods, and in 1913 – 1.5 billion poods. Over this time the Donbas's share in the empire's coal industry grew from 67% to 74%… Before World War I, Ukrainian metallurgy produced 2/3 of the pig iron smelted in the empire"[52].
The mass importation of labor from the Russian governorates, altering the demographic balance: "in 1892, 80 percent of the workforce at the mines and plants of Yuzivka, one of Ukraine's industrial towns, had arrived from the Moscow region"[53]. "Among the workers and miners of the Donbas, ethnic Russians from Central Russia predominated… The rural population of the Donbas was mostly ethnically Ukrainian"[54].
The use of cheap labor at the mines and plants under conditions of harsh exploitation: "Initially the majority of miners were seasonal workers"[54] – without rights, without settlement, worked to exhaustion.
The ban on the language in public speech: at the archaeological congress in Kyiv in 1899 the authorities forbade scholars from Austrian-ruled Ukraine to read papers in Ukrainian - they demonstratively withdrew from the sessions[55]. At the unveiling of the Kotliarevsky monument in Poltava on 30-31 August 1903, the Galicians were allowed to speak Ukrainian, but when local Ukrainians began reading a greeting address, the mayor cut the reading short, citing an order of the ministry of internal affairs; only in 1906 did the Senate revoke the ban, even reprimanding the minister for "the impropriety of his actions"[55]. In 1904-1905 the commissions of the Kyiv and Kharkiv universities and the Academy of Sciences, consulted by the Committee of Ministers, spoke out for lifting the bans on the Ukrainian word, yet the decrees of 1876 and 1881 were never formally revoked[55].
Total censorship of translations and book imports: in 1892 the Main Administration for Press Affairs directed the censorship committee to suppress translations into Ukrainian, "reducing the number of such talentless works for purely state purposes"[56]; "The ban on importing Ukrainian books from abroad was confirmed in the harshest form in 1894"[23].
The destruction of the basis for teaching children in their native language: "By a special circular of the Main Administration for Press Affairs in 1895, the printing of any books or collections in the Ukrainian language for children's reading was forbidden, 'even if in the substance of their content they appeared well-intentioned.'" The censor's resolution on a children's collection: "Obviously written for children, but they must learn in Russian. — Forbid"[23].
The denial to Ukrainians of the status of a separate people at the level of official doctrine. The linguist Sergei Bulich, in the article "Little Russian dialect" of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1896), formulated: "The relation of the L[ittle] Russian dialect to the Russian language may be likened to the relation between the Slovak dialect and the Czech language… but not to the relation between the Polish, Czech, Serbian and similar languages, on the one hand, and Russian, on the other"[57] - by this classification Ukrainian was a dialect within the Russian language. This doctrine was applied to the entire empire by the Central Statistical Committee, which conducted the census of 1897: in the tables of the consolidated volume, "Little Russian" ran as a subdivision of a single "Russian language", and its speakers were counted into the overall total of "Russians"[58]. This wrote 22,380,551 people into the "Russians" - speakers of the empire's second language after Great Russian (55,667,469)[58]. Nearly one in four of them - 5,374,863 people - lived outside the nine Ukrainian governorates: in Voronezh governorate 915,883 people named Ukrainian as their native language, in the Don Host region (now mostly Rostov oblast of Russia) - 719,655, in Kursk governorate - 527,778, in Bessarabia (now Moldova and the south of Odesa oblast) - 379,698, in Grodno governorate (now western Belarus) - 362,526, in Stavropol governorate - 319,817, in Lublin and Siedlce governorates (the Kholm region and Podlachia, now eastern Poland) - 304,261, in Siberia - 223,274, of them 54,422 in the Amur and Primorye regions, in Akmolinsk region (now northern Kazakhstan) - 51,103[58]. In the Kuban region (now mostly Krasnodar krai of Russia) Ukrainian was the most widespread native language: 908,818 people declared "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) as their native language against 816,734 with "Great Russian" (Russian), out of a regional population of 1,918,881[58]. The census methodology also undercounted Ukrainians, notes the collective monograph of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences: "The census of 1897 recorded not nationality but the respondents' native tongue, and since many Ukrainians named Russian as such, there were in fact more ethnic Ukrainians than indicated in the census"[59].
