Aggressors may use propaganda and harsh censorship to replace objective facts with fabricated narratives. Instilling a distorted lens, in which acts of occupation are presented as salvation and the blame for suffering is shifted onto the local population itself, ensures the ideological legitimization of domination.
The implantation of a narrative about the unbreakable bond between Kyiv and Moscow, serving the political aims of the metropole: the author sought "to give the Muscovite tsar the motivation to continue the struggle with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth" and "to ease the incorporation of the Hetmanate's elite into the Russian ruling estate"[1].
In 1830, during an ongoing earthquake, General Rozen 4th, who commanded the troops on the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the eastern section of the empire's fortified border along the Terek and Sunzha rivers), on the orders of commander-in-chief Paskevich sent proclamations out to the auls, instilling in the people an artificial picture of the world: the natural disaster was declared God's punishment for resisting the empire. The historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov wrote about how this lie sounded among the Nokhchi: "supporters of the Russian orientation claimed that the earthquake was caused by the wrath of Allah over the attempt at an armed uprising"[2]. The imperial historian Volkonsky acknowledges the source of the suggestion: the commander-in-chief "ordered General Rozen 4th to spread entirely opposite rumors among the people, namely, that the earthquake had been sent down by God upon the Mountain Peoples for their ill-intentioned acts against the Russian government"[3]. The imperial historian Potto recorded the act: Rozen "resorted to proclamations in which he sought to assure the people that the earthquake had been sent down upon them as punishment for their treason and their ill-intentioned acts against the Russian government"[4].
At the beginning of 1844, after the defeats of the imperial army in 1843, general Neidhardt, head of the empire's troops in the Caucasus, issued a proclamation to the highlanders that inverted the picture of the war: the invader in it is not the imperial general who brought the troops, but Shamil (the imam, leader of the resistance of the highlanders of Dagestan and Chechnya to the Russian conquest). The proclamation paints Shamil as a man "who preaches equality and the extermination of all hereditary authorities with the sole aim of seizing the inheritances of the khans and beks" and who "has filled your auls with hated murtazigats... has burdened you with heavy taxes..." (murtazigats - mounted warriors of the Imamate's standing army)[5]. The result of the proclamation historian N. I. Pokrovsky described briefly: "But the wails did not help" - by wails he means these imperial exhortations themselves[5].
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"[6]. 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"[6]. 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"[7] - 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.
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"[2]. 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"[8]. 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[2]. 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"[8], 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"[2]. 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"[2]. 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"[2]. 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"[8] - 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"[8] (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"[9]. 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)"[2]. 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[10], by the European Parliament in 2004[11] and by Ukraine in 2022[12].
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[2]. 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'"[2]. 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"[2]. 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"[9]. 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"[9].
Creation of an artificial picture of radiological well-being and the criminal, forced marching of people into the May Day demonstrations in Kyiv under radioactive fallout to mask the catastrophe[13].