Secret Police and Security Services

Seeking to weaken the Hetmanate from within and prevent it from breaking vassalage, Moscow artificially fomented civil war, supporting and arming the internal opposition against the lawful hetman: "The proclamation of I. Vyhovsky as hetman was received negatively by the representatives of the forces opposed to him," led by Poltava colonel Pushkar and kish otaman Barabash^[1]. Their revolt opened the period of the bloody Ruin.

The destruction of the political leadership that supported the hetman: "the entire (!) general starshyna" followed Mazepa, and of the Left-Bank colonels only four remained loyal to the tsar^[2]. The investigation of the officers was directed from the tsar's headquarters, where "being at Lebedyn and Sumy, Peter and Menshikov in January 1709" oversaw the reprisals^[2]. The ecclesiastical punishment was arranged by the tsar's direct order - by a letter of 31 October 1708 (No. 2795) Peter I instructed metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky: "be pleased to have him, for such a deed of his, publicly cursed in the cathedral church..."^[2][3].

Intimidation of the population by an exemplary reprisal against an entire town: during the capture of Baturyn "in the bloody massacre and fire a multitude of the town's defenders and inhabitants perished"^[2], "the town was razed to the ground and its inhabitants annihilated," and the returning residents were charged a special tax "for treason"^[4]. The devastation of the hetman capital also destroyed the state archive of the Hetmanate, which suffered "during the storming of Baturyn castle by A. Menshikov in 1708"^[4].

A covert operation by Muscovite emissaries disguised as monks to destroy ancient documents of the 11th–17th centuries: "The enormous archive and library burned down; the charters and grants… of princes, magnates, and hetmans perished"; "The fire destroyed the written memory of the Lavra's independent Ukrainian political and spiritual life"^[5].

The arrest of the acting hetman and officers in St. Petersburg for petitions defending autonomous rights. Peter was preparing a demonstrative reprisal: "Peter I planned to hold a show trial of Polubotok and his associates, accuse them of 'high treason,' and liquidate the Ukrainian autonomy. A special General Court was created for this purpose"^[6]. Only the prisoner's death derailed the plan: the hetman "died on December 21, 1724 (O.S.) of pneumonia"^[6].

The arrest and exile of the Sich's top leadership: "In July 1775, after the destruction of the New Sich, by order of Empress Catherine II, Kalnyshevsky was arrested and sent to the prison of the Solovetsky monastery"^[7]. Kalnyshevsky spent more than 25 years in confinement; formally freed in 1801, he died in the monastery.

The luring of kish otaman Hladky over to the empire's side in 1828: part of the Danubians "headed by kish otaman Y. Hladky, on May 30 (18), 1828, crossed the Kiliya mouth of the Danube, entered the port of Izmail, and joined the Russian army"^[8].

The destruction of the first political organization of the Ukrainian intelligentsia following student Petrov's denunciation to the secret police: "In March 1847 the society was crushed by the gendarmes. The police managed to identify 12 members of the clandestine organization"^[7].

Arrests, interrogations – the gendarmes "resorted to brutal pressure" and "applied refined methods of psychological processing"^[7], and reprisal against the leaders: the sentences were set out in the report of the chief of gendarmes Orlov to the emperor of May 26, 1847, with Nicholas I's resolution "Execute"^[9]. Shevchenko was sent into the army "with the institution over the poet of 'the strictest surveillance with a prohibition on writing and drawing'"^[10][9]. Hrushevsky: the brotherhood "was seized while still in the midst of its very formation" after a student's denunciation; "The heaviest punishment fell on Shevchenko: he was given over to the soldiery and exiled to the trans-Caspian desert, forbidden to write and to paint," and "persecutions and prohibitions previously unheard of descended upon Ukrainian thought and the Ukrainian word… the very words Ukraine, Little Russia, Hetmanate were deemed criminal"^[11]. The brotherhood's co-founder Mykola Hulak "was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress (1847-50), then exiled to Perm under strict police surveillance (1850-59)"^[12].

The purge of civic communities in the wake of the uprising's suppression: "the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863–1864, which had a corresponding impact on the Ukrainophile movement, interpreted by the tsarist administration as an Austrian intrigue, led to the self-dissolution of the hromadas and the fading of public activity"^[13].

State support for reactionary organizations: "The organization received financial support from the state and was patronized by Russian emperor Nicholas II. In 1907 there existed about 800 local branches of the 'Union'"^[1].

The intimidation of the population and suppression of the liberation movement by radical monarchist organizations whose program rested on the principles of "the unity and indivisibility of the Russian Empire, the preservation of autocracy… great-power chauvinism, antisemitism, militant Orthodoxy"^[1]. The outcome was "the mass Jewish pogroms provoked by the 'Union,' particularly in Ukraine, in the 'Pale of Settlement'"^[1].

In January 1908 the head of the Terek oblast, by a secret circular, ordered "to establish secret surveillance over the activity of the Muslim clergy, '...and likewise over the appearance of emissaries from Turkey'"^[14]. In 1911 "the Russian authorities took an unprecedented step - in 1911 eight sheikhs at once, of both the Qadiri and the Naqshbandi tariqats, were exiled from the Terek oblast by administrative order (a sheikh is a spiritual mentor; a tariqat is a religious brotherhood of disciples around such a mentor)... Zelimkhan's chief protector - Bamatgiri-Haji Mitayev, as well as the Ingush sheikh Batal-Haji Belkhoroyev, died in exile"^[14].

The forcible suppression of protests and repressive measures against national self-organization of the same period: Stolypin's "instruction to the governors… demanding a halt to the registration of 'alien,' including Ukrainian, national cultural-educational societies"^[1].

The mass deportation of the civilian population of occupied Galicia: "The Greek Catholic clergy suffered particular persecution. On September 18, 1914, Metropolitan A. Sheptytsky was arrested and taken away to Russia. In all, thousands of Galicians were removed as hostages (through Kyiv alone about 12 thousand passed)"^[15].

The Bolsheviks' provocation of an uprising of the Arsenal plant workers in Kyiv itself at the very moment of the Red troops' offensive: it was "an armed action organized by the Kyiv committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks) against the Ukrainian Central Rada," and "it was planned for the moment of the approach of Soviet troops to Kyiv in the course of Soviet Russia's war against the UNR of 1917–18"^[7].

In captured Kyiv the occupiers shot hundreds of people over 1919: they killed at night, printed the names of the dead daily in a newspaper, and in the last week of August proclaimed a "week of red terror." An eyewitness - Kateryna Koval-Medzvedska, a Kyivan who lived seven months in the city under Moscow's occupation, from February to August 1919 - recorded that on 24 August 1919 "a 'week of red terror' was officially proclaimed - blood flowed in rivers. Peters, Voroshilov and Latsis, all-powerful that day, took no account of government members Rakovsky, Manuilsky and others who signed orders for releases from the Cheka, but ordered those people shot 'in the order of red terror.'" The shooting was done at night: "From 2 to 4 o'clock the sinister night silence of the unhappy, tormented city was broken by single shots and the piercing sounds of a car siren. People living near one of the 17 chekas scattered across the city understood that our brothers were being shot, their cries and groans drowned out by the red executioners with the shrill piercing sounds of sirens"^[16].

From 24 to 30 August inclusive the newspaper Izvestia - the organ of the Kyiv occupation authority - daily announced lists of dozens shot "in the order of red terror"; on 26 August "a list was announced of 167 persons shot 'in the order of red terror'" - among them people whose release order the eyewitness had read two days earlier in the chancellery of the central organ of the colonial administration (the VUTsIK). "And how many people perished without announcement, simply vanished without trace!"^[16]. One of those newspaper lists survived in a reprint: Shumakher, acting head of the Whites' Information Section, reproduced in "Summary of Information on the Atrocities and Lawlessness of the Bolsheviks" No. 25 a list printed in the Kyiv Izvestia of people shot by the occupiers: a professor, a gymnasium teacher, merchants, house-owners, attorneys, former Kyiv governor Sukovkin, former vice-governor Neklyudov, 80-year-old Slynko^[17]. The very form of the announcements came from Moscow: the RSFSR government's resolution "On Red Terror" of 5 September 1918, signed by justice minister Kursky and interior minister Petrovsky, required "publishing the names of all those shot, as well as the grounds for applying this measure to them" - the Kyiv lists with the formula "in the order of red terror" delivered names and grounds, exactly what the resolution demanded^[18].

The head of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine, Rakovsky, wrote to Lenin on 9 August 1919 that the Kyiv secret police had been carried away with executions by hastily drawn-up lists and that more than 300 people had been shot in Kyiv in total^[19], while Latsis, chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, gave his own statistics in his 1920 report book: "Shot by the Kyiv Extraordinary Commission jointly with the V.U.Ch.K. - 825" people in 1919 up to October^[20].

Retreating from Kharkiv in June 1919, the Bolsheviks' secret police killed its own prisoners and hostages - Ukrainians held in its jails without trial. By the count given in a summary of the Whites' Information Section, over the months of the Bolshevik occupation of Kharkiv more than 1,000 people were shot: 40-50 were killed daily, "and in the last days this figure rose sharply"; among the named dead were former governor Bantysh with his son, generals Nechaev and Kuskov, prince Putyatin^[17]. Excavations after the Bolsheviks left yielded 239 bodies; forensic medical examination established facts of burial alive, of torment and of torture. In the concentration camp the secret police had set up on Chaikovska street, 33 bodies of executed hostages were dug up^[17]. A witness from the camp hostile to the Whites - the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison - confirmed both the routine and the last day: Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, "usually shot all the condemned... with his own hand," and "on the last day of our stay in the Kharkiv prison... 120 people were shot in the back yard of our prison"^[21]. There were no sentences: Kharkiv secret police investigators Portugeis and Feldman, by the documents studied by the historian Melgunov, "in 1919 shot people without any protocols at all" - by a pencilled resolution, "Baeva, as an incorrigible criminal, to be shot"^[21]. Before leaving neighbouring Vovchansk the Bolsheviks shot 64 hostages, among them the headmistress of the girls' gymnasium^[17]. In the settlement of Velykyi Burluk in the same Vovchansk district the Bolsheviks executed the entire family of prince Vadbolsky - nine people, among them two 80-year-old women and an English governess; the compilers of the summary recorded: "they were stripped naked, led behind the house church, candles were lit, they were ordered to kneel and pray, and then, to whistling and shouting, their ears were cut off, they were hacked with sabres and, as the victims lost consciousness, finished off with shots"^[17].

