Legal Segregation of the Population

From 1882 "especially important" cases in which the accused were highlanders were transferred to the field court-martial; in 1893, with the emperor's permission, a significant share of highlanders' criminal cases was withdrawn from the general civil courts - into whose jurisdiction these cases passed, the source does not specify^[1]. Punishment could also be imposed without any court: the head of the oblast jailed highlanders for up to one month at his personal discretion, and imposed penalties on aul communities for harbouring^[1]; on 19 November 1893 the rules of administrative deportation to Eastern Siberia on accusation or suspicion of stealing horses and livestock were extended to the Terek oblast^[1], and according to historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov the decision on administrative exile for a term of up to five years was taken by the commander of the Caucasus Army, and the place of exile was Chechen Island in the Caspian^[2]. The 1894 "Temporary Regulation on Measures to Restrain the Native Population of the Terek Oblast from 'Predation'" - its draft was submitted for approval by the head of the Terek oblast, general Kakhanov - according to historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova, wrote the collective liability of the village community for committed crimes into law^[1]; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov record the mechanics: mountain villages paid for stolen livestock "if the tracks of the stolen livestock turned out to be lost near the given village", while "the possibility that the thieves might not be highlanders at all was completely ignored"^[2]. Indigenous inhabitants were barred from holding the posts of pristav and okrug head and from serving as justices of the peace^[1]; the 1888 regulation on the administration of the Terek and Kuban oblasts established, in the words of historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova, "a narrowly caste-based military-Cossack administration, without the participation not only of representatives of the mountain peoples but of the non-Cossack element as well... the highlanders were placed outside the operation of the general laws"^[1]. In the 1890s the administration, by a separate order, forbade Cossacks to keep kunachestvo with highlanders (kunachestvo - sworn brotherhood, an institution of friendship between households)^[1]. Service was segregated too: the "political unreliability" of the Caucasus Muslims led the authorities to give up forming line units from them, and from 1886, by order of the Minister of War, recruits from the Terek oblast were assigned only to troops stationed in the Caucasus^[1]. Zemstvos were never introduced in the oblast at all; the proposal on zemstvo institutions in the Terek oblast, submitted to the State Duma in 1914, was not adopted before the revolution^[1].