Aggressors may use systemic, demonstrative, and large-scale violence against the local population. This form of radical pressure is used to neutralize defenses in the active phase of a conflict and for the subsequent consolidation of the occupation regime. Carrying out mass extrajudicial executions, public reprisals, and torture is aimed at the total psychological breaking of the colonized society's will, the physical suppression of resistance, and coercion into unconditional submission.
The occupation administration of Tersky Town employed mass terrorizing violence: in a petition to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich, the Kabardian prince Sunchaley Yanglychevich Cherkassky reported that the military detachments «burned down and utterly ruined many Shibut and Kalkan and Erokhan and Michkiz kabaks»[1] and «slew many peo[ple]»[1].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy used demonstrative brutal executions to psychologically break the Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov records that the captured leader of the uprising was "hanged by a rib on a hook in accordance with Peter I's order to P.M. Apraksin ('carry out a cruel death penalty')"[2].
The demonstrative destruction of the city as an act of intimidation for the rest of the country. Peter I personally gave the order: "and Baturyn, as a sign to the traitors (since they resisted), burn down entirely as an example to others"[3][4]. Hrushevsky: the Muscovite army, having taken Baturyn "through the treachery of one man," "dealt terribly with the populace: the people were slaughtered, the town razed to the ground, the commanders given over to terrible tortures"[5].
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"[4], "the town was razed to the ground and its inhabitants annihilated," and the returning residents were charged a special tax "for treason"[6]. 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"[6].
Mass executions of captured Cossacks after the capitulation at Perevolochna and Poltava for the final intimidation of the supporters of autonomy[4].
The Regular Army of the Russian Empire instilled submission through fear of the demonstrative destruction of families. Imperial general Yermolov, in his "Address" to the Chechens, declared: "The slightest disobedience… and your auls will be destroyed, your families sold off into the mountains, the amanats hanged, villages exterminated by fire, women and children slaughtered"[7][8].
The Russian Empire destroyed a single village demonstratively, in order to terrorize the rest of the Nokhchi into abandoning their lands. Imperial historian Potto writes that general Yermolov decided to clear the Kumyk plain, "forcing the Chechens to withdraw… beyond the Kachkalyk mountain ridge," and they could be compelled to do so "only by an example of terror," and the aul of Dadi-Yurt "was chosen as the expiatory sacrifice"[8]. Yermolov himself admits this calculation in his "Notes": "only an example of terror can compel them to remove their wives," and after the destruction of the aul "the example of Dadan-Yurt spread terror everywhere"[9].
The Russian Empire exterminated people for show in order to terrorize the highlanders. Historian D. A. Khozhaev writes that at the Gerzel-aul fortification «the tsarist generals decided to stage a demonstrative execution to intimidate the highlanders», for which they summoned «318 respected men from the Aksai (Kumyk and Chechen) villages», whom General Lisanevich, «calling out those assembled one by one… threatened and subjected to insults»[7].
On August 23, 1832, during the storming of Germenchuk, the troops of corps commander Rosen burned alive about 60 encircled defenders of the village, led by Mullah Abdurakhman, who had refused to surrender. Rosen reported to Minister of War Chernyshev: a group "numbering about 60 men ... led by ... Mullah Abdur-Rakhman, was cut off and surrounded by us in one large house"[10]. The imperial historian Volkonsky, writing on the basis of Rosen’s dispatches, acknowledges the method of the massacre: "Major General Volkhovsky ordered burning firewood and hay to be thrown into the chimneys. This had its effect... while the greater part, together with Mullah Abdurakhman, perished in the flames, continuing to chant verses of the Quran"[11]. The demonstrative burning of people alive served to terrorize all of Chechnya; Volkonsky acknowledges the calculation: the destruction of Germenchuk "was bound to have the most crushing effect on the Chechens"[11].
The method of the amanat-and-tribute system of Pullo, commander of the left flank of the Caucasus Line (a chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), was deliberately induced fear. Pullo described it plainly in a memorandum of 1840: "by threatening all the unsubmissive communities with the annihilation of their property, I instilled in them such fear, brought them to such a state, that one after another they began to submit. From 1834 to 1840 the auls of the Michik people, the Aukhovites and the Salatavians that had broken away, of Greater and Lesser Chechnya, and the never-subjugated villages of the Ichkerians and the Gumbetovians recognized the authority of the Russian government" (the listed names are highland communities of Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan)[12]. Fear was not a side effect but a declared instrument: Pullo credits the submission of the communities as the direct result of threats of annihilation.