The Bolsheviks' secret police tortured detained Ukrainians in the captured cities: interrogations with beatings and torture regardless of sex or age, closet-cells and cellars flooded with water, staged executions, staff executioners paid per person shot. In Kyiv this was put on record by the Red Cross: the report of the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross Society on the activity of the Kyiv secret police, compiled from the observations of nursing sisters over February - August 1919 and signed by the committee's acting chairman, doctor Lodyzhensky, describes the interrogations: "As soon as a person fell into the power of the ChK [the secret police], he lost all human rights... From the very first interrogation the screaming began... cruel beatings began, accompanied by abuse. Neither age nor sex protected from them" - "the fourteen-year-old daughter of the actress E. K. Chaleeva was cruelly beaten before her mother's eyes, to extract more candid testimony from both daughter and mother"; an investigator beat 60-year-old Vorovskaya in the presence of her arrested daughter^[22]. The arrested Ukrainians were kept in a windowless cellar flooded with water and in a wall closet in which, according to the report, "one could only sit hunched." Interrogation was conducted by staged executions: Ustinsky "was led to the place of execution in the basement, undressed, laid on the floor... The shot did ring out, but calculated so that the bullet flew close but past. So close that... all the skin on Ustinsky's hands was scorched. Such shooting was repeated many times. In the end Ustinsky was shot dead"; Solntsev was forced to attend executions and locked in the basement as "the last living man among the still-warm corpses" - at a night interrogation he went mad, which, at the investigators' demand, was certified by the psychiatrist Kirichevsky, himself a prisoner. One of the sisters summed up seven months of observation thus: "there were no torn-out fingernails, no epaulettes nailed to shoulders, no flayed skin, no people scalded with boiling water. But their whole life was one continuous torture"^[22].

In Odesa an eyewitness who had been held under arrest in the Odesa secret police and published his memoirs there in 1919 under the pseudonym K. Alinin recorded, from the words of the staff executioner Abash, how one of the chiefs of that secret police conducted interrogation: he "'broke a person up by parts.' He would usually sit down before his victim and begin questioning him. - An officer? - he would squint... and, taking aim with his revolver, shoot through the martyr's hand. - A colonel, perhaps? - And the bullet would shatter the elbow"; for each person shot, by the same Abash's words, the secret police paid the executioner^[23].

In Kharkiv Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, tortured the interrogated himself: his "favourite method," by testimony collected by the Whites' investigative commission, was this: "he would plunge a dagger a centimetre into the body of the person under interrogation and then turn it in the wound," and the torture went on "in the office of the investigator of the 'special department,' before the eyes of Yakimovich, his assistants and investigator Lyubarsky." The same was independently confirmed by the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison: "Usually Saenko shot all the condemned with his own hand... In our presence in the Kharkiv prison he shot a sick man on a stretcher"^[21].

On 25 May 1919 Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of the RSFSR's Ukrainian Front, disarming the villages, ordered the armies: "beforehand, to take hostages from the kulak elements"^[24]. On 29 June 1919 the central organ of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the VUTsIK) legalized "the taking of hostages" by its resolution on general mobilization^[25], and on 11 December 1919 Trotsky, war minister of the RSFSR, included "the hostage system" in the list of means by which the armies "entering Ukraine" were obliged to disarm the population^[26].

In Zhytomyr, during the nine days of Soviet rule in March 1919, hostages sat in the secret police "until payment of the contribution" - until the town paid the sum imposed on it; so recorded Livshits, commissioner of the Central Committee for Aid to Pogrom Victims, noting that a considerable part of those arrested "as hostages" were Jews^[27]. So it was in Fastiv too: until the contribution imposed on the town was paid, Jews sat as hostages^[28]. The occupation secret police in Kyiv held hostages as well: Rakovsky, head of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine, wrote to Lenin on 9 August 1919 that after the proclamation of "red terror" over the Hryhoriv uprising it had shot 30 hostages - former members of the monarchist organization "Union of the Russian People," which staged pogroms, and former tsarist officials; when it prepared to shoot 15 more and Rakovsky with Latsis, chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, checked their biographies, only two turned out to be dangerous enemies^[19].

The removal of hostages from Kyiv during the evacuation at the end of August 1919 was described by the eyewitness Kateryna Koval-Medzvedska: "Doctors, engineers, topographers were put on record, and in the last days, under threat of execution, they were carried off by force to Moscow. Besides that, landowners and the bigger merchants were carried off by the hundreds as hostages"^[16].

Moscow's seizure of direct control over the punitive apparatus through the decision to liquidate the independent All-Ukrainian Cheka (VUChK) in August 1919 and the appointment of its own special commissar, Ya. Peters^[29].

Soviet Russia carried out executions for show: "During the Chechen congress in Grozny, by verdict of the local Cheka, 7 Chechens were demonstratively shot. The execution made such '...a devastating impression on the masses of Chechens who had not yet had time to disperse after the congress' that the command of the Caucasus Labor Army demanded that henceforth death sentences on Chechens be carried out as far away from Chechnya as possible"^[14].

Over Sheikh Ali Mitaev, a member of the Chechen revkom, the GPU set "thorough surveillance", and in the spring of 1924 it "took the decision 'on the removal' of A. Mitaev from Chechnya. The official agreements with him were treacherously broken; he was suddenly arrested, taken to Rostov-on-Don and, after a brief investigation, shot"^[14]; historian E. F. Zhupikova dates the arrest to 19 April 1924 and cites the GPU's formula of accusation - "for his connection with counter-revolutionary organizations"^[30]. The historians call the character of the reprisal and its perpetrators by their proper names: "The murder of A. Mitaev by the Chekists," write Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov^[14].

On 9 May 1924 the Soviet Union, by a secret resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee (TsIK), gave the OGPU "the right of extrajudicial reprisal against bandits and their accomplices, namely: expulsion from the given locality, confinement in a concentration camp for a term of up to 3 years, and the application of the supreme measure of punishment - shooting", and prescribed that the republics declare localities "unfavorable in respect of banditry", where the GPU organs "are entitled to decide at their own discretion any case of banditry"^[31]. The Chechen authorities already in that same May telegraphed the center: "Sanction the creation of a tribunal or a political troika"^[32]. The troikas that went to work, "composed of an official of the procuracy, the GPU and the first party leader, — as a rule, passed sentences in absentia — on the basis of the submitted documents, often without even questioning the accused. Of any participation of a defense in the proceedings there could be no talk"^[14].

The special department of the Caucasus Labor Army carried out mass shootings uncontrolled even by its own command: army commissar Vrachev complained that of them "...almost nothing is known not only to the Revolutionary Tribunal or the Political Department of the army, but to me or the army commander either"^[14]. During the disarmament of May 1922 people were first captured and then shot: "up to 30 'bandits' were captured and shot, and their property was confiscated by the authorities"^[14].

The targeted physical annihilation of the national cultural elite. The official turn was sealed by the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars "On Grain Procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region" of 14 December 1932, signed by Stalin and Molotov: Ukrainization was declared to have been carried out "mechanically," which, in the resolution's own words, "made it easier for bourgeois-nationalist elements, Petliurites and the like to create their legal covers, their counter-revolutionary cells and organizations"^[33]. The term "Executed Renaissance" denotes precisely "the repressive policy of communist Moscow aimed at the physical destruction of the Ukrainian intellectual elite of the 1920s–30s (more broadly – of the entire nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia) and the tabooing of its creative achievements"^[1].

The documents of its staff described a military operation with artillery shelling as the bringing of peace: the "Main Tasks of the Special Operational Groups of the OGPU in the Operation in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast", approved by Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) for the krai, Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, open with the words that the mass operation "in its final result must bring general pacification to Chechnya and create the appropriate conditions for the peaceful Soviet-economic construction of the oblast"^[34]. The same frame was prescribed to be spoken aloud in every aul: under the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 the representatives of the authorities, having entered a village surrounded by troops, announced to the assembly the purpose of their coming - "the removal of weapons with a view to the Chechen authorities securing a normal working life for the toiling population", and the artillery shelling was given a name within this frame: "warning fire as a measure of influence"^[34]. The organizer of the operation, Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party, brought this picture to its final formula in his memoirs: "It was a brilliant operation without any bloodshed"^[35] - in the same chapter he himself describes the Chechen old men taken hostage by the Chekists and the shelling of a Chechen village by the troops of the USSR.

To get at imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, who was sheltering in the mountains of Chechnya, the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) took old men from the villages and held them hostage under the threat of destroying the villages with artillery. Mikoyan, secretary of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party and one of the operation's organizers, described it himself: "to catch him, the Chekists invited to their quarters old men from the villages where he might be hiding and, declaring them hostages, warned them that if they did not say where Gotsinsky was, they would destroy the villages with artillery, and would arrest them and put them on trial. For a whole day they tried to persuade the old men, but all was without result. Then an aeroplane was sent to that district. They were terribly afraid of the aeroplane. Only after several shells had been fired at the village so that, without destruction of the houses, the inhabitants should feel its power, did the old men say in which gorge Gotsinsky was hiding"^[35]. The word "hostages" is also in the documents of the operation itself: on 4 September 1925 Mironov, head of the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU, reported: "I report: the population is giving up Nazhmudin. I am now conducting negotiations with the representatives. The matter is being conducted through the hostages I have released... Let aeroplanes appear at 15 hours, but not strike. For effect let some 6-7 of them come"^[36]. For the Sharoy district the count of hostages is known from the documents of the military archive: historian A. Yu. Lashkov writes that "the command of the military grouping demanded of the population of the Sharoy district the surrender of the well-known bandit Gotsinsky. In doing so, 40 men from among the honored elders were taken hostage. However, the demand to surrender Gotsinsky was not satisfied within the appointed time, and therefore the troops resorted to intensified repressions. In two days 22 puds of bombs [about 360 kilograms - like 22 rounds of a modern 120 mm mortar] were dropped on the district"^[37]. The surviving companion of Gotsinsky names a different number and adds what is not in the Soviet papers: from the destroyed aul of Khakmedy "105 hostages were taken", and the hostages were threatened with shooting - his account says: "the Bolsheviks wrote of the shooting of the hostages in the event of resistance in their proclamations"^[38]. The word "hostages" is not in the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925, approved by the operation's commanders, - it allows only arrests of "influential persons of the aul" as an extreme measure: the hostage-taking was done over and above what was written, and its traces remained in the dispatches of the executors and the memoirs of an organizer.

