Migratory Replacement

The colonizer settled the lands of the deported Chechens and Ingush with newcomers and kept them there through all the years of exile. In 1956 a commission of the leadership of the Bolshevik party (the "Central Committee of the CPSU") was preparing the restoration of the republic and reported on the newcomers: into the districts that had gone to Grozny oblast "78 thousand persons were resettled from the RSFSR, Ukraine and Moldavia," onto the lands given to Dagestan "46 thousand highlanders resettled from the high-mountain districts of the republic," into the districts given to North Ossetia - "55 thousand persons"^[1]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that already by mid-May 1944 the newcomers in Grozny oblast numbered 40% of the Chechens deported from it, and "there were few willing to go to the new places" - so the colonizer paid the settlers 2,500 rubles per family and exempted them from taxes for a year^[2]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov, writing in emigration, saw in the replacement of the population an imperial calculation, and named it: "to create in the Caucasus a new colonial-colonizing and military-police corps of foreigners, subordinate, obedient and compliant in the matter of defending Soviet imperial interests." He summed it up thus: "by settling here a population of more than a million Soviet colonizers the Bolsheviks have already driven the first wedge between the brotherly peoples of the Caucasus"^[3]. As a second motive he names oil - "the clearly marked course of the Soviet government to take finally into imperial hands the leading and basic Caucasian oil economy for the whole Soviet Union"^[3]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov sum up: "As a result of artificial shifts of territorial borders and of 'corrections' in the settlement of the repressed peoples, by 1961 the Chechens and Ingush made up 41% of the population of the republic, whereas in 1939 their share had reached 58.4%"^[2].