claimed the key lay in the recesses of the Slavic soul. “Russia was as much compelled to go forward,” Lord Curzon [the Viceroy of India] maintained, “as the earth is to go around the sun.”6
The more prosaic explanation is economic. In 1861, the Civil War in the United States cut off exports of American cotton, forcing Russia to turn to other regions to supply its growing textile industry. The climate and soil of the Fergana Valley were considered ideal for cotton growing. Russia also looked to the region for other raw materials and mineral resources, and as a new market for its manufactured goods.
As Russia pushed southward, the British in India were pushing—or rather probing—northward. For half a century, the two colonial empires competed for influence and trade in a vast region stretching from Afghanistan to Tibet in what became known to historians as the “Great Game.” The term came from a letter by a British army officer, Captain Arthur Conolly, serving in Afghanistan. Conolly was an extreme example of the Victorian Christian soldier, melding imperialism with humanitarian and missionary zeal. He believed his destiny was to unite the khanates of Central Asia under British protection to stem Russian expansionism and promote commerce with India, persuade their rulers to abandon slavery, and spread Christianity. In 1841, he set off for Bukhara where the emir had imprisoned and tortured another British officer, Colonel Charles Stoddart. The mission failed, with the emir having both officers executed, so Conolly’s main legacy was to name the contest between the two great powers. He wrote that he wanted to play a leading role in “a great game, a noble game” in Central Asia. The military historian Sir John Kaye, quoting from Conolly’s letters, was the first to use the term. It was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim about Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned, street-smart vagabond who foils a Russian plot in British India.
The pawns in the Great Game were the khanates. Conolly’s nemesis, the emir of Bukhara, and the khans of Khiva and Khokand were throwbacks to medieval despots, with lavish palaces and courts, harems and slave markets. More important, the khanates controlled trade routes, agricultural lands, and natural resources, and could send large armies into the field. Fortunately for the Russians, they were almost always fighting each other. One by one, they were conquered, annexed, or co-opted by the tsar’s generals. Between 1839 and 1895, Russia annexed approximately 1.5 million square miles of territory in Central Asia. It was, writes the historian Alexander Morrison, “an example of European expansion that in speed and scale is matched only by the ‘Scramble for Africa’ or the British annexation of India.”7 By World War I, the Russian Empire encompassed all of what today are the five republics of Central Asia.
By 1850, the Kazakhs, who had reluctantly agreed to Russian “protection” in the mid-eighteenth century, were subdued after a short-lived revolt to prevent Tatar and Cossack farmers from taking over their pasture lands. The khans of the three Kazakh hordes became puppet rulers in a Russian colony. To the south, Kyrgyz tribes, descendants of herders from the Upper Yenisey basin of what today is southern Siberia, were scattered throughout the mountains. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, successive waves of Mongol invaders had pushed them south, first into the Tian Shan and then to the Fergana and Pamir Alay. Although the khanate of Khokand was still the dominant regional power, the more serious threat came from the Russian armies advancing from the north. To protect their tribes, chiefs such as Kurmanjan Dakta decided to back the Russians. In 1862, a Russian army with support from Kyrgyz irregulars captured the Khokand fortress of Pishpek (now Bishkek); the fortresses of Turkistan, Zhambyl, and Shymkent fell in 1864, Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, and finally Khokand in 1876. With the conquest of the khanates, the northern mountains became part of the Russian imperial province of Semireche (Seven Rivers) while the south, including Osh, was absorbed into the province of Fergana.
MAP 2.2 Russian conquest of Central Asia (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
For almost a century, Russia’s southern frontier attracted a gallery of heroes and villains—rogue army commanders who willfully ignored orders from St. Petersburg and whose adventures ended in famous victories or utter disasters, intrepid explorers, railroad builders, entrepreneurs, missionaries, exiled writers, spies, and adventure-seekers on the run from the law, their families, or society in general. The frontier was the place where fame and fortune was won or lost. Central Asia offered the same mix of danger, adventure, and opportunity as the American West in roughly the same period, prompting some scholars to apply Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the region.
Russia’s hold on the region was always precarious, because its strength depended largely on forts and armies, not on commerce, history, language, or culture. Even though the khans had ruled despotically, sending armies to plunder neighboring kingdoms, extorting tolls and taxes, torturing and executing opponents, and maintaining a lucrative slave trade, at least they were local despots who spoke the language of their peoples and understood Islam and tradition. Russia was the invader, the colonial power. The lands of Central Asia were always on the borderlands of empire and their allegiance to the central power fragile and suspect.
Resentment against Russian rule rose during World War I. Cattle were requisitioned from herders in Semireche, food and cotton from Fergana. In 1916, the authorities began conscripting men into noncombatant labor battalions. An armed uprising that began in Tashkent was joined by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, exasperated by the loss of their lands and heavy taxation. Although the intended targets were Russian military and government installations, roving bands on horseback attacked Russian colonists and burned their villages. Russian troops retaliated, razing Kazakh and Kyrgyz settlements, killing the inhabitants or forcing them to flee. In the middle of winter, an estimated 50,000 tried to escape over the Tian Shan to China, but many froze or starved to death on the journey.
In the turmoil that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, with civil war raging between the White and Red Armies from the Urals to the Far East, political leaders took advantage of the power vacuum and declared independent republics in Central Asia. Most revolts were short-lived and brutally suppressed by the Red Army. In early 1922, the charismatic Ottoman Turkish soldier Enver Pasha launched a “holy war” to establish a new pan-Turkic caliphate. The revolt attracted thousands of recruits, including bands of basmachi guerrillas. After a string of successes in which his army took Dushanbe and recaptured most of the former emirate of Bukhara (whose ruler, exiled in Afghanistan, was bankrolling the campaign), the self-styled “Commander in Chief of All the Armies of Islam” saw his support wane. The Bolsheviks adopted a carrot-and-stick strategy: Moscow cut taxes and returned confiscated land while sending 100,000 more troops to the region. Pasha died in August 1922, just nine months after his revolt began, reportedly cut down by Red Army machine guns while leading a suicidal cavalry charge.
Soviet Gerrymandering
When the Soviet cartographers sliced and diced Central Asia in the 1920s, someone must have said, “The Kyrgyz. Aren’t they all nomads? Let’s give them the mountains.”
Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of the region, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan, and place. The Soviets feared that such muddled loyalties could help Islamic, social, or political movements gain popular support, as Pasha’s rebellion had shown. Educated Central Asians and religious leaders still talked privately of a Greater Turkestan or a Central Asian caliphate. The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture, and ethnic profile. Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village, or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).
The Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were created in 1924, the Tajik SSR in 1929. It took the Russians longer to sort out the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, who share similar physical features, traditions, and language. Indeed, in the nineteenth
