Colonial authorities often impose legal or administrative bans on settling in places of traditional residence or on resettlement. This practice is used to prevent the Indigenous population from accessing resources important to the colonizers, e.g., rivers; to force the Indigenous population into emigration due to the absence of economic and social prospects and the high cost of housing; to create conditions for the migration of groups preferred by the empire to the new territories; and, finally, to reduce the capacity for organized resistance.
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 Russian Empire drove the Nokhchi from the lowland to clear it for itself and for loyal neighbors, and blocked their return with fortresses. Historian D. A. Khozhaev cites the admission of General Orbeliani that this expulsion was a system applied everywhere: "in all of Chechnya there remained not a single aul, not a single household, that had not been resettled from one place to another several times over"[3]. General Yermolov himself, in a report to the emperor, admits this with regard to the Kachkalyk Nokhchi: to clear the Aksai riverside he drove them out of it and placed the fortresses of Amir-Adzhi-Yurt and Vnezapnaya in their place, for the sake of "freeing it [the Aksai] from the Kachkalyks, whom I immediately ordered to be driven out of it; I established the fortress of Vnezapnaya"[4].
The "Conditions prescribed to submitting highlanders", issued by general Grabbe, commander of the troops of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), on 15 June 1840, forbade the Chechens to choose freely where to live. Point 5 prescribed: "Not to move from one aul to another for permanent residence without the permission of the local authorities"[5]. The right to live on their own land, where they had lived for generations, the empire turned into a permit issued by the authorities.
The Terek-side Chechens (inhabitants of the left bank of the Terek) who had fled to the insurgents the empire deprived forever of the right to return home. The "Report of the chancellery for the administration of peaceable highlanders" (not earlier than July 1841) records the directive: "to announce to the fugitive Chechens that they have forever lost the right to settle in the places they occupied before their flight"[5]; lieutenant-colonel Bekovich-Cherkassky (of a Kabardian ruling family, in Russian service, set over the Terek-side auls) "was instructed not to receive Chechens returning from flight without permission"[5]. By that time the houses of the twelve villages had been dismantled and carried off to the Cossack stanitsas - there was nowhere to return to, and returning was forbidden. The programme for the conquest of Chechnya approved by emperor Nicholas I in 1843 prescribed where and how the Chechens were permitted to live. War minister Chernyshev, in a report to the emperor of 16 November 1843, recorded the will of Nicholas I: to permit the Chechens to resettle on the right bank of the Sunzha near the imperial fortifications "not otherwise than in large auls, to adapt them somewhat independently for defence and for the more convenient keeping of the inhabitants in obedience, bearing in mind also in course of time to turn them into the Cossack estate. The left bank of the Sunzha and the expanse up to the Terek are designated for the establishment of Cossack stanitsas and their supply with land"[5]. The norm fixed a double dispossession: the Chechens were allowed to live by their own rivers only in large auls under the guns of the fortifications, while the left bank of the Sunzha up to the Terek was signed over to the Cossacks. The surviving inhabitants of Lesser Chechnya the empire resettled onto the plain under the guns of the fortifications being built. Vorontsov, viceroy and commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, in a report of summer 1846 recorded the course and the hitch of the policy: "The resettlement of the inhabitants of Lesser Chechnya onto the plain near the fortification under construction does not yet have proper success"[5]. By August 1846 resettlers were already living by fort Achkhoy - it was among them that the families of the Chechen Topi, who had promised to serve the empire as a secret scout in the mountains and a guide for its troops, were permitted to settle[5]. The choice of where to live was replaced by assignment: to live by the fortification, in view of the garrison.
The colonization of the Sunzha Line (the chain of Cossack stanitsas along the Sunzha river) left the Chechen people a small part of its own land. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov sum up: "after the creation of the Sunzha Cossack line and other numerous military fortifications, the greater part of the country's population found itself herded onto a space roughly 70 versts from west to east and 40 versts from south to north" (a verst is slightly more than a kilometer); per person there was less than 2 desiatinas of land (a desiatina is slightly more than a hectare) against a survival norm of 5[6]. Still earlier the empire took on the very order of settlement: "as early as the 1840s the Russian authorities strove to liquidate the numerous hamlets on the territory of lowland Chechnya, forcing their inhabitants to resettle into large villages with the aim of easing the collection of taxes and tributes and ensuring proper police control over the population"[6].
The empire's answer to the pleas of those who returned was fixed in a formula "at the very highest level": "Of any return migration of the highlanders there can be no talk"[6]. Under the rules approved in June 1861 by the chief of the Main Staff of the Caucasus Army, General Kartsov, highlanders who had entered Turkish subjecthood or overstayed their passports were "resolutely forbidden" to return[7]. By November 1865, 2,600 people had gathered at the border, ready to accept Orthodoxy for the sake of returning - "However, the Russian leadership even on such terms was in no hurry to let them through the border... they no longer had anywhere to return to; their ancestral lands had been either confiscated or sold"[7]. Those who tried to return secretly were caught for years: in 1867, 162 people were detained; in 1868 - 663; in 1869 - 369; in 1870 - 1,263; "Over ten years, from 1862 to 1872, 5,964 highlanders (mostly Chechens) managed to return to the Terek oblast, of whom 2,315 the authorities forcibly expelled to Turkey once again"[6]. Even those permitted were not allowed home: the returning Karabulaks (a Vainakh society kindred to the Chechens) "were not admitted to their native lands, but settled as a single aul, Sagopshi, on the lands of the Chechen village of Psedakh"[6].
