Eurasian Frontier final exam

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,,Iii So u(e ,k' :1: ,!: II Ii CHAPTER FIFTEEN "i1 I "

The Russian conquest and rule qf Central Asia

The time, manner, and purpose of this conquest can be divided into two stages: in the first, Russia acquired the greater part of Kazakhstan except its Semireche and Syr Darya - thus southernmost - segments; in the second, the latter two and all the rest, thus territories of present-day

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Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The earlier stage was longer and more gradual (1730-1848), and at certain points

'E structurally resembled the preceding acquisition of Siberia (which inoS ~ turn could be viewed as an analogy to the "winning of the West" by the .... {i United States); the later stage was relatively brief -lasting from 1864 to §

1884, the decisive move, however, being compressed into several cam­ oS

paigns between 1865 and 1868 - and stood squarely in the psychologi­ 01 ~

cal context of Europe's contemporary "scramble for the colonies." ~ By 1730 the Kazakhs, as we have seen, had asserted themselves as a 0"

distinct group of nomadic tribes living in the eastern part of the Dasht­ <D i Kipchak, speaking a distinctive Kipchak Turkic idiom, but lacking fJ<

f I! " overall political unity. As a somewhat peculiar substitute for the latter,

though, the tribes had coalesced into three confederations, the afore­ ~

i ': i~ mentioned Greater, Middle, and Lesser Hordes. Geography as much as i::' :;:: I" ,II tribal politics no doubt played a role in their formation: the GreaterII' ,. ii' ",. ~,.: I'I" Horde occupied a territory roughly coterminous with Semireche, the"': ::1:;,. I,' ,."',,. Middle Horde that of central Kazakhstan, and the Lesser Horde that of I western Kazakhstan. Although the Russian "orda" and English "horde"I

1:; are originally Turkic words, the more common Kazakh name for their hordes was "juz," meaning "hundred" (thus Ulu Jilz, Orta Juz, Kishi IIII

1

Juz). Except for brief periods early in their history, the Kazakhs never I, I;

managed to forge a unified khanate that would in turn become a steppe empire, in the manner of their medieval Turkic and Mongol predeces­ sors. One of the reasons for this may have been the proliferation of sultans - in this instance steppe aristocrats claiming Genghisid descent who alone were entitled to become khans - still holding positions of

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196 A history rif Inner Asia

prestige and son1(': authority, but stifling the rise of a truly charismatic new leader able to repeat the exploits of his great ancestor. On the other hand, the prestige enjoyed by the steppe aristocracy of Genghisid ances­ try may have been a factor in the peculiar vertical division of Qazaq society into two layers, the so-called "White Bone" and "Black Bone" (Aq S~yek, Qgra Siiyek). Certain other credentials, such as descent from eminent Muslim ancestors, could also entitle some individuals, often called qqjas (Kazakh form of khwaja) to claim "White Bone" status. The social and political structure of Kazakh society received a definitive codification, known as jeti jarghy ("seven verdicts"), during the reign of the khan Tauke (1680-1718) somewhat in the manner of the Mongol )lasa, but took much longer to be written down - in fact only after the annexation of Kazakhstan to the Russian empire.

The rise of Russia as a modern power, which began under the afore­ mentioned Ivan IV ("The Terrible"; ruled 1547-84) and was quickened by Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725), made Russia overwhelmingly stronger than any of her Asian neighbors. In view of this new and growing disparity, the Russian penetration of the Kazakh steppe was only a matter of time and determination. The initially slow pace and oscillating success may have been due to the fact that the occupation of Siberia presented enough challenge and reward for the time being. The Russians at first contented themselves with accepting offers of vassal­ dom from various Kazakh leaders, without actually acquiring military or administrative control over their territory beyond the erection of fortified posts gradually infringing upon it. This complex process started in 1730, when Abilay (Abulkhayr), khan of the Lesser Horde, expressed his wish that the Tsar be his suzerain, and the request was granted. For much of the eighteenth century, Russia received similar assurances of loyalty from other Kazakh leaders, and discovered that they were little more than expedient declarations designed to bolster the chieftains' positions in intertribal wars. Similar statements of allegiance were made to Manchu emperors of China after their conquest of Sinkiang in 1758.

