Aggressors may resort to the forcible mass expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their historical territories to remote regions. This practice physically neutralizes the potential for local guerrilla or political struggle and destroys the social structure of the people, freeing up lands for subsequent settlement by settlers loyal to the colonizer.
The occupation administration of the Russian Empire forcibly resettled the subordinated Indigenous population: historian Ya. Z. Akhmadov records that "by 1724 the Terek town had been razed, and all of its population, including the Okotsk sloboda, populated by natives of Chechnya... was transferred to the new fortress"[1].
The Regular Army of the Russian Empire drove the population of the destroyed villages off their lands, which passed into the conqueror’s possession. Historian D. A. Khozhayev records that the inhabitants of the eight villages near Groznaya were "driven off the lands"[2]. Imperial general Yermolov wrote to Emperor Alexander I that if the population refused to submit, they would be offered "to withdraw and join the other brigands," and then "all the lands will remain at our disposal"[2].
After the devastation of Aukh (the Chechen region in the north-east) in summer 1841 the empire resettled the Aukh families loyal to it away from their land. The imperial historian Yurov recorded: "By 21 June 180 families had gathered in the villages of Aktash and Yurt-Aukh; as a pledge of submission they delivered their most honoured men as amanats and sent their herds to pasture in Salatau" (amanat - a person whom the empire took from a community as a hostage)[3]. When the troops withdrew in September the families were led away from their native land: historian N. I. Pokrovsky - "the Aukhovites loyal to tsarism were settled in Kumyk auls, where they quickly fell under the heavy hand of the Kumyk princes"[4]. The pressure on the families was two-sided: according to Yurov, the Aukhovites who had gone over to the empire were threatened with reprisal by the Imamate, "one thing remained to them - to hold fast to the Russians"[3] - a choice between two threats that ended in the loss of their home and subjection to alien lords. The creation of the Sunzha Line went through the expulsion of the people living on it. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: after the decision to create the line of Cossack stanitsas "the systematic expulsion of the Chechens began. In the end the largest community of Lesser Chechnya - Karabulak - was deprived of its lands entirely" (the Karabulaks - a Vainakh community between Chechnya and Ingushetia)[5]. The sweep of December 1846 squeezed the inhabitants off the plain physically: the imperial officer Poltoratsky, a participant of the expedition, recorded - "the country around the Aldy hamlets kept emptying: the auls were burned, and their inhabitants were pushed further into the forests"[6].
The empire drove the population of the mountain gorges of Lesser Chechnya (the lowland-piedmont western part of Chechnya) down to its fortifications. General Sleptsov reported to General Ilyinsky on 4 October 1850: "In two days, from 30 September to 2 October, the auls Galgayevsky, Eyshkaloysky, Nachkhoysky and Terloyev, scattered in hamlets, emptied. More than 150 families settled the space around Zakan-yurt and Kazakh-kichu" - next to the imperial fortifications[7]. The report frames the resettlement as a request of the elders; the mechanism of coercion is named plainly by the same report - constraint by the future imperial settlements in the valley and the example of compatriots already resettled.
Burning and famine drove Chechen families from their land under the empire's power - and the empire kept count of those carried off. On 23 March 1852 the column of General Baklanov carried off the inhabitants of two auls: imperial historian Volkonsky counts - "There were two hundred fifty-eight souls of both sexes and all ages: fifty-one families from Mazlagash and sixteen families from Gurdali"[8]; the mechanics of the choice he conveyed in the words of contemporaries about the naibs - deputies of Imam Shamil: "the naibs pluck them, we pluck them and will go on plucking... they resolved to choose the lesser of two evils, i.e. to resettle to us"[8]. After the destruction of Khan-Kala in December 1852, Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), counted in a report of 10 February 1853: of roughly 500 inhabitants, 350 were brought to the Groznaya fortress, "the total loss of the inhabitants must be put at around 100 people" - the fate of that hundred, by the report's own admission, "is not known with exactness"[7]. In January 1854, after the devastation of the auls along the Dzhalka, "418 families of Chechens" were evicted[9], and the order of General Muravyov, commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, of 19 July 1855 counts the result: "more than 1 thousand Chechen families have resettled into our submissive auls"[9]. The plan for 1856 posed the choice bluntly: the Chechens were "to choose one of two things - to submit, or to move out farther into the interior of the Black Mountains"[9].