The direct closure of legal educational societies: of the roughly forty "Prosvitas" of Russian-ruled Ukraine, those in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions were banned from their very founding, and in 1908–1910, under Stolypin, virtually all the rest were liquidated, except the branches of the Katerynoslav governorate[55]. The crackdown received its doctrinal grounding: Stolypin declared in an address to the Senate that the revival of Ukrainian cultural life was undesirable, for "the three principal branches of Eastern Slavdom, both by origin and by language, cannot but constitute one whole"[55].
Stolypin's circular to the governors (20 January 1910) — a complete ban on self-organization: "when considering petitions for the registration of any alien societies whatsoever… one must… refuse without fail the registration of their charters"[60].
The official classing of the indigenous population as aliens: Stolypin prescribed to the governors to refuse the registration of "any alien societies whatsoever, including Ukrainian and Jewish ones, regardless of the aims they pursue"[60].
The economic squeezing of peasants onto the imperial frontier under the guise of free choice: "during 1906–12 about 1 million people left Ukraine for Asiatic Russia. The largest number of resettlers came from Left-Bank Ukraine, whose peasantry suffered from land scarcity"[12]; land and credit were unobtainable at home, while "Low land prices beyond the Urals and encouraging government credits… attracted the poor peasantry and prompted it to migrate"[12] – state coercion was disguised as voluntary resettlement.
In 1911 the Russian Empire erected a monument to princess Olha in Kyiv - on a site the city had allotted two years earlier for a monument to Shevchenko. In May 1909, the Kyiv city duma allotted the square on Mykhailivska Square for a monument to Taras Shevchenko[61]. Zilov, the trustee of the Kyiv educational district, wrote confidentially to governor-general Trepov that Shevchenko should not be placed opposite a "Russian governmental institution" and that "it would be necessary to erect a monument to one of the figures of Russian history"[61]. Out of this letter grew the program of the "historical path": on 7 April 1910, colonel Steletsky, secretary of the Kyiv section of the Imperial Russian Military-Historical Society, submitted a memorandum with a queue of eight monuments - princess Olha, Oleh, Yaroslav, Volodymyr, Volodymyr Monomakh, Sviatoslav, "prehistoric Kyiv" and Nestor the chronicler[61]. On 15 March 1911, the duma, with 68 of 72 councilors present, gave the society the site between St. Sophia Cathedral and St. Michael's Monastery - 46 votes against 22 - and at the same session overturned its own decision of 1909, moving the site of the future Shevchenko monument to the Karavaivska intersection: 41 against 24[61]. At first the duma rejected the concrete design as insufficiently "artistically monumental," and a month later permitted only a temporary model to be put up[61] - that is, they agreed to place a makeshift on the seized site, so long as it was occupied. The monument was unveiled on 4 September 1911: princess Olha in the center, to the left the apostle Andrew pointing at the Kyiv hills, to the right the seated Cyril and Methodius[62][63]. The model was sculpted by Ivan Kavaleridze and Petro Snitkin, the architect was Valerian Rykov, and the project was led by the sculptor Fedir Balavensky[64]; the historian Ihor Hyrych notes the paradox - the author of the imperial monument turned out to be "one of the 'Ukrainomaniacs' - a future outstanding sculptor and film director, and then a beginning artist, Ivan Kavaleridze"[65]. Cast on the pedestal was: "A Gift of the Sovereign Emperor to the City of Kyiv. In the Year of Our Lord 1911" - the tsar's cabinet did indeed give ten thousand rubles for the monument, and the Kyiv merchant Mohylevsky contributed another thousand[62][61]. Below, on the pedestal of the princess herself, stood: "She was the first from Rus to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; her the sons of Rus praise as their initiator"[62] - the baptism of Rus was being written into the imperial genealogy right on the stone. In 1919 the statue was thrown off its pedestal and buried, split in two, beneath the monument itself; in March 1923 the remaining figures were removed, and in March 1926 the communal department of Kyiv ordered the concrete cleared away for good[62][61]. In 1996 the statue was dug out from under the flowerbed and the monument was recreated from the old sketches, this time in marble[64].