As early as 1880, by decree of the viceroy, all highlanders were expelled from the Shatoy sloboda - "owing to the decrease of Russians in the sloboda" - with a ban on settling there henceforth[8]. On 14 May 1893 the eviction of highlanders from the towns and slobodas of the oblast began; the bans were lifted piecemeal over decades: for Grozny - on 18 March 1901, for the Vozdvizhenskaya sloboda - on 27 February 1906, for Vedeno and Shatoy - only on 10 May 1916[8]. The head of the oblast justified the repeal not by the rights of the evicted - he petitioned for the repeal of the law of 14 May 1893 as one "serving as a brake on the Russification of the tribes"[8]. By order of 26 August 1898 the head of the garrison of the Shatoy fortification banned entry into the fortification without a bilet - the population of three uchastoks was left without access to the post and telegraph office, the savings bank and the pharmacy[8].
The colonizer locked the exiled Chechens and Ingush into their places of settlement: the commandant's offices forbade absences without their permission, and the mutual surety of the "ten-yard groups" was in force - ten neighboring households answered for one another[6]. People fled anyway: from the spring of 1944 to the end of 1950 - over 20.6 thousand escapes, and the chekists caught nearly all the escapees[6]. In 1948 the colonizer forbade the exiles to live within 100 kilometers of the USSR border and forcibly resettled over 6 thousand people deeper into Kazakhstan[6].
The USSR forbade the exiled Chechens and Ingush to leave the district of settlement, which at times consisted of a few streets. A commission of the Central Committee of the party admitted this in 1953 in a memorandum to the head of government Malenkov: "the absence of a special settler without the appropriate permission beyond the limits of the district served by the special commandant's office... is regarded as escape and entails liability under criminal law"[9]. The exiled Ingush woman Aza Bazorkina, who at sixteen received a passport stamped "special settler," testifies how the commandant would not let her father's friend go to bury his dead wife: "The Muslim cemetery lay beyond the city limits, and he did not allow him to accompany his wife beyond that line"[10]. Only by its resolution of 5 July 1954 did the Council of Ministers of the USSR ease the regime: to those engaged in socially useful labor it granted "the right of residence within the given oblast, krai, republic"[11], but escape remained a crime: for leaving the settlement without permission people were tried under article 82 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (escape from a place of obligatory settlement)[9], and in 1956 "of 328 thousand Chechens, a little over 191.4 thousand were on the registers of the special commandant's offices"[6]. The ban on returning outlived even the decree of 9 January 1957: the minister of internal affairs of the USSR Dudorov asked the leadership of the Bolshevik party (the "Central Committee of the CPSU") to allow "persons of Chechen and Ingush nationality returning to their former place of residence without the permission of the Organizing Committee to be detained, removed from trains, steamers and other means of transport and returned to the places of their former settlement," and on 9 April 1957 reported: in three days "2,139 persons were identified and detained" on trains[12]. The Organizing Committee stretched the return out over four years and made it paid: the returnees complained to the formal head of state Voroshilov that the Organizing Committee's representative Nemukhin had in March 1957 "announced to us the procedure of our return over 1957-1960, with all expenses connected with the move charged to us, the movers ourselves"[12]; on 26 January 1957 the Organizing Committee and the bureau of the party's oblast committee (the "Grozny obkom of the CPSU") established that "arrival for permanent residence on the territory of the republic may take place only by permission of the Organizing Committee of the ChIASSR [the Chechen-Ingush republic]," and ordered the occupier's police to register newcomers only on those permits[12]; on 5 September 1960 the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR extended the deadline for return "until 1963"[12]. Mountain Chechnya remained closed: five mountain districts - Galanchozh, Cheberloy, Sharoy, Itum-Kale and Shatoy - the decree of 9 January 1957 did not restore[12]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write that "the highlanders were forbidden to reside" there, while the repatriates "were settled in new state farms, workers' settlements, farmsteads... especially in the Cossack districts beyond the Terek, and in arid, unhealthy places remote from district centers and towns"[6]. The same historians write that in the stanitsas, along the way, "conditions were created for their rapid cultural and linguistic assimilation": "In the stanitsas teaching was conducted only in Russian; the heads of stanitsa soviets, districts and farms remained exclusively Russians"[6]. The pogrom of August 1958 in Grozny, with the demand from the pogromists' resolution "to allow the Chechen-Ingush population to reside in Grozny oblast at no more than 10% of the total population"[12], the USSR turned against the Chechens themselves. The historians write: "In November 1958 a special passport regime was established in Grozny and in the Grozny (rural) district, under which serious restrictions on residence registration were introduced here... the true purpose of this action was to create administrative obstacles in the way of the migration of the Chechen population into Grozny," and "The initiators of the introduction of the ban, under the pretext of tightening the fight against a rise in offenses, were the party and soviet organs of Chechen-Ingushetia"[6].