Chapter 2
The Making of a Colonial Society

The Russian Conquest

The gradual subjugation of the Bashkir and Qazaq steppe by the Russian state over the preceding century and a half had brought Russia into geographical contiguity with the khanates of Central Asia by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the confrontation that followed, the technological and organizational superiority of Russian forces proved to be its own justification for conquest, which was accomplished with great ease and rapidity. Although the motivation behind the Russian expansion has been a matter of much debate, it seems quite clear that the initiatives of willful and ambitious generals played significant and irreversible roles in the conquest of Central Asia.^[1]

[1] Soviet historiography long focused on the economic impulse behind Russian expansion, asserting, not entirely convincingly, the necessity of a nascent bourgeoisie in Russia to find new markets. See the classic statement in N.A. Khalfin, Prisoedinenie Srednei Azii k Rossii (60-90-e gody XIX v. ) (Moscow, 1965). Much of Western historiography of Russian expansion into Central Asia, in positing a calculated Russian advance against India, is still hostage to the nineteenth-century British understanding of it; for a recent vulgarization of this theme, see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (London, 1990). The assumption of a grand strategy behind Russian expansion has been questioned, quite convincingly m my opinion, by David MacKenzie, "Expansion in Central Asia: St. Petersburg vs. the Turkestan Generals (1863-1866)," Canadian S1avic Studies 3 (1969): 286-311; and Peter Morns, "The Russians m Central Asia, 1870-1887," Slavonic and East European Review 53 (1975): 521-538.

Russia's first territorial acquisition at the expense of a khanate came in 1853, when Russian forces under the command of General V.A. Perovskii took the Kokand fortress of Aq Masjid to complete the Orenburg line of frontier fortifications. Further action was stalled for a decade, when the decision was made to connect the Orenburg and Siberian lines. The resulting advance led to the conquest of the towns, nominally under Kokand rule, of Turkestan (Yasi) and Awliya Ata, and it finally enclosed the Qazaq steppe behind Russian lines. This was, however, only the beginning of bigger things. The following spring, M. G. Cherniaev, promoted to the rank of major general for his recent exploits, marched on Tashkent and conquered it against the express wishes of his superiors in St. Petersburg. Cherniaev's actions in Tashkent set the pattern for Russia's military activity in Central Asia over the next two decades, as military men repeatedly presented faits accomplis to imperial authorities. Military action took place in remote, barely known areas, which left imperial authorities with no ability to monitor the actions of men on the spot, for whom the militarily weak khanates represented an easy source of military glory.^[2]

Cherniaev was decorated and the territories conquered by him retained. War thus came to Bukhara. Amir Muzaffar showed little enthusiasm for taking on the Russians, preferring to continue his campaign against Kokand, but he was surprised by his own population. In early 1866, with the Russians at Jizzakh, the ulama of Bukhara led a vast throng to the amir's palace demanding the declaration of war.^[3] A similar uprising took place in Samarqand. The amir was forced to fight, but the hastily assembled army, including many volunteers with no experience of war, suffered a massive defeat. The next years were a period of uncertainty. The amir sought help from outside: an embassy led by one Muhammad Parsa traveled to India and the Ottoman empire, but to no avail.^[4] Meanwhile, his troops suffered a number of defeats, which cost him the

[2] On the Russian conquest of Central Asia, see Khalfin, Prisoedinenie Srednei Azii ; good summaries m English are Richard N. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 1960), ch. 2; Seymour Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924 (Cambridge, 1968), chs. 2-7; and Hé1ène Carfare d'Encausse, "Systematic Conquest, 1865-1884," in Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule (New York, 1967), 131-150.

[3] 'Abdul 'Azim Sami, Tuhfa-yi shahi (ms., ca. 1899-1900), quoted by L.M. Epifanova, Rukopis'nye istochniki Instituta Vostokovedeniia Akademii Nauk UzSSR po istorii Srednei Azii perioda prisoedineniia k Rossii (Tashkent, 1965), 34; Ahmad Makhdum Danish, Traktat Akhmada Donisha "Istoriia Mangitskoi dinastii, " ed. and trans. I.A. Nadzhafova (Dushanbe, 1967), 45ff.

[4] For a description of the letter to the sultan, see Epifanova, Rukopis'nye istochniki , 69-70; for some Ottoman documents concerning the embassy, see Osmanli Devleti ile Kafkasya, Turkistan ve Kirim Hanliklari Arasindaki Munasebetlere dâir Arsw, Belgeleri (Ankara, 1992), 133-134, 136-138; see also Muhammad Anwar Khan, England, Russia and Central Asia (A Study in Diplomacy ) (Peshawar, 1963), 107-112; Mehmed Saray, Rus Isgali Devrinde Osmanli Devleti ile Turkistan Hanliklari Arasindaki Siyasi Munasebetler (Istanbul, 1990), 81-88.

provinces of Khujand and Samarqand. In 1868, Bukhara was forced to pay reparations and to sign a treaty formalizing the loss of territory and granting Russian merchants equal rights in the country. Similar terms were imposed by treaty on the rump khanate of Kokand.

The khanates were allowed to exist for several interconnected reasons. Authorities in St. Petersburg, especially the Ministry of Finance, showed a marked reluctance to take on the expenditure of administering new regions. There was also the need to minimize British concerns about Russian expansion, as well as an uncertainty about the ability to control a large population little known or understood by the Russians. Only the initial conquests were to be incorporated directly into the Russian empire. Yet, the very logic of military success undermined this hope. Each round of warfare resulted in the acquisition of extra territory as reparations. In 1873, a major campaign that reduced Khiva to vassal status gained considerable territory for Russia. In Kokand, Khudayar Khan found it difficult to assert his authority over his diminished realm and in 1875 lost his throne in an uprising that rapidly turned into a movement against the Russian presence. Russian troops invaded and occupied Kokand; the protectorate was abolished and the khanate incorporated into the Russian empire. Finally, in the 1880s, the Türkmen steppe, where no khanate had managed to assert control, was conquered, often with the use of exemplary brutality (the most notable being Skobelev's massacre at Gök Tepe in 1881). Thus, at the end of the period of conquest, for all its reluctance to take on additional expense, the Russian state found itself in the possession of a vast new densely populated territory.

The 1868 treaty with Bukhara was eventually replaced in 1873 by a new, more far-reaching version that defined Bukhara's status until 1917. It made the amir "acknowledge himself to be the obedient servant of the Emperor of All the Russias." The amir also "renounce[d] the right to maintain direct and friendly relations with neighboring rulers and khans and to conclude with them any commercial or other treaties [or to] ... undertake any military actions against them without the knowledge and permission of the supreme Russian authority in Central Asia."^[5] Once he

[5] For an English translation of the treaty, see Becker, Russia's Protectorates , 316-318 (quote on 316).

had accepted Russian suzerainty, Amir Muzaffar set about making the best of it. Through a series of adroit political maneuvers, Muzaffar and his successors carved out for themselves a position of authority that their ancestors had only dreamed of. Now, despite his military defeat, Muzaffar was installed as a ruler by the Russians, who henceforth had an interest in the security of his throne. (Nor was the defeat complete. In 1873, the Russians made the khan of Khiva cede territory on the right bank of the Amu Darya to the amir of Bukhara, whom the Russians trusted more. The amir also gained territory, with Russian blessings, in Qarategin and Darwaz and in the Pamirs.)^[6] On more than one occasion, Russian troops were deployed in Bukhara to quell disorders. Muzaffar and his successors kept on good terms with Russian elites, both in Tashkent and St. Petersburg, and backed these contacts with frequent personal gifts and public donations.^[7] Domestically, Muzaffar presented himself as the most powerful surviving Muslim monarch in Central Asia. He even turned defeat into victory by claiming credit for having prevented a complete takeover by Russia.^[8] He appealed to religious piety and grounded his legitimacy in his support for the "traditional" Islamic order in Bukhara. He and his successors jealously guarded against the introduction of any new institutions that might compromise their absolute power by casting all change as a bid'at (innovation). The nature of Bukhara's political order was transformed as a result of the protectorate, Russia's professions of non-intervention notwithstanding. With the delineation of its boundaries in the treaty, Bukhara also became, for the first time, a strictly territorial entity.

Bukhara's autonomy was further reduced in 1885, when it was included in the Russian customs boundary and a Russian "political agency" was created to conduct relations with Bukhara (which until then had been carried on through irregular emissaries). The Transcaspian Railway, built in the 1880s to connect Samarqand and Tashkent with the Caspian Sea, also cut through Bukhara. A new treaty made the railway itself and all stations along it sovereign Russian territory. The po-

[6] Ibid., 90-92, 157.

[7] Thus, while Amir Abdulahad stoutly refused permission for Jadid schools in his domain, he donated 52,000 rubles in the 1890s for the establishment of a Realschule (real'noe uchilishche ) for Russian students in Tashkent. The tradition was maintained by Alimjan (r. 1910-1920) as well. See A. Dobromyslov, Tashkent v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Tashkent, 1912), 227; B. Kh. Ergashev, "Iz istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskoi zhizni Bukhary nachala XX veka," Obshchestvennlye nauki v Uzbekistane , 1992, no. 2, 49-53.

[8] Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Réforme et révolution chez les musulmans de l'empire russe , 2nd ed. (Paris, 1981), 86-89.

litical agency, directly inspired by the British experience of dealing with princely states in India, was located nine miles from Bukhara, in Kagan, which in time became an important outpost of Russian Turkestan. The political agent was appointed by the governor-general of Turkestan, who could thus keep a closer eye on the amir and project Russian influence into Bukhara more easily. The Russian government periodically contemplated outright annexation of Bukhara, but for the same reasons that had militated against annexation in x 868, the amir escaped unscathed, his autocratic powers intact, until the revolution of 1920^[9]

The khan of Khiva was less successful. His realm was smaller and poorer, and the peace treaty accordingly more punitive. Over the decades, Muhammad Rahim Khan (1864-1910) and his successor were far less prominent in Russian public life, but since they could not make claims to authority like those of the amirs of Bukhara, they proved more open to reform. Their authority over their realm was less certain, however, and an uprising by nomadic tribes in 1916 led to massive Russian intervention that all but abolished the protectorate.