The Russian Empire erected in Kyiv the largest monument to Alexander II in the entire empire. The gratitude on the pedestal was voiced not by Ukraine and not by Kyiv but by the "Southwestern Krai" - the empire's official name for the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro[66]. The monument, by the Italian sculptor Ximenes, was unveiled on 30 August 1911 on Tsarskaya Square, between the entrance to the Merchants' Garden and the building of the Merchants' Assembly; the unveiling was timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom and held in the presence of emperor Nicholas II, the Bulgarian tsar Ferdinand and prime minister Stolypin, who two days later, on the evening of 1 September, was mortally wounded in the Kyiv theater[67]. The money for the monument was raised by an all-Russian subscription, 200 thousand rubles[68]. The central pedestal bore the coat of arms of the empire, the double-headed eagle, and the inscription "To the Tsar-Liberator, the grateful Southwestern Krai. The year 1911"; on the lower pedestal was a bas-relief of peasants giving thanks for the abolition of serfdom[68]. The krai comprised the Kyiv, Volyn and Podillia governorates[66], which after the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 were merged into the Kyiv governorate-general (1832-1914), whose task, according to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, "consisted in the liquidation of the political, socio-ethnic and cultural distinctions of the krai and the intensification of the russification of its elite - the szlachta"[4]. The monument joined a row: the Kyiv Nicholas I (1896), Alexander III (1909), Alexander II (1911), Stolypin (1912) - the historian Ihor Hyrych calls this the pre-revolutionary monument boom and adds that the erection of the monument to princess Olha and the planned subsequent monuments were handled by the Kyiv section of the Imperial Russian Military-Historical Society, nine-tenths of which consisted of officers of the Kyiv military district, and its secretary, colonel Steletsky, in a memorandum to the governor-general of 7 April 1910, laid out the queue of future sculptures - from Olha and Oleh to Nestor the chronicler[65]. Hyrych sums up the outcome of those same years thus: in that time the Ukrainians put forward one monument, to Shevchenko, and were not allowed to erect it, while their opponents managed to put up "at least half a dozen monuments asserting Russianness and negating the Ukrainian national idea"[65].
The ban on attending cultural events: the district curator "issued an instruction in which he declared students' attendance of Ukrainian theatrical performances as inadmissible as spending time in billiard halls or beer houses"[69].
The erasure of the memory of national heroes: "In January 1914, minister of internal affairs Nikolai Maklakov signed a circular by which he forbade throughout all governorates of the empire 'public celebrations of the Little Russian writer Taras Shevchenko'"[70].
The purge of the information space: Nicholas II's personal decree of 20 July 1914 on military censorship gave the command the right "to forbid for a set term, by their own authority and within the locality subordinate to them, any assemblies whatsoever, and to suspend periodical publications, as well as the transmission of postal items and telegrams"[71]. On this basis the military administration of the Kyiv military district that very day closed the only Ukrainian daily newspaper, "Rada," and confiscated at the printing house the print runs of "Svitlo" and of the "Literary-Scientific Herald," and on 9 January 1915 all Ukrainian periodicals were shut down[55].
An attempt at the bureaucratic resubordination of territories — declaring the Donbas an autonomous part directly linked to Russia, bypassing any Ukrainian authorities[72].
Coercion of legal Ukrainian parties into self-dissolution (in particular, the Borotbists in the spring of 1920) and their absorption by the CP(b)U through political blackmail and the bribery of their leaders with official posts[73].
The compulsory introduction of the metropole's language into schools: the resolution of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 13 March 1938 No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" ordered "to introduce the teaching of the Russian language as a subject of study in the schools of the national republics and regions from September 1, 1938" - from the 2nd grade in all non-Russian primary schools and from the 3rd grade in incomplete secondary and secondary schools[74].
Use of the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR (December 1922) to formally declare a union of equal republics, masking the final centralization of power in Moscow[72].
Stripping the Ukrainian SSR of control over foreign policy, the army, foreign trade, transport, and communications through the 1924 Constitution of the USSR, transferring them to the jurisdiction of the all-union people's commissariats[73].