Historian D. A. Khozhayev writes of the springs of 1859: "All the subdued highlanders were immediately, under convoy of the tsarist troops, resettled onto the plain for surveillance"[2]. To the plain, that is down to the lowland under surveillance, people were driven at once: in December 1857 up to 400 households that had come out of the auls being annihilated were sent under troop cover to Umakhan-yurt[10]. After the taking of Vedeno General Yevdokimov ordered his subordinate Nostitz "to proceed with the resettlement of the Chechens living between the Khulkhulau and the Gudermes": on 8 April 1859 "up to 300 families who lived in the nearest hamlets on the right bank of the Khulkhulau at once appeared in the camp with their belongings and livestock"[10]. Resistance to the resettlement is recorded by the imperial documents themselves: naib (district governor under the imam) Osman "several times attempted to pass by the detachment onto the plain and tried to obstruct the resettlement of the Chechens"[10]; separately, according to the journal of military operations of no later than 9 April 1859, "the Ichkerians, Aukhovites and Salatavians, having gathered in great numbers, wanted to obstruct the resettlement" of the inhabitants from the Aksai[11]. For the auls of the upper Fortanga and Assa, forced into capitulation in November 1858, the eviction was set with a deferral: "to remain in the places they occupy for another three months; with early spring they will move out onto the plain of Lesser Chechnya into the Galash society"[10]. Benoy held out longest: historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that Yevdokimov "in the autumn of 1859 and at the beginning of 1860 set about the inhabitants of the mountain society of Benoy", part of whom "were dispersed among the surrounding auls and hamlets"[5].
In the summer of 1865 a fifth of the Chechen people left Chechnya - and almost half of those who left perished. The first families set out from Vladikavkaz on 28 May 1865; the last crossed the border on 10 September[12]; the historian D. A. Khozhayev draws up the tally: "23,057 people (5 thousand families) of Chechens, Karabulaks and Ingush leave their native land for Turkey"[2]; historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov reckon "up to 23 thousand Chechens," of whom more than 4.5 thousand families were inhabitants of Lesser Chechnya and the Ichkerinsky okrug, and in all in the 1860s "up to 20% of the total number of Chechens" were expelled[5]. The dying began at once: the historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova writes - "In the course of the resettlement about 40,000 highlanders of the Terek oblast perished, which was slightly less than half of all those who had left"; according to the dispatches of the Russian consul, in Trebizond in 1864 some 180-250 people were dying each day, in Samsun - 200[12]. The lands allotted for settlement "were unfit for agriculture – stony and barren"[12]; the colony of Ras al-Ayn, where mainly Chechens had been settled, shrank by 1878 from 4-5 thousand families to 500[12]. The muhajirs themselves - as those who left were called, from the Arabic "muhajir," a migrant - wrote to the head of the Terek oblast: "We have learned that Mussa deceived us... A third of us have already perished as it is" (Mussa is General Kundukhov; they called him by his first name)[12].
The historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov reckon: "more than 1200 inhabitants of Benoy, Engenoy, Dattykh, Gendargen and other villages of Ichkeria were forcibly resettled"[5]; the historian D. A. Khozhayev details the mechanism of dispersal: the inhabitants of Benoy "on 29 January 1861, numbering 1218 people, were deported and dispersed, 5—10 households at a time, among the lowland villages of Chechnya assigned to them"[2]. Deportations went on in winter as well: the historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova writes - "Especially hard for the Chechens was the resettlement undertaken in December 1860, during severe frosts. 120 highlander families, having no way to shelter in the forest in winter, were resettled onto the plain within 2 days, their dwellings devastated by the troops. Over the winter of 1861, 1500 mountain Chechens were deported to the Chechen plain"[12]. The Akki mountain society was deported in its entirety in July 1860: according to an imperial report, "The mutinous Akkins were dispersed among the Galash people and other neighboring tribes; their dwellings were destroyed"[10].