Feze's spring tour across Chechnya (February-April 1837) was built on demonstrative violence converted into submission. Rozen's report to Minister of War Chernyshev of 4 March 1837 records the result of the annihilation of the auls: "the Chechens, gripped by fear from the preceding actions... fell into great despondency"[10] - after which the oaths followed one after another. Feze himself reported the calculation to General Velyaminov on 15 March 1837: he acted "with the intention of making use, as far as possible, of the panic fear" that had gripped "the Tavlins and the Andians" after the battle at Avtury[12]; Rozen's report of 11 March uses the same word for the demand of submission from the Andians - "wishing to make use of the fear"[10]. Fear drove people off their land: after the March sweeps through the forests the inhabitants, according to the report of 12 April, "were compelled by these searches to withdraw into the distant mountains"[10].
The invasion of Ichkeria (mountainous south-eastern Chechnya) by imperial troops in May 1839 opened with a public threat of annihilation. General Grabbe, commander of the troops of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), in a proclamation "to the Ichkerian people" threatened: "Those auls which give refuge to Tashev-hadji will all be annihilated to their foundations, and your children will long remember how all instigators are punished" (Tashu-Hadji - a sheikh, in 1834-1836 the imam of Chechnya, spiritual and military leader of the Chechen resistance)[13].
General Neidhardt, head of the imperial troops in the Caucasus, in an instruction to the commander of the Nazran detachment of 5 April 1844 prescribed fear as the goal of the troops' actions: "by the simultaneous appearance and actions of detachments from different sides, along the whole extent of the theatres of revolt, to spread fear over the entire population, and, keeping the Chechens in their homes, to prevent them from giving help to the Lezgin tribes" (Lezgin tribes - in the imperial lexicon, the highlanders of Dagestan)[12]. The population's fear here is not a side effect of military operations but their declared goal, set for the troops by written order.
Massacre as a means of intimidation was a conscious practice of the period - and the empire gave awards for it. Historian N. I. Pokrovsky writes of the strike on the hamlet of naib Duba (a deputy of Imam Shamil, leader of the highlanders' resistance to the Russian conquest): "the Russian command did not renounce separate short strikes aimed at terrifying the Chechens. The object of one such strike was the hamlet of naib Duba... What took place was an outright massacre"[14]. For this massacre the empire handed out awards: imperial officer Poltoratsky, a participant in the massacre, cites the order - "for the excellent courage and bravery shown in the action at the annihilation of the aul of Duba, such-and-such are promoted, and from ensign to second lieutenant - Poltoratsky," while Vorontsov, the viceroy in the Caucasus, sent the detachment "128 badges of the military order" for the soldiers[15]. An award for "the action at the annihilation of an aul" is official recognition of massacre as exemplary service.
At the start of the twentieth century the Terek authorities began to bring in military detachments and Cossack units for mass searches of highland auls - formally to confiscate weapons and to "detain fugitives"[16]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write what this turned into: sweeping searches of mountain villages "were as a rule accompanied by looting and other unlawful acts by soldiers and Cossacks, which was encouraged in every way by the Terek authorities, who constantly sought a pretext for applying harsher measures against the highlanders"[16]. How literally this encouragement worked is visible in November 1902: during a search staged by Cossacks at the bazaar of the village of Shaami-Yurt mass disturbances broke out, the ataman of the Samashkinskaya stanitsa, Gridnev, forbade his men to use firearms, and the clash ended without bloodshed - after which the head of the Terek oblast removed Gridnev from his post and expressed displeasure to the Cossacks who had taken part in the disturbances for their "passivity"[16]. The sanction came from the very top: when the head of the Terek oblast reported that the clashes between Chechens and Cossacks were bringing material damage and human casualties and that these groups of the population should be kept apart, Nicholas II replied that "it is precisely this neighbourhood that keeps up in the Cossacks their old ancestral daring, and therefore there is no need whatever to take measures to soften the situation"[17]. Bloodshed in Chechen villages was for the authorities not an incidental cost but the working condition of the land.
In the instructions of Svistunov, head of the Terek oblast, to General Smekalov one demand was invariably repeated: "advance at least little by little, mercilessly destroying everything and everyone before you... Our forces will keep arriving; just mow down everything without pity, beat and hang without mercy" - the instructions are quoted by historian A. I. Ismailova from the imperial publication "Materials for the Description of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78"[18]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov record: at the final stage the punitive forces "acted in full accordance" with this order[16].
