Aggressors may carry out large-scale, targeted massacres of unarmed civilians. This form of radical terror is used to physically eliminate resistance (neutralization of defenses) and to achieve a rapid forcible seizure of governance over a territory by creating an atmosphere of total fear and paralyzing the will to defend.
The punitive detachments physically exterminated the local population: in a petition to Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich, the Kabardian prince Sunchaley Yanglychevich Cherkassky reported that in the settlements they «slew many other peo[ple]»[1].
The regular army of the Tsardom of Muscovy physically exterminated inhabitants who refused to submit to the occupation: the historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov states that in 1708 «military detachments were sent to the Terek that physically annihilated any population showing the slightest disobedience»[2].
During the storming of a Nokhchi aul, the Russian Empire exterminated its inhabitants without distinction of sex or age. Historian D. A. Khozhayev writes that "the brutalized punitive forces spared neither women nor children," and, breaking into the houses, "slaughtered everyone without mercy"[3]. The organizer himself, general Yermolov, admits the toll in his "Notes": "all who bore arms were exterminated, and their number could not have been fewer than four hundred," while "a far greater number were slaughtered or perished in the houses from the effect of artillery and fire"[4]. Imperial historian Potto confirms that the aul was taken only when "every one of its defenders had been exterminated to a man," and those slaughtered or killed in the fire numbered twice as many as the one hundred forty who survived[5].
The imperial historian Potto describes how, on the night of March 6, 1820, the Greben Cossack regiment "burst without resistance into the aul [Topli], still sunk in deep sleep," the Cossacks "rushed through the saklias with daggers," and "part of the inhabitants were slaughtered before they could rise from their beds"[5].
The Russian Empire exterminated unarmed people whom it had itself convened under the pretext of an inquiry. Historian D. A. Khozhaev writes that after General Grekov attempted «to inflict a physical insult» on the Chechen mullah Uchar-Hadji from the village of Mayrtup and was killed by him, «after Lisanevich's command „Stab them! the mass extermination by the soldiers of all the unarmed highlanders present in the fortification began»[3]. The imperial historian Potto confirms that both generals «fell at the hand of a fanatic»[5]."
At dawn on January 10, 1827, the Cossacks of the detachment of General Laptev, commander of the left flank of the Caucasus Line, having burst into the village of Uzeni-Yurt, cut down unarmed inhabitants fleeing across the Argun. The imperial historian Potto recorded: the Cossacks, «having barely managed to overtake the tail of the fleeing, seized only three women and killed and wounded some fifteen people»[6]. The killed and wounded were unarmed people overtaken in flight. Armed resistance, as the same Potto wrote, was mounted later only by those inhabitants who had managed to take refuge in the forest.
At dawn on December 19, 1830, Cossacks of General Velyaminov's detachment, having burst into the sleeping village of Dzulgai-Yurt, cut down the inhabitants caught unawares. The imperial historian Potto recorded: "thirty-nine people were taken prisoner, and about twelve were cut down. The rest, having taken cover in the forest, opened an exchange of fire"[6]. Those cut down were inhabitants overtaken during the sudden nighttime seizure of the village; armed resistance was mounted later only by those who managed to reach the forest.
On 28 December 1836, during the sudden encirclement of Kishkeroy-Yurt, Pullo's troops killed inhabitants who tried to escape, as well as families in their houses: "those seeking salvation in flight were caught or exterminated", "the inhabitants, having barricaded themselves in their houses with their families, were put to the bayonet", and two were smoked out "by straw thrown into the chimneys"[7]. Upon the occupation of the village, 76 bodies of the slain were found[7]. Some of the inhabitants mounted an armed defense, and among the 76 killed are those who fell bearing arms; the technique is recorded on the basis of the killing of those fleeing and of families trapped in their houses.
During the annihilation of Lesser Chechnya by Feze's expedition in January 1837, the troops killed inhabitants who offered no armed resistance. The expedition journal, presented by Rozen to Minister of War Chernyshev on 11 February 1837, records: Shalazh-yurt, surrounded on the night of 24 January, was taken "without a shot, laying 14 souls on the spot"[8] - killings in a village that put up no armed fight. On 25 January Feze, according to the same journal, dispatched columns "to discover and destroy the population in the dense forests up both banks of the Shalazha river" - an order for the destruction of the population in so many words[8]. At Urus-Martan, after the inhabitants had fled, the journal records, "23 enemy bodies remained on the spot"[8]. The total number of the killed is not summed up by episode in the journal; some of the fallen fought an armed defense - the technique is recorded on the basis of the killings in a village taken without a shot and of the order to destroy the population.
