Central Asia in World History

by Peter B. Golden

  Galdan’s expansionism troubled his neighbors. Many of his Mongol rivals, who had not already done so, joined the Manchus, as did the Muslims of Xinjiang. In 1690, the Qing emperor, Kangxi (ruling 16611722), ordered his commanders to “pursue and destroy him [Galdan] without mercy.”26 In 1696, a massive Qing army of 400,000 delivered a crushing blow. Galdan, near starvation and losing followers daily, died the next year, perhaps of natural causes—or from poisoning. He was cremated. The Qing, to dishonor him, reported him a suicide. They captured one of his sons and publicly executed him. After some haggling, Tsewang Rabtan, surrendered his uncle’s head and ashes to the Qing, who ceremonially destroyed them in Beijing in 1698—a message to opponents of Manchu rule.

  The Jungar threat remained under Tsewang Rabtan, the only independent Mongol ruler in the Qing borderlands. His imperial ambitions drove his neighbors into Russian or Qing arms. Jungar depredations against Tibet in 1717-18 inclined the Gelugpa towards the Qing. In 1720 Tibet joined the Manchu orbit. Following Kangxi’s death, Tsewang Rabtan unleashed devastating raids against the Kazakhs, who found themselves caught between the Kalmyks and the Jungars. Kazakh tradition refers to the period of 1723-26 as the “Great Calamity” (Aqtaban Shubïrïndï, literally “the bare-footed forced migration”), a mass flight exacerbated by harsh weather and famine in which as many as two—thirds died. Fleeing Kazakhs descended on the Uzbeks lands; others headed towards the Russian and Kalmyk borders.

  In 1731 the khan of the Little Horde, Abu’l-Khayr, seeking a counterpoise to the Kalmyks, accepted Russian protection. The Middle Horde (1740) and Great Horde (1742) soon followed. Viewed as a temporary political maneuver, the relationship brought neither peace nor security. Rather, it marked the beginning of direct Russian control in the Kazakh steppe. The centuries-old struggle of the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples of Central Asia against the Jungars and Kalmyks is preserved in epic narratives still recited today, such as the Alpamϊsh tale known to virtually all the Muslim Central Asian Turkic peoples, and the Manas tale which is the Kyrgyz national epic.

  In 1757 the Manchus defeated Tsewang Rabtan’s grandson Amursana, ending the Jungarian threat. Amursana fled to Russian Siberia, where he died of smallpox, which ravaged the Oirats as a whole. Jungaria came under Manchu rule. The last steppe empire had fallen, a victim as much of internal divisions as of Qing arms.

  Qing rule was most direct over those Mongols closest to them, creating distinctions between what became Inner and Outer Mongolia. Tibetan Buddhist civilization continued to spread across Mongol society, providing a common cultural and religious identity beyond the Chinggisid imperial tradition. It was also a means to resist the pull of China, which might otherwise have assimilated them.

  Some Kalmyks, increasingly unhappy with Russian interference in their internal affairs, decided in 1771 to return to Jungaria, now under Manchu rule. Those west of the Volga remained and came under closer Russian control. The rest began the arduous trek back to Xinjiang, harried by the Kazakhs and others.

  The rapidly expanding Russian and Qing empires were now on either side of the Kazakhs who maneuvered between them. Dissatisfaction with Russian domination led the Kazakhs to join the rebellion of Emelian Pugachov in the mid-1770s against Catherine the Great. Sϊrϊm Batϊr led a movement among the Kazakhs against their khans and nobles, whom he viewed as too acquiescent towards the Russians. He died in exile in Khiva, poisoned in 1797, but his movement showed that Kazakh central authority was fading. The Russians were now determining the selection of Kazakh khans.

  The Kyrgyz—neighbors, allies, subjects, or enemies of various Kazakh, Uzbek and Moghulistani khans—were ruled by non-Chinggisids. The Ta’rîkh-i Rashîdî calls them “infidels” and “the originators of all the revolts in Moghulistan.”27 The seventeenth-century Mahmûd ibn Walî reports that they still worshipped idols, a grievous sin in Islam, and hence were “not true Muslims.”28 Islam came slowly and imperfectly to them over a long period of time. Nonetheless, they frequently involved themselves in the politics of a now-Islamic Xinjiang.

