in the campaign “"Military-Popular Administration": the Colonial Regime of the Terek Oblast (1858-1917)”
The 1894 "Regulation on Residence Permits" enshrined estate inequality: nobles, officials and merchants received passport books of unlimited duration, while highlanders ascribed to village communities received five-year books or short-term passports and bilets (written passes) for absence[1]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova states the regime's effect from the oblast's records: "Terek highlanders, should they appear beyond the Kuban or in other parts of the Russian Empire without passports, were considered vagrants and malefactors and were punished as such"; she also writes: "The passport system served the administration of the Terek oblast as a favourite means of constraining even persons well known to it"[1]. Inside the oblast a regime of absences operated: leave of up to a month was granted by the village elder, for a longer term - by the okrug head; unauthorized absence was punished by fine, arrest or public works, and a highlander could not move from one community to another without the consent of two village communities - the one he was leaving and the one he was joining[2].