The strikes on Lesser Chechnya (the lowland-piedmont western part of Chechnya) in 1847-1851 were accompanied by the annihilation of unarmed inhabitants, documented by the perpetrators themselves. On 6 March 1847 a detachment, led by a bribed guide, burst at dawn into the sleeping hamlet of naib Duba (a deputy of Imam Shamil, leader of the highlanders' resistance to the Russian conquest); imperial officer Poltoratsky, a participant in the assault, wrote: "the majority, caught by surprise half-naked, old and young, women, children and nursing infants, drowned in their own blood from the sharply honed bayonets that pardoned no one, spared no one"[9]. On 15 June 1851 in the gorge of the Gekhi river, according to historian N. I. Pokrovsky, the detachment of General Sleptsov "annihilated a series of hamlets and auls. The inhabitants who had not managed to flee were slaughtered"[10]; Sleptsov's own report of 20 June 1851 puts it more mildly - "those who resolved to defend themselves were killed, or a very few were spared and taken prisoner"[11]. On 15 September 1851, at a crossing of the Sunzha river, the slaughter of those surrendering was admitted by the commander himself. Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), described in a report to General Zavadovsky of 18 September 1851 how Chechens who had recognized the empire's power ("pacified") and Cossacks cut down the fleeing: "The pacified Chechens and our Cossacks, pursuing them along narrow paths, slashed without mercy. No one thought of defending himself... I myself and my officers tried to restrain the killings, but it was almost impossible"; he counts the dead at "more than 200 bodies"[11]. On 16 November 1851 General Kozlovsky reported, in a report of 21 November 1851, on the annihilation of the aul Dakhin-Irzau: "I resolved to annihilate this aul, which I carried out at dawn on 16 November with complete success" - more than 40 killed, more than 100 wounded[11].
In the pogrom of Chechnya of 1852 the victims among the inhabitants ran into the hundreds. On 18 January 1852 on the Goyta river operated the detachment of Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi): imperial historian Volkonsky, a participant in the march, summed up the day - "on that day we... destroyed up to two thousand households"; the count in people he recorded thus: "Only ten prisoners were taken - and even those were barely torn by force from under the daggers of the Cossacks. Apart from the highlanders who fell in the battle proper, the number of victims who perished in the auls on the Goyta reaches two hundred people"[12]. On the raid against the aul Gurdali of 11 August 1852 the sources diverge: historian N. I. Pokrovsky conveys Baryatinsky's report of 21 August 1852 - he "slaughtered its entire population, except for 52 people taken prisoner"[10]; Volkonsky, who described the same day, asserts that the aul did not fall, the detachment withdrew with heavy losses, and regrets: "If we had really devastated and burned Gurdali, slaughtered its entire population... the affair would have come out both more substantial and more useful"[12] - Baryatinsky's report and Volkonsky's account describe one and the same day in mutually exclusive ways. The annihilation of people was also a declared plan: Vorontsov, viceroy and commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, in a letter to the Emperor of 1-20 March 1854, formulated the task of the past winter - "the final subjugation and annihilation of the remaining unpacified in the environs on the plain"[11] ("unpacified" in the imperial lexicon means those who had not submitted to the empire).
Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write about the teams of "hunters": "the militiamen had orders to kill not only abreks in hiding, but any inhabitant heading from his village into the forest. As a reward for every person killed or caught in the forest the authorities paid 25 rubles" (abrek - the empire's label for a highlander it had outlawed)[13]; separate sums were set for the leaders - "for Alibek-Haji - several thousand rubles"[13]. Captives were to be killed if an attempt was made to free them - and this was carried out: "during an attack by the insurgents on the detachment escorting 135 arrested inhabitants of the village of Mekhkety to the Vedeno fortress, the soldiers killed up to 20 Mekhkety villagers"[13].
Mass Jewish pogroms with the connivance and complicity of the police: in October 1905 "over 600 pogroms and over 800 killed were registered"[14]. In Odesa, "Low-ranking policemen and soldiers failed to interfere with the pogromists and in many instances participated in the looting and killing"[15], and the commander of the district's troops told policemen: "all of us sympathize in our souls with the pogrom"[15].
On 10 October 1905, at the Grozny market, the troops of the Russian Empire fired not at the pogromists but at the Chechens whom armed reservists were attacking: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that the soldiers of the Shirvansky regiment, led by Colonel Popov, used their weapons, "...shooting the hiding Chechens, hunting them down in attics and cellars, while the reservists and hooligans smashed and looted shops before the eyes of the authorities"; by the historians' count, 27 Chechens were harmed in the pogrom, of whom 17 were killed[13].