Yet, only the military could be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the progress of Russian arms in the region. The Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs took a different view of the matter, the former worrying about the expense of administering vast new territories in a period of fiscal restraint, and the latter fearing "complications" in its relations with Britain, which saw any Russian advance as a direct threat to its occupation of India. The fears of these two ministries were reflected in the final outcome, but the military succeeded in setting the pace of conquest. Russian expansion ended when the southern boundaries of the empire were defined in a series of treaties with Britain, which thus made Russian actions subject to European international law. By that time, however, the Russian empire had acquired numerous new subjects and huge tracts of land that it ruled directly. This rule proved quite stable, at least partly because strategic considerations remained paramount in the eyes of local administrators.^[10] It was also backed by large numbers of troops, usually numbering around 50,000, who were frequently deployed.^[11] There

[9] Becker, Russia's Protectorates , ch. 12.

[10] David MacKenzie, "Turkestan's Significance to Russia (1850-1917)," Russian Review 33 (1974): 167-188, provides a nuanced view of the changing significance of Turkestan to Russia. As the discussion below of irrigation policy shows, however, strategic considerations never completely disappeared.

[11] David MacKenzie, "Kaufman of Turkestan: An Assessment of His Administration," Slavic Review 26 (1967): 272.

were few overt challenges to Russian rule until the uprising of 1916, although a certain unease about the thinness of their authority never left the minds of the new rulers.

Imagining Turkestan

The Turkestan krai (region) was created in 1867 and put in the charge of a governor-general.^[12] In view of the unsettled and largely unknown conditions in the area, civilian and military rule down to the uezd (district) level were placed in the same hands (although uezd administrators were relieved of military command in 1884), and the Ministry of War, rather than Internal Affairs, enjoying ultimate jurisdiction over it. The region was to be ruled by a governor-general, appointed by the tsar himself and answerable only to him. K.P. Kaufman, the first governor-general, enjoyed immense plenipotentiary powers over administration and the conduct of Russian relations with neighboring states. Given its peculiar position, Turkestan was to be governed under its own statute. The tsar promulgated a Provisional Statute in 1867, but the drafting of a permanent statute was delayed by differences between the various ministries involved, and a final version was not published until 1886. For the first two decades of Russian rule, therefore, Turkestan was governed provisionally, with everyday policy being set by Kaufman. The earliest Russian policies and practices bore the stamp of his preferences.

Central Asia's otherness was palpable to nineteenth-century Russians. As Monika Greenleaf has ably argued, since the early nineteenth century, Russian elites had sought to buttress their Europeanness through participation in the discourse of orientalism.^[13] The same could be said of the discourse of imperialism. In his 1864 memorandum to Russian missions in Europe, Foreign Minister A.M. Gorchakov argued in terms of mid-century imperialism common to all Europeans: "The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilized States which are brought

[12] Polnoe sobranie zakonot' Rossiiskoi Imperu , 2nd ser., vol. 42, no. 44831 (St. Petersburg, 1868). The krai initially consisted of two oblasts, viz. Syr Darya and Semirech'e; later the Samarqand and Ferghana oblasts, comprising lands annexed from Bukhara and Kokand, respectively, were added. In 1882, Semirech'e was transferred to the Steppe krai, ruled from Omsk, but returned to Turkestan m 1892, when the Transcaspian oblast, representing the last fruits of Russian expansion, was also transferred to Turkestan from the viceroyalty of Transcaucasia. Both, however, continued to be ruled under their own statutes.

[13] Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 145.

into contact with half-savage, nomad populations, possessing no fixed social organization.... In such cases it always happens that the more civilized State is forced... to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whom their turbulent and unsettled character make most undesirable neighbours.... It is a peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force; the moral force of reason and of the interests of civilization has as yet no hold upon them."^[14] Nor was this memorandum simply eyewash for the benefit of foreign governments. Educated Russians saw their presence in Central Asia as part of the greater European imperial expansion of the nineteenth century. The Russian intelligentsia might debate its relation to Europe, but no one doubted that Russia represented Europe in Central Asia.^[15] Most Russians in Central Asia saw their goals in terms of the usual nineteenth-century imperial notions of replacing the arbitrary, "Asiatic" despotism of local rulers by good government, the pacification of the countryside, and the increase in trade and prosperity. The earliest administrators took pride in the lower levels of taxation Russian rule had brought (even, for some, at the expense of rendering Turkestan "unprofitable"). Kaufman saw the growth of trade as the key to the future prosperity of the region and spent a considerable amount of energy in organizing a biannual trade fair at Tashkent. (The experiment was less than successful and was soon abandoned.)^[16]

Russia as progress stood in contrast to Central Asia as fanaticism and barbarity, much of which was seen to reside in Islam. "Fanaticism" came to be the defining characteristic of Central Asia, although precisely what it entailed could vary a great deal; its semantic range included everything from armed struggle against the Russians, through the refusal to send

[14] Great Britain, Parliament, Central Asia, No. 2 (1873): Correspondence Respecting Central Asia , C. 704 (London, 1873), 70-75.

[15] This bears emphasis for two reasons: first, current discussions of post-Soviet Russia take for granted its otherness from "Europe"; and second, the considerable literature that exists on Russian views of Asia tends to privilege those Russian authors who had more ambivalent feelings toward Europe (and consequently, toward Asia), thus overstating the prevalence of such views. See, for example, Milan Hauner, What Is Asia to Us ? (London, 1990). In any case, as Mark Bassin ("Russia between Europe and Asia," Slavic Review 50 [1991]: 13) has shown, even those Russian writers who asserted Russia's difference from Europe tended nevertheless to see "the gulf separating Russia from the Occident as considerably less deep than that separating it from the Orient"; Central Asia remained a "purely Asiatic land," a colony of Russia, no matter how un-European Russia might be.

[16] TWG was full of reports and proclamations about the trade fair in the early 1870s. The fair distinctly failed to amuse Eugene Schuyler, the American minister m St. Petersburg, who visited Central Asia in 1873; see his scathing critique in Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja , vol. 1 (New York, 1877), 207-212.

children to Russian schools, to abstention from alcohol. As David Edwards has pointed out, establishing the other as fanatical denies him or her moral status, since he or she exists beyond the realm of rationality, and gives those whose moral superiority is thus affirmed a free hand in defending their interests.^[17] In locating the fanaticism in Islam, Kaufman and his contemporaries were part of a much broader phenomenon of nineteenth-century European thought. As European armies of conquest encountered armed resistance, often in the name of Islam and many times organized around Sufi brotherhoods, the "fanaticism" of Muslims became a commonplace in the literature of imperialism. The view of Islam as a conspiratorial religion (Sufi brotherhoods, dimly understood, were particularly suitable grist for this mill), implacably hostile to Christianity (or Europe or the West), provided a common framework for colonial administrators in Asia and Africa.^[18] Russian administrators in Turkestan (some of whom were prominent orientalists) looked to the experience of the British and the French in ruling "their" Muslims, and they avidly read the works of Western European orientalists. The Russians had encountered the same phenomenon in their prolonged conquest of Daghestan, where resistance, led by Shamil, had been organized in Sufi brotherhoods. Similarly, the role of the ulama in forcing the amir of Bukhara to fight was proof to many of the implacable fanaticism aroused by Islam. This fear of Islam remained a constant component of policies toward Muslim peoples through the colonial world, although its intensity varied with the political situation. By the end of the century, the fear of traditional Islam organized in Sufi brotherhoods began to give way to a fear of Islam, fanatical as ever, but now mixed up with nationalism and modern education. Bureaucrats in Turkestan could never make up their minds as to which kind of Islam was more dangerous. Nevertheless, the fear of the conspiratorial nature of Islam rendered certain religious practices, such as the hajj, the locus of suspicion, and hence targets of control.

At the same time, in common with other Europeans, educated Russians had boundless confidence in the inherent superiority of their civilization, a belief repeated often by administrators in Turkestan. Writing

[17] David B. Edwards, "Mad Mullahs and Enghshmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 31, 655.

[18] Christopher Harmon, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960 (Cambridge, 1988), esp. ch. 1; R.S. O'Fahey and Brend Radtke, "Neo-Sufism Reconsidered," Der Islam 70 (1993): 61-64.

in the aftermath of the Andijan uprising of 1898, a group of orientalists could blandly state: "Of course, at the present time, no one doubts that Islam has had its day and that each day it nears its final collapse and decomposition. No evidence is needed to show that a renascence of the world of Islam is not possible: left to itself, it must either meet its final destruction or it will have to adopt a different culture."^[19] Russian policies in Turkestan were therefore the product of a curious combination of hubris and paranoia. The superiority and ultimate victory of the civilization they represented was assured, but the natives were nevertheless prone to a fanatical hatred of it. Yet, astute exercise of power (and the utilization of expert knowledge) could ensure the perpetuation of Russian rule and even the diminution of native fanaticism. For Kaufman, policy choices were obvious: Russian authorities were to tread cautiously and leave all aspects of local life that were not of a political nature untouched, so as not to arouse the fanaticism of the natives, while setting before them the example of the superior civilization of their new rulers. The natural corollary to nonintervention was "ignoring" (ignorirovanie ) Muslim institutions. Kaufman was critical of the treatment of religious functionaries by the earliest Russian rulers in Central Asia, who had attempted to organize them into a hierarchy that had, in his opinion, only strengthened their position.^[20] His own approach was to be different: "Finding that Islam was accustomed to living in the closest association with the state and to using its power for its own purposes, the local administration realized that the best way to fight it [Islam] would be to ignore it completely. In such a situation, the state, by not allowing Islam to unite under its wing, would condemn it to a process of decay."^[21] While the decay took its course, the state was to avoid at all costs inflaming the fanaticism of the local population. This approach laid the foundations for an often paradoxical administrative policy that in its broad outlines was pursued down to the end of the old regime. The policy, with its intended and unintended consequences, was of fundamental importance in the evolution of Central Asian culture during the half-century of tsarist rule.