In the two months of the operation of 1925 the USSR arrested and shot the leaders of the resistance of Chechnya and Dagestan. Imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky, the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, was arrested by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) on 5 September 1925. His hiding place was given up by the old men held hostage in the Sharoy district under the threat of the shelling of their villages. On the same day Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, reported to Moscow: "The operation in the Sharoy district has ended successfully. After 5 days of repressions and agent work, today at 14 hours a report was received through the aircraft that Gotsinsky has been taken"^[37]; he was arrested by an operational group of the GPU under the command of M. Ushaev^[14]. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: "N. Gotsinsky was urgently taken to Rostov-on-Don, where on 15 October 1925 he was sentenced to be shot"^[32]. Arrests are provided for by the disarmament instruction of 4 August 1925 as well - it allows "the conduct of arrests of influential persons of the aul, reactionarily disposed", with the proviso to resort to this measure "as an extreme one, with the observance of maximum tact"^[34]. Under shelling even the innocent surrendered: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that in Urus-Martan, "after the artillery and aviation shelling of the settlement, the sheikhs Solsa-Haji Yandarov and Bilu-Haji Gaytayev surrendered to the authorities - soon, incidentally, released owing to their complete innocence"^[14].

The instruction on mass searches, issued for the operation by the staff of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), establishes that until the end of the investigation the arrested are concentrated at the staffs of the OGPU district groups, and of what follows point 19 says: "The procedure for conducting the investigation and the further routing of the arrested is provided for in the regulations on the troikas for the extrajudicial examination of cases"^[34]. The "Main Tasks of the Special Operational Groups of the OGPU", approved by Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, include the same procedure directly in the list of tasks: "The removal of the counter-revolutionary, bandit and other criminal anti-Soviet element... the registration of the same, the conduct of the investigation and the extrajudicial examination of their cases and their transportation to the place of destination"^[34]. Through this procedure passed 183 of the more than three hundred arrested in the course of the operation - the investigation of their cases ended in extrajudicial shooting^[14]. The OGPU had received the right of extrajudicial reprisal a year earlier - by a secret resolution of the Presidium of the TsIK of 9 May 1924 (campaign C1176); the operation's instruction applied it to the arrested.

The USSR shot nearly all those arrested in the course of the operation of 1925 - people already in the hands of the troops and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The total number of arrested exceeded 300. Of the total number of arrested, 105 were shot on the spot; against 183 an investigation was opened, which also ended in extrajudicial shooting; 21 were exiled"^[14]. Even the OGPU's own count found few "active" ones among them: the survey submitted to Stalin names 50 "active bandits and prominent counter-revolutionary figures", while "In all, 400 bandits and elements abetting them have been arrested"^[39] - those shot were mostly not leaders but rank-and-file detainees whose guilt was established by no court. So was killed the operation's chief prisoner as well: imam Nazhmuddin Gotsinsky - the spiritual head of the resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya, detained on 5 September 1925 and sentenced in Rostov-on-Don - was shot, in the words of a highlander emigre writing in the Paris journal Prométhée in 1930, "Il fut fusillé sans jugement dans les souterrains du Guépéou de Rostov" - without trial, in the cellars of the GPU in Rostov^[40].

From 1930 to 1936 the USSR expelled peasant families from Chechnya by the orders and lists of the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)"), of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) and of the NKVD that replaced it. In January 1930 the leadership of the krai committee of the party, apportioning among the okrugs the expulsion of 20 thousand households of peasants declared well-off, assigned Chechnya 500 households; a household was expelled whole - the family with all its members^[41]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the same expulsions counting people, not households: "At the beginning of 1930, 1,500 peasants declared kulaks are expelled from Chechnya"^[14]. Historian G. I. Kakagasanov gives, from published documents, the count for the first half of 1935 - 1,553 families were expelled from the national districts of the North Caucasus krai, and he specifies: "Of these, 473 families (2,112 people) were expelled from Chechnya" - four to five people per family^[42]; for 1935 the count of Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov is briefer: "in 1935, 450 kulak families were expelled from Checheno-Ingushetia, another thousand families were expelled from Chechnya and Dagestan in 1936"^[14]. On 22 May 1936 the head of the NKVD of the USSR Yagoda, by telegram No. 56379, ordered Dagin, head of the krai NKVD directorate: "to carry out the resettlement beyond the borders of the krai" of five hundred peasant households from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Oblast and five hundred from Dagestan, finishing "no later than October 1936". In the telegram this thousand families is divided between the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Uzbekistan) and the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Kyrgyzstan). Yagoda also wrote the norms into the telegram: belongings per family - "of a total weight up to thirty poods per family" [about 490 kilograms], loading "from 32 to 35 people" per railcar; able-bodied men he permitted to be arrested "10 days before their dispatch" - "with the aim of preventing their flight"^[43].

The USSR arrested, exiled, disenfranchised and hounded the authorities of the Chechen people - the sheikhs, the mullahs, the revered elders. The national commission of the North Caucasus krai committee of the party resolved on 28 June 1927: "The sheikhs in most cases are themselves kulaks and traders... they not only economically enserf the poor and middle peasants but, using the religious prejudices of the masses, exercise their political influence as a kulak stratum over a significant part of the toiling masses"^[44] - thus the party designated the people's spiritual mentors "kulaks", class enemies. In the summer of 1927 the USSR broke off relations with Great Britain and expected war - and the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested sixteen religious authorities across Chechnya. Yevdokimov, the OGPU plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus, in his secret report for 1927 tied the arrests to the war scare: "The days of military danger of the summer period unusually inspired the Chechen musduh [Muslim clergy] in the sense of bold and open agitation for aid to external forces, for the preparation of an uprising", - and explained the operation thus: "The c/r [counter-revolutionary] propaganda of the clergy, which was shaping a panicky-defeatist mood in the Chechen peasantry, obliged our organ to be forestalled into a mass operation against the most active religious top layer. Rarely subjected to repressions and confident in the strength of his influence over the broad public - the Chechen mullah found himself caught unawares. The removal of 16 reactionary representatives of the Chechen religious world therefore made an enormous impression on him and for a time paralyzed his activity"^[45]; "removal" was what the empire called a person's arrest. Yevdokimov measured success by the disintegration of the spiritual stratum: "a whole series of mullahs began to renounce their rank (up to 30 cases), and a number of religious authorities, compromised by a/s [anti-Soviet] sabotage in the past, to hide from the authorities"^[45]. The Chechens answered with intercession, and the report admits: "the campaign for organizing public petitions on behalf of the arrested had significant success"^[45]. Among those under arrest was Sheikh Gaysumov of Shali - one of the most revered men of Chechnya; Yevdokimov wrote: "The exception was the sect of Sheikh Gaysumov, whose activists, in connection with the latter's arrest, acted very energetically in the field of mobilizing public sympathy"^[45]. The assembly of the village of Shali - 800 people - vouched for the arrested man: "to confirm that citizen Gopsumov Sungant [thus is Gaysumov recorded in the document], aged 107, has been an honored elder in the present village and has never been noted in anything discreditable, either criminal or political"^[46]; Nagayev, inspector of the North Caucasus krai executive committee, filed this assembly into his report as evidence - "in the person of these 'assemblies', led by the kulaks and the clergy, the outlines of a real organization opposing our party are beginning to crystallize"^[46]. The empire entered the intercession for an old man into its own file of incriminating material. In the autumn of 1927 the Prague journal "Volnye Gortsy" ["The Free Highlanders"] printed a letter from the Caucasus about the same wave: "The Bolsheviks, striking the pose of saviors of our national freedom, are in fact little by little killing all the living forces in the country, tearing from our ranks the most capable - our intellectual forces"; "Such an explosion of new terror took place here after the Anglo-Soviet rupture. Numerous arrests of the intelligentsia, the clergy and even whole families took place in almost every locality on the highlanders' territory. The GPU is working flat out"^[47]. The OGPU in the same report named the next target as well: "the national-democratic movement appears to us as that new kind of highlander c/r [counter-revolution] with which we shall have to contend in the coming years and months"^[45]. The empire struck at the authorities' rights as well: at the elections of 1928/29 in the Chechen Autonomous Oblast it disenfranchised 11,279 people, and in the breakdown of the lishentsy stand the lines: "Servants of religious cult, 1,569" and "Members of lishentsy families, 5,658"^[46]. By 1930 the colonizer had counted the whole stratum head by head - the report on the inspection of the oblast party organization, sent in March 1931 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - the supreme organ of the occupation power of the RSFSR, states: "The strength of the mullahs in the Chechen aul is still enormous. On 1 May 1930 there were in Chechnya... communal mullahs - 450, kub mullahs - 800, sheikhs - 34... descendants of Muhammad and other religious authorities - 250, folk healers - 150"; the conclusion, in the same place: "In order to wage a struggle against such a huge army of mullahs, sheikhs and the like, it is necessary to have trained cadres"^[46]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the arrests of the authorities became mass; the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes: the killing "was the beginning of a large GPU operation in Chechnya for the liquidation of 'kulak-counter-revolutionary elements and mullah-nationalist ideologues'"^[48]. The Grozny and Rostov krai GPU, Avtorkhanov writes, set the arrest quotas, and the government of the USSR confirmed those quotas^[48].

