Aggressors may deliberately create and maintain unbearable socio-economic conditions (acute land shortage, crushing obligations, destitution) in the historical territories of an Indigenous people. This is done to force the population to flee physical and social ruin. As a result, the people 'voluntarily-compulsorily' join the colonizer's militarized structures (for example, the Cossack host or the regular army) or migrate en masse to dangerous imperial frontiers to settle them. This technique allows the empire to accomplish its military and colonization objectives by proxy, disguising state coercion as the victims' own 'free economic choice.'
The squeezing of the Chechens out of the mountains was built on depriving them of the means of life - and the empire wrote about this openly. Vorontsov, viceroy and commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, reported to Minister of War Chernyshev in an official letter (otnosheniye) of 25 October 1847: "constrained in their means of life, seeing their constant failures, the Chechens waver, and a large number of families are already resettling into our bounds"[1]. General Sleptsov, in a report of 4 October 1850, built on this a calculation for the future: the mountain communities, "constrained by our future settlements in the valley, ... will inevitably follow the example of their compatriots" - that is, they too would come down to the fortifications[2].
The empire starved the inhabitants of the Khankala gorge out by an openly formulated plan. Imperial historian Volkonsky recorded the design of the summer of 1852: Baryatinsky, who commanded the left flank of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), "resolved... to smoke the inhabitants out of the gorge, precisely - to smoke them out, because it was necessary to annihilate with fire everything that gave them subsistence"; the calculation Volkonsky recorded thus - "And to seek food from us means to humble oneself, submit, and willy-nilly resettle"[3]. The same calculation stood behind the razing of Khan-Kala - the inhabitants were to be torn away from Imam Shamil, leader of the highlanders' resistance of Dagestan and Chechnya to the Russian conquest: "the inhabitants, deprived of shelter and sustenance, instead of running over to Shamil, would seek refuge with us"[3]. During the siege of Khan-Kala the detachment cut the aul off from water as well: "the enemy was deprived of the possibility of covered access to the river, and he was left without water"[3].
Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The principal means of driving out the highlanders became depriving them of their main source of existence – the land. The transfer of vast lands on the plains to Cossack stanitsas left thousands of highlanders without means of subsistence"[4]. Imperial statistics recorded the result: "each family in the auls has 0.5 – 10 desiatinas... With such crowding not only the development of farms, but even the existence of the people cannot be considered secured" (a desiatina is slightly more than a hectare)[5]. Meanwhile the operation's own executors were reporting the opposite. The head of the Argun okrug, Major A. Ippolitov, wrote to the head of the Terek oblast, General Loris-Melikov: "I can positively tell Your Excellency that the people are not even thinking of voluntary resettlement to Turkey; at a general assembly they declared to me that they would go only when the whole of Chechnya leaves to the last man, or when they are ordered to go"[6]. Colonel Bellik on 25 March 1865 reported to the same Loris-Melikov the words of a Chechen: "we will not go to Turkey and will not let those go who are preparing to; in Turkey death awaits us, and it awaits us here too, but here it is more pleasant, because here is our homeland and here lie our fathers, slain by the Russians"[6].
Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov give a summary based on the materials of the Caucasus Military District (RGVIA, f. 1300, op. 7, d. 3) and the work of A. I. Khasbulatov: "According to the data of 1877, in Mountain Chechnya, including Ichkeria, with a population of almost 100 thousand people, there was on average 0.3 desiatinas (a desiatina is a little over a hectare) of arable land per capita... such fantastic landlessness as in Mountain Chechnya was known to no other region of the Russian Empire"[4]. In 1901 on the Chechen plain "a family (usually quite numerous) had from 7 to 14 desiatinas"[6]. The count by family budget was kept by the oblast statistics service itself: "A Cossack family had a gross income of 918 rubles from its land allotment... and was left with a surplus of 140 rubles. The richest Chechen family on the plain, according to the Terek Oblast Statistical Committee (1903), received an income of 262 rubles from its land allotment while spending 414 rubles on its upkeep; the deficit came to 152 rubles"[6].
The economic squeezing of peasants onto the imperial frontier under the guise of free choice: "during 1906–12 about 1 million people left Ukraine for Asiatic Russia. The largest number of resettlers came from Left-Bank Ukraine, whose peasantry suffered from land scarcity"[7]; land and credit were unobtainable at home, while "Low land prices beyond the Urals and encouraging government credits… attracted the poor peasantry and prompted it to migrate"[7] – state coercion was disguised as voluntary resettlement.