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]