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Allies & Adversaries: The Russian Conquest of the Kazakh

by Janet Marie Kilian

B.A. in History, May 1996, Columbia College, Columbia University M.A. in International Relations & Economics, May 2000, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University M.Phil. in History, May 2007, The George Washington University

Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in Partial Satisfaction of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2013

Dissertation Directed by

Muriel Atkin Professor of History

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington

University certifies that Janet Marie Kilian has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 31, 2013. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Allies & Adversaries: The Russian Conquest of the

Janet Marie Kilian

Dissertation Research Committee:

Muriel A. Atkin, Professor of History, Dissertation Director

Dane K.Kennedy, Professor of History, Committee Member

Andrew Zimmerman, Professor of History, Committee Member

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©Copyright 2013 by Janet Marie Kilian All rights reserved

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Acknowledgements

It is a great pleasure to count my blessings and acknowledge the assistance I received from so many people and institutions. I would first like to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to my advisor, Muriel Atkin, for her support and guidance throughout this arduous process, and for her faith that I could actually do it. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee: Dane Kennedy, Andrew

Zimmerman, Allen Frank and James Millward. This work could not have been possible without their insights and advice. While they tried their best to guide me, any mistakes that remain in this dissertation are my own.

I would also like to thank the Central State Archives, the National Library, and the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences in the Republic of . Even as all three of them underwent renovations while I worked there in 2008, the librarians and archivists still found a way to accommodate me. I am forever grateful for their understanding and hospitality. Moreover, I would like to thank the Library of Congress for their wonderful collection of Russian and Central Asian photographs and books which helped inspire me to write this dissertation in the first place.

My research in Kazakstan would have been very different without the friends and colleagues I met along the way. I would very much like to thank Sarah Cameron,

Matthew Payne, Anna Genina, Jin Noda, Virginia Martin, and Robert Kindler for their company and insights into Kazakh history (and less profound subjects) as we all

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navigated our way through the archives and libraries together. They made my research in

Kazakhstan very special.

Lastly, I am thankful for my parents’ unwavering support year after year, and for their faith and encouragement of me in general. I am truly blessed.

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Abstract

Allies & Adversaries: The Russian Conquest of the Kazakh Steppe

Russia’s relationship with the in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolved from that of a pre-modern Muscovite state with several Inner-Asian nomadic neighbors, to that of a more centralized bureaucratic influenced by the

European Enlightenment. The Kazakhs, like many Inner-Asian nomadic populations who organized themselves around controlling and taxing conquered cities and trade routes as a means to bolster their own internal cohesion and regional power, attempted (and often failed) to claim the cities along the and sought alliances with and other states to achieve that goal. With the ultimate loss of the Syr Darya cities to the of in the early nineteenth century, the Kazakhs’ fractured could no longer benefit from economic control over those cities, and Kazakh society transformed into a different kind of nomadism with different motives to ally with

Russia against their common enemies.

Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs transformed from the eighteenth to mid- nineteenth century from one where Russian settlements and traders were frequently raided and enslaved, to one where they instead entertained pretensions of “civilizing” their nomadic neighbors. Just as their alliances changed over time, the “middle ground” that briefly existed between them until the mid-nineteenth century changed as well.

Ultimately, these shifting alliances led to the Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe and the Syr Darya. This Inner-Asian dynamic problematizes direct comparisons between the

Russian Empire and other European empires in the nineteenth century.

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Fig. 1. Kazakh Family, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00101 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 34, no. 101))

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Contents

Abstract ...... vi

List of Illustrations ...... ix

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 -- The "Kazakhs" & the Syr Darya: Formation of the in the Syr Darya Basin ...... 22

Chapter 2 -- Control a City, Control a Horde: The Political, Religious, & Economic Significance of the Syr Darya in Alliances ...... 62

Chapter 3 -- Transitional Empire & Khanates: Russia’s Transformation from an Inner-Asian to European Empire & Changing Concepts of Modernity & Backwardness ...... 141

Chapter 4 -- Keep Your Kazakhs Away from My Kazakhs: Competition & Changing Motives for Alliances between States & Kazakhs ...... 167

Chapter 5 -- A Toe-Hold on the Syr Darya: Russian-Kazakh Alliance against & Kokand ...... 211

Chapter 6 -- Friends & Foes on the Siberian Line: Russian-Kazakh-Kyrgyz Alliance against the Qing Empire & Kokand ...... 241

Chapter 7 -- Connecting the Lines: The "Pincer Maneuver" & the Alliance to Reclaim the Syr Darya ...... 274

Chapter 8 -- Finding, Keeping & Making on the Steppe: Solidifying Identites as the Middle Ground Closes ...... 345

Conclusion ...... 389

Bibliography ...... 398

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Kazakh Family, 1860s-1870s…………………………………..……………...vii

Figure 2. Kazakh aul near Chimkent, 1860s-1870s…………………………………..….30

Figure 3. Kazakh family in a yurt, 1860s-1870s……………………………………..….33

Figure 4. Facade of Mausoleum of Akhmet Yasawi…………………………..….46

Figure 5. Inside the Mausoleum to Khoja Ahmet Yasawi, 1860s-1870s……………….48

Figure 6. Kazakh Cemetery near the Syr Darya………………………………………...80

Figure 7. Caravan Cargo on the Steppe………………………….…………………….175

Figure 8. Palace Courtyard of the of Kokand……………………….……………178

Figure 9. Kazakh Travelling Yurt on the Steppe………………………….……………193

Figure 10. -General Perovskii……………..…………………..…..197

Figure 11. Caravan……………………………..…………………………………….....199

Figure 12. Preparing to Migrate…………………………………….………………..…213

Figure 13. Kazakh Winter Camp…………………………………….……………..…..215

Figure 14. Steam-powered Boat……..……………………………….………………...222

Figure 15. Russian Flotilla on the ……………..…….…………………...…..223

Figure 16. Ruins of Kokandian fort, Aq Masjid, after 1853 Russian campaign……….228

Figure 17. Remains of Kokandian Citadel at Aq Masjid………..…………….……..…230

Figure 18. Kazakh awarded the Cross of St. George for his service in the campaign against the Kokand at Aq Masjid……………………………………………….236

Figure 19. Horse in the Summer………………………………………………………..237

Figure 20. Opium Smoker………………………………………………………………245

Figure 21. Caravan Sleeping on the Steppe……………………………………………246

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Figure 22. Kazakh Migration…………………………………………………………..251

Figure 23. Kazakh Bii with a Russian Medal…………….……………………………254

Figure 24. Kazakh Bii with Chinese Coat……………………………………………..264

Figure 25. Governor-General “Iron Seat” Gerasim Kolpakovskii……..……….…...…293

Figure 26. Kokandian Fortress at Tokmak…………………………………………….303

Figure 27. Kokandian Fortress at Pishpek………………………...……………………305

Figure 28. Khudoyar Khan of Kokand………………………………………………...330

Figure 29. Kokandian Fortress at Aulie-Ata……………………………………………339

Figure 30. Kokandian Fortress at Chimkent……………………………………………342

Figure 31. Kazakh-Cossack Postal Route………………………………………………358

Figure 32. Mausoleum of Khoja Akhmet Yasawi…………………..………………….371

Figure 33. Russian Orthodox Church in Aulie-Ata, 1860s-1870s………..………….…380

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Introduction

Russian history cannot be understood without considering its relationship with its

Inner-Asian nomadic neighbors. One even wonders what Russia could have become without them. The very rise of Muscovy as a state grew out of its relationship with its

“” Mongolian conquerors based in Saray, but over time Muscovy’s leaders exchanged their title of “khan” for Caesar or “tsar” instead. By in the early eighteenth century, Muscovy had forcibly adopted some European customs and changed its name to “Russia,” with its leaders naming themselves “Emperors,” but it still had enduring relationships with powerful nomadic states to its south and east much like other Inner-Asian empires, the Qing Empire and . The ’s relationship with the Kazakhs in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century reflects Russia’s transition from an Inner-Asian empire, Muscovy, to a self-consciously

“European” empire, Russia, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment that were adapted to Russian circumstances. Russia’s transition was accompanied by the Kazakhs’ decline from a weak Inner-Asian nomadic state based on the cities of the Syr Darya basin to a collection of disparate, khan-less, fractious tribes on the Kazakh Steppe all seeking alliances with neighboring states to solidify their authority over other Kazakhs. As both the Russian Empire and the Kazakhs transformed throughout this period, their relationship gradually changed from one of mutual alliances against common enemies, to one of conquest once those alliances were no longer needed.

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Kazakh alliances facilitated Russia’s conquest of the Kazakh Steppe. The

Russian conquest of Central is often characterized as part of Russia’s ineluctable march towards and the famed Silk Road cities of , to expand

Russia’s empire and compete with Great Britain in a larger geopolitical “Great Game” after their humiliating defeat in the .1 Another popular explanation – particularly in the Cold War – was that it was “inevitable” that the Russian Empire expanded into Central Asia after it had expanded as much as possible everywhere else or had been blocked, presuming Russian imperial expansion to be a law of nature.2 These widely accepted narratives deny the agency of the Kazakh khans and who had allied with Russia, and the significant role of the Kazakhs in Russia’s conquest of the

Kazakh Steppe and the Syr Darya. Indeed, fighting among the Kazakhs reinforced by their multiple and changing alliances with neighboring states, drew Russia further and further into the steppe to protect their Kazakh allies.

The lucrative trading and holy cities of the Syr Darya played a crucial role not only in the creation of the Kazakh khanate as a separate nomadic state in the fifteenth century, but as the lodestar that directed and motivated subsequent competing Kazakh khans to make alliances with surrounding states like Russia to regain them. The socio- economic and religious authority associated with these cities reinforced a khan’s power over his people and was essential to the survival of the Kazakhs as a khanate. The

1 Helene Carrere D' Encausse, "Systematic Conquest, 1865-1884," in Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview, 3rd ed, ed. Edward Allworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 131-151; and Peter Hopkirk, : The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994).

2 Geoffrey Wheeler, The Modern History of (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 64.

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continuous attempts by the competing Kazakhs to regain the Syr Darya cities and rule over their Kazakhs in the eighteenth century explained in this dissertation will further shed light on how Russia ultimately chose to establish forts on the Syr Darya in the mid- nineteenth century to govern and protect the Kazakhs as well.

The relationship between the Russian Empire and Kazakh khanate changed significantly between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs evolved from that of a pre-modern Eurasian Muscovite state that interacted with several Inner-Asian nomadic neighbors, to that of a more centralized bureaucratic state influenced by the European Enlightenment, self-consciously attempting to modernize and become European. Meanwhile, over this same period, the changing

Russian Empire interacted with a declining and greatly transformed Kazakh Inner-Asian nomadic khanate that could no longer lay claim to its historically controlled cities along the Syr Darya.

Inner-Asian like the , Ottomans, and multiple rulers of Iran and the Qing Empire, had organized themselves at some point around taxing trade revenues and conquered cities as a means to bolster their own social cohesion and regional power, and succeeded in forming centralized states well into the seventeenth century. Unlike their Inner-Asian nomadic brethren, however, the Kazakhs, attempted --and often failed-- at this practice much later well into the early nineteenth century. With the ultimate loss of the Syr Darya cities to Kokand in the early nineteenth century, however, the social organization of the Kazakhs into separate khanates intent upon reclaiming those cities dissolved, and the Kazakhs became permanently city-less and khan-less nomads. Loss of these cities changed the very reason why the fractious Kazakhs allied with Russia and

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other states around the Kazakh Steppe in the nineteenth century as they continued to compete with each other over pastures and authority, yet their alliances with Russia pulled Russia further into the steppe as well.

In order to explore the alliance between Russians and Kazakhs in the conquest of the Kazakh Steppe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the entire narrative of

Kazakh history formulated by Russian imperial and Soviet historians of the Kazakhs’ relationship with Russia needs to be re-evaluated and re-conceptualized. To truly see the

Kazakhs as independent actors in the Kazakh Steppe with their own agency, motives and interests who were responsible for their own decisions and choices, we need to look clearly at what the Kazakh khans and sultans expressly said that they wanted from Russia in their proposed alliances, discard claims of Marxist stages of economic development, class consciousness, and degrees of progressiveness and capitalist ambitions on the

Kazakh Steppe, discard denials of Kazakh spirituality as , and discard the historical markers that have thus far been laid down as allegedly seminal events that forced the Kazakhs to turn to Russia for protection as stateless shamanists.3 This dissertation will demonstrate the importance of the Syr Darya cities to the Kazakhs in their early alliances with Russia as Inner-Asian nomads, and how the Kazakhs’ motives for their alliances with Russia changed over time in the nineteenth century – but were voluntary alliances nonetheless.

The Kazakhs had their own interests and objectives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that prompted them to ally with Russia, and they allied with

3Alan Bodger, "Abulkhair, Khan of the Kazakh Little Horde, and His Oath of Allegiance to Russia of October 1731," Slavonic East European Review 58, no. 1 (1980); and Michael Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography of the Bare-footed Flight: Dynamics of a National History," (Master's thesis, Indiana University, 2011).

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whomever they pleased to achieve those objectives – and then changed their minds as they saw fit. Just as the Kazakhs allied with Russia, they allied with the Jungars,

Bukhara, , Khiva, and later Kokand and the Qing Empire. These alliances with other states enabled the Kazakhs to fight with each other for control over the holy

Kazakh cities on the Syr Darya, and for more power and control over lucrative trade routes and their own people. As the Russian Empire became a more centralized, bureaucratic and European state, and as the rising Khanate of Kokand took the Kazakhs’ cities on the Syr Darya away from them, both the Russians and the Kazakhs changed, altering the nature of their alliances as well.

