Aggressors may manufacture "criminals" out of unwanted people: passing laws with offenses elastic enough to charge anyone ("counter-revolutionary activity", "extremism", "discreditation"), inventing conspiracies and underground organizations, forging "evidence", filling cases with people arrested by list, and keeping investigations and trials secret or turning them into public spectacle. Imprisonment becomes a matter of decision rather than fact, and every verdict retroactively "proves" the guilt of the colonized, justifying repression as a fight against "crime".
The OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) fabricated the "Chechen nationalist center" - an underground organization that did not exist - and convicted thousands of Chechens in the case. Thus the empire "explained" the uprisings against the forced merging of households into kolkhozes ("collectivization"): it was not hunger and devastation that raised the people, but a secret conspiracy. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the mechanism of the fabrication: "The logic of the Chekists suggested that the culprits and organizers of all the anti-Soviet uprisings should be sought in some single 'nationalist center', into which, undoubtedly, by the same logic, representatives of the internal and foreign Chechen emigration must belong"[1]. The work, by his words, was taken up by the krai organ of the OGPU under Kursky and Fedotov and the Chechen oblast department of the OGPU under Kraft: "They created this 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center' so skillfully and plausibly that even many of the Chechens believed in its existence"[1]. The "evidence" was letters in the name of the Chechen émigré, oil industrialist Tapa Chermoev - with calls to prepare an uprising; they came to Chechen public figures in Grozny from Istanbul, Paris and London through intermediaries whom the OGPU had obliged to hand the letters over to it. Avtorkhanov concludes: "the version of Chermoev's letters was a lie, and the letters themselves - forgeries of the OGPU. But it was precisely these letters that served as 'material evidence' against the 'nationalist center'"[1]. In the autumn of 1932 the OGPU arrested the entire "group" of the addressees, followed by mass arrests across the Gudermes and Nozhay-Yurt districts - the very one that had revolted against the kolkhozes in March 1932; Avtorkhanov writes: "In all, up to 3 thousand people were arrested in the case of the 'Chechen nationalist center'. The arrested were charged with creating a 'counter-revolutionary nationalist center of Chechnya for the preparation and carrying out of an armed uprising'"[1]. There was no trial - Avtorkhanov writes: "Almost all the arrested were convicted through the collegium of the GPU. Of the members of the 'center', Abdulkadirov, Shamilev, Kurbanov, Motsa-Hadji Sotaev and Beymurzaev were shot. Others received 10 years each. How many of the rank and file were shot is impossible to establish"[1]. With the fabricated case the empire justified itself publicly as well: Yevdokimov, secretary of the krai committee of the party, at the krai party conference of 1934 cited "the letters of the millionaire Chermoev" as proof of the preparation of an uprising with the money and weapons of the Western powers[1]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov confirm the scale: repression "in connection with the case of the so-called 'Chechen nationalist center'" befell, "by some data, up to 3 thousand people"[2].
From the summer of 1937 to November 1938 the NKVD (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) arrested people in the republic by the categories and numbers assigned in operational order No. 00447 of Yezhov, the People's Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of the USSR, of 30 July 1937. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, who worked in Chechnya in those years and later wrote about it in emigration, described the beginning of the operation: "On the night of 31 July to 1 August 1937, by lists drawn up beforehand by the NKVD, the so-called 'general operation for the removal of anti-Soviet elements' was carried out across all auls and districts"; the Chekists hauled the arrested to Grozny - to the central garage of "Grozneft", to the Stalin club, to the pre-trial detention house of the republic's militia[1]. Avtorkhanov names "up to 14 thousand people" arrested in the first wave; the published operational summary on the course of the operation gives, for mid-August, about 2.4 thousand arrested across the whole republic, divided in it by the assigned categories: 888 "kulaks" (peasants whom the colonizer deemed "well-off"), 831 "criminals", 682 of the "counter-revolutionary element"[3]. Gridasov, head of the Gudermes district department of the NKVD, answered an officer who asked how to arrest a man when there was no material on him: "Material will always be found, so long as he wears a Caucasian hat!"[1]. The arrests went on until November 1938: in the autumn of 1937 Moscow raised the number assigned to the republic to 3,200 people, and on 1 March 1938 assigned a new one - 10,108 people, of whom the troika convicted 6,767[3]. On 8 September 1937 the newspaper "Pravda" printed an article by its special correspondent Kuzovkin under the headline: "The Bourgeois-Nationalist Tangle in Chechen-Ingushetia"[3]. Avtorkhanov relates its content: the author of the article "proved that in Chechen-Ingushetia 'bourgeois nationalists' sit in the party leadership and at the head of the government, leading the Chechen-Ingush people down an anti-Soviet path", and the newspaper and the author called on a judge not named by name: "to untangle the bourgeois-nationalist tangle to the end"[1]. Avtorkhanov writes of what the investigators manufactured out of the arrested: "Over the course of three years the Chekist investigators created the case of a 'bourgeois-nationalist, counter-revolutionary-insurgent, Bukharinite-Trotskyite, terrorist-espionage, anti-Soviet, wrecking organization' – literally so ran the many-storeyed formula of the charge for the top layer of the arrested"[1]. Into this "top layer", which the Chekists named the "bourgeois-nationalist center of Chechnya and Ingushetia", the investigation wrote 137 former senior officials of the republic. The investigation entered among these 137 also Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, who was then studying in Moscow: it wrote people into the case regardless of where they were and what they did[2]. To each of them the investigation imputed Article 58 - treason against the Motherland, preparation of an armed uprising, wrecking, terrorist acts, diversion, anti-Soviet agitation, membership in an anti-Soviet organization, and sabotage. According to the charge, the "center" acted in alliance with identical "centers" of Dagestan, Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay, Adygea and Circassia and was preparing, as Avtorkhanov writes, "the proclamation of a 'North Caucasus federative republic' under the protectorate of Turkey and England", with the "Moscow inter-national center" holding the liaison between them all[1].