Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Russians Are Coming!
By the turn of the 19th century, Russia's vista to the south was of anach-
ronistic, unstable neighbours, who had a nasty habit of raiding southern
settlements, even taking Christian Russians as slaves. Flush with the new
currents of imperialism sweeping Europe, the empire found itself em-
barking willy-nilly upon a century of rapid expansion across the steppe.
The reasons were complex. The main ingredients were the search for
a secure, and preferably natural, southern border, combined with nag-
ging fears of British expansion from India and the boldness of individual
tsarist officers. And probably, glimmering in the back of every patriotic
Russian's mind, there was a vague notion of the 'manifest destiny' of the
frontier.
The first people to feel the impact were the Kazakhs. Their agreements
in the mid-18th century to accept Russian 'protection' had apparently
been understood by St Petersburg as agreements to annexation and a few
decades later Tatars and Cossacks were sent to settle and farm the land.
Angered, the Kazakhs revolted. As a consequence, the khans of the three
hordes were, one by one, stripped of their autonomy, and their lands were
made into bona fide Russian colonies, sweet psychological revenge, no
doubt, for centuries of invasion by nomadic armies from the east. Kokand
was the first of the three Uzbek khanates to be absorbed, followed by
Bukhara (1868) and then Khiva (1873).
The last and fiercest people to hold out against the tsarist juggernaut
were the Tekke, the largest and most independent of the Turkmen clans.
The Russians were trounced in 1879 at a major battle of Teke-Turkmen,
but returned with a vengeance in 1881 with a huge force under General
Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev (who famously rode a white horse and
dressed only in white). The siege and capture of Geok-Tepe, the Tekkes'
last stronghold, resulted in the death of around 15,000 Tekke and only
268 Russians.
With resistance crushed, the Russians proceeded along the hazily de-
fined Persian frontier area, occupying the Pandjeh Oasis on the Afghan
border in 1885 at the southernmost point of their new empire. Through-
out the conquest, the government in St Petersburg agonised over every
advance. On the ground their hawkish generals took key cities first and
asked for permission later.
When it was over, Russia found it had bought a huge new territory -
half the size of the USA, geographically and ethnically diverse, and
economically rich - fairly cheaply in terms of money and lives, and in just
20 years. It had not gone unnoticed by the world's other great empire fur-
ther south in British India.
So many Rus-
sian Slavs were
captured or sold
into slavery by
nomadic invaders
or slave traders
that the word
entered the
English language
as the source of
the word 'slave'.
The English word
'horde' comes via
French from the
Turkic word
ordu
,
meaning the yurt
or pavilion where
a khan held his
court.
1862-84
Tsarist Russia takes
Bishkek (1862), Aulie-
Ata (1864), Tashkent
(1865), Samarkand
(1868), Khiva (1873),
Kokand (1877) and
Merv (1884), ruled by
the Governor-General
Konstantin Kaufman
in Tashkent.
1877
German geographer
Ferdinand von
Richthofen coins the
term 'Silk Road' to
describe the trans-
continental network of
trade routes between
Europe and China.
ยจ
Dostoevsky Museum, Semey, Kazakhstan
