Russian political scientist and international relations scholar Timofey Bordachev has published a new book examining how the Russian Empire expanded into Kazakhstan and Central Asia during the 19th century. The news outlet Lenta.ru released an excerpt from the work with permission from Bordachev and the publisher AST.
The book, titled "The Plow and the Stirrup: How the East Became Part of Russia's Political Culture," argues that Russia's advance into the Kazakh steppe and the oases of Turkestan differed from how the empire absorbed its other territories, according to the excerpt.
Ukrainian and Belarusian lands, the Baltics, Finland and Transcaucasia were, at various points, taken from powerful external rivals, while vast Siberia became Russian through colonization stretching from the Urals to the Pacific. The Kazakh steppe and Turkestan, by contrast, arrived under what Bordachev calls a civilizing mission.
A shift toward a civilizing mission
From the first quarter of the 19th century, according to the excerpt, conviction grew in Russia that policy toward its nearest Eastern neighbors needed to become more decisive. The old myth of India's riches, reachable through Central Asia, gradually gave way to a view of the Bukhara Emirate and the Khiva and Kokand khanates as politically, economically and morally backward. Russia's interest in eastern trade increasingly became tied to modernizing the political and economic systems of these states.
Taming the Kazakh steppe
By the early 1830s, Russia had largely established control over the Kazakh khanates through decades of gradual integration. The decisive step was the 1822 Steppe Statute, which eliminated the remaining internal autonomy held by the sultans, according to the excerpt, which cites historian Yevgeny Bekmakhanov's research on Kazakhstan in the 1820s to 1840s.
Confidence in Russian society that trade with the Central Asian states could flourish faded, since it depended on protecting caravan routes from nomad raids. In the early 1840s, Russia's military policy in the region gradually intensified. In 1853, Fort Perovsky was established on the site of the Kokand fortress of Ak-Mechet, and the following year the fortification of Vernoye, now Almaty, was founded in the foothills of the Alatau mountains.
The last diplomatic mission to Khiva
Once the Kazakh steppe was fully pacified, Russian authorities pushed the border south, replacing the old Irtysh and Orenburg defensive lines with a new chain of fortifications closer to the Central Asian khanates.
In 1858, Nikolai Ignatiev led the last Russian embassy to the Uzbek khanates, a mission authorized to offer Khiva strikingly favorable terms for a lasting peace. Russia agreed to set aside past conflicts, forgo compensation for losses suffered by its merchants, grant Khiva's traders the same rights enjoyed by merchants from other Asian states, admit a Khivan trade agent to Orenburg, and accept duties of 2.5 percent on goods transiting the Amu Darya and 5 percent on goods unloaded from trading vessels in the khanate.
The mission's failure convinced many tsarist political and military figures that the time had come to move from diplomacy to direct military pressure. When the decisive advance of tsarist troops into Central Asia began in the mid-1860s, the Foreign Ministry's Asian Department was headed by none other than Ignatiev himself, the former leader of that final mission.
Ambitious generals and the race for glory
Personal ambition among Russia's own officials also shaped events, according to the excerpt. After Nikolai Muravyov, Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, annexed the Amur region to Russia in 1858 and was awarded the title Count Amursky, the Governor-General of Western Siberia, Gustav Gasford, began dreaming of a matching title of his own, Count Zailiysky. Driven by a thirst for conquest and glory, generals grew less responsive to orders from the central government and launched military campaigns on their own initiative, counting on the idea that victors are not judged.
Most of the senior Russian officers active in Central Asia were veterans of the Crimean War with extensive combat experience, and many were eager to compensate morally for setbacks suffered against European opponents.
A cautious, centuries-long strategy
Bordachev's book sums up more than 200 years of Russian conduct on the borders of Central Asia through several consistent traits. Russia was never in a hurry, preferring what the excerpt calls a bad peace to a good quarrel, even with difficult neighbors such as Khiva and Kokand. It avoided war whenever a clash could theoretically be sidestepped, tolerating behavior from the Kazakhs that did not fit European notions of how subjects should treat their sovereign.
Russia also viewed its neighbors pragmatically as part of a far wider geopolitical picture that included relations with China and Persia. The buffer position of the Kazakhs and the Central Asian khanates gave the empire freedom of maneuver without saddling it with excessive obligations, according to the excerpt.
Historians cited in the book note that Russia's Foreign Ministry believed for decades that it was useful not to fix a firm border in the region. A report to the tsar from Chancellor Karl Nesselrode dated January 14, 1850, stated that it was in Russia's interest to delay drawing a border line for as long as possible, since a fixed frontier would constrain the government's diplomatic room to maneuver.
Flexible rule over new territories
The excerpt also describes how newly annexed regions received varying administrative and legal status rather than being folded uniformly into the Russian system, with some administrative boundaries matching ethnic settlement patterns among Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Karakalpaks, Turkmens and other peoples. Elective principles were introduced into the public life of these nomadic peoples and written into imperial law and courts, while part of the local aristocracy was granted status equivalent to Russia's service class under Peter the Great's 1722 Table of Ranks, receiving noble titles, official rank, salaries, medals, orders and land.
From diplomacy to empire
By the mid-19th century, Russia's earlier approach to the Uzbek khanates had run its course, and building a new one was not realistic given the time it would have required, according to the excerpt. The decision to move to direct conquest ran against Russia's usual diplomatic habits, but by then it appeared to be the only option available. The book concludes that the conquest went ahead, with consequences still felt today: the era of diplomacy had ended, and the era of empire had begun.
