Aggressors may systematically disseminate a narrative that the culture, way of life, and social organization of an Indigenous people are primitive and undeveloped. Constructing an image of backwardness serves the legitimization of domination, making it possible to justify occupation and repression with the fabricated necessity of bringing progress and "civilization."
The government of the Russian Empire justified expansion with ideas of enlightening undeveloped societies: historian Michael Khodarkovsky states the ambition of the metropole's officials "to bring both Christianity and civilization to the 'wild and uncivilized' peoples along its borders"[1].
On 31 July 1925 the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, in the order justifying the operation to disarm Chechnya, declared the Chechens incapable of proper farming: "The rich lands granted to the Chechens on the plain after the revolution are not used by them in full; they run their agriculture in backward forms, are not industrious"[2]. The accusation stands in a military order as one of the grounds for sending in troops: the lands were "granted" to the people by the authorities themselves, their way of farming was declared backward by the same authorities, and the conclusion drawn from this assessment was a military operation. Historian T. U. Elbuzdukayeva, who publishes the order, also cites its continuation: "political indications" had ripened - the population's weariness of war and the demand to fight "banditry"[2] - that is, even by the document's own logic the war was to be waged not on economic backwardness, yet it is backwardness that is set down as a justification.