Muscovy’s and Russia’s main reasons for allying with the Kazakhs and venturing further into the Kazakh Steppe in the eighteenth and first half of nineteenth centuries was to secure trading routes and curb the Kazakh slave raids on their Siberian settlements and on their other nomadic allies. No matter what was agreed upon in multiple Kazakh oaths of loyalty, however, raids on caravans, settlements, and allies continued. As the authority of the khans of the Junior and Middle Kazakh hordes continued to erode in the eighteenth century, it became clear that these khans could not control the predations of their own people, and, in fact, needed to allow their people to raid in order to keep the little power that they had. Russia would spend most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century vacillating between punishing Kazakhs for disloyalty and attracting Kazakhs for more loyalty in order to curb and change Kazakh behavior on the steppe. This dissertation will examine how Russia’s policies towards the Kazakhs changed as Russia became more influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and changing concepts of the role of the state in a modernizing empire, and ultimately, how Russia determined that it was in their best

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interest to attract, in lieu of khans, as many disparate Kazakh allies as possible to secure the Kazakh Steppe for trade.

Eighteenth and early nineteenth century life on the Kazakh Steppe was a long history of Russians and Kazakhs contesting and repeatedly re-negotiating their relationship, where both sides had leverage and tools of persuasion, as did other neighbors on the steppe. It was a history of competition by neighboring states with

Russia over the Kazakhs’ loyalty, and it was a history of dependence upon each other for survival as well. The Russians and Kazakhs fought each other frequently, but as allies, they eventually defeated Kokand and conquered the steppe in the nineteenth century.

After the fall of Tashkent in 1865, however, Russia’s need for alliances diminished and with it the equal footing between Russians and Kazakhs as partners in a common imperial undertaking began to erode.

This study explores the time when Russians and Kazakhs needed each other – and intends to highlight the significant role the Kazakhs played in Russia’s conquest of

Central Asia. Historians tend to have a sedentary bias regarding the past, likely influenced by their reliance on sources of literate sedentary participants or witnesses.

Needless to say, not many nomadic Kazakhs wrote documents, relegating their history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the perceptions of more literate sources who were more interested in describing their own role in past events, often rendering Kazakhs invisible. What we have, however, is the published official correspondence between the khans’ of the Junior and Middle Hordes with the Russian government in the eighteenth century which clearly express what the Kazakh khans sought out of an alliance with

Russia. Moreover, later in the nineteenth century after the Kazakhs could no longer lay

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claim to their cities on the Syr Darya, the alliances between the Greater Horde Kazakhs and Russia continued in their mutual fight against the Khanate of Kokand, the Kyrgyzes, and the Qing Empire. From a local perspective– found at the Central State Archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan in (TsGARK) -– we have letters between Kazakh sultans and local level officials coordinating and negotiating their lives together, and letters from who were embedded and migrating with the Kazakhs to help protect them against other Kazakh and Kyrgyz enemies on the frontier. Moreover, we have travelogues of individual encounters and conversations with Kazakhs, who all give voice to Kazakhs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and what their interests were in an alliance with Russia.

The transformation of both the Russians and the Kazakhs from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century problematizes our attempts to compare the Russian Empire with other empires’ expansion or compare their interactions with other kinds of nomads occurring at the same time. This dissertation will demonstrate not only how Russia’s relationships in different Kazakh alliances changed from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, but also how the Kazakhs’ motives for alliances with Russia changed over time even when they could not lay claim to the cities on the Syr Darya as they had for centuries. Influenced by Richard White’s work on early British and French encounters with North American Native Americans as equals who negotiated their lives together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in what he called the “Middle Ground,” this dissertation explores the middle ground of Russians and Kazakhs on the Kazakh steppe around the same time and even further into the mid-nineteenth century. Most comparisons between the Russian Empire and other empires with other kinds of nomads

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in the nineteenth century, however, is truly best left for much later in the century when the Kazakhs no longer had pressing claims on the cities of the Syr Darya – beyond the scope of this dissertation.4 I have also benefitted from the great body of frontier scholarship already written on pre-revolutionary Russia such as Thomas Barrett’s work on the Terek Cossacks of the North , Nicholas Breyfogle’s work on Russia in the South Caucasus, Yuri Slezkine’s work on the peoples of Russia’s , Robert

Geraci’s work on the , Willard Sunderland’s work on colonizing Russia’s many , and others, but the uniqueness of the Kazakh attachment to the Syr Darya cities as a key motive for their relationship with Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can only take these comparisons so far.5

Michael Khodarkovsky and Yuri Malikov have greatly influenced my work on the Kazakh Steppe as a “middle ground” in the eighteenth century. While they seem to disagree with each other regarding the existence of a middle ground, to my mind they are really just focused on different aspects of the same relationship. Yuri Malikov focuses

4 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great , 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

5 Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: the Terek Cossacks and the Frontier, 1700-1860 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics & Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small People of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Robert Geraci, Windows on the East: National & Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Deception in the Russian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin, eds., Kritika Historical Studies, vol. 3, Orientalism and Empire in Russia, (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006); and Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion & Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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on the local lower-level hybrid culture that developed between Cossacks and Kazakhs in the northeastern Kazakh Steppe that created a middle ground in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is more focused on arguing against current Kazakh historiography when he reminds us of the hybrid frontier culture that once existed at a lower level between Cossacks and Kazakhs, and is not interested in Khodarkovsky’s focus on high-ranking Russian official imperial intensions on the steppe.6 Malikov’s focus on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, conveniently avoids mentioning that Russians and Kazakhs changed in the nineteenth century, and that

Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs became much more abusive when this “middle ground” closed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Michael Khodarkovsky, meanwhile, focuses entirely on Russia’s imperial ideology of officials influenced by the

Enlightenment regarding the conquest of the Kazakhs in the eighteenth century.

Unfortunately, in his comparison of Russia’s to other expanding empires at the time, he does not take into account how different the Russian encounter with the

Kazakhs as Inner-Asian nomads intent upon reclaiming cities of the Syr Darya was from other imperial experiences with other kinds of nomads. He flatly claims that there was no

“middle ground” for Russian officials, claiming that they were entirely driven by an imperialist ideology, but this only part of the story.7

6 Yuriy Anatolyevich Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture: Myths and Realities of Cossack - Kazakh Relations in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California - Santa Barbara, 2006).

7 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002).

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Like Malikov, this dissertation posits that there was indeed a “middle ground” at the lower Cossack-Kazakh level in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, however, like Khodarkovsky it will also acknowledge the Enlightenment-influenced

Russian official level and also that the Russian Empire changed while the Kazakhs were changing. In contrast to Khodarkovsky, I will demonstrate using local Kazakh archival sources that there was room for a “middle ground” in Russian official interactions with the Kazakhs even in the mid-nineteenth century, and that Russia’s ideology of expansion in the mid-nineteenth century was tempered with a good deal of humility regarding the friends and allies it needed among the Kazakhs to achieve its larger goals. That official participation in a “middle ground,” however, quickly ended once Russia no longer needed allies on the steppe.

The history of the changing nature of Russian-Kazakh alliances in the nineteenth century will contribute the current debate over how to compare the Russian Empire to other empires with nomads.8 Igor Grachev and Pavel Rykin have recently taken umbrage with Willard Sunderland’s scholarship on the Russian relationship with the Nogays of

New Russia (now ), and accuse him of idiosyncratically interpreting Russian history through a “Western mentality” by trying to claim that the Russian Empire was like Western Empires. Instead, they argue that Russia’s imperial experience on the steppe in the wake of the collapse of the was an Asian experience and should be compared to that of the Qing, Iranian, and Ottoman Empires.9 They insist that

8 Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

9 Igor Grachev and Pavel Rykin, "A European's View of Asiatic History: A Response to Willard Sunderland. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe." Forum for Anthropology and Culture, vol. 4, (2008).

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the proper paradigm in which to analyze Russia’s absorption and settlement of the steppe should be seen less a model of imperial conquest and more as a model of “interaction” of different strategies by Russians and nomads to compromise and pursue their own interests with greater or lesser effectiveness.10 Like Malikov, however, they ignore that this negotiated “interaction” – or “middle ground” – closed, and that the Inner-Asian nomads who allied with Russia in the eighteenth century that they focus on, were not the same as the Inner-Asian nomads who allied with Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, or who suffered much later as Russia attempted to intensively colonize the steppe rather than simply transit it. Sunderland is correct to point out the ambiguities of Russia’s imperial experience, and that an official ideology of imperialism implicitly existed when one group of people assumed that it was appropriate to expropriate land from another.

Sunderland, however, has not considered how Russia’s relationships with its neighboring

Inner-Asian nomads changed over time as the Russian Empire westernized, and how the capacity of the Inner-Asian nomads to control cities and trade routes changed over time

(which changed their social organization and motives for interacting with Russia).11 A thorough study of how both the Russians and Kazakhs changed between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, and how their alliances changed over this period, is therefore in order.

The history of the changing nature of Russian-Kazakh alliances in the nineteenth century will contribute the current debate over whether one can assert that Russia possessed an “Orientalist” ruling ideology in Central Asia, as coined by Edward Said for

10 Ibid.

11 Willard Sunderland, "The Ministry of Asiatic Russia: The Colonial Office That Never Was But Might Have Been," Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010, Spring).

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the French and British empires, that is currently being debated between Gregory Knight and Adeeb Khaled.12 While Khaled asserts that the Russian empire most assuredly did possess an Orientalist approach towards governing Central Asia, linking Russian scholarship and knowledge of a region to the purpose of governing the conquered sedentary peoples of in the 1870s, Knight questions whether the nexus of knowledge and power for Russian bureaucrats was intended for such a purpose in the

1830s in Orenburg on the border of the Kazakh Steppe when it came to governing the nomadic Kazakhs. This dissertation will demonstrate how different the Russian Empire’s relationship with the Kazakhs was in the 1830s from the Russian Empire’s rule of sedentary Turkestan over different peoples later, and highlight how, perhaps, Knight and

Khaled are both right, but talking past each other from their different perspectives.

Soviet scholarship of the Kazakhs provides more complicated and protean resources which can neither be dismissed, nor completely trusted. Kazakh history has been whiplashed by the vagaries of Soviet ideological shifts to such an extent that even direct quotations from archival sources by Soviet scholars are sometimes altered to fit a prescribed argument for ideological conformity, thereby undermining their integrity.13

Before Stalin, Soviet scholarship tended to focus on Russia’s imperialist colonization and

12 Adeeb Khalid, "Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism," in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, Kritika Historical Studies 3rd ed, ed. Michael David- fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006); and Nathaniel Knight, "On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid," in Orientalism and Empire in Russia, Kritika Historical Studies 3rd ed, ed. Michael David- fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006).

13 Alan Bodger, "Abulkhair, Khan of the Kazakh Little Horde, and His Oath of Allegiance to Russia of October 1731," Slavonic East European Review 58, no. 1 (1980).

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exploitation of all Central Asian peoples under the “Pokrovskii School.”14 The

“Pokrovskii School” of the 1920s condemned all colonization by all empires, including the Russian Empire, and praised native resistance to imperial rule. In the early Stalin years this interpretation, however, shifted to the “lesser evil” theory that Kazakhs were forced to join Russia or be subsumed by the Jungars and ultimately made a wise decision

– borrowing from a similar narrative regarding how Georgia joined the Russian Empire.

By the later Stalin years the “lesser evil” theory quickly backtracked to proclaim that there always was a “progressive friendship” of the oppressed Russian workers and peasants who united with the exploited Central Asian peoples against a common capitalist Russian imperial enemy throughout their relationship – an eternal Marxist

“middle ground.”15 The existence of class struggle among the nomadic Kazakhs, and whether mid-nineteenth century Kazakh leader Kenesary Kasymov was a national hero with progressive qualities or a regressive brigand was also a subject of fierce debate in

Soviet Kazakh history, ones over which Kazakh historian E.B. Bekmakhanov was purged and rehabilitated. The works of Bekmakhanov, N.G. Apollova, S.D. Asfendiarov, M.P.

Viatkin and other Stalinist-era Soviet scholars are riddled with politics and controversy, and therefore must be used gingerly.16 Nevertheless, their work is thorough, bordering on

14 P.P. Galuzo, Turkestan - Koloniia (ocherk istorii Turkestana ot zavoevaniia russkimi do revoliutsii 1917 goda) (: 1929).

15 Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: University Of North Carolina Press, 1969), 48.

16 E.B. Bekmakhanov, Kazakhstan v 20-40e gody XIX veka (Alma-ata: 1947). N.G. Apollova, Prisoedinenia Kazakhstana k Rossii v 30kh godakh XVIII veka (Alma- Ata: 1948); N.G. Apollova, Prisoedinenie Kazakhstana k Rossii v nachale XVIII veka (Alma-ata: 1948); S. Asfendiarov, Istoriia Kazakhstana (s drevneishikh vremen) (Almaty: Sanat, 1998[1937]); M.P. Viatkin, Ocherki po istorii Kazakhskoi SSR (Moscow: 1941).

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encyclopedic. While they cannot be ignored, they must be double-checked. Current

Kazakh history is still shackled by Soviet economic materialist constructs, periodization, and a sense of national victimization that leads it to overlook the Kazakhs’ own agency in their past. This dissertation will contribute to the Kazakhs’ already highly contested narrative of their history, in taking responsibility for their past as both victims and perpetrators.

