A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Russian conquest and rule 207
he wrote the tract in Persian, a detail further stressing the initial reformist
focus of this typically bilingual Bukharan who later became a major
proponent of Turkic cultural renaissance.Politically, his main focus was
reform, and for this reason he and most of his associates were at first not
averse to cooperation and association with Russia.
Both the Russian administration and the emir of Bukhara looked
warily on the various reformist currents in their territories, and never
hesitated to intervene when they felt that the existing order was threatened.The
native conservatives, especially the clerical class, gave support
to the Russians in this matter.The Tsarist regime, however, had a more
dangerous opponent than incipient nationalism to contend with: its own
socialist dissidents, revolutionaries of various hues, whose numbers in
Central Asia were swelling with deportees from Russia.Although mostly
of the intellectual and professional class, these revolutionaries made
rapid headway among the Russian workers and soldiers of the colony,
while they virtually ignored and were ignored by the natives – whether
their peers whom they barely knew or did not trust, or the peasants and
such members of a marginal native working class as there were.This was
a fateful evolution for Central Asia, for the drive, political skill and, eventually,
the military means of these revolutionaries would in due course
preserve the region as a Russian possession, thwarting the valiantly
defended aspirations of the inexperienced and unarmed Muslims.
On the eve of the First World War and the upheavals that followed it,
the two provinces of Central Asia were thus firmly incorporated in the
Russian empire.The few native uprisings, usually fomented by such
religious figures as the Naqshbandi ishon Madali (better remembered as
Dukchi Ishon) of Fergana in 1898, were speedily put down by the
Russians.Half a century of colonial rule had had effects not unlike those
in other European colonies.Their possession flattered the Russians
psychologically and benefited them economically; but perhaps the
strongest and seemingly indissoluble tie was the presence of a by then
quite entrenched Russian constituency, consisting of people of many
walks of life, from professionals to workers and agriculturalists, who considered
the colony their home and indeed had no other home elsewhere;
again, the analogy with French settlers in North Africa is especially striking.Meanwhile,
the native Muslim population, from the Kazakhs in the
far north to the Turkmens and Tajiks in the deep south, had undergone
a process that was as new, complex, uneven, and contradictory as the
entire concept of a modern colony.Neither the colonizer nor perhaps
even the colonized fully realized how temporary the arrangement was,