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"[19]. The outcome was "the mass Jewish pogroms provoked by the 'Union,' particularly in Ukraine, in the 'Pale of Settlement'"[19].
A military directive of the Russian Empire of late 1907 prescribed to the commander of the brigade stationed in the Grozny and Vedeno okrugs, in the event of an uprising, "...to act with full energy, scattering the bands to the point of total annihilation, and likewise wiping off the face of the earth the villages that sheltered them, bearing in mind that such a method will be not only more effective but also more humane"[16]. The prescription was carried out. In August 1908 the village of Tsatsan-Yurt was subjected to an "execution" with mass searches, and its residents had a "contribution" for undelivered weapons exacted from them - 7 thousand rubles[16]. In 1911, in the Vedeno and Grozny okrugs, all hamlets built "without permission" were demolished, and 100 thousand rubles were exacted from the Chechen population of both okrugs in favor of those who had suffered "...during the attack of Zelimkhan's band"[16]. People from the abrek's circle were killed and hanged: Salambek Gorovodzhiev was hanged; in March 1911 Ayub Tomayev was killed in Starye Atagi[16]. Speech was persecuted in the same manner: "Any propaganda undermining the authority of the government and the local authorities was prohibited in the strictest way", and the offender faced up to three years of prison or a fine of up to 3 thousand rubles[16].
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"[20].
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!"[20]. 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[21]. 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[22].
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[23], 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[24].
The Volunteer Army answered the uprising in Grozny in December 1919 with mass executions: after the suppression of the rising on the night of 23 December the insurgent leader Gikalo reported: "Right now there are nightmarish reprisals in Grozny: 79 people have been hanged and a mass of people shot"[16].
In November 1921 Russian occupation troops under the command of Kotovsky encircled, near the village of Mali Mynky in the north of Zhytomyr Oblast, a detachment of soldiers of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) who had returned from across the Zbruch to raise an uprising against Soviet rule - this raid is known as the Second Winter Campaign[25]. The captured Ukrainians were taken to the neighbouring village of Bazar, and a visiting Russian commission (the «Extraordinary Five») sentenced 359 men to death[26].
The colonizers staged a public execution for intimidation. The day before the shooting they forced the peasants of the village of Bazar to dig a long ditch in a ravine, and brought the residents of the surrounding villages to the execution site[26]. The purpose is recorded in the testimonies gathered by a courier of the Ukrainian underground who visited the site immediately after the execution: the people were herded there «to deter the population from attempts to resist Soviet rule»[26]. A detachment of the invader's army surrounded the 359 captured Ukrainians in a tight ring and shot them before the eyes of their assembled compatriots[26].
The calculation of intimidation is recorded in the sentence itself: the commission resolved to shoot the prisoners in order «to show the entire capitalist world and its hirelings that the power of the Soviets mercilessly punishes anyone who attempts to disrupt its peaceful work»[26].
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"[16].
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")[27].
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[27].
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"[28]. 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"[28]. 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"[28]. 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[28]. 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"[28]. 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"[28], "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"[29], 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"[28].
Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write about the days of the deportation of the Chechens: "over the two or three days that the deportation lasted, killing one or two people here and there, the punitive forces destroyed in total no less than a thousand people. And it was announced loudly and distinctly, in Russian: for attempted escape - execution, for failure to obey an order - execution, for expressing protest - execution"[16]. The Chechen historian Dalkhan Khozhaev writes that the threats "were announced in Russian, though many did not understand the language," and the toll of reprisals began within the first hours: "On the Chechen plain hundreds of people (men, women, children and the old) were shot within a few hours"; in the mountains, where people were driven to the roads on foot, "more often than on the plain, they shot down stragglers, the enfeebled, those who misunderstood an order, or simply - 'attempting to escape'"[30]. Historian Z. S. Isakieva writes about the columns from the mountain villages: "Those who could not walk were led out of the column and shot, without even permission to bury them"[31].
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"[19]. 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"[32].
The staging of public political persecution (attacks on Rylsky, Sosiura, Yanovsky, the campaign against "cosmopolitans"), instilling an atmosphere of fear. Its outcome was the execution of the defendants in the JAC case: "on August 12, 1952 they were all executed"[33].
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"[34].
Engagement in combat operations of Russian neo-Nazi groups (such as the "Rusich" sabotage and reconnaissance group under the command of A. Milchakov), whose ringleaders openly called for unmotivated sadistic violence against civilians ("Slaughter the homeless, the puppies, and the children!")[35].