Expropriation of Resources

After the inhabitants of twelve Terek-side villages (Chechen settlements of the left bank of the Terek) fled to the insurgents in June 1840, the empire gave their property to the Cossacks. The "Report of the chancellery for the administration of peaceable highlanders", drawn up not earlier than July 1841, lists the villages - Stary Naur, Novy Naur, Emingulovskaya, Murdarova, Boyan-Yurt, Kacherman-Yurt, Nagai Mirza-Yurt, Mizhi-Yurt, Kozhakhi, Kalauzova, Mamakai-Yurt and Guneshki - and records the regime: "the grain left standing in their fields the line Cossacks were permitted... to gather for their own benefit, the houses remaining in the localities to be dismantled and carried off to the stanitsas" (line Cossacks - the Cossack troops of the empire's border line)^[1]. The same report records the division of spoils: 800 rams seized by lieutenant-colonel Bekovich-Cherkassky (of a Kabardian ruling family, in Russian service) while pursuing the fleeing inhabitants of Mizhi-Yurt and Kozhakhi "were ordered to be distributed as a reward to those inhabitants of the said two villages who remained devoted to us"^[1]. The land taken from the expelled the empire handed over to the Cossack host. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov record: "to the Cossacks were given in Lesser Chechnya the 'ancestral' lands of the inhabitants of Karabulak and Galashki" (Lesser Chechnya - the lowland-piedmont western part of Chechnya; Galashki - a Vainakh community in the valley of the Assa)^[2]. The word "ancestral" comes from the imperial papers themselves: what was being given away was not wasteland but land on which people had lived for generations.