Nevertheless, a firmer hold on the northwestern, northern and north­ eastern fringes of Kazakhstan began to take shape during the reign of Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-96), with creeping colonization by Russian peasants and implantation of military posts deeper in Kazakh territory, such as Akmolinsk and Turgai. The kindred Tatars of the Volga had since the fall of Kazan in 1552 been safely incorporated in the Russian empire, and their elites were now experiencing something

Russian conquest and rule

of an economic and spiritual renaissance. Tatar traders spread out into Central Asia as well, and also represented Russian commercial interests there; the government, eager to protect the latter, saw in these Muslim subjects convenient proxies, and trade flourished. Moreover, in those parts of Kazakhstan that had by then come under a sufficient degree of Russian control, St. Petersburg deemed it practical to consolidate that control through the at first sight surprising device of tying the still only marginally Muslim Kazakhs more firmly to Islam; the idea was that this would entice the unruly nomads to a more sedate way of life, especially since it was the tsar's subjects, the Tatar mullahs, who spread among the Kazakhs as preceptors and even built mosques and madrasas. Equally remarkable was the concomitant reluctance of the Russian government to allow proselytizing activity by its Orthodox subjects. This policy of using Tatar elites, both mercantile and religious, as the Russian govern­ ment's advanced infrastructure in Kazakhstan, devised in the I 770s, continued until 1860, thus until the eve of the final drive to conquer the core of Central Asia.

Somewhat curiously, Russia's interest in Central Asia proper, the area south of the Syr Darya, appeared even before her first involvement with Kazakhstan. In 17 I 7-18 Peter the Great sent the aforementioned expe­ dition of some 300 men under Colonel Bekovich-Cherkasskiy to Khiva; its mission was less to conquer than to reconnoiter and establish a contact, but it was as an enemy that the khan of Khiva Shirghazi (1715-28) met the troop and destroyed it. A similar attempt more than a century later, in 1839-40, led by General Perovskiy, foundered on logistical problems, for the khanate was well shielded from attack on most sides by inhospitable deserts. Aside from Central Asia itself, the goal of both these expeditions may have been to probe possible routes to India; this in turn remained more a daydream than a real plan, and was diametrically opposed to the methodical and realistic manner char­ acteristic of Russian expansion.

We began our story by dividing the Russian conquest of Central Asia into two stages, 1730-1848 and 1864-84; the first stage could in turn be subdivided into two phases, of which the second occurred between 1822 and 1848, for that was when St. Petersburg resolved to eliminate the four Kazakh hordes altogether (a fourth, minor horde called Bukey's horde, had meanwhile formed to the west of the Lesser Horde between the Ural and Volga rivers): the Middle Horde was suppressed in 1822, the Lesser in 1824, Bukey's in 1845, and the Greater in 1848.

The suppression of the Kazakh hordes removed any ambivalence

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198 A history if Inner Asia

about Russia's dominance in the bulk of Kazakh territory, but it still left out its southern fringe. There were two reasons for that: logistical, for that area - primarily the middle and lower course of the Syr Darya ­ was rather remote and in parts separated from northern and central Kazakhstan by semi-arid stretches; and political, because it had by then come under the sway of the khanate of Khoqand. A conflict with Khoqand might have caused complications with Britain and China, which St. Petersburg wanted to avoid. Its acquisition thus required a different psychological, diplomatic, and military strategy. Nevertheless, by 1853 the Russians wrested Akmeshit from the Khoqandis. A year later they founded Vernyi - the eventual Kazakh capital Almaty - and pushed on to Bishkek, today the capital of Kyrgyzstan but then a Khoqandi frontier post. The strategy of these operations illustrates the vast reSOurces at Russia's disposal: her giant pincers began to squeeze the remnant of Kazakhstan from west and east, the latter approach being realized from her Siberian frontier. The brief halt that followed was caused by external circumstances: the Crimean War, and the uprising led by Shaykh Shamil in the Caucasus. These hindrances disappeared with the advent of the I 860s, and the stage was set for the final assault: it began in 1864 with the fall of Chimkent and Aulie Ata (nowJambul), and culminated with the storming of Tashkent inJune 1865.

