in the campaign “"Exiled Forever": Life in Special Settlement and Return to an Occupied Homeland (1949-1965)”
The USSR forbade the exiled Chechens and Ingush to leave the district of settlement, which at times consisted of a few streets. A commission of the Central Committee of the party admitted this in 1953 in a memorandum to the head of government Malenkov: "the absence of a special settler without the appropriate permission beyond the limits of the district served by the special commandant's office... is regarded as escape and entails liability under criminal law"[1]. The exiled Ingush woman Aza Bazorkina, who at sixteen received a passport stamped "special settler," testifies how the commandant would not let her father's friend go to bury his dead wife: "The Muslim cemetery lay beyond the city limits, and he did not allow him to accompany his wife beyond that line"[2]. Only by its resolution of 5 July 1954 did the Council of Ministers of the USSR ease the regime: to those engaged in socially useful labor it granted "the right of residence within the given oblast, krai, republic"[3], but escape remained a crime: for leaving the settlement without permission people were tried under article 82 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (escape from a place of obligatory settlement)[1], and in 1956 "of 328 thousand Chechens, a little over 191.4 thousand were on the registers of the special commandant's offices"[4]. The ban on returning outlived even the decree of 9 January 1957: the minister of internal affairs of the USSR Dudorov asked the leadership of the Bolshevik party (the "Central Committee of the CPSU") to allow "persons of Chechen and Ingush nationality returning to their former place of residence without the permission of the Organizing Committee to be detained, removed from trains, steamers and other means of transport and returned to the places of their former settlement," and on 9 April 1957 reported: in three days "2,139 persons were identified and detained" on trains[5]. The Organizing Committee stretched the return out over four years and made it paid: the returnees complained to the formal head of state Voroshilov that the Organizing Committee's representative Nemukhin had in March 1957 "announced to us the procedure of our return over 1957-1960, with all expenses connected with the move charged to us, the movers ourselves"[5]; on 26 January 1957 the Organizing Committee and the bureau of the party's oblast committee (the "Grozny obkom of the CPSU") established that "arrival for permanent residence on the territory of the republic may take place only by permission of the Organizing Committee of the ChIASSR [the Chechen-Ingush republic]," and ordered the occupier's police to register newcomers only on those permits[5]; on 5 September 1960 the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR extended the deadline for return "until 1963"[5]. Mountain Chechnya remained closed: five mountain districts - Galanchozh, Cheberloy, Sharoy, Itum-Kale and Shatoy - the decree of 9 January 1957 did not restore[5]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that "the highlanders were forbidden to reside" there, while the repatriates "were settled in new state farms, workers' settlements, farmsteads... especially in the Cossack districts beyond the Terek, and in arid, unhealthy places remote from district centers and towns"[4]. The same historians write that in the stanitsas, along the way, "conditions were created for their rapid cultural and linguistic assimilation": "In the stanitsas teaching was conducted only in Russian; the heads of stanitsa soviets, districts and farms remained exclusively Russians"[4]. The pogrom of August 1958 in Grozny, with the demand from the pogromists' resolution "to allow the Chechen-Ingush population to reside in Grozny oblast at no more than 10% of the total population"[5], the USSR turned against the Chechens themselves. The historians write: "In November 1958 a special passport regime was established in Grozny and in the Grozny (rural) district, under which serious restrictions on residence registration were introduced here... the true purpose of this action was to create administrative obstacles in the way of the migration of the Chechen population into Grozny," and "The initiators of the introduction of the ban, under the pretext of tightening the fight against a rise in offenses, were the party and soviet organs of Chechen-Ingushetia"[4].