Much of current English-language scholarship on the Kazakhs already takes the

Russian Empire’s absorption of the Kazakhs as a given, and focuses on other aspects of their relationship. Scott Bailey has written about the Russian Geographic Society’s explorations of Central , and Ian Campbell has similarly written about the production of knowledge about Kazakhs in the nineteenth century, but focuses on how that knowledge was shaped and negotiated by elite Kazakh intermediaries.17 Martha Brill

Olcott and Steve Sabol both have a chapter on the Russian conquest of the Kazakh

Steppe as part of their larger works on Kazakhs, but leave many assertions and assumptions perpetuated by Soviet scholars unquestioned. Their studies focused on a later period.18

A larger portion of English-language scholarship on Kazakhs focuses on the great influx of Russian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century, often assuming that this kind of colonization had been Russia’s intention all along back in the eighteenth and

17 Scott C. Matsushita Bailey, "Travel, Science, and Empire: The Russian Geographical Society's Expeditions to Central Eurasia, 1845-1905," (PhD diss., University of Hawai'i, 2008); and Ian Campbell, "Knowledge and Power on the Kazakh Steppe," (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2011).

18 Steven Sabol, Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness (2002: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995).

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early nineteenth centuries. This latter period of Kazakh history in the late nineteenth century, in which the Kazakhs no longer claimed Syr Darya cities, would suit a comparison of the Russian Empire’s relationship with Kazakhs to other empires’ relationships with other nomads. George Demko was one of the first American scholars to write about the Russian colonization of the Kazakh Steppe and focused on 1896 to

1916.19 Pete Rottier and Ayse Balgamis, like Steve Sabol, explore the formation of

Kazakh intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia, but focus on the early twentieth century, and Edward Sokol and Joern Happel have written about the 1916 revolt that reacted to all the late nineteenth century settlement polices that led up to it.20 The

Kazakhs and Russians of this time were not the same as those who lived and negotiated with each other on the steppe in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the focus of this dissertation.

Virginia Martin’s work on the law and custom on the Kazakh Steppe among the

Middle Horde, combined with Allen Frank’s rigorous scholarship on Kazakh life from the late eighteenth century was an enormous help in providing detail in how the Kazakhs and Russians negotiated their lives together at the time, in ways that transcended common

19 George J. Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1969).

20 Edward Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954); Joern Happel, Nomadische Lebenswelten und zarische Politik: Der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des Östlichen Europa 76 (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010); Pete Rottier, "Creating The Kazak Nation: The Intelligentsia's Quest for Acceptance In The Russian Empire, 1905-1920," (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2005); and Ayse Balgamis, "The Origin and Development Of Kazakh Intellectual Elites In The Pre-revolutionary Period," (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000).

15

tropes and stereotypes.21 Jin Noda’s extensive work on nineteenth century Russian-Qing border relations, using both Russian and Qing archival sources, has provided wonderful contributions to what we now know about Kazakh vacillations between the Russian and

Qing empires in the early nineteenth century.22 Tomohiko Uyama and Sebastien

Peyrouse’s work on Russian Orthodox missionaries among the Kazakhs also debunks assumptions that the Russian empire did not attempt missionary work in Central Asia, detailing how they flirted with the idea among nomads whom they perceived to be more malleable.23

I also rely on early to mid-nineteenth century Russian scholarship of the region such as A.I. Levshin, M.I. Krasovskii, before the latter nineteenth century imperial triumphalism set in.24 Travelogues of Russian explorers in the late eighteenth century

21 Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001); Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and Allen J. Frank and Mirkasyim A. Usmanov, eds., An Islamic Biographical of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770-1912/ Qurbaan ali Khaalidai (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

22 Jin Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans Bestowed by the Qing Empire: The Case of Ghubaydulla in 1824," Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 68, (2010).

23 Tomohiko Uyama, ed., "A Particularist Empire: The Russian Policies Of Christianization And Military In Central Asia," in Empire, , and Politics in Central Eurasia (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University, 2007), 23-63; and Sebastien Peyrouse, "Les Missions Orthodoxes entre Pouvoir Tsariste et Allogenes: Un Example des Ambiguites de la Politique Coloniale Russe dans le Steppe Kazakhes," Cahiers du Monde Russe 45, no. 1-2 (Janvier-Juin, 2004).

24 A.I. Levshin, Opisanie Opisanie kirgiz-kazachikh kirgiz-kaisatskikh ord i stepei, (St. Petersburg: 1832); M.I. Krasovskii, Materialy dlia geografii i statistiki rossii, vol. 1-3, Sobranie ofitserami generalnago shtaba, sibirskikh kirgizov, (St. Petersburg: 1868); M.A. Terentiev, Istoriia Zavoevaniia Srednei Aziiei, s kartami i planami, vol. 1-3, (St. Petersburg: 1906); and M.A. Terentiev, Russia and in Central Asia, vol. 1-2, (St. Petersburg: 1876).

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and nineteenth century, such as I.G. Andreev and P.P. Semenev, British artists and missionaries like Thomas Atkinson and Henry Lansdell, and American diplomat Eugene

Schuyler, add great insight through their observations and interviews with a wide variety of people at the time who would not usually be recorded in government correspondence.25 They talked to merchants, traders, peasants, Tatars, Kazakhs, priests and miners in the region, giving an unofficial, yet equally informative, view of what was going on. And of course, Ch. Valikhanov’s reports of his travels in the region as a

Russified Kazakh officer in the Russian military from an elite Kazakh family, lends unique insight as well.26

My research relies upon primary documents of official government correspondence from the Central State Archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan

(TsGARK) for the first half of the nineteenth century, or from published compendia of archival documents for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.27 Given the nature of this

25 I.G. Andreev, Opisanie Srednei Ordy Kirgiz-Kaisakov (Almaty: Gylym, 1998 [1758]); P.P. Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Liudmila Gilmour, Colin Thomas, and Marcus Wheeler (London: Haklyut Society, 1998); Thomas W. Atkinson, Travels in the of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and . With Adventures Among the Mountain Kirghis; and the Manjours, Toungouz, Touzemtz, Goldi, and Gelyaks: The Hunting and Pastoral Tribes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1860); Henry Lansdell, Russian Central Asia, Including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva and , 2 vols (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle, And Rivington, 1885); and , : Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, , and Kuldja, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876).

26 Ch. Valikhanov and M. Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865).

27 A.I. Dobrosmyslov, ed., Materialy po istorii Rossii. Sbornik ukazov i drugikh dokumentov, kasaiushchikhsia upravleniia i ustroistva Orenburgskago Kraia, 2 vols (Orenburg: 1900); S.K. Ibragimov, Materialy po Istorii Kazakhskikh Khanstv (Alma-ata:

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topic – a closer look at the Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe, the “middle ground” of Russians and Kazakhs, and their changing alliances – one would be hard pressed to find archival evidence of local correspondence between Kazakh sultans and Kyrgyz manaps with Russian government officials in St. Petersburg, or gain any kind of insight into their relationships from afar. Rather than work with platitudes about what Russian government officials in St. Petersburg would have liked to have had happen in the mid- nineteenth century on the distant Kazakh Steppe, a local perspective from local archives in Almaty likely gives more insight into how Russians and Kazakhs found a way to live with each other. Besides, at the time of my research, the Russian Imperial State Archives in St. Petersburg were closed for renovations. Moreover, for political reasons, the

Central State Archives of the Republic of in Tashkent, the administrative center of the Governorship-General of Turkestan after 1868, were closed to foreigners.

Even if the Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan had been open to foreigners, the state archives of the Khanate of Kokand were mostly destroyed in the midst of internal strife after its last khan, Khudoyar, fled to Russian territory for protection in 1876.28

1969); Jin Noda and Onuma Takahiro, A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the Qing Dyansty, special Issue 1st ed (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Tias Research Center For Islamic Area Studies, 2010); V.A. Moiseev, ed., Russko- Dzhugarskie otnosheniia (knoetz XVII-60e gg XVII vv) Dokumenty i izvlecheniia (Barnaul: Azbuka, 2006); M.K. Kozybaev, ed., Nationalno-osvoboditelnaia Borba kazakhskogo naroda pod predvoditelstvom kenesary kasymova (sbornik dokumentov) (Almaty: Gylym, 1996); and F.N. Kireev, ed., Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia v XVI- XVIII vekakh (Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov) (Alma-ata: 1961); I.Ia. Zlatkin, ed., Russko-Mongolskie Otnosheniia 1636-1656, Sbornik Dokumentov (Moscow: Grvl, 1974).

28 Victor Dobovitskii and Khaydarbek Bababekov, "The Rise and Fall of the Kokand Khanate," in Ferghana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia, ed. S. Frederick Starr et al (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011).

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This dissertation is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter will give a brief overview of the of the Kazakh Steppe and Turkestan, attempt to explain where the Kazakhs came from in the fifteenth century, and the importance of the Syr Darya basin.

The second chapter will explain how the Kazakhs’ attachment to the cities on the

Syr Darya and their trading routes compelled the fractious Kazakhs to ally with neighboring powers. These alliances enabled the Kazakhs to fight among themselves and with other states for control over those cities in the eighteenth century.

The third chapter will cover the transition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the Russian Empire’s attitude towards Kazakhs as officials were increasingly influenced by the Enlightenment and ideas of modernity. It will also explore how the Kazakhs changed as Inner-Asian nomads once they lost control of the Syr Darya cities and could not effectively form khanates that profited from tariffs and revenue streams from those cities and trade routes. The accessibility of vacant land after the

Jungar defeat by the Qing Empire in the mid-eighteenth century gave the Kazakhs more room to migrate and fracture as well.

Chapter four will cover the competition between Russia, the Qing Empire, Khiva and Kokand over Kazakh alliances. It will show how the Kazakhs used their fluctuating alliances to pursue their own interests on the steppe as they adjusted to organizing themselves and their migrations to their loss of the cities on the Syr Darya.

Chapter five will explain how Russia’s Orenburg Line on the western Kazakh

Steppe was extended to establish a toe-hold on the Syr Darya through the middle of the

Kazakh Steppe and create the Syr Darya Line as a way to protect the winter pastures of

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the Junior and Middle Horde Kazakhs, as well as the role of the Kazakhs in that process.

It will also highlight how the establishment of a fort on the Syr Darya was not intended to be part of a “pincer maneuver” to take the entire Kazakh Steppe, and was initially focused on Khiva.

Chapter six will cover how Russia built the Siberian Line on the eastern Kazakh

Steppe and its impact on Russia’s alliance with Kazakhs. It will explain the logic behind where and how forts were established; the timing of these decisions, and demonstrate how they were the product of alliances with the Kazakhs. The Siberian Line was also not part of a deliberate “pincer maneuver” to conquer the entire Kazakh Steppe, and was as focused on the Qing Empire as it was on Kokand to the south.

Chapter seven will explore the significant debate over whether and how to unite the Orenburg and Siberian Lines, how Russia and the Kazakh Greater Horde jointly attacked Kokandian forts and celebrated their joint victories, and how the Kyrgyzes allied with them as well. It will demonstrate how local Kazakh sultans and Kyrgyz manaps used their alliances with Russia to reassert their power over others, and how Russian officials actively cultivated their relationships with Kazakh and Kyrgyz leaders to attract them as allies. Once a decision had finally been made to unite the Orenburg and

Siberian Lines, the Kazakhs formed a militia and joined Russian forces to attack their former cities on the Syr Darya.

Finally chapter eight will explore the “middle ground” that existed in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and how Russian officials attempted to maintain the

“Russianness” of the soldiers and Cossacks as that “middle ground” began to close.

Missionaries and Russian officials believed the Kazakhs’ spirituality was more malleable

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than that of sedentary peoples of Central Asia. Policies towards religion and the Kazakhs vacillated as Russia changed as an empire in the nineteenth century. As the “middle ground” closed, and Russian control of the Kazakh Steppe strengthened, the Kazakhs were no longer allies, but subjects to be changed, governed, and “civilized.”

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Chapter 1 -- The "Kazakhs" & the Syr Darya: Formation of the Kazakh Khanate in the Syr Darya Basin

The Kazakhs’ connection to the Silk Road cities of the Syr Darya basin plays a key role both in the formation of the Kazakhs as a separate people in Central Asia, and as a motive for their alliances with Russia and other states surrounding the steppe. While the

Kazakh’s concept of loyalty and obligation in these shifting alliances often differed with their neighbors, the key goal for these alliances for the Kazakhs remained the same: control of the

Syr Darya. The early formation of the Kazakhs as a people, therefore, is a history of the

Kazakhs’ relationship with the Syr Darya, and their weakness as a khanate to maintain control over this region and their fractious members.

“Kazakhs” and “Kyrgyzes”

The early history of what became the Kazakh people was orally transmitted, fragmentary, and often contradictory. Much of what we know about Kazakh history comes from Qing imperial chronicles, Chagatai (the literary Turkish of Central Asia) or Persian sources, or wandering travelers passing through. Much of Kazakh history from the eighteenth century onwards comes from Russian officials, more travelers, or Qing imperial chronicles. Most of the Kazakh’s neighbors only wrote about the Kazakhs in passing – from a sedentary perspective – and the Kazakhs did not write their own history until much later, often using the same external sources. As Rudi Lindner pointed out, our understanding of

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nomads tends to be from the perspective of their “literate fleeing enemies” and hence somewhat biased.1 Any attempt to write the history of several hundred years of a nomadic, largely illiterate population with protean alliances and shifting locations will be tentative and vague at best.

There are many different names for the same places and peoples of this region. The

Kazakhs became “Kazakhs” for reasons that will be explained later in this chapter. For now, even their name complicates an attempt to write a narrative of their past. The name “Kazakh” itself and how it was derived as a name the Kazakhs eventually called themselves is debated. One etymological theory is that “Kazakh” (Qazaq) reflects the break of one group of descendants of Chingis Khan away from the line of another descendant of

Chingis Khan, and claims that “Kazakh” comes from the Turkic verb qaz, which means “to wander.”2 The Kazakh nomads “wandered off” and formed their own khanate instead. A thirteenth-century dictionary defined qazaq as “vagrant, homeless, refugee, or exile” likely reflecting a sedentary bias.3 The Russian word “Kazak” or Cossack is derived from the same Turkic root, qazaq, to describe peoples who broke away from society to live on the steppe frontier.4 It was because Russia already had Cossacks when they encountered

Kazakhs that they gave the Kazakhs a different name to avoid their own confusion but add

1 Rudi Paul Lindner, "What Was A Nomadic Tribe?" Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, no. 4 (1982, October), 690.