  In the early sixteenth century, Ishâq Walî, a powerful Naqshbandî Sheikh, came to Altϊshahr (“Six Cities”: Kashghar, Khotan, Yarkand, Turfan, Yangi Hissar and Aqsu). His brother, Muhammad Yûsuf came slightly later. They claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Locally, a person with such a lineage was called khoja, a term that also designated descendants of the first four caliphs and close companions of the Prophet Muhammad or, more mundanely, “teacher, elder, official.” Subsequently, competing descendants of the “Great Master” fought among themselves for ascendancy. Muhammad Yûsuf’s faction, led by his son, Hidâyat Allâh, found refuge with Galdan, the Jungarian Khan. With the Jungarian conquest of Muslim eastern Turkestan in 1678, he became governor. The rival khojas continued to feud, each faction supported by Kyrgyz tribesmen. The Qing, after destroying the Jungar Empire in 1757, initially planned to rule Kashgharia at a distance, through the khojas. Muslim resistance forced the Qing to conquer the region two years later. They made Kashgharia a tributary territory. Manchu ambans (high officials) were stationed in the cities and more important towns, and a military governor sat in Kulja. Substantial parts of Central Asia were under Russian or Qing rule.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Problems of Modernity

  In the early nineteenth century, Central Asia, politically divided and little known to outsiders, faced the weakening Qing and rapidly expanding Russian empires. British travelers, often participants in the Great Game, the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, describe an impoverished land. Captain John Moubray Trotter, a nineteenth-century British traveler-author, commented that “not one tenth” of the amîrate of Bukhara, was “occupied by a settled population,” or was “capable of cultivation.” Nomads were numerous and the sands encroached on everything, leaving behind “deserted habitations.”1 Low population density heightened the impression of decline. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mongolia had about 500,000 inhabitants, disease and monasticism taking many young men out of the reproductive pool. By the early twentieth century, Russian-dominated Central Asia may have held some 11 to 12 million people. Poor living conditions produced high death rates.

  Knowledge about the wider world varied. The Bukharan Qush Begi (prime minister) whom Alexander Burnes, a British army officer, visited for three years in the early 1830s, knew the “customs and politics of Europe” and was “well informed” about Russia.2 The Khan of Khiva, whom another British officer, Captain Frederick G. Burnaby, in 1875 found “muy simpatico,” was aware of the Anglo-Russian rivalry but was uncertain if the English and Germans were the same “nation.”3 Khiva enjoyed a reputation for lawlessness and was a notorious center of the slave trade. Military technology was poorly developed. Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat, reported in 1873 that Khoqand had “considerable difficulty in manufacturing cartridges” for their Russian rifles and the requirements of their Russian-based artillery system “had not been thoroughly learned.”4

  The Manghït Amîrs of Bukhara, compensating for their lack of Chinggisid credentials, strictly enforced public religious observance, adding to a reputation for religious fanaticism. In reality, as Schuyler observed, “mullahs and dervishes” excepted, most people were religious only in public, but in private tended to “commit many sins, if they think no one knows it.”5 Burnes praised the tolerance and “good fellowship” of his Muslim travel companions,6 but in Bukhara, he had to wear clothing indicating that he was a non-Muslim and could not “ride within the walls of the city,” a right accorded solely to Muslims. Only certain public baths were open to non-Muslims, the ‘ulama claiming that water became “polluted” by the presence of women or non-Muslims and would turn into blood. Once-famous Bukharan schools stagnated in the rote learning of theology. Bukhara’s volunteer army of 13,000 foot soldiers, 500 cavalrymen, and 620 artillery troops was poorly equipped, poorly paid, and largely engaged in other pursuits. It intimidated local inhabitants who could be arrested for venturing fo
rth at night.

  Khoqand, largest of the khanates, raided and traded with Qing China, while giving refuge to the Khojas, who preached Holy War in Xinjiang. Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand warred with each other, Iran and the Kazakhs. All took captives, who ended up in the Bukharan slave markets. “Three fourths” of Bukhara’s populace was of “slave extraction.”7South of the Uzbek khanates, Ahmad Durrânî Khan, a Pushtun chief from the area of Herat, used conquest and diplomacy to gather under his rule an uneasy mix of Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Mongols, creating modern Afghanistan. The British viewed it a buffer to Russian Indian ambitions.

