A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Russian conquest and rule 199
when the Russians crushed Turkmen resistance at the battle of Göktepe
in 1881.
The causes and goals of all these campaigns and conquests were
complex and shifting, but two catalysts can be singled out: one was the
unrealistic attempts by the local leaders, both secular and religious, to
recover from the infidels what had been lost, thus provoking the Russians
to actions they might not have taken so quickly (this was especially true
of Bukhara); the other was the virtual collapse of government in the
khanate of Khoqand, which began with the death of Madali Khan in
1842 and worsened in the 1850s and 1860s; the Russians, for several
years endeavoring to establish a working relationship with a khan in
Khoqand, finally threw up their hands and carried out the annexation.
Yet another factor may have been the contradictory effect of the setback
that Russia had suffered in the Crimean War: many Russians, especially
the more fiery members of the military, sought psychological compensation
through expansion elsewhere; in Central Asia this meant taking
solace through thwarting the real or imagined designs of the world’s
principal colonial power and Russia’s adversary, Great Britain.And
finally there was of course the colonial motivation: to gain markets for
the products of Russia’s growing industry and acquire sources of raw
materials for this industry.
The Russian conquest of Central Asia was completed by 1884 with
the acquisition of Merv.This fertile oasis contained the ruins of the
great pre-Islamic and early Islamic city, as well as a small settlement
nearby which had the same name.However, it was not Merv’s history
but its proximity to Afghanistan and thus to British India that made the
event of 1884 so important.Its fall to Russia and the subsequent Russian
drive still farther south to Kushka on the Afghan border brought British
fears for their colony to the verge of paranoia, and the mutual sparring
of the two powers came close to war when in the early 1890s the
Russians pushed south from their province of Fergana through the
Pamirs to India’s Kashmir border.Peace was rescued perhaps mainly
because neither power had the intentions that the other had suspected,
a circumstance that facilitated the work of the Pamir Boundary
Commission in 1895.Its agreement, further strengthened by the 1907
Anglo-Russian Convention, bound the two partners to respect each
other’s zones of interest, and as both a symbol and effective buffer it
created an elongated strip of territory between Pamir and Kashmir and
attached it to Afghanistan (the “Afghan finger”), while linking up its
eastern tip with China’s Sinkiang province.