[19] V.P. Nalivkin et al., "Kratkir obzor sovremennogo sostoianua 1 deiatel'nosti musul'manskogo dukhovenstva, raznogo roda dukhovnykh uchrezhden?? i uchebnykh zavedenu tuzemnogo naselenua Samarkandskoi oblasti s nekotorymi ukazaniiami na ikh istoricheskoe proshloe," in Materialy po musul'manstvu , vyp. 1 (Tashkent, 1898), 21.

[20] Cherniaev had reappointed the qazi kalan and the shaykh ul-Islam of the city to their offices: N.P. Ostrournov, "Poslednie po vremeni Sheikhul'-Islam i Kazy-Kalian goroda Tashkenta, brat'ia Ai-Khodzha i Khakim-Khodzha," Protokoly zasedanu i soob-shchentia chlenov Turkestanskogo kruzhka Imbitelei arkheologit , 20 (1914-1915):20, 13.

[21] Quoted in Beliavskii, Materialy po Turkestanu (St. Petersburg, 1884), 59.

No religious dignitaries were to be appointed to positions of authority, as Cherniaev had done in the aftermath of the conquest of Tashkent. Thus the positions of qazi kalan and shaykh ul-Islam in Tashkent were abolished. On his travels around Turkestan, Kaufman often pointedly rebuffed religious dignitaries. He also kept Turkestan out of the jurisdiction of the Muslim Spiritual Administration based in Orenburg (a creation of Catherine II, who had sought to provide a bureaucratic structure for Islam to parallel the Holy Synod), since it would have meant providing an organizational structure to local Islam. Isolating Islam in Turkestan was a natural corollary to the policy of disregarding it. Even before Kaufman left St. Petersburg to take up his new appointment, he had written to the Ministry of the Interior asking for an amendment to existing passport regulations that would make it impossible for Turkestanis to obtain foreign passports for hajj without his permission.^[22] Over the next three years, his chancellery worked out detailed regulations for the granting of passports to his subjects; finding that "while it is not possible to prevent this movement altogether, there is also no need to make it easy and affordable," it sought to make the practice as difficult as possible by setting high fees for applications for hajj passports.^[23] In 1876, Kaufman was writing to the Minister of Education D.A. Tolstoi raising his concern about the active trade in printed Qur'ans and other religious books between Kazan and Turkestan. "Finding the dissemination of Muslim teachings by as powerful a weapon as the printed word harmful for Russian interests in Central Asia," Kaufman asked Tolstoi to take measures to limit the entry and distribution of Muslim books in Central Asia.^[24] The request was impossible to implement, but it showed that even the principles of free trade so dear to Kaufman could readily be sacrificed at the altar of stability.

More significant was Kaufman's decision to make a clear distinction between the sedentary and nomadic populations of the area. The distinction had a long tradition in Russian thinking about Islam, although the relative values assigned to nomad and sedentary differed over time. As late as 1864, Gorchakov had presented the nomads as the problem ("half-savage...populations, possessing no fixed social organization") and foreseen stable neighborly relations with the "more civilized" seden-

[22] Kaufman to A. A. Lobanov-Rostovskii, 22 July 1867, TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 11, d. 1, ll. 1-2.

[23] "O poriadke vydachi zagranichnykh pasportov" (February 1870), TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 11, d. 1, ll. 460b-47; the regulations were published m TWG, 15 March 1871.

[24] Kaufman to Tolstoi, 6 February 1876, TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 11, ll. 2-3.

tary khanates. Kaufman reversed the valences. For him, sedentary populations were repositories of the fanaticism so harmful to Russian interests; the nomads, whose "way of life [was]... based on natural and still primitive principles," might "officially adhere to Islam [but] in reality shun it and have no specific religious faith."^[25] The aim of Russian policy ought to be to protect these noble savages from the influence of the fanatical Islam produced in the cities. Kaufman established distinct patterns of administration for each type of population and even hoped to redraw administrative boundaries to perpetuate the "natural demarcation" of the settled from the nomad.^[26] Although this territorial demarcation never came about, sedentary populations were placed under the jurisdiction of Muslim religious law (shariat), while personal law among the nomads was to be based on custom (adat ); in both cases, judges (called qazis among the sedentary population and biy among the nomads) were to be elected. The distinction between the two, never as clear as Kaufman had assumed, blurred considerably during this period, largely as a direct result of Russian rule over nomadic territory, which rendered it safe for both Tatar and Uzbek ulama to operate on the steppe. By 1917, a new group of Muslim scholars had appeared among the nomadic population as well. Nevertheless, the dichotomy underlay Russian administrative policies until 1917, leading to distinct patterns of political development among the sedentary and nomadic populations in Central Asia.

These initiatives were combined with a number of other precautionary measures. Kaufman forbade all missionary activity by the Orthodox church in his realm, and the ban lasted until 1917. As a result, Turkestan never experienced the politics of conversion and resistance to it that marked the cultural life of the Volga basin and gave Tatar Jadidism its flavor. Kaufman also prohibited Russian settlement outside of towns and postal stations and did not allow Russians to purchase land.^[27] This prohibition was short-lived, as the Statute of 1886 allowed Christians and local Muslims the right to buy property in Turkestan, and in time large-

[25] Quoted in Daniel R. Brower, "Islam and Ethnicity: Russian Colonial Policy in Turkestan," in Darnel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., The Russian Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington, 1997), 122.

[26] K.P. fon-Kaufman, Proekt vsepoddanneishogo otcheta General-ad" uitanta K. P. fon-Kaufmana po grazhdanskomu upravlemiu i ustroistvu v oblastiakh Turkestanskogo general-gubernatorstva 7 notabria 1867-25 marta 1881 g . (St. Petersburg, 1885), 82. The concern with protecting the nomads from the influence of their sedentary neighbors, both Tatars and "Sarts," is a constant theme m this report (see esp. ibid., 141-149, 440-441).

[27] Ibid., 246.

scale resettlement of Russian peasants appeared on the government's agenda, but the caution behind it persisted and served to place limits on the scale of Russian immigration.

Yet, Islam did not "decay." Kaufman was wrong, of course, in asserting that "Islam was accustomed to living in the closest association with the state." Kaufman's hope that "Islam" would decay if bereft of state support therefore proved to be unfounded. There were other reasons, too, why the disregard of Islam did not produce the expected results. Noninterference in native life was not incompatible with fundamental change. Over the half century of tsarist rule, Central Asia was framed with new kinds of knowledge, bureaucratic practices, and forms of economic and political power that profoundly reshaped local understandings of Islam and ensured that it did not simply decay the way Kaufman and his successors had hoped.

The confidence that knowledge could subjugate difference led to the production of colonial knowledge that began immediately after the conquest. Alongside the new administration came statistical committees and their publications, which set about bringing order to the land. Numerous expeditions, Russian as well as foreign, visited Central Asia in the 1870s and 1880s to gather geographical and ethnographic information. Central Asia was surveyed and mapped, its natural features and social institutions described, and its inhabitants, their fanaticism notwithstanding, photographed, counted, measured, and classified.^[28] Soon this attention extended to archeology and history as well. This research was formalized in a number of learned societies that appeared in Tashkent to further the study of the region's history and archeology, all of which enjoyed official support.^[29] The aim was to make the region more comprehensible by rendering it an object of familiar modes of description and classification, thus facilitating the new rulers' ability to rule.

This impulse toward rigorous ("scientific") description coexisted with a will to exoticize Central Asia, however. When Kaufman first arrived in Tashkent, he was accompanied by Vasilii Vereshchagin, one of Russia's most prominent painters, who specialized in orientalist themes (he was

[28] Physical anthropology and craniological research came to Turkestan at this time. See the numerous photographs of nude specimens of the various ethnographic types of the local population in Ch. E. de Ujfalvy de Mezõ-Kovesd, Expédition scientifique franÇatse en Russie, en Sibérte et darts le Turkestan , vol. 4 (Parts, 1879), passim.

[29] B.V. Lunin, Nauchnye obshchestva Turkestana t tkb progressivnata detatel'nost': konets XIX —nachalo XX v . (Tashkent, 1962); Brower, "Ethnicity and Imperial Rule."

a disciple of Jean-Léon Gérôme). During two stays in Turkestan, Vereshchagin painted and sketched numerous scenes of local life that illustrated the fanaticism and barbarity of the newly conquered territory: dervishes with irrationally dilated eyes, battle scenes with pyramids of (Russian) skulls, and slave auctions all served to fix the otherness of Central Asia in the mind of a wide audience that extended well beyond Russia.^[30] Arjun Appadurai has suggested that enumeration and exoticization were intertwined strands of a single colonial project in nineteenth-century India.^[31] Russian rule over Central Asia was based on similar epistemological processes.

The knowledge created by the new regime was a force in its own right. Statistical committees even counted what was not really amenable to counting; the maktab, as I have argued, was an unstructured site for the interaction of older men and children; the new regime saw them as "native schools" and insisted on collecting statistical data on them. These data are, to be sure, highly unreliable, but the process of counting itself imparted a new meaning to the phenomenon of the maktab. The regime was even more interested in the ethnic classification of the population and over time reified ethnic categories by using them to classify the population. These classifications were to play an important role in native discourses of identity.