  Sayyid Muhammad Rahîm (second from left), the heir to the Khivan throne, photographed with his companions sometime before 1896. He was a non-Chinggisid descended from Qunghrat Uzbek ‘inaqs, “trusted advisors,” who had taken power in the late eighteenth century. Photo by I. Voljinski, around 1895-96, Collection of Tetragon A. S.

  In the steppe, the Kazakhs, who exported about 1.5 million head of cattle and 100,000 horses annually, seeking trade and political maneuverability, became both Russian and Qing subjects. In 1801, their ever-fractious Chinggisids produced a fourth horde, under Bökey Khan, near the Volga-Ural mesopotamia. The Russian Empire was daily inching closer, the harbinger of new political and economic alignments.

  Although Peter the Great’s attempts to conquer Transoxiana in the early eighteenth century ended in disaster, a line of Russian forts advanced into the steppelands following the 1740 conquest of Bashkiria in the Ural region. Russia was responding to nomadic slave raids, a matter of genuine concern, but also sought to become the middleman in the overland trade. Reports of rich gold deposits in Turkestan aroused further interest.

  Catherine the Great altered previously anti-Islamic policies. Her predecessor, Elizabeth, had destroyed 418 of the 536 mosques in the district of Kazan and forbade proselytizing.8 Catherine, seeking to bring all religious institutions under greater state control, gave Muslims the status of a tolerated minority and created the Muslim Spiritual Assembly in 1788 to direct their religious life. She allowed the reopening of Muslim schools, but Muslims were wary about institutions under the control of a Christian state. Russian authorities distinguished between steppe Islam, suffused, they believed, with shamanism, and the Islam of the Uzbek cities, which they considered hotbeds of fanaticism. Catherine viewed Islam as a “civilizing” tool that would first make Kazakhs good Muslims, then good citizens, and eventually good Christians. She used Tatar teachers, her subjects, who could travel among the nomads and speak their language, to preach a more “correct” Islam. The Tatars became an important factor in implanting in the steppe an Islam that adhered more closely to traditional Muslim practices.

  Between 1822 and 1848, Russia annexed all the Kazakh hordes, abolished the power of the khans, and placed the tribes under different provincial and territorial administrations. Revolts ensued, occasionally directed at Khiva and Khoqand, since some tribes were more or less under their jurisdiction. In 1853, the Russian General Perovskii took the Khoqandian fort of Aq Mechit. The Russian advance continued with few interruptions over the next three decades. Neighboring Kyrgyz tribes, goaded by Khoqandian misrule, petitioned for Russian overlord-ship. In 1865, General M. G. Cherniaev, encouraged by the pro-Russian attitudes of some of Tashkent’s merchants and acting without government orders, took Tashkent, a Khoqandian possession. The government, not wanting to provoke the British, ever-wary of Russian encroachments on India, recalled him, gave him medals and—most significantly—kept Tashkent.

  In 1868, General P. K. von Kaufman, the newly appointed governor-general of Turkestan (all the Central Asian lands taken since 1853), reduced the Khoqandian khan Khudâyâr to little more than a Russian vassal. The Amir of Bukhara, Muzaffar ad-Din, facing domestic foes, his army routed, accepted a treaty. Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in June 1868, spared outright annexation only because Russia feared provoking a religious war. ‘Abd al-’Azîz Sâmî, a Bukharan historian of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, attributed Bukhara’s fall to moral decay, expressed in unjust rule and fanatical ‘ulama (Islamic religious authorities). The army, he maintained, was thoroughly corrupt and largely consisted of “thieves, gamblers, drunkards, some crazy and insane, others lame or blind, who never heard a gunshot.”9 The Khanate of Khiva became a Russian protectorate in 1873. Khoqand was simply annexed in 1876. In each instance, as local chroniclers such as Sâmî make clear, the misrule and decadence of the local elites played as great a role in the fall of the khanates as the force of Russian arms. Merv (also pronounced Mary), the last Turkmen center, was annexed in 1884, bringing Russia to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. Russian forces soon crossed into Afghanistan, much to the consternation of Britain.

