The Russians Are Coming
The Russian push into Central Asia began in the early 1700s with the first of several costly missions to subdue Khiva, the most western of the khanates. In 1735, having defeated the three major Kazakh tribal groups (the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes), the Russians built a forward base at Orenburg in the southern Urals. From the 1850s, in a close parallel to the advance of the American frontier (although in the opposite direction), Russia’s armies and railroad builders, followed by settlers seeking farmland, relentlessly pushed east from the industrial cities of the Urals into Siberia and southeast into Central Asia.
What motivated Russian expansion or, as Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac eloquently put it, “the prodigious projection of power over an interminable solitude”? Was it the fear of a revived Mongol empire that could threaten Europe or an impulse for historical revenge? Or a strategic calculation, almost two centuries before Sir Halford Mackinder advanced his theory that the Eurasian heartland was the geographical pivot of history? Meyer and Brysac suggest there were several reasons.
For an empire lacking natural boundaries, space itself formed a wall. The Yale scholar Firuz Kazemzadeh has pointed to Russia’s abiding horror vacui, the fear that a hostile power might populate the empty steppe. Nor can one ignore the Russian ambition to secure an overland passage to India, for purposes of commerce and possible conquest—the abiding British nightmare. Other analysts, judging these explanations inadequate, 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 century, they were all referred to as Kyrgyz. As ethnographic research began to reveal differences, the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks. Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz. They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle, or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan. In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936. In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed. And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all.
While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous. In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area. Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Russian and Ukrainian farm workers and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and other ethnicities were deported to the region. The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethnically mixed SSRs. The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR. Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering. As the Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”8 Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.
Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom. Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid recalls, the five future Central Asian presidents who met at Ashkhabat in Turkmenistan on December 12, 1991, were reluctant to assume leadership of independent nations:
Four days earlier Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus had signed a treaty dissolving the Soviet Union. The five republics were now suddenly independent but nobody had consulted the Central Asian leaders themselves. Angry, frustrated, fearful, feeling abandoned by their “mother Russia,” and terrified about the consequences, the leaders sat up all night to discuss their future. It was strange to see the heirs of conquerors of the world—Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur—so cowered. They were tied to Moscow in thousands of ways, from electricity grids to road, rail, and telephone networks. Central Asia had become a vast colony producing raw materials—cotton, wheat, metals, oil, and gas—for the Soviet industrial machine based in western Russia. They feared an economic and social collapse as Yeltsin cast them out of the empire. That night a deputy Turkmen foreign minister told me, “We are not celebrating—we are mourning our independence.”9
The next day, the leaders agreed to join Russia and other former SSRs in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was pretty much the last time they agreed on anything. Despite periodic summits and high-minded talk of regional integration, more issues divide than unite the Central Asian republics. They’ve disagreed over borders, trade and tariffs, water, gas and oil resources, environmental issues, religion, terrorism, and drug traffickers.
Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 percent of the population. At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek. With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile, ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like “a medieval map” where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”
The balkanization is illustrated by the Fergana Valley. Although most of the valley is in Uzbekistan, the northern panhandle of Tajikistan (Sughd province, with a population of over two million) juts into the valley, physically, economically, and culturally separated from the rest of the country by the Pamir Alay. Uzbekistan literally bisects southern Kyrgyzstan, the frontier zigzagging in and out of the foothills of the Fergana and the Pamir Alay; most of the route from Osh to Djalalabad, Kyrgyzstan’s third largest city, lies in Uzbekistan. The frontier cuts through the middle of villages and the market town of Kara Soo near Osh. Uzbekistan has five territorial enclaves within Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan one in Kyrgyzstan and one in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan one in Uzbekistan. When tensions between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan run high (as they often are over water, gas, electricity, and politics) frontier guards sometimes shift their posts a few yards up the road, symbolically extending national territory. In January 2000, Uzbekistan unilaterally seized a thirty-eight-mile stretch of Kyrgyzstan; it also laid mines along its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, ostensibly to keep out Islamic extremists. The Economist described Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov as “the regional bully” and noted that “good neighbourliness is in short supply in Central Asia.”10
Cursing the Future
A man waits in line outside a food shop in Moscow. Finally, he’s had enough and tells his friend: “That’s it. I’m going over to the Kremlin to kill that Gorbachev.” Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” he replies, “there was an even longer line over there.”
Through the 1990s, in cities, towns, and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, industrial workers gathered in bars, restaurants, chaikhanas, and bazaars to “curse the future.” I credit the phrase to my friend Asqat Yerkimbay, describing growing up in the central Kazakhstan mining town of Zhezdy. But I had heard a similar story from many other people.
For seventh-five years, industrial workers were folk heroes, lauded in speeches, newspapers, book
s, movies, and wall posters for their efforts to make the Soviet Union a world power. Although agricultural production was vital, Soviet industry seemed more glamorous, and definitely more photogenic. Newsreels and propaganda films recorded the whirring machines of the factory assembly line, the intense heat of the steel furnace, the jagged face of the coal seam, the electricity pylons stretching into the distance. Each product coming off the line, each steel ingot, ton of coal, or megawatt of electricity represented the growing strength of the USSR, the fulfillment of the great socialist dream. And the dream makers were Lenin’s proletariat—the engineers, coal miners, steelworkers, engine drivers. Industrial jobs paid better than most professions, and often came with perks such as apartments and vacations to summer resorts in the Kyrgyz SSR. They also helped reinforce the status of women in society. The Soviet Union never needed a Roza the Riveter because women were always in the industrial workforce.
And then it all ended. Despite Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (literally restructuring or rebuilding), most citizens had no idea of what was coming or how it would change their lives forever. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central planning system that had supported the economy collapsed too. In every sector, production had been determined by targets and quotas, which usually had little or no relationship to demand. Factories, mines, and collective farms had to meet targets, even if what they produced was not needed and piled up in rail cars or rotted in warehouses. Managers were rewarded for exceeding targets, fired or demoted for falling short—a system that provided ample incentive for cooking the books on cotton or steel production.
Postcards from Stanland Page 5