in the campaign “"Only Pardoned": Alien Rule and the Suppression of Chechen and Ingush National Life (1965-1989)”
In 1965-1989 the coloniser brought workers from Russia to the factories of Grozny and gave them housing, while pushing the Chechens out of the republic to seek work and permanent residence in other regions. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "in the 30 years since the return of the Chechens and the Ingush to their Homeland, only 16% of the workers of the oil-refining and petrochemical enterprises of Chechen-Ingushetia were Chechens or Ingush", in the radio-engineering industry 14 %, in instrument-making 6 %, while the missing workers and engineers "were brought in from Russian regions by way of organised recruitment. Moreover, some specialists received the keys to their flats right at the railway station"[1]. The historians write: "Every year more than 100 thousand people, organised in construction brigades, left Chechen-Ingushetia for construction work"[1]; historians D. B. Abdurakhmanov and Ya. Z. Akhmadov write that a family of five or six, on a state-farm worker's wage of 60-80 roubles, was left with "either 'shabashka' - hard 14-16-hour labour on construction sites in rural districts of the country, or departure for permanent residence in Kalmykia, the Rostov, Astrakhan and Volgograd regions to work on livestock farms"[2]. From the second half of the 1980s the region's occupation administration, under agreements with the Kalinin, Novgorod and Omsk regions, sent villagers to settle in the Non-Black-Earth zone[1]. The census of 1989 counted 956,879 Chechens in the USSR, of whom 734,501 lived in Chechen-Ingushetia: almost every fourth lived outside the republic[3]; the historians write: "the main cause of migration was unemployment"[1].