But no amount of knowledge could assuage the fear of the natives' fanaticism, which tended to subvert intentions of introducing citizenship to the area. This was reflected in the new administrative structure created in Turkestan. In order to minimize the chance of provoking the "fanaticism" of the local population, the internal administration of the native population was left in the hands of local functionaries. In its broad outlines, the administrative structure that emerged in Turkestan was similar to that of European Russia in the aftermath of Emancipation, where the peasantry was also left to administer itself, but the implementation of this structure in Turkestan owed as much to the fear of fanaticism as to a principled stance on the part of officialdom to establish

[30] Vereshchagin's sketches Illustrated the two-volume travelogue of Eugene Schuyler (Turkistan [New York, 1876]), perhaps the most substantial work on Central Asia to appear in English in the 1870s. Vereshchagin's vision thus became the standard view of Central Asia in Britain and the United States as well. Many of his paintings have been reprinted in E.V. Zavadskaia, Vasiln Vasilevich Vereshchagin (Moscow, 1986).

[31] Arjun Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolomal Predicament (Philadelphia, 1993), 315.

empire-wide structures in the newly acquired territory.^[32] Existing systems of land tenure and revenue collection often continued unaltered during the period of conquest, often for several years, before the new administration could mobilize resources to reorganize them. Once that was done, lower-level administration was organized at the village and volost levels. In areas of settled population, property owners met to elect electors (piatidesiatniki, ellikbashi ), who in turn elected village elders (aqsaqqal ), officials in charge of overseeing irrigation channels (ariq aqsaqqal ), and volost chiefs. In the cities, different wards elected their own asaqqals. A parallel system of administration was created among the nomadic population, with electors choosing leaders at the aul and volost levels. These officials performed basic functions and assisted the Russian administration in tax assessment. These functionaries were responsible for all matters not having a "political" character, such as revenue collection and the administration of justice.^[33] For the same reasons, the local population was not put under the obligation to serve in the military. Although this measure was no doubt popular with the newly conquered population, it also meant that the bifurcation between the two tiers of administration was complete. A few Tatars and Qazaqs served in the military administration, but Turkestani functionaries remained confined to the "native" tier. The Russian administration, which existed only at the uezd and higher levels, had control over the election and functioning of these officials. Oblast governors retained the right to annul the results of any election (the right was frequently exercised). The 1886 Statute retained these elective officials, and they continued to function until 1917. Larger towns were granted organs of elective public economic administration (khoziaistvennoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie ), with the task of overseeing local fiscal affairs and determining taxes, but Kaufman, citing widespread corruption and misuse of power, aborted the experiment in 1877

[32] Motivated both by a spirit of paternalist protectionism and the fear of rural radicalism, the state sought to retain the peasant commune in the aftermath of the emancipation of the serfs m 1861. Volost-level administration was m the hands of elected peasants and volost courts adjudicated according to customary, rather than case, law. The argument can easily be made that the Russian state's relationship to its peasantry was colonial. But many Russian intellectuals sought to overcome their alienation from the peasantry, and the middle of the nineteenth century was the high point of the romanticization of the peasant as representative of pure Russianness. In Turkestan, on the other hand, the distance from the local population was self-evident to most Russians and tended to affirm their sense of Russianness. In time, many officials came to see m the settlement of the region by Russian peasants the solution to the problem of Turkestan's otherness. Empire could reconcile the state to its peasantry m a way not possible m European Russia itself.

[33] Kaufman, Proekt , 43.

and transferred these functions to the uezd administration.^[34] The one exception was Tashkent, where municipal self-government was organized from early on.

Although this policy of "ignoring" Islam was questioned as early as 1882, it remained in force until 1917. Immediately upon Kaufman's death, with an impasse still continuing in the debate over the permanent statute, the imperial government instituted an inspection (reviziia ) of the region to assess the needs of imperial policy there. The inspector F.K. Girs argued for radical change in the region's administration. Arguing that the population was peaceful and well inclined to Russian rule, he recommended the abolition of the special features of the Provisional Statute and its replacement by empire-wide structures.^[35] These recommendations were not taken into account, and when the permanent statute was enacted in 1886, the two-tier administrative structure remained in place. A second inspection in 1908 recommended replacing the 1886 statute with one granting far greater rights to the local population, including the gradual introduction of zemstvo self-government.^[36] The proposals provoked considerable debate, which continued until the outbreak of the Great War pushed such matters to the background.

Similarly, Kaufman's policy of "disregarding" Islam was also debated but not changed in any fundamental way until after the revolution. The strongest attack on it came in the aftermath of the Andijan uprising of 1898, when about 2,000 followers of Madali (Dukchi) Ishan, a minor Sufi shaykh, attacked the Russian barracks in Andijan and killed 22 soldiers while they slept and injured some 16 to 20. The insurgents, who were armed only with knives and cudgels, soon dispersed and were eventually hunted down. Russian retribution was swift: 18 of the insurgents were hanged, 360 were exiled to Siberia, and Mingtepe, Madali's village, was razed to the ground and replaced with a Russian settlement.^[37] The attack did not produce any other incidents, but it sent shock waves through Russian society and officialdom since it reaffirmed official fears

[34] Ibid., 60-66.

[35] F.K. Girs, Otchet revizuiushchego, po Vysochaishemu povelenuu, Turkestansku krai, Tainogo Sovetnika Girsa (St. Petersburg, 1883), 453-463.

[36] K.K. Palen, Otchet po revizn Turkestanskogo kraia, proizvedennoi po Vysochaisheniu povelentiu Senatorom Gofmeistorom Grafom K.K. Palenom , 19 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910- 1911); see also Pierce, Russian Central Asia , 87-91.

[37] The literature on this episode is considerable; for a variety of viewpoints, see, V. P. Sal'kov, Andizhanskoe vozstanie v 1898 g.: sbornik statei (Kazan, 1901); Fozilbek Otabek oghli, Dukchi Eshon woqeasi (Tashkent, 1992 [orig. 1927]); Beatrice Forbes Manz, "Central Asian Uprisings m the Nineteenth Century: Ferghana under the Russians," Russian Review 46 (1987): 261-281.

about the thinness of Russian rule in Turkestan. In a memorandum to the tsar, the governor-general, S. M. Dukhovskoi, saw in the uprising the failure of all policies of the Russian state toward its Muslim subjects. He attacked the policies not just of Kaufman but of Catherine II, who had created the Spiritual Administration for Muslim Affairs in Ufa and encouraged the Islamization of the Qazaq steppe. Rather, "Islam,... a teaching extremely inert and undoubtedly inimical to Christian culture, excludes all possibility of a complete moral assimilation of our present Muslim subjects with us. A pure Muslim, strongly believing in the letter of the Qur'an and the shariat, cannot be a sincere and trusted friend of a Christian."^[38] With this much Kaufman could have agreed; Dukhovskoi, however, drew other conclusions. A rapprochement between Muslims and the "Russian people" was possible only once the Muslim faith weakened, and that did not appear likely to Dukhovskoi. "Islam is so strong in the imaginations of the dark and passionate Asiatics that it would be useless to expect a rapid decline [in its influence]."^[39] It was therefore no longer possible to continue disregarding Islam; rather active measures were necessary to control it, such as the abolition of the Spiritual Administration at Ufa, close supervision over all Muslim institutions, and the creation of a special censor for Muslim publications. In addition, Dukhovskoi suggested using modern medicine as a vanguard for breaking down the fanaticism of the Muslim, especially of women, as well as encouraging mixed marriages between Russians and Muslims (or, since the Church would not recognize such marriages, simplifying procedures for the adoption of children born of such cohabitation).^[40] If the dark and passionate Asiatic fanaticism of the local population could be thinned by Russian blood, then it was to be coopted into the service of the state.

On the whole, Dukhovskoi's dark warnings met only a lukewarm reception in St. Petersburg and did not result in any significant change in policy. In the end, "nonintervention" proved durable because it was rooted not so much in the whims of a governor-general but in a very real shortage of resources, both human and financial, which placed strict limits on the Russians' ability to effect substantial change. Turkestan was vastly undergoverned even by Russian standards. Central Asia was

[38] S.M. Dukhovskoi, Vsepoddanneishii doklad Turkestanskogo General-Gubernatora Generala of Infentarit Dukhovskogo: Islam v Turkestane (Tashkent, 1899), 13.

[39] Ibid., 14.

[40] Ibid., 18.

conquered at a time when the Russian government was deep in debt after the Crimean War and the Great Reforms and every expenditure was closely scrutinized. Once the conquest had been accomplished, the central government continued to be extremely tight-fisted with funds for the new region. Thus, at the time of its creation in 1867, the Syr Darya oblast was staffed with only nineteen career (shtatnye ) officials with a budget of only 48,500 rubles.^[41] At that time, the Ministry of State Control refused to release funds to provide housing for the new administrators, and even the premises for the governor-general's chancellery were built from local taxes.^[42] Simultaneously, down to the end of the old regime, there was a remarkable shortage of capable men to administer the region. As a governor-general pointed out in his report to the tsar in 1897, Turkestan suffered in comparison even with other borderlands administered by the Ministry of War. Samarqand oblast, for example, with a population a little smaller than that of Terek province in the Caucasus, had only half as many permanent staff and no chancellery. The uezd administration lagged behind even more; Samarqand's was run by a mere seventeen officials, compared with fifty-two in Tiflis and forty-four in Erevan, both of which had far smaller populations.^[43] The 1908 senatorial inspection voiced the same complaints. Ferghana oblast, with a population of two million, was administered by only forty-three career bureaucrats, including two translators. Of these, only nine had a higher education, all in technical fields.^[44] And with the exception of the few capable orientalists among them, Russian administrators had no acquaintance with local languages. The question of providing courses for administrators in local languages was raised at the official level after the turn of the century, but nothing tangible came of it.^[45]

The End of Isolation

Administrative policies might profess to minimize interference, but they could not keep at bay the profound economic transformation of the region as a result of its incorporation into the Russian empire.^[46] Central

[41] Beliavskii, Materialy , 37.