"Already in August 1877 the first 150 inhabitants of the villages of Zandak and Dattykh were deported; small parties of exiles were being sent off throughout the autumn"[5]. "In the spring of the following year, 1878, another 110 families were deported from the Terek oblast, and 660 families from Dagestan. Most of the deportees died within the first months of exile. It is also known that over 500 Chechens were sentenced to lifelong katorga labor"[5]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova gives the count for a single governorate: "of the 1625 highlanders deported in 1878 to the Novgorod governorate, 429 died within the first months (118 of them men, the rest - women) and 74 were declared hopelessly ill"[12]. The conditions were described by journalist Yu. Poluyansky, who visited the exiles: "In Cherepovets the highlanders are housed in a half-ruined, long-uninhabited hovel... Of the fifty people, up to thirty have already died, mostly children, of consumption and typhoid fever... For subsistence the adults are allotted 6 kopecks a day, the children 3 kopecks"[12]. Within Chechnya, mountain villages were being driven down onto the plain: "From the locality indicated, the villages of Mekhkety, Khatuni and Tauzen have been deported almost to a man"[5]; the plan for the wholesale deportation of the Salatavians, "up to 3000 souls," to the northern governorates was cut down to 200 people only for lack of escort troops[13].
By 1913 the Russian Empire had arrested and exiled from the Terek oblast thousands of people "on the charge of sheltering the abrek"[5]. "In the course of suppressing the actions in the mountainous part of Chechnya, hundreds of peasants were exiled from the Vedeno okrug alone. As a result a great number of families lost their main breadwinners and found themselves on the brink of destitution" - part of his takings Zelimkhan spent on supporting the families of the exiled[5].
The mass deportation of the civilian population of occupied Galicia: "The Greek Catholic clergy suffered particular persecution. On September 18, 1914, Metropolitan A. Sheptytsky was arrested and taken away to Russia. In all, thousands of Galicians were removed as hostages (through Kyiv alone about 12 thousand passed)"[14].
From 1930 to 1936 the USSR expelled peasant families from Chechnya by the orders and lists of the krai committee of the party (the "North Caucasus kraikom VKP(b)"), of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB) and of the NKVD that replaced it. In January 1930 the leadership of the krai committee of the party, apportioning among the okrugs the expulsion of 20 thousand households of peasants declared well-off, assigned Chechnya 500 households; a household was expelled whole - the family with all its members[15]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write of the same expulsions counting people, not households: "At the beginning of 1930, 1,500 peasants declared kulaks are expelled from Chechnya"[5]. Historian G. I. Kakagasanov gives, from published documents, the count for the first half of 1935 - 1,553 families were expelled from the national districts of the North Caucasus krai, and he specifies: "Of these, 473 families (2,112 people) were expelled from Chechnya" - four to five people per family[16]; for 1935 the count of Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov is briefer: "in 1935, 450 kulak families were expelled from Checheno-Ingushetia, another thousand families were expelled from Chechnya and Dagestan in 1936"[5]. On 22 May 1936 the head of the NKVD of the USSR Yagoda, by telegram No. 56379, ordered Dagin, head of the krai NKVD directorate: "to carry out the resettlement beyond the borders of the krai" of five hundred peasant households from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Oblast and five hundred from Dagestan, finishing "no later than October 1936". In the telegram this thousand families is divided between the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Uzbekistan) and the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (today's Kyrgyzstan). Yagoda also wrote the norms into the telegram: belongings per family - "of a total weight up to thirty poods per family" [about 490 kilograms], loading "from 32 to 35 people" per railcar; able-bodied men he permitted to be arrested "10 days before their dispatch" - "with the aim of preventing their flight"[17].
Mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants ("kulaks") and their family members to Siberia and remote northern regions of the USSR[18].
Mass forced resettlement by quota: "under the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of December 5, 1939 and March 2, 1940, subject to administrative resettlement were the employees of the former state institutions, courts, police, army, merchants, Polish settlers, landowners, owners of plants and factories, and their families"; in total "up to 1,250,000 people were removed to remote regions of the USSR"[19]. The waves were separate: the osadniks were deported under the USSR Sovnarkom resolution of December 5, 1939, no. 2010-558ss - its text remains in the closed Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (fond 93), while the mechanics of the operation are known from the NKVD Instruction approved on December 29, 1939[20]; the families of officers, policemen and prison guards were deported under the resolution of March 2, 1940, no. 289-127ss[21].