Tashkent is of course the capital of Uzbekistan, and as such we asso­ ciate it with that republic rather than with Kazakhstan. In 1865, however, the event was perceived more as the final step in the conquest of Kazakhstan. For the time being, accommodation with Khoqand, Bukhara, and Khiva, rather than their conquest, was viewed by the prin­ cipal policy planners in St. Petersburg as preferable to any further push southward that might provoke Britain to action from India's northwest frontier. The clashes with Khoqandi forces did not yet mean war, and Tashkent was stormed almost against the wishes of the Russian govern­ ment by the brash General Chernyaev.

Yet a mere three years later, in 1868, the Russians were at war with the emir of Bukhara, routing his forces in several battles, annexing a sub­ stantial part of the emirate's territory (including Samarkand), and allow­ ing the rest to exist as a de facto Russian protectorate; five years later, in 1873, they defeated in a similar manner the khan of Khiva, annexing much of his territory, and leaving the rest as a protectorate; and by 1876 they did away with the khanate of Khoqand altogether, annexing all of its remaining area. Only the territory rougWy corresponding to modern Turkmenistan remained untouched, but its turn came five years later

Russian conquest and rule

when the Russians crushed Turkmen resistance at the battle of Gbktepe in 1881.

The causes and goals of all these campaigns and conquests were complex and shifting, but two catalysts can be singled out: one was the unrealistic attempts by the local leaders, both secular and religious, to recover from the infidels what had been lost, thus provoking the Russians to actions they might not have taken so quickly (this was especially true of Bukhara); the other was the virtual collapse of government in the khanate of Khoqand, which began with the death of Madali Khan in 1842 and worsened in the 1850s and 1860s; the Russians, for several years endeavoring to establish a working relationship with a khan in Khoqand, finally threw up their hands and carried out the annexation. Yet another factor may have been the contradictory effect of the setback that Russia had suffered in the Crimean War: many Russians, especially the more fiery members of the military, sought psychological compen­ sation through expansion elsewhere; in Central Asia this meant taking solace through thwarting the real or imagined designs of the world's principal colonial power and Russia's adversary, Great Britain. And finally there was of course the colonial motivation: to gain markets for the products of Russia's growing industry and acquire sources of raw materials for this industry.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia was completed by 1884 with the acquisition of Merv. This fertile oasis contained the ruins of the great pre-Islamic and early Islamic city, as well as a small settlement nearby which had the same name. However, it was not Merv's history but its proximity to Mghanistan and thus to British India that made the event of 1884 so important. Its fall to Russia and the subsequent Russian drive still farther south to Kushka on the Mghan border brought British fears for their colony to the verge of paranoia, and the mutual sparring of the two powers came close to war when in the early 1890s the Russians pushed south from their province of Fergana through the Pamirs to India's Kashmir border. Peace was rescued perhaps mainly because neither power had the intentions that the other had suspected, a circumstance that facilitated the work of the Pamir Boundary Commission in 1895. Its agreement, further strengthened by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, bound the two partners to respect each other's zones of interest, and as both a symbol and effective buffer it created an elongated strip of territory between Pamir and Kashmir and attached it to Mghanistan (the 'Ughan finger"), while linking up its eastern tip with China's Sinkiang province.