A "kulak" was what the colonizers called a peasant they deemed "well-off". In Chechnya officials entered a person into the "kulaks" without any trial, and the colonizer then stripped him of his rights. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "To limit the political influence of the kulaks such a measure was applied as deprivation (temporary or permanent) of voting rights. In 1926, 1.3% of the voters were thus barred from taking part in the elections, and in 1927 - already 4.5%"[39]. The report on the inspection of the party organization of the Chechen Autonomous Oblast, sent on 7-9 March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, states: "The lishentsy [people stripped of the vote] in the re-election campaign of 1928/29 numbered 11,279 people, on average 6.8% across the oblast; in some settlements of the okrugs the percentage reached 30, and in the Galanchozh okrug up to 40%"[75]. In January 1930 the leadership of the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)"), preparing a resolution on the expulsion of peasant families, wrote into the draft: "subject to expulsion are exclusively those deprived of voting rights, and also kulaks who by chance have not been deprived of voting rights"[76]. Officials drew up the lists of "kulaks" at random, and the party's own oversight admitted it. Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, reported in February 1930: in Avtury and Shali, "of the 18 households listed for individual taxation [a punitive higher tax], 4 households turned out to be not kulak at all: one poor-peasant and three middle-peasant"; in Kurchaloy 12 poor-peasant and 7 middle-peasant households were entered into the "kulak list", while 89 households that the colonizer himself counted as well-off in his own tax rolls did not make it into the "kulak list"[77]. Larin also named the purpose of the "grain assignments" - the quotas of grain the colonizer ordered the auls to hand over: "The aim was benign: to introduce stratification into the mountain auls by these assignments, but what came of it was exactly the opposite"[77]. Peasants entered as "kulaks" and middle peasants were put on trial by the colonizer for failure to deliver grain and pay taxes - and even the imperial courts found no guilt in those cases: by Larin's count, 40% ended in what amounted to acquittal. Up to November 1929 "265 cases against kulaks were heard, and 132 against middle peasants"; of the 265 cases against "kulaks", "30 were acquitted and 26 sentenced conditionally", another 58 people received forced labor, and such verdicts Larin also counted among the acquittals: "40% were acquitted"[77]. The empire vetted even its own village soviets - the organs it had planted in the auls in place of Chechen self-government - and expelled from them Chechens with the "wrong" past. Larin reported: "In 5 mountain okrugs, 215 persons of clearly alien element have been found in the composition of the village soviets. There are kulaks, and traders, and former elders, and former policemen, and former bandits, and clergy"; the resolution of the oblast party conference, which had proclaimed "the complete cleansing of the composition of the village soviets from alien and kulak elements", he corrected: "To put it mildly, that was said incautiously"[77]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "If in 1928 62 kulaks were repressed across the whole of Chechnya, a year later the number of the repressed reached 356 people... As a result of these repressions, by the end of 1931 the number of kulak households in Chechnya had shrunk threefold compared to 1929"[39]. Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, who fought against the insurgent Chechens, in his report to the krai committee of the party named among the causes of the uprising "the incorrect disenfranchisement of middle peasants, and in a number of cases of poor peasants as well", which in the Itum-Kali okrug had become mass practice[75].
The colonizer outlawed the Chechen courts by legislative acts and installed its own judicial system. Until 1927 the sharia courts - courts of Islamic law - were the judicial system of the Chechen people and heard all its cases: criminal, land, labor and family. The occupation power at first recognized the Chechen court: in April 1921 the congress of Soviets of the Mountain Republic - the Soviet autonomy into which the empire had then included Chechnya - resolved to recognize the sharia court system. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov call this "a manifest (and temporary) concession to the Muslim clergy"[39]. Just a month later, in May 1921, the leadership of that same republic stripped the sharia courts of budget money and of the support of its organs[39]. But the courts went on working. In December 1925 the party leadership in Chechnya set out to discredit them, and, as historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, that attempt "failed completely"[39]. And in 1927 "the sharia courts were curtailed in their rights by an act of will, at the direct demand of the procurator of the Supreme Court of the USSR... Criminal and land cases and labor disputes were removed from their competence, state financing was terminated, and Soviet organs were directly forbidden to apply to the sharia courts"[39]. In their place the colonizer installed its own organs: historian K. G. Dendiev writes that in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast "the all-Union judicial system is introduced, with the subsequent abolition of sharia legal proceedings"[78]. Despite this, the Chechens preferred to settle disputed cases in their own courts. Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, reported in February 1930 that in the Urus-Martan okrug "land disputes are resolved not in the judicial-land commissions" but before the aul elders, of whose influence he said: it is "still not undermined to any more or less significant degree"[77]. In December 1929 the insurgents in Benoy established their own organ of power and sent their demands to Moscow. The fourth point there read: "Abolish the 'people's' courts introduced by order from above, and restore the sharia organs of justice"; the fifth - "End the interference of regional leaders and figures of the central organs of power in the internal affairs of the 'Chechen Autonomous Oblast' and restore the powers of political decision of the Chechen Congress"[78].