[42] Kaufman, Proekt , 92.

[43] "Vsepoddaneishn doklad Turkestanskogo General-Gubernatora za 1895-97 gg.," TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 53a, ll. 100b-11.

[44] Palen, Otchet , XIV: 47.

[45] Lunin, Nauchnye obshchestva , 22.

[46] What little economic history of Central Asia has been written m the West deals with the Soviet period. Much, of course, has been published on the imperial period in Russian, however, with the exception of a few monographs published in the 1920s, this literature suffers from the necessity to reconcile the Central Asian experience with official interpretations of Marxism. An example of the earlier work is P.G. Galuzo, Turkestan —kolonna (Moscow, 1929). Many of the orthodoxies of the last three decades of the Soviet period may be found in A.M. Aminov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Srednei Azu (kolonial'nyi period ) (Tashkent, 1959).

Asia's isolation was quickly breached. The telegraph arrived in Tashkent in June 1873, and the first bank opened in May 1875.^[47] After a slow beginning, the region was also linked to Russia by railway. Purely strategic reasons (the conquest of the Turkmen steppe) motivated the construction of the Transcaspian Railway, the first railway project in the area. It reached Samarqand from the Caspian only in 1888, and Tashkent and the Ferghana valley were connected only a decade later. The Orenburg-Tashkent line, providing a much more direct link with European Russia, was built between 1900 and 1906. Until then, travel to European Russia from Tashkent entailed a journey through the Türkmen desert to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian, a steamer ride to Baku or Astrakhan, and further train or steamer connections onward. Even so, the new technology represented an immense saving of time and money over previous forms of transport. Not only did it effectively tie Turkestan to Russia, it also altered patterns of overland trade with neighboring countries. The conquest had already subjected the trade with India to Russian tariffs (and the customs boundary was extended to include Bukhara as well in 1885); the introduction of railways and steamships proved to be the last nail in the coffin of the caravan trade, for it became much cheaper and faster to send goods to India via Odessa and Bombay than overland across Afghanistan.

The conquest also led to the triumph of a cash economy in Central Asia. The Statute of 1886 recognized the right to possession of land by those who cultivated it. In sedentary areas, this effectively created private ownership of land in the hands of a class of smallholders. In nomadic areas, the state claimed ownership of the land since it was not cultivated. Long-distance trade was replaced by far more intensive exchange with Russia, which eventually led to the demise of local crafts production and its replacement by industrial goods from European Russia. The key role in this transformation was played by cotton. Cash crop production brought the cash economy to the countryside, created a greater economic surplus than ever before, and caused the emergence of a pros-

[47] TWG , 28 June 1873; 3 June 1875.

perous city-based class of merchants and middlemen that did more to alter the social terrain in Central Asia than any conscious government policy. Cotton had long been grown in Central Asia and exported to Russia, but its production took a quantum leap in the 1880s with the introduction of long-fiber American cotton into the region. A rapidly developing textile industry in Russia and Poland provided an almost insatiable market that had hitherto been completely dependent on imported cotton. Kaufman early on encouraged the adoption of long-fiber cotton by local cultivators. An experimental farm was established on the outskirts of Tashkent in 1878; three years later, it was providing seed and information gratis to interested peasants.^[48] In 1884, a certain A. Wilkins planted 300 desiatinas (800 acres) with Sea Island and Upland cotton in the Tashkent area on an experimental basis. The Upland variety succeeded beyond all expectation.^[49] Table z shows the growth of cotton production in Turkestan in the ensuing three decades. It was accompanied by shifts in patterns of land use, especially in Ferghana oblast, where cotton accounted for 44 percent of cultivated land.^[50] The foundations for Soviet Central Asia's economic catastrophe were already in place.

[48] TWG , 18 June 1881, 3-4.

[49] A.P. Demidov, Ekonomicheskit ocherk khlopkovodstva, khlopkotorgovli i khlopkovot promyshlennosti Turkestana (Moscow, 1922), 35-36.

[50] Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe polozheme Uzbekistana nakanune oktiabria (Tashkent, 1973), 30. The table refers only to the three core oblasts of Turkestan. An additional 60,362 desiatinas were sown with cotton in 1916 in Semirech'e and Transcaspia. Cotton cultivation was also widespread m the protectorates, where in 1915, the area under cotton amounted to 146,000 desiatinas (ibid., 29).

By the turn of the century, Turkestan had acquired a new significance to the Russian economy. The tsarist government supported cotton production in Turkestan, which it saw as a way of achieving freedom for the textile industry of European Russia from cotton imports from the United States and India. In the oft-quoted words of the minister of agriculture in 1912, "Every extra pud of Turkestani wheat [provides] competition for Russian and Siberian wheat; every extra pud of Turkestani cotton [presents] competition to American cotton. Therefore, it is better to give the region imported, even though expensive, bread, [and thus] to free irrigated land in the region for cotton."^[51] But since the government's interests lay primarily in encouraging the textile industry of European Russia, and not the economic development of Turkestan, it limited its encouragement to imposing high tariffs on imported cotton (by 1900, the import duty on cotton was four rubles per pud ). Little was done to improve matters locally by funding improvements in irrigation and transportation or credit to small farmers.^[52] Yet, cotton reconfigured the social order in Central Asia. It required intensive amounts of labor (which altered work patterns in the countryside) as well as cash (to buy seed, pay for transport, and buy food during the growing season), which was available to few peasants. Cotton-buying firms were only too willing to advance large sums of money against the harvest, often at exorbitant rates, thus tying the peasantry into a never-ending cycle of debt.^[53] This dislocation was cause for some concern among local administrators, since it threatened to provide fertile grounds for disaffection that could lead to an explosion of "fanaticism." The state's interest in maintaining the region's stability could act as a damper on Russia's economic exploitation of the region. From the beginning, governors-general had enacted paternalistic legislation to protect Central Asians from outsiders. They had waged a constant struggle with usurers (mostly Indian), placing limits on what they could claim in return for defaulted loans.^[54] Similarly, a 1902 decree forbade the seizure of plots of under one desiatina for debt.^[55] In the 1910s, an ambitious project for financing a large-scale irrigation works at the Moscow Stock Exchange came to naught in part because of concerns among

[51] A.V. Krivoshein, Zapiska glavnoupravltaiushchego zemledeliem i zemleustroistvom o poezdke v Turkestansku krai v 1912 godu (St. Petersburg, 1912), 7.

[52] Demidov, Ekonomicheskn ocherk , 86.

[53] Ibid., 123ff.

[54] TWG , 19 December 1877.

[55] A. Iuldashev, Agrarnye otnoshenita v Turkestane (konets XIX-nachalo XX vv. ) (Tashkent, 1969), 175-176.

the Turkestan authorities about the political consequences of concessions sought by the Moscow financiers.^[56]

At the same time, with the imperial government beginning to sponsor resettlement of Russian peasants in the borderlands in the 1890s, Turkestan was cautiously opened to peasant settlement, directed mainly to the nomadic areas of Semirech'e and Syr Darya oblasts, where the state claimed ownership of land not cultivated by the nomads. Settlement was seen by many as an instrument of control and economic exploitation of the new territory; perhaps the most vocal proponent of this view was Minister of Agriculture A. V. Krivoshein, who in 1909 offered the simple formula of "cotton + settlement + irrigation = a new Turkestan" as a means of knitting the region more tightly to the empire. His view was not overwhelmingly popular in the bureaucracy, however, as many worried that unbridled resettlement would lead to mounting disaffection and the emergence of a political issue, as was happening in the neighboring Steppe region, where the "land question" had become a major spur to Qazaq nationalism.^[57] The volume of rural settlement remained small, and as of 1 January 1910, there were 382,688 Russians living in Turkestan, comprising 5.9 percent of the population. (The figure was only 153,651 [3.2 percent] for the three core oblasts.)^[58]

Almost all of the cotton produced in Central Asia was exported to the textile centers of inner Russia and Poland. Since production was dispersed among numerous smallholders, the task of procuring the harvest, and of advancing loans for the next one, fell to local middlemen, who made hefty profits. This group, which came to be known as the chistach (a corruption of the Russian word chistit ', to clean, since most of them were agents for cotton-cleaning firms), arose from among the local mer-chantry or usurers but in time diversified their operations.^[59] From its ranks emerged a fledgling modern merchant class in Turkestan. Also, land alienated from smallholders tended to concentrate in the hands of wealthier landholders, many of whom belonged to the urban merchantry. Central Asia experienced an unprecedented expansion of its economy, especially in the cities, whose populations swelled. The largest growth

[56] Muriel Joffe, "Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire: The Politics of Irrigation," Russian Review , 54 (1995): 387.

[57] In 1909, for instance, the governor-general, P.I. Mishchenko, in a memorandum to the minister of war, warned of the potential of any "artificial growth" of resettlement to lead to antigovernment sentiments; TsGARUz, f. 2, op. 2, d. 369, ll. 110b-12.

[58] The figures are from V. I. Masal'skn, Turkestansku krat (St. Petersburg, 1913), 362.