201

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200 A history qf Inner Asia

We may thus consider the year 1895 as the terminus by which the southern borders of Russian and then Soviet Central Asia - and now of the independent republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan - had taken their definitive form. Russia's acquisition of a new, non­ Russian, non-Slavic, non-Christian, Muslim territory of course had precedents bracketed by Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the khanates of Kazan in 1552, Astrakhan in 1556, and Catherine the Great's annex­ ation of the khanate of Crimea in 1783. Those conquests, however, were not quite of the modern colonial type but had elements akin both to Spain's Reconquista and Russia's spread into the Siberian expanse; the conquest of Central Asia, on' the other hand, bore all the hallmarks of nineteenth-century Europe's colonial expansion: the motivation of acquiring abundant and cheap sources of raw materials such as cotton for the Russian textile industry, and, inversely, of gaining a privileged position for Russia's commerce; the ease and rapidity of military opera­ tions in which handfuls of disciplined and well-armed troops of a modern European power overcame much larger native forces, and the resulting pacification and organization of the conquered territories along pragmatic lines so as to suit primarily the colonizer but also, up to a point, to benefit the colonized, were the chief elements of this expansion.

British India is the colony that is routinely mentioned as the antece­ dent, model, or counterpart to Russian Central Asia, but French North Mrica presents an even closer parallel (although the initially tentative and protracted invasion of the Indian subcontinent does harbor certain analogies with Russia's initial probing of Kazakhstan). Chronologically, the French conquests bracket the Russian ones - Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1883, Morocco in 1912 - in contrast to the eighteenth­ century inception of Britain's drive. Both the French and Russian con­ quests were government undertakings from the start, unlike the British arrival in India, which was at first a private enterprise of the East India Company; all three acquisitions were vast expanses of territory, but sizable colonization by settlers - both agricultural and urban - from the colonial powers occurred only in Central Asia and North Mrica; finally, geographical realities must have been a powerful psychological as well as logistical factor: the contiguousness of Central Asia with Russia's own territories, and the relative proximity of North Mrica to France, may have played a similar catalytic role in the evolving concept of those countries as indivisible parts of the fatherland, in contrast to India, whose remoteness beyond two oceans, a population vastly surpassing

Russian conquest and rule

that of Britain, and a civilization too impressive to subordinate it to that of the conqueror, deterred any such contemplations.

The administrative structure devised by St. Petersburg for its new pos­ sessions went through several stages and modifications. The stages were the fall of Tashkent in 1865, the defeat and truncation of the emirate of Bukhara in 1868 and of the khanate of Khiva in 1873, the liquidation of the khanate of Khoqand in 1876, and the completion of the overall con­ quest with the fall ofMerv in 1884 and penetration of the Pamirs by 1895. The result was the Governorate-General of Turkestan (Turkestanskoe General-Gubernatorstvo or General-Guberniya Turkestan), adminis­ tered by a military governor residing in Tashkent and divided into five regions (oblasts) and two protectorates. The regions were Syrdarya (center Tashkent), Semireche (center Vernyi) , Fergana (center Skobelev), Samarkand (center Samarkand), and Zakaspie (Transcaspia, center Ashgabad); the protectorates were the emirate of Buldlara and the khanate of Khiva.

Meanwhile, the organization of the steppes to the north - thlls of the greater part of Kazakhstan - proceeded along lines that were somewhat distinct without, however, denying the many-faceted links with Turkestan. The distinctiveness resided, among other things, in their geo­ graphical and historical linkage with Russia proper and with Siberia. The result was that unlike the Governorate-General of Turkestan, which had a specific administrative and geographical unity, the territory inhabited by the Kazakhs consisted of three separate parts: the western­ most part, whose area corresponded to that of the Bukey and Lesser Hordes, was now the oblast of Uralsk, whose administrative center was the city of Uralsk and whose governor reported directly to the Ministry of Interior; its central part, more or less the former Middle Horde, con­ sisted of the oblasts of Turgai and Akmolinsk; the governor of the Turgai oblast did not even reside there, but rather across the border in Orenburg, for he was at the same time governor of the Governorate­ General of Orenburg and also reported to the Ministry of Interior; the oblasts of Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk, on the other hand, formed a full-fledged Governorate-General, that of the Steppe, but their governor did not reside there either but across the border in the Siberian city of Omsk, which is thus also included in this governorate on some maps. The Semipalatinsk oblast covered some of the territory of the defunct Greater Horde, but the greater part of the latter now corresponded to the Turkestan oblast of Semireche and the eastern fringe of that of Syrdarya, both within the Governorate-General of Turkestan.

