Deportation

In the summer of 1865 a fifth of the Chechen people left Chechnya - and almost half of those who left perished. The first families set out from Vladikavkaz on 28 May 1865; the last crossed the border on 10 September^[1]; the historian D. A. Khozhayev draws up the tally: "23,057 people (5 thousand families) of Chechens, Karabulaks and Ingush leave their native land for Turkey"^[2]; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov reckon "up to 23 thousand Chechens," of whom more than 4.5 thousand families were inhabitants of Lesser Chechnya and the Ichkerinsky okrug, and in all in the 1860s "up to 20% of the total number of Chechens" were expelled^[3]. The dying began at once: the historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova writes - "In the course of the resettlement about 40,000 highlanders of the Terek oblast perished, which was slightly less than half of all those who had left"; according to the dispatches of the Russian consul, in Trebizond in 1864 some 180-250 people were dying each day, in Samsun - 200^[1]. The lands allotted for settlement "were unfit for agriculture – stony and barren"^[1]; the colony of Ras al-Ayn, where mainly Chechens had been settled, shrank by 1878 from 4-5 thousand families to 500^[1]. The muhajirs themselves - as those who left were called, from the Arabic "muhajir," a migrant - wrote to the head of the Terek oblast: "We have learned that Mussa deceived us... A third of us have already perished as it is" (Mussa is General Kundukhov; they called him by his first name)^[1].