The USSR fought the auls that revolted in December 1929 not only with troops but with false promises; the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and wrote in emigration, described this mechanism. For the "peaceful liquidation" of the uprising a government delegation arrived from Moscow - it included Nikolayeva, member of the Central Committee of the union party (the "TsK VKP(b)"), and Ryskulov, deputy head of the government of the RSFSR, - and the "peace commission" of religious authorities it created declared to the insurgents in Shali: "responsibility for the events that have occurred lies exclusively with the local functionaries, who acted contrary to the directives of the party and the government", and in the name of the government delegation an address to the Chechen people was read out: "the internal Chechen affairs will henceforth be decided by the Chechen people itself"^[48]. The insurgents, Avtorkhanov writes, "found these explanations satisfactory and agreed to return to their homes"; the GPU detachment (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) that arrived next spent three days arresting local Soviet functionaries - just as had been promised; Avtorkhanov continues: "and toward one o'clock in the morning of the fourth day they surrounded the house of the former leader of the insurgents, Shita Istamulov"^[48]. The seizure failed - the Chechens fought Shita Istamulov free; Avtorkhanov writes: "To the ultimatum to surrender without a fight, however, Shita and his brother Hasan replied with fire. Part of Shita's house was engulfed in flames and Hasan gravely wounded when, toward dawn, help arrived: about a hundred armed Chechen horsemen surrounded the very part of the GPU troops that had invested Shita's house. After perhaps an hour of hand-to-hand fighting the GPU detachment, numbering up to 150 men, was almost entirely destroyed"^[48]. Avtorkhanov continues: "Freed by his friends, Shita Istamulov called all Chechens to a 'holy war' for the restoration of the 'Imamate of Shamil' and the expulsion of the 'infidels' from the Caucasus. Following this call, Shali, Goity and Benoy rose again"^[48]. The second deception was the amnesty; Avtorkhanov writes: "To all participants of the uprising, including the leaders of the uprising, an amnesty was declared in the name of the central government" - Shita Istamulov returned to Shali and "on instructions from above" was even appointed chairman of the Shali rural consumers' society (a cooperative for manufactured goods)^[48]. Avtorkhanov describes the denouement thus: in the autumn of 1931 Shita Istamulov "was summoned to Baklanov, head of the district GPU, to be handed the official act of amnesty from Moscow. Handing him the act with one hand, Baklanov with the other, from under the counter, emptied an entire Mauser clip into him. The gravely wounded Istamulov managed to stab the treacherous Baklanov to death with his dagger. The outside guard finished Istamulov off"^[48].

The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) fabricated the "Chechen nationalist center" - an underground organization that did not exist - and convicted thousands of Chechens in the case. Thus the empire "explained" the uprisings against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"): it was not hunger and devastation that raised the people, but a secret conspiracy. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the mechanism of the fabrication: "The logic of the Chekists suggested that the culprits and organizers of all the anti-Soviet uprisings should be sought in some single 'nationalist center', into which, undoubtedly, by the same logic, representatives of the internal and foreign Chechen emigration must belong"^[48]. The work, by his words, was taken up by the krai organ of the OGPU under Kursky and Fedotov and the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU under Kraft: "They created this 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center' so skillfully and plausibly that even many of the Chechens believed in its existence"^[48]. The "evidence" was letters in the name of the Chechen émigré, oil industrialist Tapa Chermoev - with calls to prepare an uprising; they came to Chechen public figures in Grozny from Istanbul, Paris and London through intermediaries whom the OGPU had obliged to hand the letters over to it. Avtorkhanov concludes: "the version of Chermoev's letters was a lie, and the letters themselves - forgeries of the OGPU. But it was precisely these letters that served as 'material evidence' against the 'nationalist center'"^[48]. In the autumn of 1932 the OGPU arrested the entire "group" of the addressees, followed by mass arrests across the Gudermes and Nozhay-Yurt districts - the very one that had revolted against the kolkhozes in March 1932; Avtorkhanov writes: "In all, up to 3 thousand people were arrested in the case of the 'Chechen nationalist center'. The arrested were charged with creating a 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center of Chechnya for the preparation and carrying out of an armed uprising'"^[48]. There was no trial - Avtorkhanov writes: "Almost all the arrested were convicted through the collegium of the GPU. Of the members of the 'center', Abdulkadirov, Shamilev, Kurbanov, Motsa-Hadji Sotaev and Beymurzaev were shot. Others received 10 years each. How many of the rank and file were shot is impossible to establish"^[48]. With the fabricated case the empire justified itself publicly as well: Yevdokimov, secretary of the krai committee of the party, at the krai party conference of 1934 cited "the letters of the millionaire Chermoev" as proof of the preparation of an uprising with the money and weapons of the Western powers^[48]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov confirm the scale: repression "in connection with the case of the so-called 'Chechen nationalist center'" befell, "by some data, up to 3 thousand people"^[14].

The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) passed sentences on arrested Chechens by "troikas" - commissions of three: without trial, without defense counsel, up to execution by shooting. In Chechnya the extrajudicial procedure had operated since the 1920s: Kraft served as deputy head of the Chechen oblast department of the GPU - the oblast link of the political police - and worked with troikas as early as 1924: on 20 August the leadership of the Chechen oblast executive committee, on his report, resolved "to deem necessary the extension of the term of functioning of the troika for extrajudicial hearing by two months"^[49]. On 2 February 1930 deputy chairman of the OGPU Yagoda signed order No. 44/21 "On measures for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" - "kulaks" was what the colonizers called peasants they themselves declared well-off^[41]. Under this order the OGPU created troikas: cases in them were examined without trial, and the panel was made up of representatives of the krai committee of the party, of the procuracy, and Chekists^[49]. The troikas received the cases of the "first category" - the peasants whom the supreme organ of the occupation power (the "Politburo of the TsK VKP(b)"), by its secret resolution of 30 January 1930, had consigned to concentration camps, up to execution by shooting^[41]. In the autumn of 1931, after the killing by the Chekists of Shita Istamulov - leader of the 1929 uprising in Shali, - the GPU carried out a wave of mass arrests across Chechnya. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes of the trial of the arrested: "The arrested were convicted by an extraordinary 'troika' of the GPU specially created for the purpose, chaired by its chief G. Kraft", and "few of them ever returned to freedom"^[48]. The count of the arrested diverges among the sources: the historians give up to 35 thousand, while by the OGPU's own memorandum of 31 July 1931, 20,230 people passed through the extrajudicial troikas of the whole North Caucasus krai in 1930^[41]. The troika worked after the March 1932 uprising in the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya as well: Yevdokimov, head of the OGPU for the North Caucasus krai, at a secret conference of the secretaries of the national oblast committees of the party in Rostov on 15 December 1932, reported the tally of the Chekists' "work" on the results of the uprising: "...745, of them 386 screened out, 359 brought before the troika, 100 people sentenced to 10 down to 3 years, 188 conditionally, 166 released"^[49].

The USSR shot arrested Chechens - including captured leaders of the uprisings. In March 1932 the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya revolted against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"); historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The five captured leaders of the uprising were soon shot"^[14]. Next the Chekists came for the clergy - Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov continue: "Arrests befell some well-known Chechen sheikhs, and Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was shot in April 1933"^[14]. Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was a spiritual mentor of Muslims (a sheikh) from the village of Lakha-Nevre, today's Nadterechnoye; researcher A. Dukhaev, quoted by historian K. G. Dendiev, writes of him: "He was arrested for the last time on 17 March 1933, at the age of 85... and on 9 April of the same year sentenced to the supreme measure of punishment. The sentence was carried out on 10 May 1933. In 1990 Kana-Sheikh Khantiev was rehabilitated"^[49]. The sources diverge on the date of the execution: April or 10 May 1933. The count of those shot is not limited to the top: the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes that in the case of the "Chechen nationalist center", fabricated by the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), rank-and-file people were shot as well - how many, it is impossible to establish^[48].

Mass dispossession and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of resisting peasants (the so-called "kurkuls") to remote special settlements in Siberia and the North^[29].

Mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants ("kulaks") and their family members to Siberia and remote northern regions of the USSR^[29].

Mass arrests of peasants during the dekulakization campaign: according to the 1930 directives, in addition to deportations, tens of thousands of people were sent directly to concentration camps for isolation^[29].

Use of dekulakized peasants, sent into the emerging GULAG system, as forced unpaid labor for heavy state projects^[29].

Deliberately starving millions of Ukrainian peasants to death as a direct result of Moscow's state policy^[29].

Systematic psychological suppression through public show trials of "saboteurs" and the introduction of the punitive law on the protection of socialist property (the "law of five ears of grain")^[29].

Sealing off the starving region: peasants who tried to escape from the blockaded villages were intercepted on roads and at railway junctions. The directive sealed off precisely Ukraine and the Kuban: "all peasants who had managed to leave Ukraine and the North Caucasus were subject to return to their places of residence," while permits to leave were denied even "to the national districts of the krai, where there was no famine at all"^[29]. Within 50 days "219.5 thousand peasants were detained, including 38 thousand in the Ukrainian SSR, 47 thousand in the North Caucasus, 44 thousand in the Central Black Earth region, 5 thousand in the Western oblast, 65 thousand on the railways"; of these, "186.5 thousand were sent home under convoy, almost 3 thousand were convicted, and all the rest awaited trial or were under investigation in filtration camps"^[29]. The point of the operation lay not in sentences but in marching people back into the starving villages: the coded telegram "documentarily attests to his intention to organize absolute famine in the rural areas of Ukraine"^[29].

Lethally dangerous exploitation of the labor of Ukrainian peasants, convicted en masse under the "law of five ears of grain" and exiled to corrective labor camps during the Holodomor^[29].

Creation of an atmosphere of total paralyzing fear in society through the fabrication of cases (for example, the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine") and the staging of public show trials^[29].

Mass closure and destruction of churches, as well as repressions against clergy, aimed at the complete destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC)^[29].

Physical annihilation and isolation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, writers, and scholars, as well as of the party opposition (national communists), in the course of targeted repressions. Fabrication of cases (including the "UNC" case) and driving representatives of the national elite to death, including the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the writer Mykola Khvylovy, and People's Commissar Mykola Skrypnyk^[29].

