Police Apparatus

The metropole's occupation administration legally prohibited the free residence of the Indigenous population in Tersky Town, organizing the forced expulsion of unapproved persons and total demographic control: in 1631, Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich issued a decree to the Prikaz of the Kazan Palace ordering a census of the newly arrived Nokhchi (Michkizians and Okochans) and ruling that those of them «who cannot be trusted» must be «ordered to be expelled out of Tersky Town, and ordered to go back whence each had come»^[1]; to ensure surveillance, in the state register of serving people for the region of the Prikaz of the Kazan Palace for 1637, the central authorities recorded in detail the number of subordinate residents of Tersky Town, including 350 «Okotsky people» and 680 newly arrived «Okochans, and Tatars, and Michkizians, and Shibutians»^[2]; and in 1640, on the orders of the Terek voivode, the Terek syn boyarsky P. Lukin and the clerk F. Belkov compiled a name-by-name register of the population of the Terek slobodas, rigidly recording every household of the subordinate Nokhchi (Okochans)^[1][2].

The legal enserfment of Ukrainian peasants by Catherine II's decree of May 3, 1783, depriving them of the right of free movement: "For the certain and reliable collection of treasury revenues in the viceroyalties of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siverskyi and for the prevention of any flights… each of the villagers is to remain in the place and station where he is registered by the current last revision"^[3].

The introduction of territorial discrimination: by the decree of 1791, the Jewish population's right to burgher and merchant status was confined to specific viceroyalties – Ekaterinoslav and Taurida^[4] – the legal foundation of the future Pale of Settlement, which confined the area of residence and economic activity to the colonized governorates.

Mass Jewish pogroms with the connivance and complicity of the police: in October 1905 "over 600 pogroms and over 800 killed were registered"^[5]. In Odesa, "Low-ranking policemen and soldiers failed to interfere with the pogromists and in many instances participated in the looting and killing"^[6], and the commander of the district's troops told policemen: "all of us sympathize in our souls with the pogrom"^[6].

The forcible neutralization of movement activists at the hands of the security structures and party apparatus: the dispersal of commemorative actions with beatings ("dragged out of the car, beaten") with the participation of the KGB and the militia^[7], the hospitalization of the beaten political prisoner Vasyl Ovsienko^[8], and the death of Rukh member Yevhen Melenivsky - after a "conversation" at the regional MVD directorate he "died on his way home"^[9], and later - the law enforcement bodies' demonstrative disinterest in solving crimes against Rukh functionaries: they "demonstratively displayed disinterest in solving the crime"^[10].

Coercing residents of the occupied territories into taking Russian passports: "the policy of mass conferral of Russian citizenship to residents of occupied areas of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions exacerbated the coercive environment there," and "those who refused Russian passports were denied access to public services, notably social security, healthcare, and education, and risked unemployment" and "faced a heightened risk of arbitrary detention when crossing checkpoints"^[11].