CENTRAL ASIA

Long before geographers named the region "Central Asia," it had become known by the name of "Turkestan" (land of the Turks) among peoples in the surrounding region. Bordered on the north and east by the plains of southern Siberia and the deserts of western China, and on the west and south by the Caspian Sea and the Pamir mountain chain, this area had gradually become the domain largely of Turkic-speaking peoples. Their principalities (khanates) had thrived economically as long as the Silk Road commerce had carried precious goods through their region from China to the Middle East and Europe. Their Muslim religious schools had for a time in the Middle Ages been centers of learning as well as piety. But by the nineteenth century, little remained of those good times. Trade had dwindled, leaving only the farming in the oasis areas (mainly by Uzbeks) and livestock raising by pastoral nomads (principally Kazakh and Kirgiz) to sustain economic well-being. The small Turkic states fought sporadic wars among themselves, using the meager resources of their peoples to maintain their poorly equipped armies and to pay for the backing of allied nomadic tribes. Until the mid-nineteenth century, no Western empire threatened their independence.

the russian conquest

That threat became a reality with the expansion of the Russian Empire. For centuries the empire had moved toward the east and south onto the European and Asian steppes (plains) in territories previously controlled by nomadic tribes. Its primary goal, similar to that of the United States in the nineteenth century on its western Great Plains, was to subjugate the unruly nomads beyond its control and to exploit the resources of the steppe. Troops came first, and then came settlers to cultivate the fertile land. This process of Russian conquest encountered little effective opposition. By the 1860s, the border between the empire and Turkic peoples had reached the northern region of Central Asia. In the following decade, military leaders attacked the forces of the Turkic principalities. This move, which was initially the decision of frontier commanders, received the backing of the government when victory appeared certain. By 1875, Russian troops had defeated all the opposing armies. The largest area became the Russian governor-generalship of Turkestan, with its capital in the city of Tashkent. Two principalities (Bukhara and Khiva) became protectorates of the Russian Empire. Their rulers remained in power, but were under the control of Russian advisers.

Russian conquest of Central Asia provoked the opposition of the British Empire. Its diplomatic sphere extended beyond its Indian colony into Afghanistan and Persia, just south of Turkestan. Russian and British agents competed for influence among the tribes in these lands in secret operations baptized by observers as the "Great Game." This struggle for empire was finally settled in the early years of the twentieth century. The 1907 diplomatic agreement between the two empires delimited their spheres of influence, and confirmed the formal borders separating Turkestan from Persia and Afghanistan (now the southern borders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan).

Turkestan resembled in many ways an overseas colony of other Western empires. Until railroads reached its territory late in the nineteenth century, the deserts that separated it from European Russia made transportation and communication as difficult as though an ocean lay between these lands. The Russian army officers who became the first colonial officials there had as little knowledge of their subject peoples as European officials in newly conquered Asian and African colonies. They assumed the Muslim population to be deeply hostile toward the presence of "infidels," and believed as well that the way of life of the various peoples, settled as well as nomadic, was backward, even "barbaric," as measured by the standards of Western civilization.

In the opinion of some officials, colonial rule required stern policies of military occupation and close surveillance to prevent Muslim rebellion.

Others argued that the empire's primary obligation was to encourage these subject peoples to acquire the economic skills useful to a market (capitalist) economy and to accept their responsibilities and rights as citizens in a multiethnic, centralized empire. This divergence of views remained unresolved as long as the empire endured; the problems that it created contributed to the outbreak of the major uprising that occurred in Turkestan in 1916.

russian colonial reforms

Even the most ardent supporters of the progressive integration of Turkestan into the empire recognized that its peoples would remain ethnically and religiously unique. The Central Asian colony was inhabited by a population speaking Turkic dialects and deeply committed to the Muslim faith. The empire's laws made religious toleration a fundamental right of its peoples. Local Islamic authorities were stripped of the power to punish violators of religious laws, but the empire's laws required protection of every Muslim's right to worship. Pilgrimage to holy sites, including Mecca, was permissible; Muslim religious schools continued to flourish. Some of Russia's empire-builders there believed that Islam was no obstacle to peaceful rule.

In the long run, these reformers expected the benefits of their colonial rule to win the backing of the population. Their domination put an end to the local wars among the khanates, and stopped the periodic raids by nomads on the settled population. Agricultural production expanded rapidly. The most important crop became a new variety of cotton, imported by Russian agronomists from the southeastern United States and rapidly adopted by the local farmers. They sold their crop to the cotton mills of Russia, readily accessible after the turn of the twentieth century when rail lines finally crossed the desert to Turkestan. Turkestan's economy became heavily dependent on the sale of this commodity, and Russian authorities were convinced that the colony was finally becoming a profitable undertaking. One senior government official (borrowing from a British prime minister's description of India) called Turkestan the "jewel in the crown" of the Russian Empire. By then, education officials, in the hopes of encouraging the population to adapt to Russian culture, had established a small number of state-run bilingual schools offering elementary education in Russian and Uzbek (or Kazakh) languages.

Turkestan farming prospered, but so too did Muslim practices. The railroad took cotton north to Russia, but also opened the way for many thousands of pilgrims to travel rapidly and safely each year to the Arabian holy places. A few subjects collaborated with the Russian rulers and adopted a Western style of life. Most families kept the old traditions. In the late imperial period, the seclusion of Muslim women became even more pervasive and strict than in the past with the gradual spread, among townspeople and even villagers, of public use of the total body veil (the paranji).

the revolt of 1916

Russian military officers remained in charge of the region. They claimed that their presence was indispensable to the security of Russian rule, pointing to occasional unrest among their subjects as evidence that the Muslim population continued to be opposed to the empire. They called for mass colonization by Russian farmers of fertile areas, in the belief that only when a large number of Russian settlers had made Turkestan their home would real integration of Turkestan within the empire be possible. Some officials warned that the seizure of land by a massive influx of pioneers would provoke a major rebellion, especially among the nomadic tribes, but their advice was ignored. In 1900 Tsar Nicholas II himself authorized Russian colonization in Turkestan. By 1914, European-style farm villages had appeared wherever pioneers had moved in, taking legally or by force pastureland of the nomads.

In the summer of 1916, the Russian government called up the male population of Turkestan for labor service in the war against the German and Austrian empires. Its reckless action triggered protest demonstrations, attacks on Russian settlers, and finally a major uprising among the nomadic tribes. Before Russian troops and militia could repress the rebellion, thousands of Russians lost their lives. The authorities' brutal repression caused many more deaths among the Turkestan nomadic tribes. Ethnic hostility, already stirred up by the colonization campaign, became the cause for recurrent attacks by Russians on nomads, and by natives against Russians. Even before the 1917 Revolution brought down the Russian Empire, the consequences of Russia's failed colonial mission there had, in the words of one Russian official, "destroyed this jewel of the Russian state."

See alsoColonies; Imperialism; Russia.

bibliography

Bacon, Elizabeth E. Central Asia under Russian Rule: A Study in Cultural Change. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966. An inquiry into the impact of Russian rule on the way of life of Turkestan peoples

Brower, Daniel. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. London, 2003. Study of Russian colonial ideology and policies in Turkestan.

Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998. A thoughtful inquiry into Muslim efforts to reform Turkestan's society.

Meyer, Karl E., and Shareen Blair Brysac. Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. Washington, D.C., 1999. Dramatic story of Russian-British contest in Central Asia.

Pierce, Richard A. Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917: A Study in Colonial Rule. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960. A survey of imperial rule in Turkestan.

Daniel R. Brower