Institutional destruction of national historical scholarship, closure of research schools, and removal of the works of Ukrainian historians from scholarly circulation^[29].

The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, writes: "At the beginning of October 1937, accompanied by a large Chekist staff, there arrived in Chechen-Ingushetia a candidate member of the Politburo, chairman of the Party Collegium of the KPK under the TsK and Yezhov's deputy – Shkiryatov"^[48]. Shkiryatov convened an enlarged plenum of the oblast committee of the party in the Lenin House of Culture in Grozny - by the archival protocols the plenum ran on 8-10 October 1937, with 194 participants^[49] - and summoned there also the senior officials of the city and the districts. Avtorkhanov continues: "Shkiryatov gave the order to arrest all Chechens and Ingush who were members of the Chechen-Ingush oblast committee"^[48]. The Chekists arrested them right there, in the hall of the plenum. Avtorkhanov writes of what followed: "Then Shkiryatov's order was extended to all Chechen-Ingush officials, from the chairman of the republic's government down to the chairman of a village soviet"^[48]. In October and November 1937 the NKVD (a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested Ali Gorchkhanov, chairman of the government of the republic; Abdul-Khalim Salamov, his deputy; Khasi Vakhayev, second secretary of the oblast committee; Magomed Mamakayev, head of the culture and propaganda department of the oblast committee; Khamid Okuyev, People's Commissar (minister) of education; Musa Khaniev, chairman of the Supreme Court; Khasan Mekhtiev, prosecutor of the republic; and Said Baduev, chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers. Avtorkhanov writes also of the lower floors: "Arrested were also the chairmen of the district executive committees (in the Chechen-Ingush republic there were up to 28 districts), almost all chairmen of village Soviets, of kolkhozes, and their party organizers"^[48]. Of the 23 heads of the district NKVD departments only Goytiev was a Chechen, and the NKVD arrested him too. The NKVD arrested, and the party organs removed from office - historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "In all, in October 1937, 30 of the 76 members and candidate members of the Chechen-Ingush obkom were repressed, including all the Chechens and Ingush; 20 of the 28 secretaries of district party committees; 77 members of district committees and 192 senior officials of the rural districts of the republic"^[14]; in 1938 the colonizer removed almost all heads of the district land departments, 19 chairmen of district executive committees and 22 secretaries of district committees^[14].

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^[48]. 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"^[49]. 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!"^[48]. 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^[49]. 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"^[49]. 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"^[48]. 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"^[48]. 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^[14]. 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^[48].

The colonizer repressed almost the entire Union of Writers of Chechen-Ingushetia. On 20 November 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party (the "obkom VKP(b)") dissolved the board of the writers of the republic - the resolution's wording: "as having proved clogged with hostile bourgeois-nationalist elements /Arsanov, Mamakayev, Aiskhanov and others/"^[49]. One of the convicted, Khalid Oshaev, wrote in 1961 to the Ossetian writer Khadzhi-Murat Muguev: "of the 12 members of the union of writers of Chechen-Ingushetia 9 people were arrested, 7 convicted, 4 shot. I myself, a member of the Union of Writers since 1934, spent 13 years in confinement, and for 2 years was held in solitary confinement"^[50].

On 13 November 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party (the "obkom VKP(b)") approved two lists not subject to disclosure: No. 25/97 - on the removal of literature published in the republic - and No. 31/107 - on the mandatory removal of books from libraries and the book trade; the ban covered the works of 29 authors, among whom the historian K. G. Dendiev names D. Madayev, Kh. Yandarov, N. Muzayev, D. Malsagov and Kh. Oshaev^[49]. The first Chechen literary works had appeared in the early 1920s^[14] - the colonizer was removing and banning a literature not yet twenty years old.

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)"^[14]. 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^[49]. 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'"^[48]. 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"^[48]. 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"^[48]. 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"^[48]. 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"^[48]. 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"^[48].

An extrajudicial organ - the "troika" - passed sentences in Chechen-Ingushetia under operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937, and Yezhov confirmed the troika's composition in the text of the order: "I confirm the following personal composition of the republican, krai and oblast troikas: ... Chechen-Ingush ASSR: chairman - Dementyev; members Yegorov, Vakhayev"^[51] - Dementyev, People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic; Yegorov, first secretary of the oblast committee of the party; and Vakhayev, second secretary. The historian G. I. Kakagasanov describes the institution: "An extrajudicial organ created for carrying out punitive policy... Its composition included: the head of the OGPU, the secretary of the party organization, the prosecutor of the republic, krai or oblast"^[42]. The troika's procedure and its regime of secrecy are prescribed in the text of the order: the troikas examine "the materials on each arrested person or group of arrested persons", and first-category sentences are carried out "with the obligatory full preservation in secrecy of the time and place of the carrying out of the sentence"^[51]. The NKVD (the People's Commissariat (ministry) of Internal Affairs - successor of the OGPU and a predecessor of today's FSB) did not inform the families of the condemned of the execution; Kakagasanov writes: "More often this took place under the formula 'convicted without the right of correspondence', which meant 'execution by shooting'"^[42]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov describe also "conviction by albums" - sentencing in absentia on a brief docket, "without acquaintance with the criminal case itself"^[14]: that procedure was set by the orders of the "national lines" of the terror, beginning with NKVD order No. 00485. The investigation of the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center" lasted, by the count of the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov - a contemporary of the events who wrote in emigration - exactly three years^[48]. The Chekists chose not to try 137 people in a single trial and split the "center" into three groups: into the first they gathered the Soviet-party leadership of the republic - Ali Gorchkhanov, Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Khasi Vakhayev, Khamid Okuyev and Tuchaev; into the second - non-party men whom the investigation called the cultural-ideological leadership - Khalid Yandarov, Akhmat Matsiev, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, D. Malsagov, Magomed Mamakayev; into the third - a "terrorist group", into which "the Chekists gathered, by the logic of things, young people alone"^[48]. The groups came before the military tribunal of the North Caucasus Military District; Avtorkhanov writes: "of the roughly 120 people who reached the trial alive, only one - the former mullah Akhmat Tuchaev - admitted his guilt. All the rest declared with one voice that all the crimes imputed to them were an invention, and their 'sincere confessions' false and fabricated from beginning to end", "The entire charge and the evidence in the case were built exclusively on this personal testimony extracted by torture", "There was no other material evidence or witness testimony to substantiate the charge" - and the tribunal passed its guilty verdict on the first group "solely on the basis of the testimony of one defendant – A. Tuchaev"^[48]. The tribunal sentenced Abdul-Khalim Salamov, Ali Gorchkhanov and Tuchaev to be shot, the rest - to prison terms of 7 to 25 years^[48]. From the death cell Tuchaev submitted a petition for clemency addressed to Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and wrote in it: he had confessed to crimes he had not committed because only so had the NKVD promised to free his family and spare his life^[48]. Moscow commuted the death sentences of all three and reduced the terms of the others; the "terrorist group" the same tribunal released in its entirety, the case of the "culture-ideologists" it "did not accept for proceedings at all", and those who sat without "cases" the Chekists put through the Special Board - the NKVD's own departmental "court", which passed sentences with no trial and no defendant present^[48].

On the morning after the night arrests of 31 July 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party resolved: to hold meetings in all kolkhozes "with an explanation of the political situation in the countryside", and by 5 August - district and Komsomol meetings "on the results of the operation"^[49]. On 3 August 1937 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the TsK VKP(b)), by telegram No. 1178, obliged the oblast committees of the party: to organize "in each oblast, by districts, 2-3 open show trials" of assigned "wreckers of agriculture" - "covering the course of the trials widely in the local press"^[49]. The newspaper "Groznensky Rabochy" ["The Grozny Worker"] covered the open trials from August 1937 - on 20 August under the headline: "The Trial of the Former Managers of Chechingtorg"^[49]. From 11 September 1937 the same newspaper printed denunciations in waves, day after day: 11 September: "Untangle the Bourgeois-Nationalist Tangle" - with a report on a meeting at which "of the 587 members and 132 candidate members of the party present at the meeting... 520 people spoke"; 15 September: "Enemies of the Chechen-Ingush People: Root Out and Smash to the End the Band of Bourgeois Nationalists"; 16 September: "Enemies of the People Have the Run of Chechingizdat: the Wolf Pack Is Headed by the Dyed-in-the-Wool Nationalist Arsanukayev"; 17 September: "Expose and Smash the Vile Band of Bourgeois Nationalists! - Such Is the Common Voice of the Party Organizations of Chechen-Ingushetia"; the newspaper denounced people by name - Gorchkhanov, Salamov, Mekhtiev, Vakhayev, Okuyev, Khaniev, Matsiev, Yandarov^[49]. On 27 September the newspaper printed an announcement: "Wreckers of Grain: Toward the Coming Trials" - three days before the report on the trial itself; on 12 October, under the headline: "The Trial of the Wreckers from the Artemovsky Elevator" - the newspaper reported: "the workers and housewives who filled the hall met the verdict with stormy applause"; on 3 November, under the headline: "The Trial of the Wreckers of the Second Oil Refinery"^[49]. In March 1938 the participants of a rally in the Oktyabrsky district of Grozny demanded of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR the shooting of "rabid fascist dogs"^[49], "Groznensky Rabochy" on 11 March printed an open letter of the Pioneers of Grozny school No. 3 demanding "the physical annihilation of the bestial enemies of the people"^[52], and of the trial of 16-26 March the historian K. G. Dendiev writes: the proceedings in the case of the "Bourgeois-nationalist Trotskyite-Bukharinite counter-revolutionary group of Abastov, Kebiev, Zarmayev and others" "were heard in open session, with the participation of a state prosecutor and an organ of the defense", and the indictment was printed by "Groznensky Rabochy"^[49].