[59] Iuldashev, Agrarnye otnoshentia , 104.

was in Tashkent, which grew from around 76,000 in 1870 to 234,289 in 1911. In the same year, Kokand, at the center of the cotton boom, had a population of 113,636 and Samarqand 89,693.^[60]

A New Social Map

Local society underwent a major realignment in the first decade of Russian rule. In Bukhara and Khiva, Russian support strengthened the rulers against chiefs and governors, allowing a greater degree of centralization than the rulers had been able to achieve themselves. Yet, since this centralization was not entrenched in any new formal institutions of administration, the protectorates did not see the emergence of functionaries in the manner of Turkestan. The ulama, too, enjoyed less autonomy in their affairs, even though their jurisdiction was wider in the protectorates than in Russian territory. The amir also managed to turn the ulama, who had proved so troublesome in 1866 and 1868, into a state-supported estate, providing numerous sinecures and establishing a hierarchy that had never existed before.^[61] But the new wealth also affected the protectorates, which were fully absorbed into the Russian economy after 1885. The amir of Bukhara, one of the world's largest traders in astrakhan, acquired a vast personal fortune; others too, native Bukharans as well as Russian subjects from Turkestan and many Tatars, amassed great wealth from this trade.

Change took a rather different direction in Turkestan. In the sedentary areas, the most profound upheaval was the almost total disappearance of the warrior elites. The colonial nature of the conquest of Turkestan, as well as its suddenness, left little room (or need) for the cooptation of native elites, as had been the case in other Muslim areas of the empire, such as the Crimea and the Qazaq steppe. A few scions of ruling families received titles and admission into the Russian armed forces, but their numbers remained small.^[62] Warlords who fought against the Russians met varying fates. Many were pensioned off, others were exiled to provincial towns in European Russia, while some escaped to Afghanistan to live out their days. The Statute of 1886, which granted de facto property rights in land to those who cultivated it, struck a direct blow at the eco-

[60] Aziatskata Rossua , vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1914), 352-353.

[61] Sadriddin Aini, Istortia Mangytskikb emirov (1921-23), In Sobranie sochinenu . 6 vols. (Moscow, 1971-75), VI: 293-294.

[62] A.Z.V. Togan, Bugunku Turkili (Türkistan) ve Yakin Tarihi , 3rd ed. (Istanbul, 1981), 272.

nomic power of the tribal chiefs, and the introduction of elections for administrative positions undermined their political power.

The disappearance of the tribal chiefs was accompanied by a realignment of existing groups and the emergence of new ones. Proximity to the Russians and a knowledge of their language came to be a new source of notability. Anxious to create a group in local society loyal to them, the Russians created a new group of "honorable" (pochetnye ) citizens from among those who had welcomed the conquest. Many of the wealthiest merchants of Tashkent, for instance, had favored annexation by the Russians as early as the 1850s, and had even maintained contact with the Russians in Orenburg. When Tashkent was finally taken in 1865, these merchants provided the conquerors with their initial footing in an unknown and hostile environment. On 17 July 1865, Cherniaev decorated thirty-one men for "assiduous service and attachment to the Russian government... [and] for services rendered during the conquest of Tashkent."^[63] This laid the foundations for a new elite of notables who served as intermediaries between the colonial regime and local society. Immediately after Tashkent was taken, the conquerors were lionized by two of the wealthiest merchants in the city, Said Azim-bay and Sharafi-bay Zaynulabidin, the latter a Tatar who had lived in Tashkent for a long time.^[64] Between them, they owned the two largest caravansaries in the city and maintained extensive trading interests in Russia.^[65] Both were well rewarded: Said Azim-bay received the rank of "hereditary honorable citizen" from the emperor himself in St. Petersburg, and Sharafi-bay was appointed chair of the first Public Economic Administration of the old city.^[66] Other such appointments followed in Tashkent and in every other city conquered by Russian forces. Said Azim-bay's family remained prominent in local affairs until 1917: Two of his sons, Said Karim-bay and Said Ghani-bay, were elected to the Tashkent City Duma, and a son-in-law won election to the Second Duma in 1906 (although he refused to serve). The family's house acquired a permanent place on official itineraries in the old city, and as late as 1906 the newly appointed governor-general stopped by the house for tea as part of his initial tour of Tashkent.^[67] Said Ghani's millions ensured his appointment in 1908 as the

[63] F. Azadaev, Tashkent vo vtorot polovine XIX v . (Tashkent, 1959), 72-75.

[64] P.I. Pashino, Turkestanskit krai v 1866 godu. Putevye zametki (St. Petersburg, 1868), 96, 104, 106, 119.

[65] Ibid., 154n.

[66] N.P. Ostroumov, Sarty (Tashkent, 1908), 98-99; Azadaev, Tashkent , 2-4, 104.

[67] Taraqqi—Orta Azyaning umr guzarlighi , 3 February 1906.

official guide in charge of supervising the arrangements for the hajj for Muslims of all Russia.^[68] With time, the ranks of these honorable citizens swelled to include local merchants as well as some ulama and other functionaries. Honorable citizens received medals and ceremonial robes, were invited to official functions, and acquired numerous formal and informal privileges. The new economy also produced its own heroes. By the turn of the century, a number of wealthy merchants (bays, aghniya ) had emerged as prominent social figures. Some of them were decorated by the authorities, while others enjoyed the fruits of the stability provided by Russian rule, the monetized economy, and freedom from competition with military or khanly elites, as had been the case before the conquest.

Kaufman's policies also ensured that the ulama survived the conquest well. The impulse to nonintervention left the madrasas largely intact. The Provisional Statute of 1867 did not alter the status of waqf property, and although the 1886 statute sought to regulate such property more closely, the concept as such was never abolished. Similarly, the state retained Muslim courts, which, although placed under bureaucratic supervision, continued to function as before and to be staffed by the ulama themselves. Kaufman's hope that the removal of state support would lead to a sharp decline in the authority of the ulama proved misguided, partly because the qazis were more closely tied to the state now than before. Indeed, given the decline in the fortunes of the old warrior elites, the relative position of the ulama increased in Turkestan. Similarly, judicial affairs remained largely in Muslim hands. Among the settled population, every volost and city ward elected, indirectly through ellikbashis , a qazi. Anyone over the age of twenty-five without a criminal record could aspire to this office. The jurisdiction of the qazis was strictly defined by law, although Russian administrators had few means of ensuring strict compliance. Qazis could sentence people to arrest for up to eighteen months or a fine of up to 300 rubles.^[69] They were not competent to hear cases involving documents written in Russian or cases involving non-Muslims. Their decisions were subject to review by Russian circuit courts. Qazis did not receive a fixed salary but were allowed to charge fees for each case heard or each document signed.^[70] Apart from avoiding active interference in the religious life of the local population, these

[68] Odessku listok (Odessa), 19 July 1908.

[69] Polozhenie ob upravlenn Turkestanskogo kraia (St. Petersburg, 1886), § 217.

[70] On Muslim courts, see F. Bakirov, Chor Turkistonda sud, shariat wa odat (Tashkent, 1967); N. Lykoshin, Pol zhizm v Turkestane (Petrograd, 1916), 52—96.

institutions were a means of cutting costs. By making the seeker of justice responsible for its cost, the Russian authorities removed a substantial source of expenditure from the colonial budget. Moreover, these institutions were meant to destroy the authority of traditional Islamic elites among the settled population and of tribal and clan structures among the nomads, a task deemed necessary for turning natives into citizens of the empire.^[71]

The application of the electoral principle to qazis had been aimed at diminishing the moral authority of the office in the eyes of the population. (The 1886 Statute further eroded the moral authority inherent in the office by turning qazis into "popular justices.") This was only partly successful, for although the qazi's became an elected office, the population in the settled areas of Turkestan continued to recognize the cultural capital of the ulama. Many men who had been qazis in the last years of Muslim rule returned to office through election. Muhiddin Hakimkhojaoghli, for instance, the son of the last qazi kalan of Tashkent, was elected qazi of the Sibzar part of Tashkent and continued to be reelected until 1902.^[72] Of the 253 qazis serving in the three core oblasts of Turkestan on 1 June 1883, 225 had the usual madrasa credentials.^[73] There was also a marked reluctance on the part of the population, especially in the early years of Russian rule, to have recourse to Russian justice. In the three years 1880-1882, there were only three instances of natives turning to a Russian court when such recourse was not obligatory.^[74] After 1886, when qazis became "popular justices" overnight, a struggle ensued about the meaning of their office. The state tried to coopt them as its agents and provided them with new seals, made of steel, and inscribed in Russian with the name of the office. Qazis had traditionally been appointed because of their personal merits, and the silver seals they had used indicated only the name of the individual. Many qazis resisted the new reg-

[71] Among the nomads, volost boundaries were drawn on a strictly territorial basis, without regard to tribal and clan affiliations of the population. This was intended to loosen tribal affiliations, but some observers saw it as only fueling further intrigue, as members of various tribes sought to elect their tribesmen to office: lu. Iuzhakov, "Itogi 27-letnego upravlenila nashego Turkestanskim kraem," Russkn vestnik , 1891, no. 7, 70-73; A. A. Divaev, "Atkamnary (stranitsa iz zhizni Kirgiz)," Sbornik materialov dlia statistiki Syr-Dar'mskoi oblasti , 3 (1894): 3-17.

[72] V.V. Bartol'd, Istortia kul'turnot zbizni Turkestana (1927), in his Sochinenna , 9 vols. in 10 (Moscow, 1963-1977), II/1: 359-360. Reelection of incumbents seems to have been routine; in 1880, five of the eight functionaries (fours qazis and four aqsaqqals) up for election retained their offices; TWG . 29 August 1880.

[73] Girs, Otchet , 326.