On 29 January 1944 People's Commissar (Minister) of Internal Affairs Beria approved the principal document of Operation "Chechevitsa" - the "Instruction on the Procedure for the Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush"[22]; on 31 January the State Defense Committee of the USSR issued two resolutions on the deportation and the destinations[5]. The first laid out the reception of the deported at the places of exile: the Soviet NKVD (predecessor of today's FSB) was instructed to send "in February-March of this year, for resettlement, up to 400 thousand people to the Kazakh SSR and up to 90 thousand people to the Kirghiz SSR," and in every destination district it was prescribed "to organize troikas consisting of the chairman of the district executive committee, the secretary of the district party committee and the head of the district branch [RO] of the NKVD"[23]. The second resolution prescribed that people be transported "at the tariff for the transportation of prisoners"[24]. On 7 February, at a meeting with Beria, "concrete tasks were set for organizing the deportation of 459,486 Chechens and Ingush - 97,635 families," and the date was fixed: 22-23 February[25]. The colonizer massed in the republic, write historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov, "up to 19 thousand officers of the NKVD and NKGB and 100 thousand combat-ready soldiers of the internal troops... over 15 thousand railway wagons and hundreds of locomotives, 6 thousand trucks"[5] - under a cover story: "rumors were spread about large-scale tactical exercises in the mountains of Chechnya and Ingushetia"[25]. On 23 February, the Soviet military holiday ("Red Army Day"), NKVD troops rounded up the men - historian Z. S. Isakieva writes: "Instead of the clubs, the men were driven (and marched) to assembly points under reinforced armed guard"[25]. The Chechen historian A. G. Avtorkhanov cites the testimony of a Russian student eyewitness, printed in the émigré journal Prometheus in 1949, about the evening of 23 February in the auls: "That evening the Red Army men lit fires on the aul squares and began singing and dancing. The aul residents, suspecting nothing, gathered at this festivity as spectators. When in this way most of the residents had assembled on the square, all the men were arrested. Some Chechens had weapons, and shooting broke out in many places... The men arrested on the squares were locked in barns, and a hunt began for those who had not been on the square. The whole action was carried out in two or three hours"[26]. "By 11 o'clock of the first day of the deportation more than 94 thousand people had been taken out of various settlements"[5], and by the morning of 24 February - more than 333 thousand. The NKVD hauled the people in 180 trains: following a "rationalization" proposal the agency packed the loading tighter - "densification of the loading of the special contingent" in its papers - from 24 to 45 people per wagon; historians write: "In reality up to 80 people were crammed into the freight 'teplushka' wagons"[5]. En route, according to the official figures of the Soviet NKVD, 1,361 people died[5]; the eyewitness Ametistov, later a judge of the Constitutional Court of Russia, recalled: "I saw them [the Chechens] brought in in wagons - and half were unloaded already as corpses. The living were thrown out into 40-degree frost"[5]. "The last train with deported Chechens and Ingush pulled up for unloading in the Kazakh steppe on 20 March 1944"[5]. A. G. Avtorkhanov recorded how it looked to the people: "On 23 February 1944... within literally 24 hours the entire population of the Checheno-Ingush Republic was placed under arrest, and its loading into prisoner trains began, for dispatch to an unknown destination," while the decree liquidating the republic "was published backdated" - two years and four months later[26].
The forcible removal of insurgents' families to Siberia and the deportation of the Ukrainians of Zakerzonnia: the removal of "bandit accomplices" with their entire families began at once - already in the summer of 1944 "more than 17,000 people were carried off to Krasnoyarsk Krai"[19]; in all, in 1944–52, 203,662 people were removed to special settlements, among them "representatives of the families of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and their sympathizers — 182,543 people"[19]. Operation "Vistula" was carried out in order to "deprive it of socio-economic and moral-psychological support from the local Ukrainian population," and ended in the scattering of the community: the authorities rid themselves of the Ukrainian population, "dispersing about 150 thousand people"[27].