The colonizer took from the Chechen clergy the donations of their congregations and closed their houses of worship. In the autumn of 1929 in Goity the colonizers were confiscating a mosque over an unfulfilled "grain assignment" - a quota of grain owed to the empire; Shita Istamulov, leader of the uprising in Shali, spoke of it: "Look what an outrage they are committing in Goity; they have announced: until you deliver the grain, we will take away the mosque for that time. What good is this, when the Chechen people is being robbed of its last faith..."[78]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in 1929 in the Nadterechny district "an experiment begins in removing the mullahs from the distribution of the voluntary donations of Muslims for the benefit of the poor and the clergy - the zakat" - the empire handed the distribution over to its own peasant mutual-aid committees[39]. The colonizer destroyed the greater part of the mosques of Chechnya - the before-and-after count is given by historian K. G. Dendiev: before the Russian revolution Chechnya had "2,675 mosques, 60 thousand murids [disciples of sheikhs], members of various religious organizations, 38 sheikhs, 850 mullahs and 140 religious schools", - and the count of mid-1937: "401 mosques, not counting the kub ones [small neighborhood mosques]", at which "406 mullahs worked"[78]. Belov, commander of the occupation troops of the North Caucasus Military District, in the district command's report to the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)") on the results of the military operation of spring 1930, named the closing of mosques on the colonizers' orders among the causes for which the Chechen auls had risen in arms[75].
By prohibitive acts of 1925-1929 the Russian colonizer destroyed the children's schools of the Chechen people. The khyuzhar is the elementary school at the mosque: a mullah (clergyman) or a qadi (judge of Islamic law) taught children to read the Quran, to write in Arabic and to count; no permit was needed to open one, and the school lived on parents' money and believers' donations[15]. Such a school stood in nearly every settlement, and the people had no other. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "Literally at every mosque there operated schools teaching the Arabic language and script, as well as the basics of arithmetic"[39]; and of the first Soviet years: "while religious schools at the mosques existed in the overwhelming majority of settlements, the secular school had yet to be created anew, since the few 'highlander' schools that had existed in the Terek oblast before the revolution had closed"[39]. The ministries of internal affairs and of education of the RSFSR, by a secret instruction on the teaching of the Muslim creed of 21 August 1925, permitted the Muslim creed to be taught "only in mosques" and "exclusively to persons who have reached the age of 14", with a separate permit from the local imperial organ for each case and with particulars on every teacher - down to his social estate before the revolution; as for the teaching of general subjects under the guise of the creed, the ministries ordered it watched for and prevented[79]. For a school that took children and taught them writing and counting, this was a ban on working. The Chechens did not submit and went on building schools. Nagayev, chairman of the krai commission that inspected the Chechen oblast, in a secret memorandum to the presidium of the North Caucasus krai executive committee of 4 August 1928 cited the tally: on 1 January 1927 Chechnya had 138 Arabic schools with 2,068 pupils, on 1 January 1928 - 180 schools with three thousand pupils, against 105 Soviet schools; the growth of the Arabic schools Nagayev called "the most serious political question"[75]. The Chechens also thwarted closures by force - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "attempts to close the schools at the mosques by force provoked protests of the population, often accompanied by a refusal to build Soviet schools, as happened in the auls of Gudermes and Achkhoy-Martan"[39]. The supreme organ of the occupation power and the government of the RSFSR, by the resolution "On religious associations" of 8 April 1929, forbade religious associations to hold children's gatherings, groups and circles "for the teaching of religion" and resolved: "The teaching of any religious creeds whatsoever in state, public and private educational and upbringing institutions is not permitted"[80]. Displacing the khyuzhar at once did not succeed: by May 1930, 168 religious schools were still operating in Chechnya and Ingushetia[39]. In the khyuzhar's place the USSR installed its own school and shifted it to the Russian language - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "If in the 1928/29 school year 79.8% of all schoolchildren in Chechnya were taught in their native language, in 1930/31 it was already only half"[39]. Historian K. G. Dendiev places the closing of the religious schools in one row with the imposition of income tax on the mullahs, the abolition of the sharia courts and the handover of mosques "for economic needs"[78]; the colonizer also handed over the zakat - the Muslims' donations on which the school lived - from the mullahs to its own committees in 1929.