[74] Ibid., 327.

ulation under various pretexts, and some used both seals for a period. According to the reminiscences of a zealous functionary, this practice ended only when he personally broke the old seals with a hatchet.^[75]

The story reveals much more than native obstreperousness or Russian bureaucratic zeal: The meaning of the institution was in flux. The struggle was over whether the qazis were to operate as agents of the colonial state or as members of a traditional Islamic elite. The Russians also sought to bring order to what seemed to them the chaos of traditional Islamic law. As I argued in Chapter 1, shariat is best understood as interpretive practice in which the possession of knowledge of appropriate texts gave the jurist license to issue his opinions. Abstracted from this discursive context, the manuals of fiqh were rendered incomprehensible and chaotic. The Russians brought a different understanding of law, as a code, accessible to all and universally applicable. The shariat itself was often (mis)taken as such a code; Dukhovskoi, for instance, could state simply that the "shariat... a multivolume commentary on the Qur'an [is] considered by Muslims to be a universal codex, in which believers find answers to all questions, without any exceptions, of religious, state, public, and personal life."^[76] Dissatisfied therefore with the practice of qazis, who cited no precedents and followed no particular procedure, officialdom set out to refashion the shariat as a civil code. The British invention of "Anglo-Mohammedan" law in India, a formalized code of personal law based on shariat precepts and Anglo-Saxon procedure, provided the inspiration. Already in 1893, B.D. Grodekov had translated the Hidaya (an eleventh-century manual of fiqh by 'Ali b. Abi Bakr al-Marghinani used as the basic code for "Anglo-Mohammedan" jurisprudence) from the English, and other attempts at the creation of what Brinkley Messick has aptly called "colonial shariat" continued down to the end of the old regime.^[77] Yet, characteristically, little came of the effort, and the tension between the various conceptions of the status of Muslim law and qazis was never fully resolved. The ulama, however, came to be seen as keepers of the Muslim tradition, the last bastions of Islam. With political power gone and compromises required in navigating the new

[75] Lykoshm, Pol Zhizm , 70-71.

[76] Dukhovskoi, Vsepoddanneishei doklad , 5.

[77] Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History m a Muslim Society (Berkeley, 1993), 58-66; on attempts to create "colonial shariat" in Turkestan, see Bartol'd, Istorua kul'turnot zhizni , 386-388; N.A. Smirnov, Ocherki istoru tzuchenna Islama v SSSR (Moscow, 1954), 76.

social and economic order, traditional practices came to be valorized as the sources of Muslim identity.

Local notables operated inside a precarious matrix of loyalty and suspicion. Kaufman was fond of majestic displays of his power, for he believed in behaving like an "oriental" monarch in the Orient. On his travels around the region, and especially on his return from military campaigns, he preferred to be welcomed by local notables with suitable imperial pomp. When Kaufman returned from a trip to St. Petersburg in 1873,

officials, as well as Russian and Muslim merchants of Tashkent met Kaufman three chaqirim outside the city. They welcomed him with a laden table .... The Governor General stopped and gave those present the Emperor's greetings to the inhabitants of the region. Later, he mounted his carriage and entered the city, where he reviewed the soldiers who stood, row upon row, from the head of the street to his mansion. At his mansion also, he conveyed the greetings of the Emperor to the officials who had gathered there [to greet him]. Upon hearing this, the men were very pleased and returned home with joy.... Later, after nightfall, all streets and houses were illuminated in order to celebrate the return of the esteemed Governor General.^[78]

The notables played their part, as they did in presenting addresses and petitions to the new rulers. During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877, notables from Aq Masjid presented Kaufman with assurances of loyalty and 10,000 rubles for wounded soldiers collected from the nomadic population of the uezd.^[79] Others sent their sons to Russian schools and built European-style houses in the Russian parts of town. Yet, nothing could dislodge suspicion of even the most loyal notables from the minds of Russian officialdom. For all the prominence Said Azim-bay acquired, Kaufman felt it "necessary to deal with Said Azim-bay very cautiously, because he wants to boss everyone and everything."^[80] We have seen that the fear that local notables and functionaries would place their interests before those of the state ("corruption," "misuse of power") led to the demise of organs of municipal self-government in the 1870s. In 1906, the veteran administrator V.P. Nalivkin rued the fact that the Russians had from the beginning enclosed themselves in a "living wall" of op-

[78] TWG , 28 February 1873; see also Schuyler, Turkistan , 1: 81-82.

[79] TWG , 29 April 1878.

[80] Quoted m N.P. Ostroumov, Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman, ustroitel' Turkestanskogo kraia. Lichnye vospominanna N. Ostroumova (Tashkent, 1899), 321.

portunists and ill-wishers.^[81] Other administrators, realizing their dependence on these intermediaries, but helpless to do anything, fretted over their evil designs. Many in Tashkent suspected that Russian policy in Bukhara was hostage to the machinations of a small group of translators who had "taken over" the political agency in Kagan.^[82] As fears of pan-Islam gathered strength after the turn of the century, honorable status proved no protection against arbitrary searches. Said Karim's house was searched in 1914 because of numerous suspicions harbored against him by the police (ranging from conspiracy to take over the publishing trade in Tashkent to collecting money on behalf of the Ottoman war effort).^[83] Yet, such searches, while a reminder of the precariousness of their position, did not undermine the notables' prominence in Muslim society.

The Russian presence, for all its professions of noninterference, had created new sources of notability and thus redefined the politics of status and prestige in local society. The new rulers' dependence on the decorated notables and the translators gave them a degree of informal influence in local society. Muslim functionaries in the new apparatus similarly appeared as intermediaries between the local population and the Russian state, as well as figures of authority. The ulama retained their source of moral and cultural authority and became the sole bulwarks of moral authority; indeed, the elimination of tribal chiefs, who had often competed with the ulama, gave the latter a stature in society that was in many ways unprecedented. These new elites reached their compromises with the new order, which in turn defined the positions they came to occupy in the new politics of culture in Turkestan.

Russians and Natives

But Muslim society was no longer autonomous; it was set against a new settler society that took root as a direct result of the Russian conquest. The earliest Russians to arrive were members of the conquering armies. They were followed by civilian functionaries and, in time, by traders, workers, and divers adventurers, so that quite soon a settler Russian society, complete with its own schools, churches, newspapers, and markets, appeared in Turkestan. Given the cautious approach to peasant re-

[81] V.P. Nalivkm, Tuzemtsy ran'she t teper ' (Tashkent, 1913), 72-75, passim; see also Togan, Turkili , 274.

[82] See, for instance, the report of a police agent sent from Tashkent to Bukhara on a secret mission m April 1910, in GARF, f. 102, op. 240 (1910), d. 277, l. 23.

[83] "Spravka" (21 May 1915), TsGARUz, f. 461, op. l, d. 2263, I. 160b.

settlement in Turkestan, the majority of its Russian population was connected with administration and trade. The emergence of Russian society also transformed the urban landscape. The Russians built their own quarters, which were self-consciously designed as advertisements for the superiority of the conquering civilization, adjacent to native cities. In common with urban development in other European colonies, these quarters were laid out according to a regular plan, their straight, wide streets contrasting to the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the traditional cities. Imperial architecture and the presence of churches further defined these quarters as different, and disproportionate expenditure and allocations ensured the maintenance of this order. Such "new cities" arose next to all major cities in Turkestan (in Bukhara, they developed along the Transcaspian Railway), while in nomadic territory, urban life emerged for the first time during this period. Vernyi (present-day Almaty), Pishpek (Bishkek), and Askhabad (Ashgabat) were all established as Russian settlements in this period and remained predominantly Russian. Although common in the colonial world, this pattern of urbanism was unique in the Russian empire. Similarly, in common with other settler societies, there were marked differences in wages between settler and native populations. As an American traveler observed in 1910, "Wages of Europeans are very high. A Russian labourer or servant expects twice or three times as much as he gets at home, but the wages of natives are low, 25 and 30 cents a day being the maximum."^[84] This combination of cheap native labor and high salaries for settlers meant that even the poorest sections of the Russian population enjoyed a standard of living considerably higher than the majority of the native population.

All this served to underscore Turkestan's uniqueness in the empire. Unlike other Muslim areas of the Russian empire, Turkestan was a relatively densely populated region with practically no Russian settlement in the beginning. It differed dramatically in that respect from the Volga region and the Crimea, which were also inhabited by Muslims but where the demographic balance was quite different and Russian rule much better entrenched. It also meant that the relationship between the rulers and the ruled was different—and more distant—than elsewhere in the Russian empire. The nomenclature adopted for classifying the local population gives some indication of this difference. Most non-Russian groups inhabiting the Russian empire were designated inorodtsy (a term best translated by the French allogènes ). Although the term had a consider-

[84] William Eleroy Curtis, Turkestan: "The Heart of Asia " (London, 1911), 289.

able semantic range, it connoted inhabitants of the Russian state who were somehow alien.^[85] For legal purposes, the population of Central Asia was classified as inorodtsy , but the term was never used in Central Asia itself, where the term tuzemtsy , directly translatable as "native," with all its connotations, held currency. Unlike inorodtsy , the term tuzemtsy asserted the connection of the given population to the land; conversely, the term also affirmed the foreignness of the Russians in the region in a manner that was inconceivable in other parts of the empire.^[86] Moreover, in Turkestan, the otherness of the local population acquired a social as well as a political or ethnic connotation, for the native population fit the state's system of classifications only awkwardly. Table 3, which classifies the local population by social categories, shows the ambivalence inherent in the state's classifications of its newest subjects. While entry into various estates was open to the native population of Turkestan, natives remained simply natives unless marked by some forth of social mobility. As the figures for Tatars show, this was not the fate of all inorodtsy in the empire.^[87]

Yet the lines between European and native were not entirely rigid. The new Russian cities were never segregated. The vast majority of the European population lived in those quarters, but a substantial proportion of their population was invariably of local origin. "Russian" Tashkent grew rapidly after its establishment in 1866. It had a population of 2,073 in 1870, 4,926 in 1877, 33,276 in 1901, and well over 56,000 in 1911.^[88]

[85] The concept behind this term has attracted little attention. Its legal and popular meanings differed considerably, and even the former did not remain constant over the last century of the old regime; see the succinct overview m Henning Bauer et al., Die Nationalitaten des Russischen Reiches in der Volkszahlung von 1897 , 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1991), 1: 416-419; see also L. Shternberg, "Inorodtsy: obshchii obzor," in A.I. Kastelianskn, ed., Formy natsional'nogo dvizhenua v sovremennykh gosudarstvakb (St Petersburg, 1910), 531-534.