2 A.I. Levshin, Opisanie Opisanie kirgiz-kazachikh ili kirgiz-kaisatskikh ord i stepei, (St. Petersburg: 1832), 2.

3 Jiger Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder: Studies on the Steppe Political Cycle (13th to 18th Centuries)," (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996), 18.

4 Shane O'Rourke, The Cossacks (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 32-33.

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more for posterity – “Kirghiz-Kazaks”, “Kirghiz-Kaisaks” or simply “Kirghizes.”5 It is for this reason that the steppe upon which the Kazakhs lived in the nineteenth century was called the “Kirghiz Steppe” and that steppe today is called the “Kazakh Steppe.”

The Kirghiz of the nineteenth century, however, should not be confused with the

Kyrgyz of today. The Kyrgyz of today were called “Diko-Kamenny Kirghiz” (wild-rock

Kirghiz) or “Kara-Kirghiz” (Black Kirghiz) in Russian sources, Burut in nineteenth century

Qing sources, and they have a different history than the Kazakhs.6 To add more complications, current transliteration from Kazakh into English of “Kazakh” is “Qazaq,” and

“Kyrgyz” is transliterated from Kyrgyz into “Qyrghiz.” For the sake of clarity, this dissertation will have Cossacks, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyzes populate its pages in the nineteenth century.

Names and Places

When describing the history of moving people on the Kazakh Steppe, it is tempting to cling to geographical names to orient oneself, but this too can be confusing particularly in a history that describes the production of identities. These physical geographical names changed over time, and were called different names by different peoples passing through.

The Syr Darya has been long been identified as a dividing line between sedentary peoples and nomads and was once called Jaxartes by the ancient Greeks. The Syr Darya flows from what is now the southern part of the Kyrgyz Republic () through northern

5 Levshin, Opisanie, 2.

6 Henry H. Howorth, "The Westerly Drifting Nomades, from the Fifth to Nineteenth Century. Part IV. The Kirghises, or Bourouts, the Kazaks, Kalmucks, Euzbegs, and Nogays," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 1, (1872), 228.

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Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the Ferghana Valley to the Aral Sea. Further to the south and west of the Syr Darya is the , once called the Oxus by the ancient Greeks. The agricultural sedentary region between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, was “Transoxania”

(beyond the Oxus River) until the eighth century, but was often called “Transoxania” by western historians through the nineteenth century. When the Arabs invaded from the southwest, they called the region, “Mawarannahr” which also means “beyond the river.”

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the main sedentary states of Mawarannahr were the (Xiva) on the Amu Darya, the (Bokhara or

Buxoro) further up the Amu on the Zerafshan River tributary, and the rapidly growing

Khanate of Kokand (Quqon) on the Syr Darya in the Ferghana Valley. The cities of

Tashkent (Toshkent), and Samarkand (Samarqand) were ruled by either Bukhara or Kokand and were sometimes independent as well. Other cities in the Syr Darya region, many of which were damaged and depopulated from years of fighting, such as Aulie-Ata (current

Taraz), Yasi (Turkistan), and Signaq (near nineteenth century Aq Masjid and current

Kyzyl ), were once ruled by the Kazakhs but were conquered by the Jungars in the eighteenth century and then Khanate of Kokand in the nineteenth century, as will be explained later in this chapter.

After the Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, Mawarannahr was known as

“Turkestan.” “Chinese Turkestan” was in what is now the western Chinese autonomous region of “” (New Territory), after the Qing conquered it in the eighteenth century.

“Chinese Turkestan” in the nineteenth century was also known as “Kashgaria” with one of its cities, , known as “Little Bukhara” to Russian and European observers. The region was known as “Altishahr” (Six Cities) to the Turkic-speaking inhabitants who lived in the

25

region to describe the oasis cities of Yarkand, Kashgar, Khotan, Aksu, Ush Turfan, and

Yangi Hissar. In this dissertation, Transoxania, Mawarannahr, and will be interchangeable, and Altishahr and Chinese Turkestan will be interchangeable as well. For the sake of clarity, “Turkestan” will imply what will eventually become “Russian Turkestan” and not Mawarannahr and Altishahr combined. Trade between Mawarannahr and Altishahr and onwards east and west in an overlapping network of routes formed the heart of the famed

“Silk Road,” and was a lucrative target to conquer by sedentary and nomadic peoples alike.

The semi-arid north of the Syr Darya and south of the forested taiga of

Siberia, between the River and to the west, the and Tien

Shan to the east, where many nomads roamed over the millennia, was called Dasht-i

(Dasht-i Qypchak) or the “Kipchak Steppe” between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries after the nomadic Turkic who had previously inhabited it.7 This steppe eventually became known to the Muscovites and later Russians as the “Kirghiz Steppe” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries when they encountered the Kirghiz-Kaisaks who lived there, but was also still called the Dasht-i Kipchak at the time, and is now called the “Kazakh

Steppe.” In the interests of simplicity, the Kazakhs will live on the Kazakh Steppe in this dissertation, even if they were “Kirghiz-Kaisaks” on the “Kirghiz Steppe” to nineteenth century Russians.

Besides the centrality of the Syr Darya to the Kazakhs, there were other rivers around the steppe that sometimes defined their territories, such as the (Yaik) River in the west, and the River in the northeast. The Ili River in southeastern Semirechye region, which flows to Balkhash, was a key river for the Kazakh Greater Horde. The main town on

7 Ibid., 234.

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the Ili River, Kulja, was in what is now China (also called Ili, and now ), and caravans often followed this river as part of a northern trade route. The Russian name “Semirechye”

(or in Kazakh) means “seven rivers” after the seven main rivers that flow into Lake

Balkhash. Further down the Ili River valley towards the west, between the Bolshaya

Almatinka and the Malaya Almatinka Rivers, the Russians built the fortress of Vernoe

(Alma-Ata or Almaty) in the mid-nineteenth century on the territory of the Kazakh Greater

Horde.

The border between Russia, the Kazakhs and the Qing Empire, as will be discussed later, was still undefined at this time. The Kazakhs did not have much regard for borders anyway. The frontier ran roughly from the Altai Mountains to the to the Tien Shan. On what is now the Chinese side of the Tien Shan, the open in the northern part of what is now Xinjiang was called Jungaria by Western scholars after the vanquished Mongolian-ruled nomads who once lived there. The region was sometimes called

Zhun bu (meaning the Jungar tribes, or Jungar region) in the eighteenth century, but more commonly Bei Jiang (Northern Xinjiang) after the Qing conquest in the mid-eighteenth century. Just as people often moved back and forth from the oasis cities of Mawarannahr to

Altishahr, nomads often moved back and forth from the Kazakh Steppe to Jungaria.

The nineteenth century Kokandian fortresses of Tokmak and Pishpek (currently

Bishkek), both now located in Kyrgyzstan, were located in the (Chui) River valley which flowed northwest into Semirechye. The Chu and the Rivers were contested borders between the Kazakh Greater Horde and the Kyrgyz, and their respective Russian and

Kokandian allies.

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Nomadism, Poddanstvo and Albatu

The Syr Darya basin is where Inner-Asian nomads abutted sedentary populations of oases for several millennia. Over time, many nomads settled around the oases, supplanting or merging with existing populations, taxing and dominating them as ruling elite. Nomads and sedentary populations were allies at times, antagonistic at others. Owen Lattimore argues that nomadism and agruculturalists were symbiotic systems where nomads not only needed agricultural settlements, they probably developed out of agricultural settlements as a means to produce more domesticated animals for agricultural settlements in the first place. 8 They needed each other for trade and goods, yet also disdained each other for their divergent ways of living. Nomads who roamed vast distances from their summer to winter pastures, completely dependent upon the vagaries of the weather, needed to trade for the manufactured wares of sedentary populations they could not make themselves. Agricultural settlements and cities, as they grew, needed livestock, and horses for their to defend themselves.

Moreover, they needed nomads to serve as their cavalry defense against other nomads. Who controlled whom in this relationship also shifted back and forth, from cities taxing nomads in order to live on their territories and trade, to nomads taxing cities for agricultural products and manufactured goods and charging trade caravans for protection.9

8 Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1928-1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 24-25

9 Wolfgang Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia, the Great Steppe and Iran, 1700-1750," in Shifts and Drifts in -Sedentary Relations, ed. Stefan Leder and Berhard Streck (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2005); David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1986); and Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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While the Kazakh control over the cities of Turkistan, Tashkent, and many other urban settlements on the Syr Darya has long been known, the political and economic importance of cities for Kazakh socio-political organization has often been misunderstood or overlooked. As Nicola Di Cosmo has pointed out in his work on the rise of nomadic powers in , the formation of leadership within nomadic groups by controlling sources of wealth – such as trade and production – was a necessary condition to centralizing power and military expansion.10 In his work on state formation and periodization in Inner-Asian history, Di Cosmo enumerates four approaches by which Inner-Asian nomads obtained revenue from external sources in order to build states: tribue extractions from other nomads, city-states and large sedentary states; forging trade-tribute partnerships with trade merchants who needed to transit their territories and by trading with them; regular taxation of sedentary subjects and nomads though a dual administration of both nomadic and sedentary peoples; and establishing a more centralized direct taxation system of an agricultural base.11 These stages did not replace one another in an evolutionary way; rather, they were a menu of options from which inner Asian nomads selected and improved upon over time, expanding and discarding various approaches as their circumstances demanded. As Di Cosmo rightly points out, and as the history of the Kazakhs amply illustrate, the Inner-Asian state was always at risk of dissolving and returning to a condition of nonstate, or of returning to a state that was not able to resume the level of economic capacity previously attained.12

10 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies, 42

11 Nicola Di Cosmo, "State Formation & Periodization in Inner Asian History," Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999), 24-27.

12 Ibid., 27

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Fig. 2. Kazakh aul near Chimkent, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00102 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 35, no. 102))

A key source of wealth, and hence power, for the Kazakhs as Inner-Asian nomads was the Syr Darya cities. Kazakh control over cities and extraction of tribute provided a means for economic redistribution that kept khans in power over their people. Control over trade routes between cities also gave khans more power. When trade routes and cities declined, the power of the nomads who taxed them declined as well. It was therefore in every Kazakh khan’s interest to secure a city, not necessarily to continually live there, but to exploit it for his own ends. The Kazakhs’ relationship with Russia in the eighteenth century,

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as well as their relationships with the Qing Empire, Iran, and Bukhara – and even the Jungars

– revolved around negotiations for access to the cities along the Syr Darya to establish an

Inner-Asian state. Whereas Iran, Bukhara, and the Jungars played by these rules where the

Kazakhs paid them tribute in exchange for the right to tax cities and trade routes, much to the

Kazakhs’ chagrin, the Russian and Qing empires from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, did not. The eighteenth and nineteenth century for the Kazakhs was a history of multiple failed attempts by many Kazakh actors to forge a stronger Inner-Asian state through multiple alliances to acquire the Syr Darya cities and form a state.

Scholars of Inner-Asian pastoral nomadism, such as Anatoly Khazanov, still tend to look at Kazakh control of cities as abortive attempts to become sedentary and “civilized” or as short-term adventures for loot, but this misses the point entirely.13 Khazanov’s emphasis on the impact of sedentary populations on Inner-Asian nomads only in terms of becoming sedentary ignores the economic role of cities for nomadic social organization outside of the benefits of sedentary culture and “civilization.”14 While David Sneath and others argue that nomadic or polities were already “headless states,” Khazanov argues that

Inner-Asian nomads only became states just before or after they raided a city (with the help of the sedentary population).15 This approach, however, while partially true, completely

13 Anatoly M. Khazanov, "Nomads and Cities in the Region and Adjacent Countries: A Historical Overview," in Shifts and Drifts in Nomad-Sedentary Relations, ed. Stefan Leder and Bernhard Streck (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2005).

14 Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd (Madison: University Of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

15 David Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, & Misrepresentations of Nomadic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Anatoly M. Khazanov, "Characteristic Features of Nomadic Communities in the

31

misses the economic role of cities for the redistribution of wealth which reinforced the social organizational power among the raiding nomadic population in that process, and ignores the possibility that nomads liked being nomadic and acquired cities to maintain their social order as an Inner-Asian state. Both Sneath and Khazanov overlook the key economic role of capturing and taxing cities in establishing and maintaining nomadic power as an acephalous state.

Nomadic groups such as the Kazakhs were highly amorphous and flexible. While their oral histories often may have claimed a common mythical progenitor, a tribe rapidly expanded when it served the interests of those who joined that tribe, and rapidly diminished when it did not. and clans, like other Inner-Asian nomads who rapidly expanded and contracted, were not kinship-based societies.16 The terms “tribe” will be used throughout this dissertation out of convention, but it in no way implies a kinship-based social organization of the Kazakhs as pastoral nomads. Russian interlocutors who engaged with them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not think of them as kinship organizations when they called them “tribes” either.17 The horde ( or jüz) was a tribal that was comprised of tribes (taypa), which were theoretically comprised of clans (ru), although the terms for tribes and clans were often fluidly used interchageably. All levels of this social organization dynamically expanded and contracted according to changing circumstances in the past.18 The Kazakh hordes and tribes were often led by descendants of aristocratic

Eurasian Steppe,” in The Nomadic Alternative. Ed. Wolfgang Weissleder (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978), 124.

