Deportation

"Already in August 1877 the first 150 inhabitants of the villages of Zandak and Dattykh were deported; small parties of exiles were being sent off throughout the autumn"^[1]. "In the spring of the following year, 1878, another 110 families were deported from the Terek oblast, and 660 families from Dagestan. Most of the deportees died within the first months of exile. It is also known that over 500 Chechens were sentenced to lifelong katorga labor"^[1]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova gives the count for a single governorate: "of the 1625 highlanders deported in 1878 to the Novgorod governorate, 429 died within the first months (118 of them men, the rest - women) and 74 were declared hopelessly ill"^[2]. The conditions were described by journalist Yu. Poluyansky, who visited the exiles: "In Cherepovets the highlanders are housed in a half-ruined, long-uninhabited hovel... Of the fifty people, up to thirty have already died, mostly children, of consumption and typhoid fever... For subsistence the adults are allotted 6 kopecks a day, the children 3 kopecks"^[2]. Within Chechnya, mountain villages were being driven down onto the plain: "From the locality indicated, the villages of Mekhkety, Khatuni and Tauzen have been deported almost to a man"^[1]; the plan for the wholesale deportation of the Salatavians, "up to 3000 souls," to the northern governorates was cut down to 200 people only for lack of escort troops^[3].