The Muravyov massacre of February 1918 after the capture of Kyiv by the Red troops: the EIU characterizes Muravyov as "the initiator of mass executions in the city," and later he was himself arrested on the charge of "'condoning mass executions and lootings that led to the fall of Soviet power in Ukraine'"[16]. Hrushevsky on the campaign's commander: "the chief commandant, the former gendarme Muravyov, who in February had boasted of executions of Ukrainians and the ruin of their property"[17].
Deliberately starving millions of Ukrainian peasants to death as a direct result of Moscow's state policy[18].
In early November 1941, waging a military operation against the "uprising" it had itself declared, the USSR bombed with combat aircraft mountain auls of Chechnya in which there was neither this invented "uprising" nor the real protest. The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: for the suppression of the protest, "besides the operational groups and internal troops, three flights of combat aircraft were brought in," and "the operation proved poorly prepared in the military respect and was accompanied by heavy losses among the peaceful population. Bombs rained down on auls whose population did not even suspect any 'uprising'"[13]. The historian S. P. Arenin, who wrote from the documents of the NKVD Department for the Struggle against "Banditry" (a predecessor of today's FSB), writes of the operations of 28 October - 3 November 1941: they were carried out by "chekist-military groups, to which three flights of aircraft were attached"[19]. In the spring of 1942, according to memoirs, Soviet aircraft repeated the strikes on a larger scale - the Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who wrote about these events in emigration, testifies: "in the spring of 1942 Soviet aviation twice subjected all of mountain Checheno-Ingushetia to bombing," and "in the auls of Shatoy, Itum-Kale and Galanchozh the inhabitants killed by aerial bombing and by the Bolsheviks' artillery shelling outnumbered those left alive"[20]. Avtorkhanov adds: "In those days, when Stalin was arranging this hell over his own people, not a single German had yet set foot in the Caucasus"[20]. The report of the 141st Regiment on the military operation of 30 October - 15 November 1941 counts only its own men and "bandits" - "killed: bandits — 36... Regiment losses: killed — 6, wounded — 7"[21]; there is not a line in it about killed or wounded villagers. On the Galanchozh district the testimonies and the documents diverge: the historians cite data gathered from those who were in the mountains - that "absolute calm was observed" there, "and the bombing of peaceful auls by Soviet aviation came as a shock even to the district leadership"[13], while Khalukhaev's report names the Galanchozh district among those engulfed by the uprising[21].
During the deportation the punitive forces of the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) killed on the spot those Chechens who could not be brought to the trains - the gravely ill, the old, women with children: in the agency's papers they were listed as "untransportable." On 27 February 1944 in the aul of Khaibakh, Galanchozh district, the punitive forces, according to historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, killed "over 700 people": Colonel Gvishiani, as the historians write, "ordered the 'untransportable' residents of Khaibakh and the surrounding hamlets locked... in the stable of the local collective farm named after L. P. Beria, after which the stable itself was piled round with hay and set on fire"[13]. An eyewitness - Dziyaudin Malsagov, Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of Justice of the republic - testified: "When the stable was engulfed in flames, the huge, heavily reinforced gates collapsed under the press of people, and through the fire a crowd of maddened people surged out. Gvishiani commanded: 'Fire!' Automatic and machine-gun bursts rang out from dozens of barrels... No one broke through the fire and the gun cordon. No one was saved"[13]; Gvishiani received from People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria, the historians write, "a personal commendation, a recommendation for a decoration and a promotion in rank"[13]. The punitive forces killed the "untransportable" throughout the mountain districts: "47 gravely ill people were put to death and buried in a single pit on the grounds of the Urus-Martan district hospital... several dozen old people, women and children were burned in Tsori, Targim and Guli. Many of those who fled that day from the villages into the mountains or forest were shot on the spot without warning"[13]; "in the Itum-Kale district... houses were packed with the sick and pelted with grenades and bottles of incendiary mixture"[13]. Historian Z. S. Isakieva writes: at the end of March 1944 NKVD troops "shot" the residents of mountainous Malkhista, whom they had failed to reach in February because of snowfall[22]. The Chekists recorded the shootings of the sick in their own correspondence: on 28 May 1944 the head of the Galanchozh operational sector Gransky reported to Deputy People's Commissar (Minister) of State Security Kobulov about the "unauthorized shootings of the elderly Chechen women, the sick and the crippled who remained after the resettlement" - in the Nachkhoevsky village soviet alone the "sick and crippled" shot numbered "up to 60 people"[23].
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"[24][25] – 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"[24]. 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"[14].