  Russia, like other imperialist powers, claimed it was bringing its “civilizing mission” to the benighted “natives.” The Russian costs for these territorial gains, roughly equal in size to Western Europe, were relatively light. Perhaps a thousand men perished in the actual fighting. Central Asian losses were much higher. Russian generals, facing weak and divided opponents, enjoyed technological and numerical superiority. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia had some twenty million Muslim subjects, larger than the Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. The government was uncertain about the loyalties of its newly acquired Muslim population—as it was also of its non-Orthodox Christian and Jewish subjects.10

  In Qing-dominated eastern Central Asia, matters unfolded somewhat differently. Inner Mongolia faced colonization by large numbers of Chinese peasants. Chinese merchants controlled the economy throughout Mongolia. Urban development was weak. Urga had perhaps 7000 inhabitants, most living in tents. A sizable minority were monks. Cultural differences, economic competition, and exploitation created enmity between Mongols and Chinese. Lamaistic Buddhism undoubtedly played a key role in preserving Mongol identity. Mongol princes north of the Gobi, and hence at some distance from direct Qing control, used the Russians as a counterpoise to China.

  Sharp cultural and religious differences distinguished Muslim Xinjiang from its Qing overlords. Between 1825 and 1857 Kashgharia erupted in revolts, led by or on behalf of the Khojas, who were themselves torn by deadly factional rivalries. Choqan Valikhanov, a Kazakh scholar and Russian army officer, in 1858, described the chaos that descended on Kashghar. Qing soldiers sacked the city, seized the women, and carried out executions “with ceremonial, horrific slowness.”11 The skulls of the executed adorned the portals of the city.

  Elsewhere, the situation was calmer until the 1850s. Crushing taxation and Qing misrule contributed to revolts of the Dungans (a term for Chinese Muslims), soon imitated by their Turkic coreligionists. Xinjiang dissolved into a crazy quilt of local rivalries and anti-Qing movements. As the Qing hold slipped, Ya’qûb Beg, a Khoqandian general, seized much of the region and sought diplomatic and trade relations with Russia and Britain. London recognized his “amîrate.” Russia exploited the situation, taking the Ili River Valley in 1871. When Ya’qûb Beg died in 1877, his “amîrate” collapsed and the Qing, much to everyone’s surprise, restored their authority. Russian-Qing territorial differences over the Ili Valley were settled in 1881. Determined to assert closer control, in 1884 the Qing gave east Turkestan and Jungaria provincial status. Henceforth, the province of Xinjiang “(new frontier”) was to be directly administered by Qing officials.

  The Russians had no master plan for the administration of their newly won Central Asian domain. In the General Governorates, the population remained under traditional leaders. Russian administration operated, as far as possible, at a distance, hoping to lessen the cost of governance and the chances for friction with local Islamic sensibilities. General von Kaufman maintained that Islam should be ignored and that, lacking state support, it would wither away. The calculation that the seemingly less devout nomads would become Russified and eventually Christianized proved erroneous. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the role of Islam in Kazakh life
grew, becoming one of their important sources of identity.

  The core territories, reorganized in 1898, consisted of two General Governorates: the Steppe (consisting of the provinces of Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk) and Turkestan (comprising the provinces of Syr Darya, Semirech’e, Fergana, Samarkand, and Transcaspia) as well as the two protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva. The General Governorate of Orenburg administered the rest of the steppe zone of Kazakhstan (Ural’sk and Turgay provinces).

  The Russians sought to keep Central Asians divided and isolated from “harmful” modernizing ideas such as democracy. Unlike other ethnically non-Russian subjects, they could not be drafted into the army—where they might also acquire knowledge of modern warfare and weaponry. Hoping to prevent change, tsarist autocracy often made common cause with the more conservative elites and ‘ulama. The latter even resisted attempts at improving public hygiene and sanitation because they came from nonbelievers. These policies perpetuated backwardness.

  Russia sought to extract natural resources and keep the “natives” quiet. Russians and others from the European regions of the Russian empire, largely officials and skilled workers, settled in cities that often grew up around older “native” towns. Von Kaufman wanted administrators who knew local languages and customs. Teams of scientists, ethnographers, and artists arrived to catalogue “natives,” flora, and fauna. Sorting out the various groupings was a difficult task but one that was essential for imperial administration. Individuals often had multi-layered identities of religion, clan, tribe, and ethnic group, and they answered inquiries according to how they perceived the affiliations of the questioner.