Aggressors very often alter administrative boundaries within a captured region. In the course of implementing this technique, traditional systems of local governance are forcibly abolished, while the seized lands are fragmented and integrated into the colonizer's standard bureaucratic grid, which irreversibly destroys the historically formed social ties within the society. For example, many borders in Africa are the result of struggles between colonial powers[1]. The borders of the union and autonomous republics of the USSR were established by Moscow for administrative convenience and were changed in accordance with the decisions of the Moscow leadership[2].
The legal codification of the territory's division. Moscow deliberately fragmented a once unified country, turning such important regions as Zaporizhzhia into rightless buffer zones under joint administration: "...Zaporizhzhia (which under the treaty of 1667 was under the joint rule of Moscow and Warsaw)"[3].
The abolition of the regimental-sotnia administrative order to serve the imperial partition of the lands: the Sejm of 1699 adopted the decision "banning the Cossacks on the Right Bank"[5].
The liquidation of Cossack administrative units and the introduction of imperial division: the report of the Shakhovskoy-Panin commission confirmed by the empress on December 16, 1764 and Catherine II's manifesto of July 28, 1765[6][7] – "On the basis of the Sloboda regiments the Sloboda-Ukrainian Governorate was formed"[8].
The abolition of the Cossack regimental order and the division of the Left Bank into imperial viceroyalties: the Kyiv Viceroyalty was established by the nominal decree to the Senate of September 16, 1781 (PSZRI, coll. 1, vol. XXI, no. 15,228; execution ordered from November)[9][10], "which finally abolished the remnants of the Hetmanate's autonomy and its regimental-sotnia administrative-political and military order"[11]; the same decree established the Chernihiv and Novhorod-Siverskyi viceroyalties.
The erasure of historical borders and the introduction of the imperial vertical: "The governor-general concentrated the entire fullness of administrative power: he was endowed with the right of legislative initiative, determined the degree to which all-Russian laws extended within the governorate-general, and controlled the activity of state institutions, including judicial ones"[12].
The oblast was recut in 1862, 1869, 1888 and 1899[13]. From 1 May 1888 the Vedeno and Argun okrugs were merged into the Grozny okrug - under the formula quoted by historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova, "to shield the Cossacks from the 'corrupting' influence of the highlanders"[13]. The Chechen villages on the right bank of the Terek, which were slated for transfer to the Kizlyar and Pyatigorsk otdels (Cossack divisions), were set apart as a special uchastok (sub-district) and temporarily left under the head of the Grozny okrug; the mountain okrugs were divided into uchastoks, while the Cossack otdels were divided by the pattern of manning military units, into sotnias (Cossack hundreds) and regiments[13]. From 1 January 1899 the oblast was recut once more: four otdels - Pyatigorsk, Mozdok, Kizlyar, Sunzha - and four okrugs: Vladikavkaz, Khasav-Yurt, Nalchik, Grozny[13].
An attempt at the bureaucratic resubordination of territories — declaring the Donbas an autonomous part directly linked to Russia, bypassing any Ukrainian authorities[14].
The colonizer abolished the very republic of the Chechens and Ingush and carved up their land among its neighbors: on 7 March 1944 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued the decree "On the Liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR and the Administrative Organization of Its Territory"[15]: lowland Chechnya went into the newly created Grozny Okrug of Stavropol Krai - a month later the colonizer transformed it into Grozny Oblast[16]; the mountain part was divided between the Georgian SSR (today's Georgia) and the Dagestan ASSR (today's Dagestan within Russia), and the Ingush lands were handed to North Ossetia[17]. The abolition was given legal form by the law of 25 June 1946[15].
In June 1956 the head of the Soviet militia Barsukov reported: "to place the Chechens and Ingush in the districts where they lived before the deportation is not possible," because "these districts are settled by migrants from the central oblasts of the RSFSR," while on the lands that had passed to North Ossetia, where before the deportation "77,578 Chechens and Ingush lived," "the local [and] party organs consider the return of the Chechens and Ingush inexpedient"[16]. The minister of internal affairs of the USSR Dudorov in June 1956 proposed not returning the people at all: "The former territory is settled" - and raised the question "of creating for the Chechens and Ingush an oblast autonomy on the territory of the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSR"[18]. The USSR dropped the plan because of "the sharply negative attitude of the Chechens and Ingush" and their striving to return home[19]. The decree of 9 January 1957 charged the Russian parliament (the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) with establishing the borders[18] - and the Prigorodny district stayed with North Ossetia. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The unanimous protests of the Chechen-Ingush delegation on the question of the Prigorodny district were ignored by the Central Committee of the CPSU"; the colonizer cut off "1,600 square kilometers of exclusively black-earth land," and enlarged the republic "at the expense of the sandy lands of the Burunnaya steppe (in essence, semi-desert) beyond the Terek"[17]. The historians write that in Dagestan the colonizers "sought at the same time to prevent the restoration of the Aukh (Chechen) district. For this the returning Chechens were not allowed to settle in their old houses in their native auls, but were dispersed in small groups" across five districts[17]. The Russian parliament, in setting the republic's borders, did not return to it the former Aukh district either - it is absent from the list of transferred lands[16]. On 10 April 1964 the new settlers of the village of Duchi in the former Aukh district beat and expelled the Chechen Salikh Saitamulov, who had returned to his parents' plot, and on 12 April about 500 Chechens came to Duchi with demands, as the investigation recorded, "to permit Saitamulov and other Chechens to reside in the village of Duchi and other former Chechen villages, to return to them their former households and plots of land"; the KGB (predecessor of today's FSB) under the government of Dagestan answered with a criminal case for mass disorders[20]. The case fell apart: historian V. A. Kozlov writes that the Chechens "held together and evaded giving testimony," and the case was closed "for absence... of the elements of a crime"[20].
The redrawing of internal borders by the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium's resolution of 19 February 1954: "To approve the joint submission of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on the transfer of the Crimean oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic"[21] – the decision was taken in Moscow, without any expression of will by the peninsula's inhabitants. Behind the "commonality of the economy" stood the desire to shift the peninsula, ruined by deportation and war, onto the books of the Ukrainian SSR: "Moscow admits ever more openly: the Crimean region is a problem territory that the union center does not know how to sustain"[22].