16 Morgan, The Mongols, 37; and Sneath, The Headless State, 3.

17 Sneath, The Headless State, 3.

32

lineages, usually claiming descent from Chingis Khan, who ensured that their people could graze their livestock, raid others, and protect themselves. External pressure played a major role in the formation of nomadic hordes and tribes as defensive units. When a leader no longer provided defense or redistributed booty, the cost of leaving was relatively low and

Fig. 3. Kazakh family in a yurt, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00104 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 36, no. 104))

18 Edward Schatz, Modern Clan Politics: The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond (Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 2004). 28-31

33

members of that tribe voted with their feet and hooves.19 Lindner argues that tribes did not form in a vacuum for their own sake. Instead, the very existence of a tribe presupposes that an external threat existed elsewhere to prompt its formation.20 The formation of the Kazakhs was in contradistinction to the group from which they had broken, the . Rather than thinking of nomads and sedentary peoples as existing on some sort of evolutionary ladder with nomads as less evolved, primitive anachronisms on a bottom rung, nomads and sedentary peoples on the Kazakh Steppe lived symbiotically, albeit contested, for several millennia. As will be explored later in depth, like the nomads who came before them, the

Kazakhs needed cities, and when they could not trade with those cities, exact tribute from them, or enter their territories for pasture, they would raid them.21 When deprived of the cities of the Syr Darya in the eighteenth century after the Jungar invasion, the Kazakhs specifically asked the Russians to establish new points of trade in instead, thereby creating new opportunities to trade livestock, and to tax and escort the trade routes along the way. Thus, even though nomads and later Kazakhs did not live in cities, they played a crucial role in these urban trading economies by either facilitating or hindering trade, and motivated Kazakh alliances. Taking this point even further, while we can say that the

Kazakhs as Inner-Asian nomads were organized as Sneath’s decentralized aristocratically- governed “headless states” rather than kinship-based tribal confederations, and we can

19 Lindner, "What Was A Nomadic Tribe?" 700; Thomas T. Allsen, "Sharing Out the Empire: Apportioned Lands under the Mongols," in Nomads in the Sedentary World, ed. Anatoly M. Khazanov and Andre Wink (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon Pres, 2001), 183; and Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1988), 10, 19-20.

20 Lindner, "What Was A Nomadic Tribe?" 710.

21 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia," 179.

34

acknowledge the distributed and rhizomatic nature of power of these acephalous states as well, it should still be emphasized that the Kazakhs’ desire to claim the cities of the Syr

Darya as key economic sources of power was because these “headless states” sought to sprout heads as khans and dominate the other nomads and cities around them as conventional centralized states. Kazakhs did not want to stay “headless” if they could help it and most of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries was a series of struggles over who could be khan. The number of khans and sultans who reached out to Russia for alliances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to acquire these Syr Darya cities and vanquish their enemies might best be characterized as a “Kazakh hydra” rather than “headless” at all.

The Kazakhs’ pastoral nomadism was not a matter of backwardness, but rather a reasonable approach to living on an Inner-Asian steppe. They actively traded and participated in the regional economy, and were affected by global shifts in trade and economic shocks to their neighbors just as cities and agriculturalists were. Kazakh migration patterns and their way of life also changed over time to adjust to external threats and new opportunities. Their relationships with their sedentary neighbors was influenced by their ability to move elsewhere at any given time The kinds of livestock they raised often depended upon the market upon which they sold them. Moreover, the Kazakhs were hardly uniform. The exigencies of Kazakh economic life varied from the Kazakhs who lived in the west, to the east, as did their markets, and their relations with their neighbors.

As the Kazakhs negotiated their relationships with their neighbors, when they did not dominate them, they would swear fealty or loyalty to agree upon terms to trade. Throughout

Kazakh history there are many references to one group or another of Kazakhs swearing loyalty to a Russian monarch to enter into Russian poddanstvo or “subject-hood,” or another

35

group of Kazakhs swearing loyalty to the Qing emperors to become albatu (servants) to the ejen (master) Emperor of the Middle Kingdom using Mongolian terminology, and they often swore fealty to both.22 There is considerable debate among both Russian and Chinese historians over what poddanstvo or albatu actually entailed regarding the Kazakhs who were so far removed from the capitals of either empire. Mongolian groups, such as the and

Jungars, and later Kazakhs too, would enter into poddanstvo or albatu with the Russian and/or the Qing empires for trade and pasturage rights, protection from other nomads, help against internal rivals, and would break those oaths when it no longer served their purposes, only to repeat the process later. The Mongolian ejen-albatu terminology is particularly important regarding the Kazakhs’ relationship with the Qing Empire since most early correspondence between the Kazakh Middle and Greater Hordes and the Qing was initially in

Mongolian, mostly written by the Jungar Mongols who had been incorporated by the Middle and Greater Hordes after their defeat.23 Japanese historian Jin Noda argues that the Kazakh-

Qing relationship should be understood within the context of the Jungar and general

Mongolian system of governance –the ejen-albatu (master-servant) relationship – that originated in Mongol nomadic society, not the often-debated tributary system. 24 Kazakh poddanstvo to Russia and tribute to the Qing, as will be demonstrated in this dissertation, for all intents and purposes meant the same thing to the Kazakhs within the Inner-Asian nomadic framework of duty obligations and deference of an albatu to the ejen, regardless of what the

22 Jin Noda and Onuma Takahiro, A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the , special Issue 1st ed (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Tias Research Center For Islamic Area Studies, 2010), 99, 104.

23 Ibid., 101. In contrast, most early correspondence between the Little Horde and Russia was written by Tatar scribes and was heavily influenced by the .

24 Ibid. 99, 104

36

Russian or Qing governments might have thought they had agreed to through their imperial lenses.25

Moreover, as will be explored later in the dissertation, the Kazakhs, like the nomads before them, would swear loyalty as albatu to the growing city states of Mawarannahr as well, like the khanates of Kokand and Khiva, and release themselves from those oaths just as easily. The Kazakhs were free agents. The only way to enforce an agreement required catching them first – and that was no easy task. For the period covered by this dissertation, the Kazakhs would be increasingly squeezed by their sedentary neighbors, and enter short- term alliances with them, but were still free agents who were loyal subjects and vassals to everyone and no one at the same time.

The Kazakh Steppe had seen better days socially and economically before the

Russians conquered it in the mid-nineteenth century. Like billiard balls ricocheting off one another on a table, when there was turmoil or dynastic struggles in the Qing Empire, Iran, and the principalities of Mawarannahr, that reverberated into the steppe as various peoples from all directions invaded to escape unrest elsewhere, compensate for losses, loot to expand one’s power, and forge new alliances. Stability and prosperity depended upon political and economic stability in the surrounding regions. Trade routes realigned in the 18th century.

While overland trade routes between the Russian and Qing empires developed elsewhere in

Siberia, and European traders relied more on direct sea routes to China, Mawarannahr’s trade with the Qing Empire continued and there was still profitable trade between and

25 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 405; E.N. Marasinova, "O Politicheskom Soznanii Russkogo Obshestva vo Vtoroi Polovine XVIII v."," Vopros Istorii no. 12 (2007).81; and Fletcher, "China And Central Asia: 1368-1884," in Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, ed. Beatrice Forbes Manz (New York: Aldershot, 1995), 224.

37

Russia via Mawarannahr as well.26 Even after the region suffered from the Jungar invasions

(and fleeing Kazakhs) in the mid-eighteenth century, from the Iranian invasion of Nadir

Shah, and from the considerable instability that ensued after they had left, trade in one direction or another still continued (and likely attracted these invasions).27 Fights over water and land, and the right to tax commerce and trade routes ensued, often destroying the very things they fought over. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians would step into this nomad-sedentary dynamic along the Syr Darya valley that had endured yet changed over the centuries.

Where Kazakhs Came From

Long before the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, Turkic nomads had moved into the Kipchak Steppe and had driven out or assimilated the Iranian nomads who had previously lived there.28 When the Mongols invaded, they absorbed or intermarried with the Turkic tribes of the Kipchak Steppe, including the Kipchaks, within their ranks. Over the centuries, the descendants of these Mongols spoke a Turkic-based language. The Kazakhs,

Uzbeks, and Tatars all evolved out of the Mongol-Turkic synthesis in the fifteenth century as the Mongol Empire slowly disintegrated.

26 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia," 191.

27 Scott Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002); Jos J.L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c 1710-1780 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 30. There is considerable debate regarding the magnitude of economic “decline” or re-alignment in Mawarannahr in the eighteenth century. Trade, particularly in horses, continued. Use of Indian specie on the Kazakh Steppe briefly flourished in the mid-eighteenth century after Nadir sacked and looted Delhi.

28 David Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 248, 261.

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Just before Chingis Khan died in 1227, Mawarannahr and the Kipchak Steppe had been divided between two of his sons: (the eldest) and Chagatai. Jochi got the Kipchak

Steppe west of the Irtysh river, established his capital there, and formed the Jochid Khanate and Chagatai got Mawarannahr and Altishahr (western and eastern Turkestan) and

Semirechye and formed the .29

After the death of both Jochi and Chingis Khan in 1227, Jochi’s domain was further divided primarily among his two elder sons: Ordu-Ejen (Hordu) and Batu. There is considerable debate over what happened next. Several months after Chingis’ death, Jochi’s second son Batu, took control over the western Kipchak Steppe and established his capital,

Saray, north of the Caspian Sea (near current ) as the Ulus Jochi or “Jochi’s

People.” Batu’s other brothers paid deference to him as the new head of the Jochid Khanate.

Batu ruled the area later occupied by the Kazakh Junior Horde, but went on to conquer the

Eastern of the Rus principalities by 1240. The Eastern Slavs called Batu’s Khanate the

“Golden Horde,” but it was also known as the “White Horde” or the “Kipchak Khanate.”30

Ordu-Ejen’s domain, however, is what interests us regarding the Kazakhs. Ordu-

Ejen, as Jochi’s eldest son, inherited his father’s capital on the upper banks of the Irtysh

River and controlled the eastern Kipchak Steppe. This area encompassed the land from the upper banks of the Irtysh River to the ancient town of Signaq (near Aq Masjid in nineteenth century Russia) on the right bank of the Syr Darya to the delta of the Syr Darya at the Aral

29 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 32. Another son, Ogodei was given land along the Ili River (further east of ), and Tolui, the youngest, inherited land in Mongolia.

30 Donald Ostrowski, "The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions," Slavic Review 49, no. 4 (1990, Winter); and Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder" 34. There is some controversy over the term “Kipchak Khanate” as the Kipchaks historically never had a khanate.

39

Sea – roughly the same territory as the Kazakh Middle Horde of the nineteenth century.31

Even though Ordu-Ejen was formally subordinate to his younger brother, Batu, he largely ran his internal affairs independently. The tribes under Ordu-Ejen, after many years and through a convoluted process, would become the Kazakhs.32

There is considerable debate and confusion over what Ordu-Ejen’s horde was called.

His successors on the eastern Dasht-i Kipchak or Kipchak Steppe, according to Russian and some Turkic sources, were called the “Blue Horde” or “Kök Orda,” according to a contemporaneous fourteenth-century Persian source, Rashid ad-Din’s History, circa 1304.33

By the end of the thirteenth century, Ordu-Ejen’s grandson Konichi (Qonichi) shifted the capital of the Blue Horde from the upper Irtysh River to Signaq on the lower Syr Darya near the sedentary trading cities of Mawarannahr, and after a few fights with the Chagatayids, acquired more cities on the Syr Darya such as and Sayram – later Kazakh cities. The trading cities along the Syr Darya likely provided the Blue Horde with an important revenue stream that ensured group cohesion and a rival power-base to the White Horde at Saray.

By the mid-fourteenth century, both the White Horde and the Blue Horde were in crisis and suffered from the plague and internecine killings. The lineages of both Batu and

Ejen-Orda died out and were replaced by other descendants of Jochi.34 The Blue Horde briefly conquered and ruled the White Horde and controlled the entire Kipchak steppe under

31 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 27.

32 Ibid., 25.

33 Istvan Vasary, "The Beginnings of Coinage in the Blue Horde," Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 62, no. 4 (2009, December), 374.

34 Uli Shamiloglu, "Preliminary Remarks on the Role of Disease in the History of the Golden Horde," Central Asian Survey 12, no. 4 (1993), 450.

40

Urus (Orus) in 1376, but was defeated by another Jochid, Toqtamish, with the help of

Tamerlane (Temür-i Leng) who ruled in Mawarannahr.35 The members of the White Horde were also known as “Uzbeks” in honor of Uzbek Khan who converted his followers to Islam earlier in that century.36 When the White and Blue Hordes united under Toqtamish, controlling all of the Kipchak Steppe, they were therefore known as “Uzbeks.”37

Meanwhile the Chagatai Khanate had fallen into disarray. Tamerlane rose up to control all of Mawarannahr. The Turko-Mongolian nomads of Semirechye in the riparian region south of Lake Balkhash, had broken off and formed Mogulistan. Altishahr was all that remained under direct Chagatayid control.38 Fighting broke out between Tamerlane and his protégé, Toqtamish, between 1387 and 1398, that led to the destruction of nearly every trading city oasis across the Kipchak Steppe and beyond from Samara (in current Russia) to

Tabriz (in Iran), devastating trade between Central Asia and .39

After Toqtamish was defeated by Tamerlane in the early fifteenth century, the White

Horde broke up into several smaller khanates of the , , Astrakhan, Sibir, and the

Nogay Horde among others, who fought among themselves and with new nomads from the east. Eventually, Abu’l-Khayr declared himself Khan of the Uzbeks near (in what is

35 Uli Shamiloglu, "Tribal Politics and Social Organization in the Golden Horde," (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1986), 163-171.

36 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 26.

37 Sneath, The Headless State, 31. Scholars sometimes mistakenly blur the Blue and the White hordes together much earlier than this and claim that the Blue and White Hordes were the same from the very beginning.

