in the campaign “"Exiled Forever": Life in Special Settlement and Return to an Occupied Homeland (1949-1965)”
The colonizer destroyed the mountain villages of the Chechens so that the people would have nowhere to return to. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The policy of depopulating Mountain Chechnya, begun in February 1944, found its continuation in 1957-1960" - and explain how it was done: "The remains of houses were blown up and burned, bridges and paths were demolished. The organs of the KGB and MVD drove out onto the plain by force of arms the families of highlanders who by hook or by crook had made their way along paths above the clouds into their native auls"[1]. Historian A. B. Kuznetsova sums up: "Settlements and populated places remote from communications (high-mountain ones) were destroyed," and with the settlement of the rural districts by newcomers "the skills of transhumant animal husbandry, of working high-mountain plots of land, of terrace farming were lost"[2].