The USSR took livestock and land from the Chechen peasants. In one year of the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization") Chechnya lost 184 thousand head of livestock. The report on the inspection of the party organization of the Chechen Autonomous Oblast, sent on 7-9 March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, carries a table of oblast statistics: total livestock in the oblast in 1929 - 993,200 head, in 1930 - 809,063. The report admits: "The growth of livestock numbers in all categories that had begun in 1929 found no continuation in 1930; on the contrary, a significant decline in numbers occurred, sparing only the horses"[75] - and the cause is named right there: the decline occurred "chiefly in the spring of 1930, when the kulaks, offering frenzied resistance to the growth of kolkhoz construction, predatorily destroyed the livestock"[75]. That is how the colonizers described the peasants' actions: people slaughtered their own livestock rather than hand it over to the kolkhozes. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov put the loss higher still: "Forced to join the kolkhoz, the peasants strove to shelter at least part of their household from socialization, and if that failed, simply rid themselves of it. Thus collectivization was accompanied by a sharp reduction of livestock numbers - in the single year 1930 they shrank in Chechnya by almost 300 thousand head"[39]. The Central Committee of the party (the "TsK VKP(b)") likewise admitted that the livestock was being taken by force: in the resolution "On the forced socialization of livestock" of 26 March 1932 it recorded that "in a number of districts a practice is observed of socializing the cows and small livestock of individual kolkhoz members by in fact coercive methods", and demanded that such attempts be "cut short"[81]. The colonizer took land from the Nokhchi as well. In the redistribution the Russians called "land settlement", write Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, "in the Vedeno, Itum-Kali and Shatoy okrugs about 1.5 thousand hectares of land were seized from the kulaks and the mosques"[39]. The directive to "curtail" the Chechen peasants declared well-off when seizing land stands in the same VTsIK report[75].
The USSR ruined the Chechen peasants with taxes and forced deliveries of grain and meat. Officials taxed those entered as "kulaks" at a higher rate by a special list ("individual taxation"), and Larin, chairman of the North Caucasus krai control commission, held in February 1930 that too few households made the lists: in the Vedeno okrug, "of 8,513 households only 80 households were taxed on the individual basis"; in Tsentoroy "of 464 households, 406 are exempted from the unified agricultural tax", in Belgatoy 295 of 335, in Dargo 439 of 501. The tax struck at random, to the point of absurdity - of the village of Day Larin said: "a kulak in Day was assessed at 4 kopecks, while a Komsomol member there was assessed at 4 rubles 39 kopecks"[77]. The colonizer laid "grain assignments" - delivery quotas of grain - on the mountain auls, though there was hardly any grain there. Larin reported: the oblast committee of the party gave the Nozhay-Yurt okrug an assignment of 15,000 poods - about 240 tonnes of grain; further in Larin: "and on the spot they raise it to 25,000, and on the single aul of Benoy, where there are hardly 5 thousand poods to be had at all, fall 5 thousand poods"; for non-delivery the colonizers inventoried property for confiscation and imposed fines - in Shali, Larin reported, "a decision was passed to fine 60 households"[77]. In 1932, write historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, on top of the confiscated livestock "a meat procurement plan was also handed down, which meant, in essence, the confiscation of a significant part of the livestock"[39]. The colonizer taxed the clergy as well: historian K. G. Dendiev places the imposition of income tax on the mullahs as the first step of their displacement from the life of Chechnya[78].
Forcible seizure of land, livestock, and agricultural implements from peasants as part of forced collectivization under slogans of socialist modernization[73].
Confiscation of absolutely all food, including the extraction of seed stocks, through the mechanism of crushing grain procurement quotas, which led to mass deadly famine[73].
Mass confiscation and destruction of literature declared "nationalist," and rigid control over the printed word and the arts[73].
The forced orthography reform of 1933, aimed at artificially bringing Ukrainian grammar and terminology closer to the Russian language[73].
The forcible closure of all national councils, pedagogical institutes, theaters and cultural institutions of ethnic minorities in the Ukrainian SSR[82]: the national districts and village soviets were liquidated by the resolution of the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 24 January 1938[83], and the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U of 10 April 1938 reorganized the national schools and colleges and turned the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute into an institute of foreign languages[84].