38 Rene Grousset, The Empires of the Steppes: A , trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970 [1939]), 341.

39 Beatrice Forbes Manz, "Temur and the Problem of a Conqueror's Legacy," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, no. 1 (1998, April), 24-26.

41

now Russia’s ) in 1428. He was a descendant of Jochi’s fifth son, Shayban, who had been allotted the territory between the River in Siberia and the Irtysh River

(north of Ordu-Ejen’s allotment). Hence, Abu’l-Khayr’s followers were also known as

Shaybanids, as well as Uzbeks.40 Abu’l-Khayr united the Turko-Mongolian tribes throughout the Kipchak Steppe and rebuilt the Blue Horde capital of Signaq on the Syr Darya as his own to benefit from trading revenues along the Syr Darya.41

The nomads of , who had broken away from the Chagatai Khanate and controlled Semirechye and the Issyk-Kul region (in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan, northern Kyrgyzstan) and parts of Jungaria, established their capital in the Ili River valley near what later became Kulja in Xinjiang, China, and benefitted from tribute revenues from the trading cities of Altishahr. They oriented themselves towards trading with the Ming

Dynasty.42 The Kazakh Greater Horde in Semirechye and the northern Kyrgyz tribes would later do the same with the Qing Dynasty.

After the fall of the Mongols and the in the second half of the fourteenth century, western non-Chinissid Mongolian tribes grew in strength. The western

Mongolian tribes in various configurations and alliances were known as “Oirats” (also known as Oolud, Eleuth, e-lu-te, e-la-te) generally, and later as “” or “Jungars” depending on their political alliances as separate western mongolian confederations. These western Mongol Oirats following Tibetan would periodically dominate the Dasht-i

Kipchak and the Syr Darya basin for almost three hundred years. The Kazakhs grew out of

40 Grousset, Empires of the Steppes, 478.

41 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 80.

42 Grousset, Empires of the Steppes, 81.

42

this conflict. Oirats first took Moghulistan, forcing the nomads who lived there to either join them or flee. The Oirats controlled territory between Lake Balkhash in Semirechye to Lake

Baikal in what is now Russia’s Eastern Siberia, and expanded to the Ming Empire by the mid-fifteenth century. 43 The Oirats’ growing accumulation of people and pasturelands eventually led to conflict with the Uzbek of the Kipchak Steppe under Abu’l-

Khayr, and culminated in a battle outside of Signaq in 1457 where Abu’l-Khayr was soundly defeated. The Oirats burned the trading cities and agricultural centers, destroying the economy of the entire Syr Darya region.44

Soon after, in 1459, the great-grandsons of the Blue Horde’s , who had once briefly united the Blue and White Hordes in the fourteenth century, resuscitated the

Blue Horde’s independent identity and broke away from Abu’l-Khayr. These great- grandsons, Janibek and Kerey, thus became the founders of the Kazakhs who “wandered off” from the Uzbeks, as the name “Kazakh” implies. After Abu’l-Khayr’s defeat to the Oirats, many of his nomadic Uzbek followers moved to ally with Janibek and Kerey. Abu’l-Khayr was later killed trying to reassert his control over them.45

Meanwhile, the Uzbeks, particularly under Abu’l-Khayr’s grandson

Shaybani Khan, consolidated Uzbek power in Mawarannahr in the sixteenth century and drove out the Timurids (descendants of Tamerlane). Like the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks of the sixteenth century were nomadic at this time, and the name “Uzbek” did not apply to the

43 Ibid., 480.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

43

sedentary peoples of Mawarannahr that later came to be called Uzbeks in the twentieth century.

Anatoly Khazanov distinguishes between two main tendencies of nomadic states in the region.46 The first type subjugates a sedentary population in a vassal-tribute relationship, and inhabits separate ecological zones like the steppe and oases. In the second type, the nomad moves into the same territory inhabited by the sedentarists after conquering that population. The Kazakhs with their cities on the Syr Darya adjoining the steppe tended towards the former, whereas the Uzbeks who roamed in and among the many settlements in

Mawarannahr, tended towards the latter, and eventually sedentarized faster than the

Kazakhs.47 Both Kazakhs and Uzbeks, however, depended upon revenue streams from taxing cities and trade tariffs to solidify their own power over their own people. 48

Holy Yasi (Turkistan)

The historic rivalries between the predecessors of the Kazakhs and the predecessors of the Uzbeks, who controlled the western and eastern flanks of the Dasht-i Kipchak, dominated the region for nearly one and a half centuries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at the same time as the Oirat conquests ebbed and flowed across the region. For the Kazakhs of the sixteenth century, their persistent fights with the Uzbek Abu’l-Kharids

46 Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 231.

47 Wolfgang Holzwarth, "The Uzbek State as Reflected in Eighteenth Century Bukharan Sources," in Nomaden und Sesshafte - Fragen, Methoden, Ergebnisse, oreintwissenschaftliche Hefte 15, Mitteilungen des SFB "Differenz und Integration" 4/2nd ed, ed. Thomas Herzog and Wolfgang Holzwarth (Halle: Tiel 2, 2004), 100.

48 Ibid., 96.

44

continued the rivalry of their predecessors – particularly over the trading cities and religious centers along the Syr Darya.49

The importance of the holy town of Yasi (Turkistan) to the Kazakhs is often ignored because of common assumptions about the Kazakhs as poor Muslims. Nevertheless, Yasi

(Hazrat-e Turkistan, or Turkistan) was a holy town to the Kazakhs, pilgrimage to the

Tamerlane-built shrine of Sufi saint Khoja Ahmet Yasawi was widely considered as if one were going to a “Second Mecca.”50 Ahmet Yasawi, who lived from

1093 to 1166, and his followers were known for spreading Islam to the nomads of the steppe and were therefore a key figure in Kazakh spirituality. Likewise, other Kazakh dominated cities like Sayram were believed to have been where Khoja Yasawi was born, had a shrine to his parents, and Otrar had a shrine to his teacher. Moreover, as is often the case with shrines and gathering points, Yasi was also a thriving market to exchange goods. After about a century of fighting, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Kazakhs had successfully driven the Uzbeks out of Yasi and the ancient Blue Horde capital of Signaq as well.51 The Kazakhs would hold these cities until briefly driven out by the Jungars in the eighteenth century, and then again permanently by the Kokandians in the nineteenth century.

49 K.A. Pishchulina, "Prisyrdarinskie goroda i ikh znachenie v istorii Kazakhskikh Khanstv v XV-XVII vekakh," in Kazakhstan v XV-XVIII vekakh (Voprosy sotsial'no- politicheskoe istorii) (Alma-ata: Nauka, 1969), 5.

50 Bruce G. Privatsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazakh Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001), 3.

51 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 68.

45

Fig. 4. Facade of Mausoleum of Khoja Akhmet Yasawi, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09947-00005 (digital file from Part 1, vol. 1, pl. 3, no. 5)

Kazakh control of holy Yasi as their capital helped define the Kazakhs vis-à-vis the Uzbeks.

With the Kazakh claim to Yasi, the Kazakhs laid claim to the Islamic heritage of a Sufi saint,

Khoja Ahmet Yasawi.52 By wrapping themselves in the religious authority of a major Sufi shrine to shore up their legitimacy, the Kazakh khans attempted to reinforce their authority. 53

Tamerlane had done it himself when he had built a shrine to Yasawi in in Yasi a century

52 Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan, 45.

53 Ibid.

46

prior.54 Contrary to claims that the Kazakhs had only really become Muslims much later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to Tatar missionaries, anthropologist Bruce

Privratsky argues that the Kazakhs were just as Muslim as the Uzbeks in the sixteenth century, thereby reinforcing a religious importance for the Kazakhs to claim to Yasi

(Turkistan) as their own.55 A contemporaneous sixteenth-century Iranian scholar Fazullah ibn Ruzbikhan provided a legal opinion to an Uzbek khan, known as the Mihman-nama-i

Bukhara, that the Kazakhs had been converted to Islam at the same time as the Uzbeks and that they could be legitimately attacked only because they retained certain local practices, making them apostates but not pagans.56 While one can disagree on the proper way to be a

Muslim in the sixteenth century, it was clear even then that the Kazakhs were Muslim. It was also around this time in the sixteenth century that Yasi became known as “Turkistan” – place of the Turks – where “Turk” had come to mean “nomad” as opposed to the sedentary

Persian-influenced populations of Mawarannahr.57 As Privratsky aptly argues, “It is not that

Turkistan has always belonged to the Kazakhs, but that the Kazakhs – as long as they have been Kazakhs – have belonged to Turkistan.”58 The Kazakhs would later ally with Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to take Turkistan and its surrounding pastures back.

Both the Kazakh Khanate and the Uzbek Shaybanid Empire rose at the expense of

Chagatai Moghulistan, weakened by Oirat incursions. It was under (Kasim or

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 46.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 47.

58 Ibid.

47

Qasim), the son of Janibek, in the early 1500s, that the Kazakhs coalesced as a “khanate” with Turkistan as his capital. A khanate implies that a state is ruled by a khan, and only a descendant of Chingis could become a khan for centuries after. Kasym Khan eventually expanded his territory from Semirechye, which he took from Moghulistan, towards Tashkent, strengthening the Kazakh hold over the trading cities along the Syr Darya. In the nineteenth century, Russia would follow this same path, reclaiming the same cities from the Khanate of

Kokand, with the help of the Kazakhs.

Fig. 5. Inside the Mausoleum to Khoja Ahmet Yasawi, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,LC-DIG-ppmsca-09947-00007 (digital file from Part 1, vol. 1, pl. 4, no. 7))

48

The Three Kazakh Hordes

By the nineteenth century, the Kazakhs had long since divided into three hordes on the Kazakh Steppe – the Junior, Middle, and Greater – as well as a smaller “Inner Horde”

(which was not technically a horde but a political entity composed of Kazakhs from the

Junior Horde) and a smattering of independent Kazakh auls (nomadic villages) permitted to roam further north on Russian land in Siberia. They were an unruly, disparate people with negligible centralized governance. Dispersed throughout the steppe with their livestock, and trading and allying with different neighbors in different directions, they seemed to have very little in common but their nomadic lifestyle and skill in raiding neighbors, according to

Russian Imperial scholar M.I. Krasovskii.59 This was surely a great decline from the Kazakh

Khanate of the sixteenth century.

Historians still debate when the Kazakhs formed three separate hordes and when these began to function autonomously, with their own separate khans. Jiger Janabel argues that after breaking from the Uzbeks in the fifteenth century, the Kazakhs immediately formed three separate hordes (zhuz or jüz) similar to Mongolian centurian units, that stretched from east to west – the Greater or Older Horde (Ulu), Middle Horde (Ordta or Orta ) and Junior,

Little, Lesser or Younger Horde (Kichi). While Kazakh legend claims that the mythical founder of the Kazakh people, Alash, had three sons who formed the three hordes, jüz means

“hundred” in Mongolian and Kazakh, and organizing people in terms of jüz was originally intended for military purposes. As those purposes subsided, the jüz structure evolved into a diffuse political and social organization by the nineteenth century.

59 M.I. Krasovskii, Materialy dlia geografii i statistiki rossii, vol. 1, Sobranie ofitserami generalnago shtaba, oblast sibirskikh kirgizov, (St. Petersburg: 1868), 14-15.

49

Upon their arrival in Semirechye, Janibek and Kerey absorbed the nomadic tribes who already lived in Moghulistan, such as the Usun, Dulat (Dughlat), Kangli (Qangli) and

Jalair.60 According to Kazakh historian B. Irmukhanov, these tribes may have already been organized as a tribal confederation in their own right before the Kazakhs arrived, led by the

Usun tribe.61 Irmukhanov also posits that it was because of the seniority of the Usun tribe and their alliance with Kasymov Khan in the sixteenth century that the Greater Horde acquired its senior status as “Great” or “Elder” (Ulu jüz).62 Janibel posits that the nomads of Semirechye were just the first ones to join Janibek and Kerey’s people when they moved to Moghulistan, while the nomads that formed the other hordes joined later.63

After the death of Abu’l-Khayr in 1468, about 200,000 more Uzbeks joined the nascent Kazakhs. Eighteen affiliated tribes divided into three separate clan configurations – the Bayuli,Alimuli and Zhetiru -- became the Junior Horde (Kichi jüz).64 The Middle Horde

(Ordta jüz), comprised of the Argun, Nayman, Kongrat (Qonghirat), Kerei and a number of smaller tribes had also already been affiliated with one another and were probably the last to join the Kazakhs.65 The population size of these hordes was not the determining factor in

60 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 103.

61 B.B. Irmukhanov, Usun i etnogenez kazakhskago naroda (Almaty: Nash Mir, 2006),122.

62 Irmukhanov, Usun, 123.

63 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 108.

64 Allen J. Frank, "The Qazaqs And Russia," in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chingissid Age, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 365.

65Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 107. The Usun, Kerei, Nayman tribes, etc. are all names of famous Turkic and Mongol tribes long before the Mongol

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assigning seniority; rather, it was likely their chronological order in allying with Janibek and

Kerey in becoming Kazakhs.66

Whatever the reason for three separate Kazakh hordes, suffice it to say that these three distinct hordes probably existed from the time the Kazakhs broke from the Uzbeks.

The unification of the Kazakhs under one khan was historically a rare event in the Kazakh

“Khanate.” Russians would engage with these three separate hordes, and their disparate factions, as they began to disintegrate.

As a confederation of tribes, organized around self-preservation, securing pasturage and acquiring loot, the Kazakhs could quickly expand and contract depending upon the strength of a given leader, the strength of a common enemy, and the vagaries of fate.

