in the campaign “"Exiled Forever": Life in Special Settlement and Return to an Occupied Homeland (1949-1965)”
In June 1956 the head of the Soviet militia Barsukov reported: "to place the Chechens and Ingush in the districts where they lived before the deportation is not possible," because "these districts are settled by migrants from the central oblasts of the RSFSR," while on the lands that had passed to North Ossetia, where before the deportation "77,578 Chechens and Ingush lived," "the local [and] party organs consider the return of the Chechens and Ingush inexpedient"[1]. The minister of internal affairs of the USSR Dudorov in June 1956 proposed not returning the people at all: "The former territory is settled" - and raised the question "of creating for the Chechens and Ingush an oblast autonomy on the territory of the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSR"[2]. The USSR dropped the plan because of "the sharply negative attitude of the Chechens and Ingush" and their striving to return home[3]. The decree of 9 January 1957 charged the Russian parliament (the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) with establishing the borders[2] - and the Prigorodny district stayed with North Ossetia. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The unanimous protests of the Chechen-Ingush delegation on the question of the Prigorodny district were ignored by the Central Committee of the CPSU"; the colonizer cut off "1,600 square kilometers of exclusively black-earth land," and enlarged the republic "at the expense of the sandy lands of the Burunnaya steppe (in essence, semi-desert) beyond the Terek"[4]. The historians write that in Dagestan the colonizers "sought at the same time to prevent the restoration of the Aukh (Chechen) district. For this the returning Chechens were not allowed to settle in their old houses in their native auls, but were dispersed in small groups" across five districts[4]. The Russian parliament, in setting the republic's borders, did not return to it the former Aukh district either - it is absent from the list of transferred lands[1]. On 10 April 1964 the new settlers of the village of Duchi in the former Aukh district beat and expelled the Chechen Salikh Saitamulov, who had returned to his parents' plot, and on 12 April about 500 Chechens came to Duchi with demands, as the investigation recorded, "to permit Saitamulov and other Chechens to reside in the village of Duchi and other former Chechen villages, to return to them their former households and plots of land"; the KGB (predecessor of today's FSB) under the government of Dagestan answered with a criminal case for mass disorders[5]. The case fell apart: historian V. A. Kozlov writes that the Chechens "held together and evaded giving testimony," and the case was closed "for absence... of the elements of a crime"[5].