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202 A history if Inner Asia

One final comment on the administrative borders of Central Asia: both the khanate of Khiva and the emirate of Bukhara lost important segments of their territories: those of Khiva were incorporated in the Syrdarya region, those of Bukhara in that of Samarkand, together with the precious city itself On the other hand, the emirate's territory was extended farther east so as to include almost all of modern Tajikistan except eastern Badakhshan, which was incorporated in the Fergana region, and Khujand, which was divided between the Fergana and Samarkand regions.

The new political map of Central Asia thus reflected a blend of geo­ graphical, historical, and strategic factors used or created by the Russian conqueror. The native population played little or no active part in this process, which only marginally took account of a reality that in the Soviet period would playa paramount role, namely the ethnolinguistic one. Yet the life of the natives was immediately and increasingly affected by the new order. The break with the past brought about many radical departures, but two deserve special mention: the relative peace and order installed by the European conqueror in an area where internecine warfare and marauding had been endemic, and the surrender of the population's overall destiny to the discretion of a new and alien master who was an infidel.

Tashkent became the seat of the Russian governor and administra­ tion. The choice made sense on several counts. Its climate is salubrious and, although continental, without the extremes characteristic of places farther north or south; its location, at first sight somewhat eccentric, was quite central within the province of Turkestan; situated near the right bank of the Syr Darya, it also lay in an area where the worlds of historic Transoxania to the south and of the Kipchak steppe to the north met and overlapped; on the ethnolinguistic level, this was reflected in the Sart population of the city, which spoke Turki Turkic or Tajik Persian, and the Kazakh population of the countryside, which spoke Kipchak Turkic; this overlapping was also visible in the historic role of Tashkent as one of the crossroads of long-distance trade routes. The fact that its promi­ nence had previously never equalled that of Bukhara or Samarkand may similarly be ascribed to this position in a transition zone: for although Tashkent benefited from the contact with the steppe nomads, it was also too exposed to their unpredictable incursions and tribal move­ ments, and to occasional contests between the rulers of Transoxania and the Kazakhs and other nomads, to become a major metropolis. Once peace was solidly established by Russia, however, Tashkent quickly sur-

Russian conquest and rule

passed all other Central Asian cities. Much of this rise was of course due to the city's function as the first modern capital of Central Asia and seat of the colonial administration. The Russians built a quarter of their own alongside the native city, establishing a pattern that they would follow in a number of other places: a European city developed through a rational system of urban planning, presenting a sharp contrast to the traditional native quarters.

The second governor of the Turkestan Governorate-General was Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, a general descended from a Russified German Baltic family who had commanded the Russian troops in the crucial confrontation with Bukhara. He was an able officer and administrator, and his long tenure of office (1867-82) did much to put the colonial administration of Central Asia on a solid base. The system held firm until the entire edifice of the Russian empire collapsed in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The prime motivation of the Russian conquest had been economic self-interest, and the evolution of the colony between 1868 and 1917 amply met that goal. The area became a supplier of raw materials for Russian industry and a consumer of Russian products, after the classical colonial pattern. We have already pointed to cotton as the most important commodity sent to Russia; its cultivation increased to the verge of becoming a monoculture, and the adverse effect of this one-sidedness was made worse by the concomitant decrease in the growing of cereals, which made Central Asia dependent on wheat imports from Russia. The other major aspect was the afore­ mentioned colonization by agricultural settlers, mostly Russian and Ukrainian. This affected primarily Kazakhstan, but also the Semireche region of Turkestan, including portions of northern Kyrgyzstan. Some of the most fertile tracts of land were thus seized, with the doubly harmful effects of expropriating the nomads' grazing grounds and of hampering their seasonal movements in search of water and pasture land (thus a reverse process in comparison with the aforementioned desedentarization caused by the Mongols). Other forms of immigrant colonization existed too, and all over the two provinces; they were mostly of the professional urban type: civil service, transportation and commu­ nications, incipient industry, and modern education, staffed chiefly by and for the Russians. This arrangement led to the special demographic physiognomy of some cities where the European population, living in its own quarters, began to equal or even surpass the native one. Trade with Russia, formerly passing through the intermediary of Tatar merchants, was now taken over by the colonizers themselves. To a considerable