On 11 July 1937 the occupation authorities approved the number of people "subject to shooting" in Chechnya: 862 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off") and 555 "criminals" - 1,417 people in all^[49]; operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July records for the ChIASSR: 500 people - to be shot (the order's "first category")^[51]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the executed writers: "of the 12 members of the Chechen-Ingush Union of Writers 9 were arrested, 7 convicted, among them four - S. Baduev, A. Dudayev, Sh. Aiskhanov, S. Oziev - sentenced to be shot"^[14]. The NKVD (a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested one of those four - the writer Abdi Dudayev - on 24 November 1937 "without the prosecutor's sanction", on the standard charge of "anti-Soviet agitation", and on 2 December, by decision of the "troika under the NKVD of the ChIASSR", the Chekists shot him - eight days from arrest to killing; the finding on his case of 13 May 1958 states: "The investigation of Dudayev's case was conducted in violation of the law; confrontations with witnesses were not held"^[49]. Moscow personally confirmed the lists of detainees for shooting: Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov signed the list of 7 December 1937, and on 28 December the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR passed 32 death sentences on it^[49]; on 12 September 1938 the Politburo confirmed a new list of those subject to its court: of the 61 under investigation, 50 went under the case of the "bourgeois-nationalist center", and 55 of them stood "in the shooting article"^[49]. On 29 June 1938 the Military Collegium sentenced a large group of the republic's technical intelligentsia to various terms, and 30 people to be shot - the Chekists shot them the same day^[49]. The indictment in the case of Porubay - deputy People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, put on trial after the change of course - states: "Falsified the investigative cases of Khamzatkhanov, Aliev, Khasiev, Kadilov, Ukhuev, Mutushev; all these persons were sentenced by decision of the troika to VMN" - "VMN" meant execution by shooting^[49]. The Chekists dumped the bodies of the killed into two trench-pits at the central cemetery of Grozny - the historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva writes: there, "in October, November and December 1937", they dumped "the bodies of the shot"^[49]. A. Bozhedomov opened the burial in the summer of 1990 - by excavations with the participation of members of the Chechen-Ingush "Memorial" and staff of the museum of local history^[49].

The conduct of secret mass "national operations" of the NKVD for the physical annihilation of members of ethnic minorities^[53]. The mechanism was set by the operational orders of people's commissar Yezhov: No. 00485 of 11 August 1937 opened the Polish operation - "to begin, from 20 August 1937, a broad operation aimed at the complete liquidation of the local organizations of the 'POW'" with completion "within a three-month term"^[54], - and No. 00439 of 25 July 1937 the German one^[55]; the Greek, Bulgarian and other operations followed their template^[53]. The scale is recorded in the perpetrator's own accounting: according to the summary figures of the 1st Special Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR dated 30 August 1938, 94,659 people were arrested in the republic under orders Nos. 00485, 00593 and others (54,011 on the Polish line, 23,036 on the German, 5,642 on the Greek), of whom 61,683 had been convicted by 1 July 1938; in all, of the 197,945 people convicted by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR over the reporting period, 122,274 were sentenced to be shot - nearly two out of every three^[56]. Across all the "national lines" of the USSR, 335,513 people were convicted, and 73.66% of them were shot^[13].

Mass forced resettlement by quota: "under the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of December 5, 1939 and March 2, 1940, subject to administrative resettlement were the employees of the former state institutions, courts, police, army, merchants, Polish settlers, landowners, owners of plants and factories, and their families"; in total "up to 1,250,000 people were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[57]. The waves were separate: the osadniks were deported under the USSR Sovnarkom resolution of December 5, 1939, no. 2010-558ss - its text remains in the closed Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (fond 93), while the mechanics of the operation are known from the NKVD Instruction approved on December 29, 1939^[58]; the families of officers, policemen and prison guards were deported under the resolution of March 2, 1940, no. 289-127ss^[59].

The neutralization of the politically active stratum through mass arrests: immediately after the "People's Assembly" came "the arrests of leading figures of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, by lists prepared in advance, drawn up in the Soviet consulate"^[60]; "in all, in 1939—1941 the NKVD organs arrested 21,982 Poles, 23,163 Ukrainians and 13,160 Jews"^[60], and those arrested faced execution, prison or the GULAG camps: "in total, during 1939—1941, between 16 and 35 thousand OUN members were shot or imprisoned"^[60].

The transfer of hundreds of thousands of people into special settlements and camps as a system of forced labor: in under two years "up to 1,250,000 people (about 10% of the population) were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[57] – the deportees were assigned to labor in remote regions with no right to leave.

The USSR declared the economic protest of the Chechens an "uprising" organized by "fascist agents". The party organs of the Soviet colonial administration of Checheno-Ingushetia, "at the prompting of the NKVD-NKGB", gave the protest of late October 1941 a name the historians render as: "an open anti-Soviet 'kulak-bandit uprising'"; the events themselves, as the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write, bore "features of social protest"^[14]. This version became fixed in the documents: in the report of the commander of the 141st Regiment of the NKVD Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), Lieutenant Colonel Khalukhaev, dated 26 June 1943, October 1941 is described thus: "an armed counter-revolutionary uprising was raised by German-fascist agents"^[46]. The count kept by the secret services contradicted the picture they were imposing: over the whole of 1941 the NKVD organs eliminated 12 "bands" with a total strength of up to 100 men, recording four "bandit incidents" in which nine people died^[14]. There is no uprising behind these figures: all the "bands" the NKVD counted and eliminated over the year held up to a hundred men for the whole of Chechnya, and nine people died in the clashes. The desertion the colonizer imputed to the Chechen people was the desertion of recruits, not of frontline soldiers - the certificate of Dementyev, head of the Grozny Region directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, dated 1956, states: during the first mobilization "450 men deserted en route to the dispatch point, 269 men evaded the call-up"^[46], and the historians confirm: the detained deserters were "by no means from the front, but from units being formed in Grozny or passing through it"^[14]. On frontline desertion Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "over the first six months of the war, 38 known cases of desertion from the front line"; at the same time, they write, in Checheno-Ingushetia "they began to count as 'deserters' also those who fled death in the 'labor army' or evaded mobilization into it," and they also write about the bookkeeping: "A man was counted as an 'evader', or even a deserter, if he failed to appear at the recruitment stations at first summons, even by reason of disability or of his own death"^[14]. The historians note that the assessments rested "on the data of the central apparatus of the NKVD of the ChIASSR exclusively," and that "the only real thing here was the bombing of Chechen auls and hamlets by Soviet aviation. Everything else is open to question"^[14]. The military commissariats carried out three call-ups: 29 August - 2 September 1941 (8 thousand men were subject to call-up), in October 1941 (4,733 men) and on 17-25 March 1942: "14,577 men were subject to call-up, of whom only 4,395 were called up"^[46] - people evaded the call-up en masse. In April 1942 the USSR cancelled the call-up of Chechens and Ingush altogether - Dementyev's certificate states: "In connection with this, in April 1942 there followed an order of the NKO of the USSR cancelling the call-up of Chechens and Ingush into the army"^[46] (the NKO - the USSR ministry of defense). The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writing in emigration, dates the release from service to February 1942 and renders the order's motivation in the words "the Chechens and Ingush, by religious conviction, refuse to eat pork"^[48]. The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that it was the NKVD organs (a predecessor of today's FSB) that obtained the halt of the call-up in March 1942, and render the official motivation thus: "the halt of the call-up was motivated all but by care for the Chechens and Ingush, even by the impossibility of providing their nourishment with meat (the highlanders did not eat pork, and there was practically no mutton or beef laid in as canned food)"^[14]. Two years later the USSR accused the people it had itself removed from the call-up of evading service and going over to the enemy; on this accusation the colonizer built the decree deporting the people from its own lands in 1944, known as Operation "Chechevitsa" ("Lentil") (campaign C1180) and later recognized as genocide of the Chechen people: by Russia in 1991^[61], by the European Parliament in 2004^[62] and by Ukraine in 2022^[63].

In September 1941 the USSR created special departments for the struggle against "banditry" within the local NKVD organs (a predecessor of today's FSB), including in Chechnya, and permanent operational groups in the Shatoy, Galanchozh and Itum-Kale districts, whose task the historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov render in the words "to quickly suppress any manifestations of banditry"^[14]. The first came the military operation of 30 October - 15 November 1941 across the districts of the declared "uprising": according to the report of the 141st Regiment of the NKVD Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), 36 people recorded as "bandits" were killed and 251 detained - "insurgents — 127, bandits — 7, bandit-insurgents — 13, deserters — 104"^[46]. On 5 December 1941, in the village of Gikhi in the Urus-Martan district, the regiment in a two-hour battle destroyed a group of ten people that the report calls the "cadre band" of Kaidov Azak: three were killed, seven detained^[46]. In the same December, to support the operational groups, the USSR formed the 178th Motorized Rifle Battalion in Chechnya, expanded the following year into the 141st Regiment of NKVD troops (in the commander's report the regiment is called a rifle regiment, by the historians - a mountain-rifle one)^[14]. The regiment's count for 1941, from 25 October to 1 January 1942: 59 people killed, 390 detained^[46].

The USSR built its accusations of Chechen "banditry" on falsified statistics: an inspection by the central apparatus of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) in the summer of 1943 showed that of 213 "bandits" reported killed, only 22 people had ever been on file; at the end of August 1943 the files listed 359 members of "bandit groups" for the entire Checheno-Ingushetia^[14]. On 9 November 1943 Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Kobulov submitted to People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria a report "On the Situation in the Districts of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR" "with deliberately false figures alleging a mass presence of active bandits and deserters. 'Kobulov! A very good memorandum,' Beria noted on the report, and set in motion the preparation of Operation 'Chechevitsa'"^[14]. Beria lied in his final report as well - he informed the leadership of the USSR that the deportation had passed "without serious instances of resistance or incidents"; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "In his report to the country's leadership the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs lied outright: the deportation of the Chechens was accompanied by numerous incidents and mass killings of peaceful residents"^[14]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writing about this in emigration in 1952, took the official version apart point by point. The motive announced by the decree of 25 June 1946 he quotes verbatim - "Many Chechens and Ingush, incited by German agents, voluntarily joined formations organized by the Germans and, together with the German armed forces, took up arms against the Red Army... Therefore the Checheno-Ingush Republic is to be liquidated and its population deported" - and calls it calculated "for the ignorance of the Soviet people and the unawareness of the West"^[48]. Against this version he sets two facts: "during the Second World War not once did a German soldier set foot on the territory of the Checheno-Ingush Republic, save for the brief occupation of the border settlement of Malgobek, populated by Russians," and "the Chechens and Ingush were physically unable to join German formations, since there was no compulsory conscription in Checheno-Ingushetia"^[48].

