A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Russian conquest and rule 205
of the colony, conquered last, may at first sight seem surprising, but the
reason was its compatibility with the lively shipping traffic on the
Caspian, linking it both with ports on the northern, Russian side of this
sea and with Baku and thus Russia’s Transcaucasus possessions.By 1898
this line was extended all the way to Tashkent, and in 1906 a line linking
this city to Orenburg and thus to the rest of the empire – for example,
on to Samara, Riazan, Moscow, and St.Petersburg – was completed.
This network had great strategic, economic and psychological
significance, emphasizing a structural feasibility of Central Asia’s incorporation
in the Russian empire that was impossible in the case of the
overseas colonies of other European powers.Moreover, the construction
of a branch from Merv to Kushka on the Afghan border, the southernmost
point in Russian Turkestan and, for that matter, in the entire
Russian empire, was dictated by the aforementioned strategic considerations,
while that from Samarkand to Andijan served primarily economic
interests.Another detail worth mentioning is the fact that this
line, in its sector between Merv and Samarkand, passed through the
emirate of Bukhara but skirted the city itself some twelve kilometers to
the southeast; that was where Kagan or New Bukhara, a railroad station
town populated mainly by Russian administrative personnel, developed
and eventually played a role in the events leading to the collapse of the
native regime.
Starting with General Romanovskiy (1865–67) and ending with
General Kuropatkin (1914–17), eleven men served as governors-general
of Turkestan.Central Asia experienced in the course of these decades
an economic development that benefited, as we have said, the colonizer,
and in certain basic respects harmed the native population, for example
through loss of land to settlers, growth of detrimental monoculture, and
dependence on food imports and finished products from Russia.On the
positive side, the population drew some benefit from the pax Russica
imposed on it by the colonizer, and from the contact with modern civilization
as represented by Russia.True, most Central Asians continued
to live as before; few were those who received education, and such education
as there was continued to be of the traditional type based on the
Koran and the classics of Arabo-Persian culture.
Nevertheless, a minority of Central Asians did become exposed to
modern education.This happened through a variety of channels.One
was a certain number of schools opened by the Russians for the natives,
where teaching was done both in the vernacular and in Russian (the socalled
russko-tuzemnye shkoly or “Russo-native schools”).Another was