205 204 A history qf Inner Asia

extent the natives, essential to the base of the productive process, remained excluded on the executive and profit-taking level.

On the cultural and spiritual level, the Russians were fairly benevo­ lent and tolerant colonizers. Although convinced of the superiority of their own civilization and religion, they had less of the condescending or downright contemptuous attitude toward the natives characteristic of most colonizers from Western Europe. Islam, the sharia, waqf, religious practices and education, and the general way of life were not interfered with unless in direct conflict with Russia's interests and with the excep­ tion of slavery, which the Russians suppressed in imitation of similar measures taken by other colonial powers in their possessions (and not long after the 1861 suppression of serfdom in Russia). Proselytism by the Orthodox Church, despite the participating priest's role at the storming of Tashkent, received no encouragement from the authorities. This atti­ tude, however, was a result not only of Russian tolerance, but also of the changed intellectual and spiritual climate in Europe, and it presented a sharp contrast to the earlier, sixteenth-century conquest of Kazan, where forced conversion or expulsion of those who refused to convert, in addition to other forms of persecution, wrought havoc among the Tatar population; in the same manner, for example, the effects of the 1830 French landing at Algiers differed from those of the Spanish Reconquista, despite the participating French bishop's exuberant excla­ mation about Christianity's return to North Africa. Central Asia's natives, having lost their political and economic independence, thus retained their spiritual freedom, and most remained staunchly Muslim in their religion, culture, and way of life. This also meant, however, that the bulk of the population received little of the already vertiginous intel­ lectual and scientific progress in which Russia had taken part since the time of Peter the Great.

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Aside from the military occupation itself - about 40,000 troops are :~::i! estimated to have been stationed in the two provinces, which had a pop­ ulation of about six million souls and an area of some 1,277,000 square kilometers (493,000 square miles) - the construction of railroads and of a telegraph network proved an effective means of controlling the colony. Especially the railroads facilitated this control and would later playa· crucial role in the preservation of Turkestan as Russia's possession iii'i..I.'i

ri: during the turbulent years of the Bolshevik Revolution. The first line, opened to traffic in September 1881, connected the Caspian port of Uzun Ada - to be shifted in 1894 to Krasnovodsk - with the Turkmen city of Kizil Arvat; the location of the earliest railroad line in this part

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Russian conquest and rule

of the colony, conquered last, may at first sight seem surprising, but the reason was its compatibility with the lively shipping traffic on the Caspian, linking it both with ports on the northern, Russian side of this sea and with Baku and thus Russia's Transcaucaslls possessions. By 1898 this line was extended all the way to Tashkent, and in 1906 a line linking this city to Orenburg and thus to the rest of the empire - for example, on to Samara, Riazan, Moscow, and St. Petersburg - was completed. This network had great strategic, economic and psychological significance, emphasizing a structural feasibility of Central Asia's incor­ poration in the Russian empire that was impossible in the case of the overseas colonies of other European powers. Moreover, the construction of a branch from Merv to Kushka on the Afghan border, the southern­ most point in Russian Turkestan and, for that matter, in the entire Russian empire, was dictated by the aforementioned strategic consider­ ations, while that from Samarkand to Andijan served primarily eco­ nomic interests. Another detail worth mentioning is the fact that this line, in its sector between Merv and Samarkand, passed through the emirate of Bukhara but skirted the city itself some twelve kilometers to the southeast; that was where Kagan or New Bukhara, a railroad station town populated mainly by Russian administrative personnel, developed and eventually played a role in the events leading to the collapse of the native regime.