On 24 January 1938 the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), by its resolution "On the Liquidation of National Schools and National Sections in Schools," closed non-Russian schools throughout the Union, liquidating the national districts and village soviets on the same day[85][83]; on 13 March the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the USSR Council of People's Commissars No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" made the metropole's language a compulsory subject in all schools of the republics[74]. Kyiv executed the decision on 10 April 1938: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, "proceeding from the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)," declared "the further existence of special national schools inexpedient and harmful" and resolved to reorganize the German, Polish, Czech, Swedish and other schools and technical colleges "into Soviet schools of the ordinary type," to liquidate national sections and classes at ordinary schools, colleges and universities, and, where there was nowhere to transfer the pupils, to transfer the institutions themselves to ordinary school curricula - "with instruction in Ukrainian or Russian"; the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute was turned into an institute of foreign languages, and all the work was ordered finished by 1 August 1938[84]. The Politburo wrote its justification into the resolution itself: "enemies of the people - Trotskyites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists operating in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR - implanted special national German, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Greek and other schools, turning them into hotbeds of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on children"[84]. The decision was given the form of a state act by the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in its resolution of 29 June 1938 on the reorganization of special national schools, colleges and the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute: by 1 August 1938, 766 national primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools were subject to reorganization into ordinary schools with (predominantly) Russian and Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and another 122 were merged with Russian and Ukrainian ones on the territorial principle - the count of the historian Liudmyla Yakubova[86].
The official annexation of the occupied lands: the western Ukrainian lands were incorporated into the USSR under the treaty with Germany of September 28, 1939[4], and "after the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna at the end of June 1940, on August 2, 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR annexed Northern Bukovyna and the Khotyn, Akkerman, and Izmail districts of Bessarabia to the Ukrainian SSR"[87].
The sign of the new order goes up within the very first weeks: Soviet troops took Lviv on 22 September 1939[88], and already in October, in the city center, on the islet in the middle of today's Svobody Avenue, rose the monument to the Stalin Constitution - a huge vertical composition of columns entwined with red banners, on a wooden frame, with five sculptural groups (a Red Army soldier, a worker, a mother with a child, a female student, and an old Hutsul with a boy) and inscriptions in Ukrainian, Polish and Yiddish symbolizing the "friendship of peoples" according to the articles of the Stalin constitution[89][90]. The sign has named authors: the sculptor Serhii Lytvynenko and the Kyiv artist Mykhailo Dmytrenko, who arrived in Lviv in 1939 in the "landing party" of Soviet artists whose task was the implantation of socialist realism; possibly the authors merely adapted to the site a design produced in Moscow, and it was executed by the sculptors Yevhen Dzyndra and Andrii Koverko[89]. The monument stood until 30 June 1941 and vanished with the arrival of the Germans[89].
The total removal of industrial equipment and food supplies into the interior of the USSR: "550 industrial facilities were moved into the interior of the USSR (190 of all-Union and 360 of republican subordination)"; "From the Right Bank to the left bank of the Dnipro were ferried 4,498 tractors, 680 combines, 690 motor vehicles"[52].
The redrawing of internal borders by the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium's resolution of 19 February 1954: "To approve the joint submission of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on the transfer of the Crimean oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic"[91] – the decision was taken in Moscow, without any expression of will by the peninsula's inhabitants. Behind the "commonality of the economy" stood the desire to shift the peninsula, ruined by deportation and war, onto the books of the Ukrainian SSR: "Moscow admits ever more openly: the Crimean region is a problem territory that the union center does not know how to sustain"[92].
The jubilee was fixed with a material sign in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, on the very square where the rada had taken place in 1654. The sign went up in the course of the jubilee reconstruction of the town ordered by the republic's authorities: "in connection with the preparation for the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia," the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR allocated 20 million rubles for the reconstruction of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, the reconstruction plan was developed under the direction of the architect Volodymyr Zabolotnyi, and in May 1954, "on the square where the historic Pereiaslav Rada took place (now Reunification Square), an obelisk with a memorial plaque was erected"[93]. On the plaque, beneath a relief of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a text is cast: "On this square, on 8 (18) January 1654, the Pereiaslav Rada took place, which, expressing the will of the Ukrainian people, unanimously adopted the historic decision on the reunification of Ukraine with Russia"[94]. The sign did not merely mark the spot: it declared the decision unanimous and expressive of the people's will, fixing this version in bronze on the very square where it all happened.
The legislative transfer of schools through "freedom of choice": the union Law of December 24, 1958 left the language of instruction to the republics[95], and the Law of the Ukrainian SSR of April 17, 1959 wrote into Article 9: "Instruction in the schools of the Ukrainian SSR is conducted in the pupils' native language. It is for the parents to decide to which school, with which language of instruction, to send their children" - the study of a language not taught in a given school became optional[96].
