| ID | Name |
|---|---|
| T0117.001 | Migratory Replacement |
| T0117.002 | Encouragement of Mixed Marriages |
As part of demographic assimilation, aggressors may carry out large-scale, state-sponsored resettlement of loyal citizens from the metropole to the territories of the colonized society, while simultaneously encouraging or coercing the local population to emigrate. Artificially populating the region with colonists changes the electoral, cultural, and linguistic balance, providing a reliable base of social support for the occupation regime.
The colonization of the steppes adjacent to Crimea with settlers to create a loyal rear: as early as 1752, New Serbia was formed from Serbs – "officially – to guard the southern frontiers from Tatar and Turkish raids, but in fact – to subdue the Zaporozhians"[1], and in 1776 Potemkin directly ordered "not to return fugitives"[2], accelerating the settlement of the south.
In the place of the expelled Chechens and Karabulaks (a Vainakh community between Chechnya and Ingushetia) the empire settled Cossacks - stanitsas on the sites of auls. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov list them one by one: "in 1845, on the site of the Chechen (Karabulak) aul of Obarg-Yurt, the stanitsa of Troitskaya was established; in the same year, on the site of the Chechen aul of Dibir-Yurt, appears the stanitsa of Sunzhenskaya (Sleptsovskaya)"; "On the site of the aul of Enakhishka (Karabulak community)... the stanitsa of Mikhailovskaya (present-day Sernovodskaya) was founded"[3]. They also record: "In 1845-46 the Sunzha military line was formed, and in the stanitsas built on Karabulak lands the Cossacks of the 1st Sunzha regiment were settled"[3]. The mechanics of the replacement were formulated in retrospect by colonel De-Sazhe (1854), quoted by the same historians: "Every step of the advance cut off from the highlanders irrevocably a piece of their native land. Thus were Lesser Chechnya and Galashki subjugated. On all these places Cossacks have been settled, fortifications built with the regiments' headquarters..."[3].
In 1847-1851 Cossack stanitsas rose, name by name, on the sites of the auls of Chechens and Karabulaks (a Vainakh community between Chechnya and Ingushetia). Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov give the series: "In 1847 on the site of the aul Gazhariyn-Yurt the stanitsa Nesterovskaya was erected. In 1847 on the site of the aul Ekha-Borze the stanitsa Assinovskaya was raised... the village of Mokhmad-Yurt - the stanitsa Magomed-Yurtovskaya (1847), present-day Voznesenovskaya; the village of Eldarkhan-Yurt - the stanitsa Karabulakskaya (1851); the village of Semashki - the stanitsa Samashkinskaya (1851); the village of Zaki-Yurt - the stanitsa Zakan-Yurtovskaya, later Romanovskaya (1851); the village of Alkhan-Kala - the stanitsa Alkhan-Yurtovskaya, later Yermolovskaya (1851)"[3]; of burned Akh-Borze they write plainly: "the burned Karabulak village of Akh-Borze is replaced in 1847 by the stanitsa Assinovskaya"[3]. The empire planned the continuation of colonization in writing: Vorontsov, viceroy in the Caucasus, in an official letter (otnosheniye) to Minister of War Chernyshev of 25 October 1847, reckoned that after the felling of the forests and "the removal from there of the hostile Chechen auls," "in 1849 it will be possible to lay the beginning of the settlement of the 2nd Sunzha regiment"[4]. Who the replacements were is visible from the empire's resettlement files. In 1847 families from the Don Cossack Host were moved to the Sunzha - according to the lists of the resettlement file, the first echelon set out on 23 May 1847 to settle the just-built stanitsas Magomet-Yurtovskaya and Assinskaya; the totals of the lists - 219 souls male and 221 female[5]. In 1850 the empire planted in the stanitsas of the regiment, including Assinskaya and Magomet-Yurtovskaya, the families of married soldiers of the regular regiments, including those "belonging to landlord ownership" - former serfs[5]. The first settler families lived, according to an imperial sketch, "in shanties covered with straw, or in dugouts"[6].