Starting with General Romanovskiy (1865-67) and ending with General Kuropatkin (1914-17), eleven men served as governors-general of Turkestan. Central Asia experienced in the course of these decades an economic development that benefited, as we have said, the colonizer, and in certain basic respects harmed the native population, [or example through loss of land to settlers, growth of detrimental monoculture, and dependence on food imports and finished products from Russia. On the positive side, the population drew some benefit from the pax Russica imposed on it by the colonizer, and from the contact with modern civil­ ization as represented by Russia. True, most Central Asians continued to live as before; few were those who received education, and such edu­ cation as there was continued to be of the traditional type based on the Koran and the classics of Arabo-Persian culture.

Nevertheless, a minority of Central Asians did become exposed to modern education. This happened through a variety of channels. One was a certain number of schools opened by the Russians for the natives, where teaching was done both in the vernacular and in Russian (the so­ called russko-tuzemnye shkoly or "Russo-native schools"). Another was

206 A history if Inner Asia

modern education propagated by the Muslims themselves; these reform­ ers were often from other, older parts of the Russian empire, or were Central Asians who had lived or studied at Russian institutions. One such reformer, a Crimean Tatar named Ismail Bey Gasprinskiy (Gaspirali, 1851-1914), founded a movement known as usul-iJadid, "new

,;' method," because of the new type of education that was its main ;1I purpose. A certain number ofjadid schools thus appeared also in the two Ii provinces. Efforts to enlighten the people took other forms as well, such "

as the periodical press (for example the newspaper Terjuman published in the Crimean city of Bakhchesarai by Gasprinskiy from 1885 to 1914). Despite its incipient nature arid often ephemeral duration, the effect of

,I this press in forming the small but important group of those Central

I Asians who were increasingly aware of a need for modernization was considerable. Most of these new currents arrived by way of Russia and:\ thanks to familiarity with the Russian language through which native

"I intellectuals gained acquaintance with Western culture, but they were at

'ii the same time part of the general awakening to the need for reform that was gripping many Muslim countries, especially the Ottoman empire.

!~ While Russian cities such as Orenburg or St. Petersburg were where the select few from Central Asia would usually travel or study, some went to Istanbul, where they imbibed ideas not only of modernization but also of modern nationalism, mostly in its adapted forms of pan-Islamism or pan-Turkism. Abdarrauf Fitrat (1886-l938) thus spent some time in the Ottoman capital, and after returning to his native Bukhara he became one of the newly formed group of "Young Bukharans" who, like the "Young Turks" of the Ottoman empire, strove to reform their society. Reform became the leading motto of the Young Bukharans toward the end of the Tsarist period, and it began to surpass the parallel or com­ peting mottos of pan-Islamism or pan-Turkism. It was no accident that the most articulate group appeared in Bukhara; in comparison with areas under direct administration from Tashkent, the emirate's back­

lil wardness became that much more evident, while its relative indepen­ I'i

dence may have encouraged the Young Bukharans to consider reform II:' ~\ I' I.:

rather than liberation from Russia as the most urgent goal. Fitrat's sub­ i~ ,(I: sequent career and life epitomize the drama, ultimately tragic, that l' Ii unfolded in Central Asia under Tsarist and then Soviet rule. The first act

I" 1" took place during the final years of the Tsarist regime, when Fitrat wrote \

his Munazara ("The Dispute"), a reformist essay urging his compatriots I: I:' to awaken to the needs of modern times. Although he eventually 'I became a major scholar and publisher of Chaghatay Turkic literature, I. I I

207Russian conquest and rule

he wrote the tract in Persian, a detail further stressing the initial reform­ ist focus of this typically bilingual Bukharan who later became a major proponent of Turkic cultural renaissance. Politically, his main focus was reform, and for this reason he and most of his associates were at first not averse to cooperation and association with Russia.

