Aggressors deliberately organize the collection of strategic, geographic, demographic, and economic data on target territories. Within this technique, the colonizer sends diplomats, merchants, explorers, or specialized expeditions to determine the population size of a potential object of colonization, assess its defensive capacity and infrastructure, and survey mineral deposits and natural resources. The information obtained is used by the metropole to plan a subsequent seizure by force, the establishment of control, or economic exploitation. The colonizer's emissaries often attempt to win over the population with gifts it values (for example, glass beads resembling objects used as money and perceived as foreign currency) or through mutually beneficial trade exchange. In some cases, people are drawn into participation in rituals that the colonizer later construes as a declaration of allegiance.
The occupation administration dispatched emissaries to collect strategic, demographic, and economic data on the mountain societies of the Nokhchi: in 1658 the central apparatus of the Posolsky Prikaz instructed the Terek voivodes to find out «how many of them there are and what kind of people they are... and what fighting force they have... and what grows in their land, and what craftsmen there are»[1], in execution of which in 1659 the Terek voivodes Melenty Kvashnin and his associates «sent a streltsy commander into the Shibut land and ordered him to inspect in the Shibut land... the towns and places»[1], who, in an extract for the report of the Posolsky Prikaz to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich of 1660, reported that «[to]wns they have none, nor any fighting forces»[1].
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy organized expeditions to study and inventory natural resources in the territories of the Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov records the 1717 "survey of mineral springs and other natural riches of the Terek River (including the Bragun warm springs) by Doctor Gottlieb Schober on the assignment of Peter I"[2].
The government of the Russian Empire dispatched specialists to collect data on the lands and population of the Nokhchi: historian Sh. B. Akhmadov points out that in 1728 the officer I. G. Gerber "on the government's assignment... compiled a description of the localities and population... as well as a map of this area"[3].
In 1836, corps commander Rosen sent covert topographers through Chechnya for the clandestine surveying of the land that had not submitted. In a report to the emperor, Rosen acknowledges: "in 1836, to survey the direct route leading from Kakheti to Chechnya, a topographer was sent who, having crossed the snow ridge, came out onto the Caucasian Line at the fortress of Groznaya, and from there, through Chechnya and the lands of the Kistins and the Didois, returned to Kakheti"; at the same time "I sent from Vladikavkaz Ensign Prince Utsmiev of the Life Guards Grenadier Regiment with a topographer, through Chechnya, to Andia"[4]. Rosen named the method outright: "covert surveys of the lands of the mountaineers hostile to us"[4].