in the campaign “Colonial oil: the seizure of the Grozny subsoil and the rent of the Cossack host (1845-1917)”
By orders for the Terek oblast of 15 August 1890 and March 1897 the Russian Empire forbade the Chechen village communities "to enter into any agreements with mining industrialists" without the government's permission - "The guilty, in the person of village officials, were brought to account, and suits were brought in the courts to annul the concluded contracts"[1]. The ground of the ban is formulated by historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova: "The aul communities were deprived of the right to lease out oil-bearing plots - the land was granted to them not by right of property but only into use with the right of surface working; its subsoil was considered the property of the treasury"[1]. When the Ministry of Agriculture confirmed rules that allowed peasant communities to lease out their own land for the working of the subsoil, the head of the Terek oblast, General Kakhanov, in 1894 "categorically objected to the extension to the Chechen lands" of these rules - and demanded that, even if the communities' rights were recognized, the resolution on leasing the land be confirmed by the uchastok chief and a third of the income go "to pay the podymnaya tax of the communities concerned"[2]. For the Cossacks the opposite rule was in force: from 1891, when subsoil passed to the treasury, stanitsas were entitled to replacement land or compensation - "For the Chechen communities no reserve land allotments were provided by the state. Still less was there any question of material reward"[1].