Both the Russian administration and the emir of Bukhara looked warily on the various reformist currents in their territories, and never hesitated to intervene when they felt that the existing order was threat­ ened. The native conservatives, especially the clerical class, gave support to the Russians in this matter. The Tsarist regime, however, had a more dangerous opponent than incipient nationalism to contend with: its own socialist dissidents, revolutionaries of various hues, whose numbers in Central Asia were swelling with deportees from Russia. Although mostly of the intellectual and professional class, these revolutionaries made rapid headway among the Russian workers and soldiers of the colony, while they virtually ignored and were ignored by the natives - whether their peers whom they barely knew or did not trust, or the peasants and such members of a marginal native working class as there were. This was a fateful evolution for Central Asia, for the drive, political skill and, even­ tually, the military means of these revolutionaries would in due course preserve the region as a Russian possession, thwarting the valiantly defended aspirations of the inexperienced and unarmed Muslims.

On the eve of the First World War and the upheavals that followed it, the two provinces of Central Asia were thus firmly incorporated in the Russian empire. The few native uprisings, usually fomented by such religious figures as the Naqshbandi ishon Madali (better remembered as Dukchi Ishon) of Fergana in 1898, were speedily put down by the Russians. Half a century of colonial rule had had effects not unlike those in other European colonies. Their possession flattered the Russians psychologically and benefited them economically; but perhaps the strongest and seemingly indissoluble tie was the presence of a by then quite entrenched Russian constituency, consisting of people of many walks of life, from professionals to workers and agriculturalists, who con­ sidered the colony their home and indeed had no other home elsewhere; again, the analogy with French settlers in North Africa is especially strik­ ing. Meanwhile, the native Muslim population, from the Kazakhs in the far north to the Turkmens and Tajiks in the deep south, had undergone a process that was as new, complex, uneven, and contradictory as the entire concept of a modern colony. Neither the colonizer nor perhaps even the colonized fully realized how temporary the arrangement was,

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208 A history if Inner Asia

in which again we can observe an analogy with other colonies, but espe­ cially with North Africa. The fact remains that by 1917, there had arisen in both provinces an elite of educated and politically sophisticated natives who proved themselves capable of putting up a brave fight for their people's rights. In the end they lost, but not even the heaviest hand of alien rule that followed could ultimately change the impermanence of that rule, as the events of 1991 have shown.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From Governorates-General to Union Republics

Among the symptoms of the second-class citizenship that the Muslims of Central Asia experienced in Tsarist Russia was their official status as inorodtsy, natives (literally, "alien-born"), and the fact that they were not required to perform military service. The latter aspect appeared to be an asset when the First World War broke out and their young men were spared shedding blood on the battlefields. In 1916, however, the impe­ rial government took a step whose consequences proved detrimental to the Russians and disastrous for the natives: it issued a decree that large numbers of Central Asian Muslims be drafted for labor behind the battle lines - primarily that of digging trenches. The insulting nature of this order, compounded by still wilder rumors, provoked a number of uprisings in both provinces, directed against government representatives but also against civilians, especially the agricultural settlers. The author­ ities, taken by surprise, could not prevent serious casualties on the Russian side, but when they finally suppressed the revolts, the loss of life among the natives was staggeringly heavier and the suffering much worse. Especially hard hit were the Kyrgyz, because their attacks on the settlers in the neighborhood of the lake Issyk Kul were particularly violent and the resulting repression was that much harsher. Many fled across the border to Sinkiang, with further casualties wrought chiefly by the elements during the winter of 1916-17.

Kuropatkin, the governor-general of the Turkestan province, had the situation und~r control and was making plans for further exploitation of the colony now that more land had been vacated by the fleeing Kyrgyz, when the empire began to crack at the center. Although the attitude of the Provisional Government led by Kerenskiy after the February 1917 revolution was at best ambiguous with respect to Central Asian Muslims, the change did give the latter certain liberties they had not enjoyed before: they could form their own organizations, freely publish

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