In April-May 1943 officers of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB), led by Kolesnikov, Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the republic, in the course of "anti-banditry operations" detained Chechens "suspected of ties with bandits" and shot them "unlawfully, without trial or investigation" - 25 people in two months, "citizens guilty of nothing whatsoever": in the village of Bachi-Yurt, on the orders of cavalry platoon commander Volosov, the convoy shot 17 of 19 detainees, among them a 15-year-old girl; in the village of Belty a convoy headed by Soviet militia section commander Dubasov shot four people "without any pretext whatsoever" and delivered their corpses to the district branch of the NKVD; at the Kuloi hamlet Meishvili, a battalion commander of the NKVD troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), shot the brothers Baisar and Baim Bataev, Dzhamalani Pitalov and Mavla Chebiev^[46]. The executioners wrote the shootings off as "attempted escape," and Kolesnikov issued "findings that the use of weapons had been proper"; all this was established by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office following a letter from the Chechen Dokhtukaev, written from exile - the results were reported in 1957 to Bulganin, head of the government of the USSR, but no one was ever brought to court: the ten-year statute of limitations had expired^[46].

The USSR lured out by deception the Chechens who were hiding in the mountains from the occupation regime, promising freedom - in the NKVD's (predecessor of today's FSB) papers this was called "legalization." Those who believed the promises were arrested or deported together with their compatriots to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (today's Kyrgyzstan) in the course of the genocidal Operation "Chechevitsa." The report of Dementiev, head of the Grozny Oblast internal affairs directorate (1956), states: in September-October 1943 alone "30 bands were legalized, comprising 183 men, plus 60 lone bandits"^[46]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: the NKVD files "listed 1,300 so-called legalized bandits, that is, men who had come forward, by mutual agreement, with a confession and been released from repression for it. All or nearly all of them were arrested shortly before the deportation or in its course"^[46]. In the days of the deportation the troops announced clemency for those who had gone into the mountains - and deported those who came out. A Russian student eyewitness from Grozny, whose testimony was printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949 and is cited by the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writes: "At the same time an amnesty [a promise not to punish] was announced for those who had gone into the mountains, if they came forward voluntarily. Some of them did in fact come forward, but were deported all the same…"^[48]. In the summer of 1944 the colonizer repeated the deception: historian P. M. Polian writes that in June "tried and tested" religious authorities, deported in February, were brought from Kazakhstan to Grozny, and they induced hundreds of Chechens in hiding "toward legalization and, hence, deportation"^[46].

The colonizer cut the Chechens off from medical care from the first day of the deportation: the Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes that the troops, driving people out of their homes, "threw the sick off their hospital beds"^[64]. Typhus broke out in the trains - the certificate of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) of 7 April 1944 on those brought to Kirghizia states: "412 people died and 278 were hospitalized"^[65]. With no quarantine and no medicine at the destinations the epidemic spread: by 1 April 1944 about 4,800 people had fallen ill in Kazakhstan, over 2,000 in Kirghizia^[14]. The colonizer forbade local residents, on pain of arrest, to help the dying Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov writes: "The local population was categorically forbidden to render help to the dying by giving food, water or medicine. Even a simple display of human sympathy for the perishing women and children was punished with arrests"^[48].

The USSR, deporting the Chechens and Ingush from their native land, made no provision for food at the places of exile - and from famine and disease in exile almost a third of the deported died within four and a half years. The colonizer had taken the people's livestock and food back home: by the resolution of the State Defense Committee of the USSR of 31 January 1944 the people's commissariats (ministries) were obliged "to accept in the North Caucasus from the special settlers livestock and agricultural produce... issuing exchange receipts for what was accepted," while from the confiscated livestock 350 horses "fit for cavalry service" were handed over to the cavalry units of the Soviet militia^[66]. Pchelkin, People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the Kirghiz SSR, reported to People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria on 22 April 1944: the food the exiles had brought with them "is running out," "the established ration is critically insufficient," the collective farms are "in no position to help for lack of it, as a result of which in some districts there are instances... of the eating of roots and grasses"^[46]. Historian P. M. Polian writes: for lack of food, shelter and fodder the exiles in Kirghizia "had to slaughter up to 90%" of the livestock issued "in compensation for that left behind in their former places of residence," while the funds allocated to them were handed out by local bosses to others - in the Kazalinsk district "one ton of bread was issued to the local party activists," and in the collective farms of the Bazar-Kurgan district "food was issued only to able-bodied special settlers, while those unfit for work were deprived of rations"^[46]. In exile the Chechens and Ingush died by the tens of thousands: by the end of 1944 the number of exiles ("special settlers" in the colonizer's terms) had fallen by about 11.5 thousand in Kirghizia and by more than 46 thousand in Kazakhstan^[14]. In 1945, among the North Caucasus exiles, 44,652 children died - 2,230 were born; no fewer than 80 thousand people were starving^[14]; in the winter of 1948-1949 in the Kazakh SSR (today's Kazakhstan) up to 118 thousand were starving, and 418 people died of hunger^[14]. By October 1948 about 146.9 thousand North Caucasus exiles had died in exile; historians put the direct losses of the Chechens and Ingush at 145.7 thousand people, and together with the unborn - at 300 thousand; the people recovered its pre-war numbers only by 1959^[14].

The Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) obliged the exiled Chechens and Ingush ("special settlers" in the colonizer's terms) over 12 years of age to report monthly to the special commandant's office - the agency's surveillance post at the place of exile; from age 16 the commandant's office opened personal files; the colonizer forbade them to join the Bolshevik party, its youth league (the "Komsomol") and the trade unions, and did not take them into the army^[67]. From January 1945 the commandant could, without trial, arrest "offenders" for up to 5 days or fine them up to 100 rubles^[14]. By the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 26 November 1948 the deportation was declared eternal: the Chechens and Ingush were "exiled in perpetuity," with up to 20 years of hard labor for escape and up to 5 years of prison for aiding escapees^[14].

The colonizer locked the exiled Chechens and Ingush into their places of settlement: the commandant's offices forbade absences without their permission, and the mutual surety of the "ten-yard groups" was in force - ten neighboring households answered for one another^[14]. People fled anyway: from the spring of 1944 to the end of 1950 - over 20.6 thousand escapes, and the chekists caught nearly all the escapees^[14]. In 1948 the colonizer forbade the exiles to live within 100 kilometers of the USSR border and forcibly resettled over 6 thousand people deeper into Kazakhstan^[14].

The colonizer abolished the very republic of the Chechens and Ingush and carved up their land among its neighbors: on 7 March 1944 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued the decree "On the Liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR and the Administrative Organization of Its Territory"^[67]: lowland Chechnya went into the newly created Grozny Okrug of Stavropol Krai - a month later the colonizer transformed it into Grozny Oblast^[46]; the mountain part was divided between the Georgian SSR (today's Georgia) and the Dagestan ASSR (today's Dagestan within Russia), and the Ingush lands were handed to North Ossetia^[14]. The abolition was given legal form by the law of 25 June 1946^[67].

On 23 February 1944 the colonizer mobilized students and housewives not employed at factories in Grozny and from six in the morning drove them out to the Chechen auls, from which, half an hour after their arrival, the troops took away the arrested Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of one of the mobilized - a Russian student of the Grozny Petroleum Institute: "Thus we were, according to a carefully worked-out plan, distributed among the auls, 20-30 people per aul"^[48]. The student writes about the work they were given in the auls: "The task of the students was to keep the farms in order until the arrival of the settlers from Kursk and Oryol oblasts. We were to gather the livestock, feed it, take in the grain, the implements, and so on"^[48]. By mid-May 1944 settlers had arrived in Grozny Oblast numbering 40% of the deported Chechens, including 6,800 families from Stavropol Krai^[14]. Into the districts handed to Dagestan the colonizer resettled 65 thousand people from 224 mountain villages of Dagestan^[14]. The settlers died too: in the Aukh district in 1944-1947 about 2 thousand - nearly a third - of the resettled Laks, one of the mountain peoples of Dagestan, died of disease^[14].

On the land emptied by the deportation of the Chechens the colonizer destroyed the urban markers of their history: it ransacked the republican local history museum and blew up the monument to the Chechen commander Aslanbek Sheripov^[14].

The colonizer ravaged the shrines and graves of the deported Chechens. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "...on the orders of the party-soviet organs even mosques and cemeteries were plundered... The grave churts (stones) went into the foundations of factories and livestock farms; they were used to pave city streets and edge sidewalks"^[14]. The colonizer destroyed the city mosque of Grozny^[14].

Having deported the Chechen people in February 1944, the colonizer burned its books and manuscripts. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "On the squares and streets of Grozny bonfires of books blazed up. All literature and textbooks in Arabic, Chechen and Ingush were burned"^[14]. Historian D. A. Khozhaev writes about the clan chronicles - the tyaptars: "For three days and three nights a bonfire burned in the center of Grozny, in whose flames were destroyed nearly all the Chechen tyaptars, as well as all the manuscript and printed literature devoted to the history and culture of the Chechens"^[68]. From the auls, writes D. A. Khozhaev, open trucks carried "ancient manuscripts, religious-philosophical treatises, Arabic-language books on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, historical hadiths, ancient legends of the Chechens and Ingush in Arabic and in Chechen (in Arabic script), secular belles-lettres. All these books and manuscripts were dumped in Grozny straight onto the snow by the public toilet in the square adjoining the Palace of Pioneers"^[64].