National identity or “ethnogenesis” that Soviet and current Kazakh historians often seek at this time did not exist, nor was there any kind of collective identity that persuaded people to think that they belonged to a larger unit than their immediate tribe. For example, Kasym

Khan, who ruled from 1511 to 1523, is believed to have attracted more than a million people and formed an army of 300,000 between 1515 and 1520, only for the Kazakhs to precipitously decline in number under his successor, Tahir Khan. In less than a decade, from

1523 to 1533, Tahir’s followers shrank to 30,000, after his defeat by the powerful Uzbek

Manghit tribe on the Syr Darya. Tahir Khan was rejected as a leader by his followers,

“Being a harsh man, he practiced much cruelty, so that his people who numbered 400,000 persons, suddenly deserted him and dispersed, while he was left alone among the Kyrgyz,

conquest and it is debatable whether or not these Kazakh tribes actually descended from those tribes.

66 Ibid., 108.

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and died, at last, in misery,” according to Muhammad Haidar’s Tarikh-i Rashidi.67

According to that sixteenth-century chronicle, under Tahir Khan the Kazakhs shrank until

“not a vestige of all his host remains on the face of the earth.”68 From Mirza Muhammad

Haidar’s perspective in the 1540s, the future of the Kazakhs looked grim. One Kazakh historian even claims that the Kazakhs “temporarily disappeared” from Semirechye.69 It is also worth noting that the Uzbek Shaybanid khanate also grew and shrank just as quickly, with many of the same tribes that were sometimes “Kazakhs” forming their ranks.

According to Mirza Muhammad Haidar, before the Shaybanids conquered Bukhara and

Samarkand, they only had 2,000-3,000 followers, but afterwards, they grew to 56,000.70

The Muscovites first learned of the Kazakhs around this time in the sixteenth century when Muscovite envoys to the Nogay Horde in the western Kazakh Steppe, Danil Gubin in

1534 and Semen Maltsev in 1569 brought back word that the Kazakhs were at war with the

Nogays and the Bukharans.71 In the context of all this fighting, Kasym Khan’s other son,

Haq-Nazar, became khan in 1538 and slowly increased Kazakh numbers. The Kazakhs returned to Semirechye and also established their capital along the Syr Darya.72 In the

67 Mirza Muhammad Haidar, The Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza [A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia], ed. N. Elias, trans. E. Denison Ross (London: Curzon, [1895]), 273.

68 Haidar, The Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza, 273.

69 Irmukhanov, Usun,123.

70 Chahryar Adle, Irfan Habib, and Karl Baipakov, eds., History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. V, Development in Contrast: From the mid- to the Mid-19th Century, (Unesco, 2003), 366.

71 Levshin, Opisanie, 2, 47.

72 Irmukhanov, Usun, 123.

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process of providing military services and alliances to various city-states in Mawarannahr to fight each other, the Kazakhs once again acquired Turkistan and Sayram in the Syr Darya valley and absorbed more nomads from Moghulistan.73

The Kazakhs once again secured control of the Syr Darya in the mid-sixteenth century, ensuring control over their holy cities and lucrative access to trading routes, and allowing the Kazakhs to consolidate and strengthen.74 Their power-base on the Syr Darya allowed them to successfully fight with the Nogays to their west and north to absorb more pastureland and control new trade routes. Even though Tamerlane had destroyed many trading cities between Mawarannahr and Siberia in his battles with Toqtamish in the fourteenth century, some had been rebuilt and trade revived. By the sixteenth century, trading cities had recovered and there continued to be a robust trade between Altishahr and

Mawarannahr in expensive fabrics, shawls, porcelains, perfume, dried fruit and other agricultural products.75 After the Nogays were pushed out of the way or absorbed by the

Kazakhs, the Kazakhs could engage in the lucrative trade between the upper Volga river area and Mawarannahr, particularly in the slave trade.76 Much to Russian chagrin, the Kazakhs would engage in this slave trade for the next three hundred years. The Kazakhs also unsuccessfully attacked the Oirats in 1552. The Oirats retaliated by invading as far as

73 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 83.

74 Pishchulina, "Prisyrdarinskie goroda,” 41.

75 G. Sultanova, "Trade Relations Between Bukhara and Yarkend Khanates in the 16th - Early 17th Centuries," International Institute for Central Asia Studies Bulletin 11, (2010), 44.

76 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder," 86.

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Tashkent, sending the Kazakhs into disarray, but the Oirats had more pressing concerns with the Ming and left the region.77

By 1573, Ivan the Terrible sent an emissary, Tretiak Chebukov, to meet Kazakh Khan

Haq Nazar (who ruled all three hordes from 1538 to 1580) to establish an alliance against

Kuchum Khan of Siberia. Kuchum Khan was of the same Shaybanid line as the Uzbeks who ruled in Mawarannahr. The Kazakhs and Muscovites, therefore, had similar interests in defeating them.78 Chebukov, however, was captured by a relative of Kuchum and killed.79

The three hordes briefly united again under Khan Tawakkul (Tevekkel, Taulkel) in

1582 who significantly expanded Kazakh power in the region and ruled from 1582 to 1598.

Khan Tawakkul reached out to ally with the Muscovites under Tsar Fedor in 1594 for weapons to fight Bukhara and the Nogays, who were after Astrakhan which Russia had conquered in 1556, and had sent a son, Kul-Muhammed, to Muscovy as a hostage amanat.80

Uraz-Muhamad, Tawakkul’s nephew, was appointed by Muscovy to be the Khan of

Kasimov, a Tatar puppet state under Russian poddandstvo at that time as well.81 By 1595,

Muscovite envoy Veliamin Stepanov was instructed to discuss the possibility and benefits of

Muscovite poddanstvo with Khan Tawakkul in which the Russian “Sovereign, Tsar, and

77 Ibid., 95.

78 Alton S. Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria 1552-1740: A Case Study in Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 34.

79 Ibid.

80 F.N. Kireev, ed., Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia v XVI-XVIII vekakh (Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov) (Alma-ata: 1961). 3.

81 V.V. Veliaminov-Zernov, Isledovanie o Kasimovskikh Tsariakh i Tasrevichakh, part 2 (Sanktpeterburg: 1864), 104; Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 164.

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Grand would act to protect them from all their enemies…and they could stand against the Bukharan khan and Kuchum.” 82 Relations seemed to taper off after this, as Muscovy fell into its “Time of Troubles” (1598 to 1613) which ended with the establishment of the

Romanov Dynasty. Contact between the Kazakhs and Muscovites seems to have dropped for about a century.

By 1598, through exploiting Uzbek internecine rivalries, Khan Tawakkul had seized several cities in the Ferghana and Syr Darya valleys – Aksu, Andijon, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Turkistan again.83 After his death in 1598, however, the Kazakhs fell into disarray again, with rival members of his family seizing different cities then under Kazakh rule as power- bases and fighting among themselves. Tawakkul’s younger brother, Esen eventually prevailed on the Syr Darya. His disastrous campaign into Altishahr, in a failed attempt to exploit dynastic struggles there, however, ended his tenure as khan. His followers fell from

300,000 to 7,000 and the Kazakhs dispersed again.84

Meanwhile, the Mongols to the east were fighting among themselves as well, with the

Western Mongols, the Oirats, growing in strength and expanding into the Kazakh Steppe and

Siberia again. A few of the Oirat tribes, led by the Torghuts, broke off and moved even further west to invade the western Kazakh Steppe and migrate north of the Caspian Sea in

1616. They became known as the Kalmyks (Qalmyqs, Qalmaqs, Calmucks) to their Turkic-

82 Ibid., 7.

83 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder,” 91.

84 Ibid., 95.

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speaking neighbors, meaning “left behind.”85 They moved into the area where the Nogays used to migrate and where the Kazakhs wanted to control.

By the early seventeenth century, Tashkent and Turkistan were the principle centers of the Kazakhs while they were gradually being pushed out of Semirechye or absorbed by the growing Western Mongolian tribes.86 Some members of the Kazakh Middle and Greater

Hordes and the Kyrgyzes around the Irtysh River and Semirechye, were already under the

Jungar rule and would remain so until the mid-eighteenth century.87 Others were pushed further north and west into Muscovy’s expanding domains in Siberia, with Kazakh slave raids reported in Tomsk.88

By the 1640s, the Manchus from what is now China’s northeast had established the

Qing dynasty, and a faction of the Oirats had organized themselves as the “Jungars”

(Dzungars). “Jun-ghar” is Mongolian for “left wing” and was a military organizational term.

The Jungars lived in the Ili River valley and along the Irtysh River, but built their capital on the Imil River in what is now China.89 Western Mongols (Oirats) following Tibetan

Buddhism dominated much of Eurasia, stretching at times from the Caspian Sea across the

85 Grousset, Empires of the Steppes, 521; V.V. Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, Vol. 1, trans. V. Minorsky and T. Minorsky (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1962), 160. The term Kalmyk is what the Western Mongol (Oirat) tribes who moved to the Volga region (mainly Torghuts) were called, but the term was also used as a general Turkic term for all Oirats, and even sometimes the Manchus. It was a loose Central Asian Turkic term for eastward Monolian nomads, or peoples confused with Mongols, who were from the east and not Turkic.

86 Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 160.

87 Janabel, "From Mongol Empire to Qazaq Juzder,” 109.

88 I.Ia. Zlatkin, ed., Russko-Mongolskie Otnosheniia 1636-1656, Sbornik Dokumentov (Moscow: GRVL, 1974), 22-23.

89 Grousset, Empires of the Steppes, 526.

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Kazakh Steppe, through Jungaria and Altishahr, to . The Kazakhs were either subsumed into Jungar ranks, or fled.

As will be discussed later, the Jungars are believed to have played a significant role in the future of the Kazakhs’ relationship with Russia, although this is debated. When writing about Kazakh history, however, it is important to keep some perspective. The Jungars – not the Kazakhs – were the last powerful nomadic confederation to emerge in Eurasia, as an organized, centralized nomadic state. With the help of European advisors and captives, the

Jungars were armed with firearms such as matchlocks, mortars, and cannons, and would remain a significant power in the region for nearly a century until destroyed by the Qing.90

The loosely organized and disparate Kazakh hordes on the western fringes of the Jungars spent several centuries attempting to become an Inner Asian state like the Jungars -- through failed attempts to secure the trading cities along the Syr Darya with mult-vectored alliances -- but merely succeeded in surviving them.

The was also a significant power in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Further upstream on the Syr Darya, on the left (southern) bank, towns such as Jizzaq and were controlled by the Khanate of Bukhara, while the towns downstream like Turkistan were controlled by Kazakhs.91 Bukhara, however, still laid claim to cities of Turkistan and Tashkent after the Kazakhs re-took them in 1628 and 1642 respectively.92

90 Perdue, China Marches West, 304-307.

91 Audrey Burton, The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History 1550-1702 (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 1997), 342.

92 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia," 183. Bukhara made its last attempt to enforce its claim to the right bank of the Syr Darya in 1688.

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By the late seventeenth century, the Jungars had seized nearly all the Kazakh cities in the Syr Darya basin except Turkistan, where Kazakh Middle Horde Khan Tauke (Tyawka,

Tiauka, or Toiuke), lived. 93 Between 1681 and 1685 the Jungars invaded nearly annually to take another city from the Kazakhs. Despite their losses to the Jungars, the Kazakhs managed to take back the towns along the Syr Darya yet again. While Tauke Khan only had ten or eleven towns in 1681, before the Jungars raids, by 1696 he had twenty-five to thirty- two towns.94 What was left of the three Kazakh hordes united under Tauke, who ruled from

1680 to 1718, and was considered the last great khan of the Kazakh Khanate.95 Even during this time, however, other Kazakh “khans” would nominally request “coronations” from the

Emir of Bukhara to govern cities along the Syr Darya in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.96

Both the Kazakhs and Jungars had similar interests in controlling towns as vassal sources of tax revenue, grain, and luxury goods like textiles and manufactured goods. Both the Kazakhs and Jungars would impose grain tariffs on their sedentary subjects, and were resented by the sedentary populations.97 By the mid-eighteenth century, while poorer

93 A.K. Kushkumbayev, Voennoe delo kazakhov v XVII-XVIII vekah (Almaty: Daik Press, 2001), 124.

94 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia." 184

95 Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001).5. Khan Tauke also established the Kazakh code of laws, the “Seven Charters” or Zhety Zhargy (Jeti Jargi), which governed the Kazakhs as a set of defensive and punitive principles. These “laws” were oral, and very flexible customary guidelines until Russian ethnographers later tried to write them down and govern Kazakhs by them.

96 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia," 189.

97 Ibid., 184.

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Kazakhs would dress “like wolves, dressed in hides,” the wealthier Kazakhs wore fabrics extracted from these conquered cities, or bartered for livestock.98

Tauke Khan, in one of his many losses to the Jungars, had his son taken hostage and sent to Lhasa, presumably for a Buddhist education. Giving a son as a hostage, or amanat, symbolizes a subordinate relationship as a way to cement a peace agreement. Perhaps lured into a false sense of security regarding their relationship, however, the Jungars granted Tauke

Khan’s request and returned his son. When the son was returned, with an escort of 500

Jungar warriors in 1698, Tauke killed all of them and kept their families as captives.

Moreover, the Kazakhs under Tauke raided caravans belonging to the Jungars, Kalmyks and merchants from the Qing Empire, disrupting trade.99 A Jungar emissary to negotiate with

Tauke Khan was killed by a Kazakh warrior as well. Tauke Khan’s Kazakhs had clearly demonstrated that they were no longer subjects of the Jungars and that Tauke Khan was probably not able to control his people’s actions.