Cossack stanitsas continued to rise on the sites of Chechen auls: in 1856-1857 on the site of the village Churt-Togi the stanitsa Petropavlovskaya was planted - historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov give the pair in their general series: "the village of Churt-Togi - the stanitsa Petropavlovskaya (1856)"[3]. The method was confirmed in writing the same year by General Muravyov, commander-in-chief in the Caucasus: "to consolidate our dominion by stanitsas moved forward - is a method already tried with profit, and it should not be changed"[3].
The head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov, set out the plan: "...the Chechen population had to be herded into one place... This population, cut off on one side from the mountains by the new stanitsas... would no longer dare to threaten us with an uprising and would not escape the most vigilant surveillance"[3]. The land of those who left was taken by the treasury: "many auls emptied completely; the untended lands became overgrown with weeds. These lands were confiscated for the benefit of the treasury"[7], and it was allotted "to Russian officers, the local nobility and, chiefly, to the Cossack hosts"[7]. The replacement proceeded stanitsa by stanitsa: in 1861-1865 alone, 81 Cossack stanitsas were founded on the emptied lands of the North Caucasus[8]. In Chechnya this can be seen step by step: in 1868 the resettlement of the Chechens was directly subordinated to the stationing of the Sunzha Cossack regiments - there was an option of leaving the inhabitants on the right bank of the Sunzha, "but the Cossack host laid claim to these lands, so the Chechens were moved to the left bank of the Terek and the Sunzha, and their lands were taken by the 1st and 2nd Sunzha regiments"[7]. From 1863 to 1885, 112 settlements were founded in the Terek oblast, mostly of Russian settlers, while the Terek Cossack Host occupied a third of the oblast's area while making up a fifth of its inhabitants[7]. The difference shows in the allotments: a Cossack family received on average from 57 to 90 desiatinas (a desiatina is slightly more than a hectare)[9], whereas in the Chechen auls a family had "0.5 – 10 desiatinas... that is, no more than 2 desiatinas per head"[8].
The Kakhanovskaya stanitsa "was founded in 1860 on the site of the village of Umakhan-Yurt in the bend of the lower Sunzha" and found itself almost encircled by 14 Chechen villages, which took in the evicted people of Umakhan-Yurt[7]. Six stanitsas of the Kizlyar otdel "were situated on the lands of the expelled Chechen population", and the Baryatinskaya stanitsa, planted right up against the large village of Stary Yurt, took away part of the Stary Yurt residents' lands[7]. In all, on the Sunzha Line, by the count of historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova, "the highlanders lost 262946 desiatinas of lowland land"[7].
The mass importation of labor from the Russian governorates, altering the demographic balance: "in 1892, 80 percent of the workforce at the mines and plants of Yuzivka, one of Ukraine's industrial towns, had arrived from the Moscow region"[10]. "Among the workers and miners of the Donbas, ethnic Russians from Central Russia predominated… The rural population of the Donbas was mostly ethnically Ukrainian"[11].
On 23 February 1944 the colonizer mobilized students and housewives not employed at factories in Grozny and from six in the morning drove them out to the Chechen auls, from which, half an hour after their arrival, the troops took away the arrested Chechens. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of one of the mobilized - a Russian student of the Grozny Petroleum Institute: "Thus we were, according to a carefully worked-out plan, distributed among the auls, 20-30 people per aul"[12]. The student writes about the work they were given in the auls: "The task of the students was to keep the farms in order until the arrival of the settlers from Kursk and Oryol oblasts. We were to gather the livestock, feed it, take in the grain, the implements, and so on"[12]. By mid-May 1944 settlers had arrived in Grozny Oblast numbering 40% of the deported Chechens, including 6,800 families from Stavropol Krai[3]. Into the districts handed to Dagestan the colonizer resettled 65 thousand people from 224 mountain villages of Dagestan[3]. The settlers died too: in the Aukh district in 1944-1947 about 2 thousand - nearly a third - of the resettled Laks, one of the mountain peoples of Dagestan, died of disease[3].
Artificial alteration of the demographic composition of the population in the occupied territories (for example, in destroyed Mariupol) by incentivizing the relocation of citizens of the Russian Federation and their mass purchase of housing, against the backdrop of squeezing out the indigenous residents.