in the campaign “Police Registration and Restriction of Settlement (1631–1640)”
The metropole's occupation administration legally prohibited the free residence of the Indigenous population in Tersky Town, organizing the forced expulsion of unapproved persons and total demographic control: in 1631, Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich issued a decree to the Prikaz of the Kazan Palace ordering a census of the newly arrived Nokhchi (Michkizians and Okochans) and ruling that those of them «who cannot be trusted» must be «ordered to be expelled out of Tersky Town, and ordered to go back whence each had come»[1]; to ensure surveillance, in the state register of serving people for the region of the Prikaz of the Kazan Palace for 1637, the central authorities recorded in detail the number of subordinate residents of Tersky Town, including 350 «Okotsky people» and 680 newly arrived «Okochans, and Tatars, and Michkizians, and Shibutians»[2]; and in 1640, on the orders of the Terek voivode, the Terek syn boyarsky P. Lukin and the clerk F. Belkov compiled a name-by-name register of the population of the Terek slobodas, rigidly recording every household of the subordinate Nokhchi (Okochans)[1][2].