The colonizer erased Chechen and Ingush names from the map. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "Streets, settlements, auls and districts were hastily renamed"^[14]. Historian P. M. Polian writes of the Ingush lands handed to North Ossetia: "all the Ingush place names were repressed as well; they were replaced with Ossetian or Russian ones" - by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of 29 April 1944 the Psedakh district became Alansky, Nazran district - Kosta-Khetagurovsky, Achaluki district - Nartovsky, and by the decree of 30 August 1944 the colonizer renamed "all the districts and their centers" of Grozny Oblast^[46]. The Chechen lands that had gone to Georgia the colonizer named the Akhalkhevi district^[14].

Regular chekist-military operations by the NKVD and MGB to sweep western Ukrainian villages: the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR T. Strokach personally "directed and coordinated operational-chekist operations to liquidate the underground of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and mass deportations of the population in Western Ukraine"^[1]. Already "on April 5, 1944, on the basis of a directive of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR, a scheme of arrests and deportation of OUN–UPA members was worked out"^[57].

Extrajudicial killings of civilians in the course of suppressing the insurgency: the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee itself admitted, in its resolution "On the Political and Economic Situation of the Western Oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR" of May 26, 1953: "From 1944 through 1952, up to 500 thousand people in the western oblasts of Ukraine were subjected to various kinds of repression, including over 134 thousand arrested, over 153 thousand killed, and over 203 thousand deported forever from the Ukrainian SSR"^[69][12] – the authorities did not divide the killed into insurgents and civilians, and already on July 2, 1953, after Beria's arrest, the resolution itself was revoked as conducive to "the activization of bourgeois-nationalist elements"^[69]. Terror was also waged by disguised MGB "special groups" acting under the guise of the UPA: the military prosecutor of the MVD troops of the Ukrainian district, Kosharsky, in his report to Khrushchev (February 15, 1949), cited "examples of beatings, rapes and robberies of the population" by agent-fighters and stated: "the actions of the so-called MGB special groups are of a pronounced bandit, anti-Soviet character and, of course, cannot be justified by any operational considerations"^[15].

The creation of an atmosphere of total fear through the bloody provocations of NKVD special groups operating in the guise of the UPA: People's Commissar Strokach "initiated the formation of special groups of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR from former partisans for the struggle against the UPA" and "personally interrogated the captured leaders of the OUN networks of Western Ukraine"^[1]. The terror was also demonstrative: "one of the forms of struggle was the policy of intimidating OUN and UPA members and the local population: open trials and executions, putting the bodies of the dead on public display, and destroying insurgent graves"^[70].

The forcible removal of insurgents' families to Siberia and the deportation of the Ukrainians of Zakerzonnia: the removal of "bandit accomplices" with their entire families began at once - already in the summer of 1944 "more than 17,000 people were carried off to Krasnoyarsk Krai"^[57]; in all, in 1944–52, 203,662 people were removed to special settlements, among them "representatives of the families of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and their sympathizers — 182,543 people"^[57]. Operation "Vistula" was carried out in order to "deprive it of socio-economic and moral-psychological support from the local Ukrainian population," and ended in the scattering of the community: the authorities rid themselves of the Ukrainian population, "dispersing about 150 thousand people"^[4].

Mass arrests of UPA fighters, OUN members, and those suspected of aiding them, followed by dispatch to the GULAG camps, upon which the regime placed "the isolation of 'unreliable elements'" as one of its key tasks^[12]. During Operation "Vistula," for civilians suspected of assisting the underground there was provision for "the introduction of courts-martial and concentration camps, in particular at Jaworzno"^[4]. By 1951 Ukrainians had become the second-largest nation of the GULAG: according to the agency's own statistics, the "National composition of GULAG prisoners (as of January 1, 1951)" counted 506,221 Ukrainians out of some 2.5 million prisoners - about 20%^[71].

The use of captured resistance members and deportees as free labor: the tasks of the GULAG included "using them as cheap labor and transferring them, as needed, from place to place"^[12]; deportees from Western Ukraine were sent to special settlements and hard labor - in the summer of 1944 alone "more than 17,000 people were carried off to Krasnoyarsk Krai"^[57].

Fabricated repressions against figures of the Ukrainian and Jewish intelligentsia: in the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, "on July 18, 1952 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court passed death sentences on 13 people, including 5 natives of Ukraine, the well-known Jewish writers and poets D. Bergelson, D. Hofshtein, L. Kvitko, P. Markish, I. Fefer. On August 12, 1952 they were all executed"^[8].

Targeted arrests of the new Ukrainian intelligentsia, dissidents, and protest participants (including after the premiere of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors") to suppress the nascent resistance^[72].

Use of political trials, interrogations, and administrative pressure by the KGB on the signatories of the "Letter of 139" to create an atmosphere of fear in cultural circles: "Administrative repressions against the 'signatories' began, along with KGB pressure. Rumors spread across Kyiv and Ukraine about the existence of an underground terrorist Banderite organization run by Western intelligence services"^[73].

Mass arrests of members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the fabrication of criminal cases: Vasyl Stus was "arrested on January 12, 1972 together with other Ukrainian writer-human rights defenders: I. Svitlychny, Ye. Sverstiuk, Ihor and Iryna Kalynets," and after joining the Helsinki Group in October 1979 he was "arrested a second time on May 14, 1980" and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile^[1]. He "died in the punishment cell of special-regime camp VS-389/36" and was buried "in a nameless grave under No. 9 in the camp cemetery"^[1].

The forced disappearance of a key functionary of the movement: "on the night of January 15–16, 1994, two armed unknown men burst into the NRU secretariat in Kyiv, took some documents, and searched for Boichyshyn" - Mykhailo Boichyshyn, head of the Rukh secretariat, was never seen again. The investigation was sabotaged: law enforcement "at first was in no hurry to accept the report of the politician's disappearance, and then demonstratively displayed disinterest in solving the crime," and "the investigators were interested not so much in the circumstances of the attack on the Secretariat and Boichyshyn's disappearance as in the party's financing"^[74].

The immediate elimination of the independent press: GKChP resolution No. 2 of 19 August 1991 ordered "to temporarily limit the list of published central, Moscow city, and oblast socio-political editions to the following newspapers: 'Trud,' 'Rabochaya tribuna,' 'Izvestia,' 'Pravda,' 'Krasnaya zvezda,' 'Sovetskaya Rossiya,' 'Moskovskaya pravda,' 'Leninskoye znamya,' 'Selskaya zhizn'"^[75] – anything not on the list could not appear.

An attempt to physically eliminate the leader of the democratic opposition V. Yushchenko at the height of the election campaign by dioxin poisoning: in late December 2004 "a patient presented with TCDD poisoning; the levels in his blood serum (108000 pg/g lipid weight) were more than 50 000-fold greater than those in the general population"^[76]. The poisoning led to severe disfigurement of the candidate's face.

The imposition of corrupt gas-supply schemes through intermediary companies: Moscow "used a series of intermediary trading companies (Itera from 1998, Eural Trans Gas from 2003, Rosukrenergo (RUE) from 2005) to transport, and sometimes to supply, the gas to Ukraine," a practice that "was long criticized in European government circles and by corporate governance bodies (where there was concern about their opacity)"^[77]. RUE's co-owner Dmytro Firtash told the US ambassador in December 2008 outright that "He acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich's approval to get into business in the first place"^[78].

The installation of a controlled administration under military cover: the decisions of the Crimean parliament were taken in conditions where "behind the backs of Crimea's self-defense forces, our servicemen, of course, stood"^[79]. The UN General Assembly declared the ensuing referendum void and confirmed that it "was not authorized by Ukraine"^[80]. OHCHR recorded the "election" scene itself: overnight into 27 February "armed groups without insignia took over the buildings of the local government and parliament," and "on 27 February, members of the Parliament of Crimea, in the presence of gunmen, dismissed the local Government and elected Sergey Aksenov as the Head of Crimea"^[81].

The seizure of Sloviansk by an armed group that had crossed the border, and the formation of the separatist "DNR"/"LNR": the detachment's commander openly admitted that "in practice it was our detachment that set in motion the flywheel of the war that is still going on," and that "it was I, after all, who pulled the trigger of the war"^[82]. In parallel, "groups of armed men unlawfully carried out a well-organized and coordinated seizure of public buildings and police and security service offices"^[83]. The "republic's" leadership was from the outset dispatched from Moscow: "Alexander Boroday - the first prime minister of the DNR, who in 2014 handed over his powers to Alexander Zakharchenko," a Muscovite raised "in an intelligentsia Moscow family"^[84].

The use of a hacker group linked to the security services to compromise Ukrainian artillerymen's software: "the filename 'Попр-Д30.apk' was linked to a legitimate application which was initially developed domestically within Ukraine by an officer of the 55th Artillery Brigade named Yaroslav Sherstuk," and "in-depth reverse engineering revealed the APK contained an Android variant of X-Agent" - an implant whose exclusive operator is FANCY BEAR^[85]. The same toolkit was used in cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid in the winters of 2015 and 2016^[86][87].

Targeted cyberattacks by Russian security services on distribution substations of the Ukrainian power grid in the winters of 2015 and 2016, aimed at causing mass power outages for the civilian population^[86][87].

An attempted armed seizure of power in the spring of 2014 by storming regional administrations: the UN recorded that already "in mid-April 2014" "groups of armed men unlawfully carried out a well-organized and coordinated seizure of public buildings and police and security service offices in towns and villages of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," and "in order to retain control of the seized areas these groups erected barricades and checkpoints"^[83]. In Kharkiv the coup was quickly suppressed.

The instigation of armed clashes in Odesa on May 2, 2014: the UN records the violence committed "in Odesa on 2 May 2014 during clashes between supporters of unity and supporters of the federalization of Ukraine, as a result of which 48 people died, mostly supporters of the country's federalization," and notes that "no one has yet been held to account"^[83]. The culmination was the fire in the Trade Union Building where activists had taken refuge: the UN monitoring mission listed among the key uninvestigated questions "what caused the fire in the Trade Union building" and "who are the perpetrators of the killings"^[88].

Масштабные операции спецслужб РФ по кибершпионажу, перехвату данных (в том числе через взлом публичных сетей Wi-Fi) и скрытому развертыванию деструктивного ПО против украинских организаций и граждан^[89][90].