The ideological course toward erasing nations: the Third Program of the CPSU, adopted by the 22nd Congress in October 1961, announced "a new stage in the development of national relations in the USSR, characterized by the further drawing together of nations and the achievement of their complete unity," and called "the effacement of national distinctions, especially of language distinctions," merely "a considerably longer process than the effacement of class boundaries"[97].
The material sign of the "merging of nations" was erected in Pereiaslav in the Kyiv region, the city of the Pereiaslav Rada: "on 8 October 1961, a majestic monument in honor of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia was unveiled on B. Khmelnytsky Square"[93]. The authorities unveiled the sign themselves: according to the newsreel Radianska Ukraina No. 49, the opening rally was addressed by Petro Shelest, first secretary of the Kyiv obkom of the CPU, and Pankratov, a secretary of the Moscow obkom of the party - the metropole spoke at the unveiling in its own voice[98]. The composition consisted of two female figures representing Ukraine and Russia and three bas-reliefs with medallions: "a torch, 1654; a hammer and sickle in the rays of the sun, 1917; the Order of Victory, 1945"[99]. The sign's purpose is recorded in its own protection passport: "The monument is a symbol of the eternal, unbreakable friendship and the indestructible monolithic unity of the fraternal peoples - Ukrainian and Russian…"[100]. Four years after the unveiling, the sign was taken under state protection by the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR of 21 July 1965 No. 711 "On the approval of the list of monuments of art, history and archaeology of the Ukrainian SSR"[101][102]. The pedestal bore the inscription "Forever together - forever with the Russian people"; in early December 2021 it was removed by unknown persons[103], and the monument itself was dismantled on 7 July 2022 - by an order of the Ministry of Culture that struck the monument, protection No. 5894-Ko, off the register "due to the loss of the subject of protection"[104].
Administrative pressure on schools: pursuant to the resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers of 13 October 1978 No. 835, the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, by its resolution of 2 November 1978 No. 518, obliged the ministry of education of the Ukrainian SSR to introduce, from the 1980/81 school year, the study of the Russian language in the first grades of general-education schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction[105].
The ideological exaltation of the metropole's language: the all-Union scientific-theoretical conference "The Russian Language — the Language of Friendship and Cooperation of the Peoples of the USSR" (Tashkent, 22–24 May 1979) adopted detailed recommendations on Russification - from organizing "the study of the Russian language in the senior groups of preschool institutions" to "the use of the Russian language in lessons in other school subjects" in the senior grades of national schools[23].
Financial privileges for teaching in the metropole's language: pursuant to the resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers of 26 May 1983 No. 473 "On additional measures for improving the study of the Russian language in general-education schools and other educational institutions of the union republics," the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, by a resolution of 10 June 1983 - signed by Shcherbytsky and Liashko, stamped "Not for the press" - raised from 1984 by 15 percent the salary rates of teachers of Russian language and literature and allowed classes of more than 25 pupils to be split into subgroups for Russian lessons[23][106].
Deliberate concealment by the union leadership in Moscow of the scale of the Chornobyl NPP disaster from its own population and international organizations, depriving Ukrainians of information about the level of the radiation threat[107].
A referendum with a vague formulation to legitimize union control: the ballot of the 17 March 1991 referendum asked voters to endorse "the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics"[108] – even though the content of the "renewed federation" was nowhere defined, while the result was then used as a mandate for a new union treaty.
An armed seizure of power: the GKChP statement of 18 August 1991 announced the transfer of the USSR president's powers: "In connection with the impossibility, for reasons of health, of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev performing the duties of President of the USSR and the transfer… of the powers of the President of the USSR to Vice-President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev… to form the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR"[109]. The putsch was timed to derail the treaty-based reconstitution of the Union: "The formation of the GKChP was preceded by the so-called Novo-Ogaryovo process - negotiations begun on April 23, 1991 by USSR President Gorbachev at his suburban residence of Novo-Ogaryovo with the leaders of the union republics on the signing of a new Union Treaty"[54] - the coup cut this process short.
The legal formalization of the territory's severance: the treaty on "accession" was signed on March 18, 2014, and the law ratifying it was "Adopted by the State Duma on March 20, 2014, approved by the Federation Council on March 21, 2014"[110].
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