Deportation

Historian D. A. Khozhayev writes of the springs of 1859: "All the subdued highlanders were immediately, under convoy of the tsarist troops, resettled onto the plain for surveillance"^[1]. To the plain, that is down to the lowland under surveillance, people were driven at once: in December 1857 up to 400 households that had come out of the auls being annihilated were sent under troop cover to Umakhan-yurt^[2]. After the taking of Vedeno General Yevdokimov ordered his subordinate Nostitz "to proceed with the resettlement of the Chechens living between the Khulkhulau and the Gudermes": on 8 April 1859 "up to 300 families who lived in the nearest hamlets on the right bank of the Khulkhulau at once appeared in the camp with their belongings and livestock"^[2]. Resistance to the resettlement is recorded by the imperial documents themselves: naib (district governor under the imam) Osman "several times attempted to pass by the detachment onto the plain and tried to obstruct the resettlement of the Chechens"^[2]; separately, according to the journal of military operations of no later than 9 April 1859, "the Ichkerians, Aukhovites and Salatavians, having gathered in great numbers, wanted to obstruct the resettlement" of the inhabitants from the Aksai^[3]. For the auls of the upper Fortanga and Assa, forced into capitulation in November 1858, the eviction was set with a deferral: "to remain in the places they occupy for another three months; with early spring they will move out onto the plain of Lesser Chechnya into the Galash society"^[2]. Benoy held out longest: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that Yevdokimov "in the autumn of 1859 and at the beginning of 1860 set about the inhabitants of the mountain society of Benoy", part of whom "were dispersed among the surrounding auls and hamlets"^[4].