A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Russian conquest and rule 203
passed all other Central Asian cities.Much of this rise was of course due
to the city’s function as the first modern capital of Central Asia and seat
of the colonial administration.The Russians built a quarter of their own
alongside the native city, establishing a pattern that they would follow in
a number of other places: a European city developed through a rational
system of urban planning, presenting a sharp contrast to the traditional
native quarters.
The second governor of the Turkestan Governorate-General was
Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, a general descended from a
Russified German Baltic family who had commanded the Russian
troops in the crucial confrontation with Bukhara.He was an able officer
and administrator, and his long tenure of office (1867–82) did much to
put the colonial administration of Central Asia on a solid base.The
system held firm until the entire edifice of the Russian empire collapsed
in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.The prime motivation of the
Russian conquest had been economic self-interest, and the evolution of
the colony between 1868 and 1917 amply met that goal.The area
became a supplier of raw materials for Russian industry and a consumer
of Russian products, after the classical colonial pattern.We have already
pointed to cotton as the most important commodity sent to Russia; its
cultivation increased to the verge of becoming a monoculture, and the
adverse effect of this one-sidedness was made worse by the concomitant
decrease in the growing of cereals, which made Central Asia dependent
on wheat imports from Russia.The other major aspect was the aforementioned
colonization by agricultural settlers, mostly Russian and
Ukrainian.This affected primarily Kazakhstan, but also the Semireche
region of Turkestan, including portions of northern Kyrgyzstan.Some
of the most fertile tracts of land were thus seized, with the doubly
harmful effects of expropriating the nomads’ grazing grounds and of
hampering their seasonal movements in search of water and pasture
land (thus a reverse process in comparison with the aforementioned
desedentarization caused by the Mongols).Other forms of immigrant
colonization existed too, and all over the two provinces; they were mostly
of the professional urban type: civil service, transportation and communications,
incipient industry, and modern education, staffed chiefly by
and for the Russians.This arrangement led to the special demographic
physiognomy of some cities where the European population, living in its
own quarters, began to equal or even surpass the native one.Trade with
Russia, formerly passing through the intermediary of Tatar merchants,
was now taken over by the colonizers themselves.To a considerable