[86] In actual bureaucratic practice, tuzemtsy and inorodtsy could be used as mutually exclusive categories. In 1906, the special regulations governing the election of candidates from Turkestan to the State Duma divided the electorate into "native" (tuzemnoe ) and "non-native" (netuzemnoe ) groups, thus classifying the nonnative morodtsy with the Russtans; see "Polozhenie o vyborakh v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu," Polnoe sobrante zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperli , 3rd ser., vol. 25 (St. Petersburg, 1907), no. 26662, § 1, prilozhenie . The confusion resulting from attempts to implement this distinct, on is recorded in TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 17, d. 616, 1. 134.

[87] As a recent statistical analysis of the 1897 census has shown, Kalmyks and the "small peoples" of Siberia were the only other groups m the empire among whom large parts of the population remained simply inorodtsy ; see Bauer et al., Die Nationalitaten des Russischen Retches , II: 197.

[88] N.A. Maev, "Topograficheskii ocherk Turkestanskogo kraia," Materialy dlia statistiki Turkestanskogo kraia , 1 (1872): 10-11; Azadaev, Tashkent , 134; A.I. Dmitriev-Mamonov, ed., Putevoditel' po Turkestanu i sredne-aziatskoi zheleznot doroge (St. Petersburg, 1903), 352; Istorua Tashkenta (Tashkent, 1988), 145.

It presented a marked contrast to the old city, and already in 1873 a foreign visitor felt that "one can live for years in Russian Tashkent without even suspecting the existence of the Sart part of town."^[89] As early as 1870, members of the local population owned sixty-nine shops in the new city, and they comprised more than one-fifth of its population. By 1901, Muslims (including Tatars) accounted for one-third of the civilian population of the new city,^[90] which had sixteen mosques in 1913 (compared with fifteen churches and two synagogues).^[91]

Nor could officialdom turn unequivocally to the settler population for support, for it was not immune from the suspicion directed at local notables. Russian autocracy jealously guarded its monopoly over matters of state policy from the interference of any public groups, Russian or not. In colonial borderlands such as Turkestan, this monopoly often

[89] Ujfalvy, Expédition sctentifique , II: 14.

[90] Dmitriev-Mamonov, Putevoditel ', 352.

[91] Aztatskam Rossua , I: 320.

came up against the need to find broader support for Russian rule. Dukhovskoi's suggestion for the genetic Russification of the region was only the most blunt (because desperate) expression of the hope, frequently expressed in bureaucratic correspondence, that the answer to the lack of personnel resources in Turkestan was to entrust the supervision of various aspects of local life to members of the Russian population. Yet, seeking such support from society implied a partnership with society that the autocracy found unacceptable even after the revolution of 1905. In Turkestan, administrators hoped that Russian society would recognize its duty to empire and act in the interests of state, and they expressed astonished dismay when it failed to do so. The political agent in Bukhara wrote in 1906 of the deleterious effects of the revolution on "Russian prestige" in Bukhara, and in 1910, Governor-General Mishchenko turned literary critic in order to remind the editor of the Tashkent journal Sredniaia Aziia of his duties to Russian power in the region. Presented with a complimentary copy of the new publication, he found "extremely weak in literary terms" a sketch that presented in a poor light the behavior of army officers. "This story belongs to phenomena," he wrote, "that are altogether undesirable, especially in Central Asia."^[92] Russian society did not always agree with officialdom. It was the only segment of Turkestan's population to be involved in the revolution of 1905; in the ensuing elections to the State Duma, local Russians largely voted for radical parties of the left.^[93] The files of the political police indicate that the state found itself governing settler society almost as sternly as native society.

Along with the Russians came members of other groups that further complicated the dichotomy between Russian and native. Some, such as Ukrainians, Belorussians, and even Poles and Germans, tended to be lumped together with the Russians both in terms of perception and legal privileges. Others, such as Jews, Armenians, and Tatars, occupied separately delineated spaces in the new colonial society. A sizable Jewish community had existed in Bukhara since at least pre-Mongol times and played a significant role in the area's economic life. In 1833, Bukharan Jews were granted the same rights to trade in Russia as Muslim merchants from Bukhara and Khiva, and this pattern of equal legal treatment for all subjects of the amirs of Bukhara was maintained after the conquest.

[92] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 28, d. 1119, l. 112.

[93] On the considerable revolutionary activity among the Russian population of Turkestan, see A.V. Piaskovskli, Revoliutsua 1905-1907 godov v Turkestane (Moscow, 1958).

Kaufman saw Bukharan Jews are a good influence in Turkestan as well as a channel for Russian influence in Bukhara. Under the terms of the 1873 treaty with Bukhara, Bukharan Jews had the right to own property and to settle anywhere in Turkestan, a right denied Russian Jews. As a result, large communities of Bukharan Jews appeared in Tashkent, Samarqand, and the cities of the Ferghana valley, where they were very successful in business. This success, as well as general anti-Jewish sentiment of the reign of Alexander III (r. 1881-1894), led to a gradual curtailment of their favored status, culminating in a 1910 law that made it illegal for Bukharan Jews to reside in all but a few towns of Turkestan unless they could prove that their ancestors had lived in the area before the Russian conquest. The needed documents were duly produced, and many Jews remained in Turkestan.^[94] Some of them had acquired sizable fortunes, especially three families in Ferghana that had concentrated a great part of the raw cotton export to Russia in their hands. According to one estimate, the Vodiaevs alone managed 60 percent of this trade.^[95] In 1914, there was a large enough Jewish community in Kokand to support a newspaper, Rahamin . The wealth of the community, as well as its contacts abroad (extremely sketchy notices in contemporary travelers' accounts refer to the fact that many local Jews had contacts in Western Europe and that many spoke French fluently), allowed it to negotiate increasing legal disabilities.

An Armenian community similarly developed in the major urban centers of Turkestan, performing similar entrepreneurial functions in the economy, its arrival facilitated by the Transcaspian Railway. But for our purposes, the most important community was the Volga Tatars. Under Russian rule since the middle of the sixteenth century, the Tatars enjoyed affinities of language as well as of religion with Central Asia and had played a central role in Russia's trade with Central Asia during this period. Bukharan madrasas were also a common destination for Tatar ulama. A number of Tatars moved to Turkestan after the Russian conquest, partly because their familiarity with both Central Asia and Russia gave them a considerable competitive advantage in the area. True to form, the administration attempted to stem this unauthorized movement of people, although the repeated prohibitions are evidence of a distinct lack

[94] On Bukharan Jews, see Michael Zand, "Bukhara vii: Bukharan Jews." Encyclo-pœdta Iramca , IV: 530-545, with an exhaustive bibliography.

[95] Catherine Poujol, "Approaches to the History of Bukharan Jews' Settlement m the Fergana Valley, 1867-1917," Central Asian Survey 12 (1993): 553-554.

of success.^[96] Some Tatar and Bashkir officers served in the Russian army and therefore appeared in administrative roles; many more served as interpreters and guides; but the vast majority of Tatars living in Central Asia were connected with trade and private business. As inorodtsy , they suffered from a number of legal disabilities—they could not legally own immovable property—and were often the objects of suspicion, but they nevertheless occupied a space quite distinct from the local population. They were not tuzemtsy , and as Table 3 again shows, were much better integrated into Russian social classifications. Their position with regard to local society was, however, always ambivalent; their religious and linguistic affinities with it had made them the natural intermediaries in the Russian trade before the conquest, but they nevertheless remained outsiders. "A number of Noghays [the Turkestani term for Tatar] have arrived in these parts lately," a newspaper reader stated in 1876. "Some want to buy property here and marry locally because life is good here and the climate is better. But local Sarts and Qazaqs don't want to give them their daughters."^[97] The disdain was mutual, however, as the Tatars in Turkestan soon formed a close-knit community, which self-consciously delineated itself from the local population and looked to phenomena in the Tatar lands of European Russia for inspiration. Numerous markers separated them from the local population: Most chose to live in Russian quarters, far more Tatars sent their children to Russian schools, and Tatar women followed different codes of dress and comportment than Turkestani women. The Tatar community in Tashkent organized a benevolent society with its own school in 1902, which further served to demarcate it from the rest of Muslim society.^[98]

Yet for all the intermediary groups and the differences within Russian society, the Russian-native dichotomy came to provide the parameters within which difference and hierarchy were imagined in Turkestan. The settler population's oppositional proclivities did not render it sympathetic to the native population. The otherness of the native population was too widely shared in Russian discourse for that, and the emergence of a colonial economy tended to reinforce the differences. Even though the entire spectrum of Russian political life appeared in Turkestan, all sections of it were united in taking for granted the exclusion (or disre-

[96] TWG , 29 March 1874, 19 December 1874.

[97] TWG , 28 July 1876.

[98] Tashkand shahrining orus chastida istiqamat etub masjid-t jami 'imizga qawm bulub turghuivchi hamma abl-t mahalla noghay khalqiga ruski tatariski ishkolaning paptchitilstvasining predsidatilidan daklad (Tashkent, 1902).

gard) of the natives from mainstream politics. This fact was to be of fundamental importance in 1917. But the dichotomy was also shared by non-Russian groups in Turkestan, who appropriated it for their own uses. The vocabulary of progress and backwardness inherent in the dichotomy was also to figure prominently in the politics of cultural reform in Muslim society itself, which was made necessary by changes in society noted above and the need to make new choices in new circumstances unleashed by the Russian conquest.