It was after these events in 1689 that the Jungars launched a punitive expedition against the Kazakhs in Semirechye, reportedly killing several thousand and taking ten thousand captive.100 The cycle of violence continued from there. By 1709, the Jungars had attacked the Kazakh encampments near the Syr Darya “like ants and locusts” according to the reporting Bukharan governor of Samarkand, and many had been taken captive. The

Kazakhs fled and took shelter in Tashkent, where the governor claimed the sedentary

98 Ibid., 185.

99 Grousset, Empires of the Steppes, 531.

100 Kushkumbayev, Voennoe delo kazakhov, 124.

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inhabitants were terrified by the pagan (Tibetan Buddhist) Jungar army that was in pursuit.101

The Jungars, however, quickly left after they had attacked the Kazakhs, and the Kazakhs seemed to have lost control of these towns again.

There is considerable confusion about what happened next. It seems that the Kazakhs remained fractured. While Tauke Khan, who died in 1718, was considered the last great leader of the Kazakh Khanate and united many Kazakhs behind him, he also had a rival, Kaip

Khan [Ghayb] who rose to prominence in the same horde and was quite powerful between

1703 and 1718. 102 Both Tauke and Kaip are said to have led a group of seven weaker

Middle Horde Kazakh tribes near the Syr Darya that the Bukharans called the “Yeti-Urugh” or Seven Tribes. These tribes were united with the Kazakh Alchin tribe from the Junior

Horde as a kind of temporary fourth horde near the Syr Darya. 103 With two khans already ruling the Yeti-Urugh offshoot of both the Junior and Middle Hordes in 1710, the common narrative on Kazakh history is that the “three” Kazakh Hordes reportedly met in the

Karakorum desert to regroup, selected Tauke as khan of all the Kazakhs, and under the leadership of warrior (batyr) Bogenbai of the Middle Horde, the Kazakhs united to successfully fight the Jungars in 1711-12 while the Jungars were focused on fighting the

Qing.104 The Jungars returned their attention to the Kazakhs in 1716, and conquered and absorbed a significant number of them.105

101 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia," 187.

102 Ibid., 188.

103 Ibid., 188-189.

104 Kushkumbayev, Voennoe delo kazakhov, 126.

105 Ibid.

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After Tauke Khan’s death in 1718, the Kazakhs were divided once more and would not join ranks again even in the face of a common enemy.106 While the Kazakhs had successfully managed to regroup several times as a weak khanate between the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries from their base on the Syr Darya, their control of the Syr Darya, and capacity as a nomadic state, became even more challenged and tenuous as the century progressed, requiring even more frequent alliances with neighboring states to regain the Syr

Darya.

106 After Tauke Khan’s death in 1718, his son Shah Muhammad (Semeke, or Shahmuhambet) ruled Turkistan.

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Chapter 2 -- Control a City, Control a Horde: The Political, Religious, & Economic Significance of the Syr Darya in Alliances

As Muscovy and later Russia further established itself in Siberia in the eighteenth century as an empire, it expanded its relationship with the many nomadic and semi- nomadic peoples of Inner-Asia -- the Kalmyks, , Jungars, and Kazakhs just to name a few. These respective relationships were constantly contested, renegotiated, and played off each other. Degrees of alliance and mutual dependence varied between parties, and there was always the fear on Russia’s part that their frequently sparring

Inner-Asian nomadic neighbors would unite or ally with other neighboring states against

Russia. Like the Jungars who had fleetingly sought alliances with Russia in the past, the

Junior Horde Kazakhs sought an ejen-albatu relationship with Russia and wanted

Russian help in building or acquiring a city on the Syr Darya to fight the other Kazakhs who were alban of other states who already had cities and hence power. When Russia failed to live up to Kazakh expectations in their relationship, the Kazakhs of the Junior and Middle hordes sought alliances elsewhere to achieve the same goal, with varying degrees of success. Russia, meanwhile, grappled with how to best attract the Kazakhs to ally with them under Russian poddanstvo and compete with other states, even as it sought to change and civilize them as the subjects of an increasingly European empire.

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Russia Moves into Siberia

Russia’s conquest of the Kazakh Steppe was an outgrowth of its imperial conquest of Siberia and should to be understood in terms of the region’s rivers and portages. The

Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed the established transportation and communication network that started further north, downstream in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Muscovites (and later

Russians) initially sought to avoid the dangerous, slave-raiding, nomad-inhabited

Eurasian steppe around Kazan. The area beyond that was populated by peoples who had conquered them in the past. Instead, they relied upon the vast Siberian river networks that flowed into the Arctic Sea far to the north to acquire lucrative furs to meet the growing European demand. In Russia’s eastward expansion, the Volga and the Yaik

(Ural) rivers, which flow south into the Caspian Sea, combined with Siberia’s navigable river networks further east, which flowed from the highlands of Inner-Asia into the Arctic

Ocean, were Russia’s primary means of transportation and communication in the region for at least three hundred years.1

Russia came into contact with the Junior and Middle Horde Kazakhs in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through two different river systems, the Yaik River to the west with the Junior Horde, and the Irtysh River to the east with the Middle Horde.

Much of the Kazakh Greater Horde south of Lake Balkhash was a vassal of the Jungars and mainly interacted with Russia under different circumstances much later. Muscovites would maintain relations with the Junior and Middle Kazakh hordes, which had different priorities at different times, only sporadically until the eighteenth century, when both the

1 Catherine the Great changed the name of Yaik River to Ural in 1775.

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Russian Empire moved further south along the Yaik and Irtysh rivers, and the Kazakh hordes had moved further north away from the Syr Darya basin, and had new reasons to interact.

Ivan the Great, the Grand Prince of Muscovy, who had led the Russians against the Mongols in 1480 and declared himself “Ceasar” or Tsar, moved into northwestern

Siberia on punitive expeditions during the last years of his reign in the early sixteenth century; these were Muscovy’s first forays into Siberia. His grandson, Tsar Ivan the

Terrible, moved further east and south down the Volga river, conquering remnants of the

Mongolian Jochid khanates – or “Golden Horde” khanates as the Muscovites called them

–such as Kazan in 1552, and Astrakhan in 1556. After Cossacks under a fur-hunting mercenary hired by the wealthy , Ermak, took in 1583,

Ivan decided to authorize its incorporation into Muscovy as well. The Khanate of Sibir’s capital, Isker, which was situated on the Tobol River (not far from current Tobolsk) where it joins the Irtysh River, fell as well.2

The conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan gave Muscovy control of the Volga River and opened Siberia’s river network to the east. Transport down the Volga, then up the

Kama River to Perm, then up the Chusovaia River to the low-lying opened the way east. From here, the Urals are only 164 yards above the surrounding lowlands, which enabled the portage of boats across the crest of the Urals, and allowed the Cossacks to travel further into Siberia either down the Tavda or Tura Rivers, and a short way up the Tobol River to its juncture with the Irtysh at Tobolsk. By 1600,

Muscovy’s Cossacks had claimed all the territory between the Yaik and rivers, and

2 W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a : Siberia and the Russians (New York: Random House, 1994), 42.

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were beginning to head towards the Yenesei River above what is now Mongolia, to finally reach the by 1639.3 It is from Tobolsk, established by the Cossacks in 1587 in the former territory of the Khanate of Sibir, and up the Irtysh River to the south, that the Muscovites first engaged with the Jungars and encountered the Kazakh

Middle Horde. Unlike the Kalmyks and Bashkirs, with whom the Muscovites allied and armed to fight their mutual enemies, the Muscovites would initially engage with the

Kazakhs, Jungars, and others further east with more caution.4 The Muscovites tried to pursue their own interests in trade, exploiting natural resources, and taxing subject peoples for fur, while avoiding military alliances or further antagonizing stronger nomadic peoples to their south and east.

The Jungars and the Irtysh River

The main nexus of Muscovite-Jungar interaction was at Lake Yamish near the

Irtysh River (about 25 miles from current Pavlodar). The Cossacks tried to settle at Lake

Yamish from 1613 to 1620, but the Jungars kept driving them out.5 This lake was an important place for all the peoples of the region because of its great supply of salt –

3 Ibid., xxi.

4 The Kalmyks, western-Mongolia nomads who were related to the Jungars, were fairly recent arrivals to the Volga River area north of the Caspian Sea, and occupied lands vacated by the Nogays when they moved further west to Ottoman territory. The Bashkirs, who lived near the Ural Mountains and between the Volga and Tobol rivers, were another Turkic-speaking group that had been incorporated by the Mogols under the “Golden Horde.” While some were half-nomadic, many practiced agriculture.

5 Michael Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography Of The Bare-footed Flight: Dynamics of a National History," (Master's thesis, Indiana University, 2011), 17.

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essential for preserving food – and because it had become an important point of trade for many other goods as well. The Cossacks and Jungars periodically came to blows over access to salt at Yamish, sending annual armed expeditions to collect the mineral.

Tensions came to a head in 1634 when 2,000 Jungars attacked a Russian military expedition to the lake. The Jungars and Muscovites finally negotiated a peace agreement at this time. The Jungars would allow the Muscovites to send caravans to collect salt at

Lake Yamish, while Muscovy would share the salt mine with the Jungars and allow

Jungars increased trade in Muscovite territory. A trading town developed around Yamish that became the largest trading center in Siberia for half a century, until the designation of

Kiakhta as the main Russian trade center for commerce with the Qing in 1727 with the

Treaty of Kiakhta. 6 This was such an important place that Jungar leader Kontaisha

Batur (1634-1654) built his capital town between Lake Yamish and the Irtysh River, with a Buddhist monastery and had used Turkestani peasants to cultivate the land.7 Twenty- five foot walls were built to surround his town, with four cannons.8 Batur even asked governor of Tobolsk to send him Russian artisans, including stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths, weapons manufacturers, as well as guns, armor, bullets, pigs and chickens.

Muscovy agreed to send Batur pigs and chickens.9 Russia’s nomadic neighbors would

6 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 107. Russian Emperor Peter the Great (1682- 1725) renamed Muscovy the Russian Empire under his reign.

7 Ibid., 106.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 107.

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ask for help building and acquiring fortified towns in the steppe well into the eighteenth century.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jungars competed with another group of

Mongols to the east, the Khalkhas (Altyn Khan Mongols), over the trade route for

Russian caravans to the Qing Empire, and interacted with Russia quite frequently. Batur sent thirty-three embassies to Moscow during his reign and received nineteen Russian embassies as well. 10 The fragmentary Kazakhs, many of whom were under Jungar suzerainty, were largely absent from this important and contested relationship between the Russians and Jungars.

Along with Tashkent and the cities along the Syr Darya, the Kazakh Greater

Horde and a significant portion of Semirechye fell under Jungar rule in 1616.11 While the

Kazakhs fought back and forth with the Jungars in the seventeenth century, they would lose independent control over Semirechye and the Syr Darya region to the Jungars again in the 1680s, and again in the 1720s. Much of the Kazakh Greater Horde would be subsumed into the Jungars until the Jungars were defeated by the Qing Dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century.

In 1688, the Jungars sent an envoy to Russian officials in Irkutsk to ask for an alliance against their enemies to the east, the Mongolian Khalkhas. Although Russia refused to invade Mongolia on their behalf, they promised to aid the Jungars if the

Khalkhas attacked Jungaria. The Jungars asked the Muscovites for two or three thousand

10 Ibid., 105.

11 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002),148.

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Cossacks and some cannons.12 The Russians, however, had their own problems with the

Qing further to the east that ultimately led to the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, and did not want to exacerbate the situation, even if they had actually had several thousand Cossacks to spare that they could have sent to aid the Jungars.13 The Kalmyks and Kazakhs would later ask Russia for Cossacks and cannons to fight their enemies as well.

After about a century-long hiatus in relations, the remaining Kazakhs, under

Tauke Khan, again reached out to Muscovy, by sending an emissary in 1694 to Tobolsk, the seat of the Russian government in Siberia. This emissary, however, was captured and killed by thieves along the way and there is no further information regarding the purpose of his visit.14 The ill-fated trip was about four years before Tauke Khan’s clash with the

Jungars after they took his son captive, so perhaps he was once again proposing a

Kazakh-Russian alliance against the Jungars.

In 1710 and 1711, the Kazakhs, united under Tauke Khan, attacked the Jungars again, and the Jungars returned the favor in 1713 and 1716.15 In the midst of intermittent

Kazakh-Jungar fighting, the Jungars and Russians also clashed, but the Russians and

Kazakhs were not allies, nor did the Russians want to antagonize the Jungars by

12 Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, 4 vols (London: 1876-1927), vol 1, 639, 628.

13 Alton S. Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria 1552-1740: A Case Study in Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 37.

14 F.N. Kireev, ed., Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia v XVI-XVIII vekakh (Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov) (Alma-Ata: 1961), 15.

15 Alan Bodger, "Abulkhair, Khan of the Kazakh Little Horde, and His Oath of Allegiance to Russia of October 1731," Slavonic East European Review 58, no. 1 (1980), 45.

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becoming allies of the Kazakhs.16 Russian Emperor Peter the Great was busy fighting the

Great Northern War against Sweden and the at this time. The Jungars, meanwhile, had a more threatening enemy from the east, the Qing Empire under the powerful Kangxi Emperor. Russia was only beginning to figure out how to engage with this region at an administrative level, and Peter the Great had just appointed the first

Governor-General of all of Siberia, Prince Matvei Gagarin, in 1708 based in Tobolsk.17

The Muscovites and later Russians had clashed with the Jungars in eastern Siberia over the right to collect tribute from local peoples in the region since the 1640s. Russia’s relationship with the Jungars was not just around the eastern Kazakh Steppe, but extended to eastern Siberia near the Yenesei River. In the 1690s and early 1700, Russian

Cossacks had defeated the Yenisei Kirghiz on that river, who were under Jungar rule near what is now Krasnoiarsk.18 The Cossacks also pushed their way up to the headwaters of the Ob River, fighting the Jungars in 1709-1710 at what is now Kuznetsk, and had reached the Altai Mountains by 1718. While Peter the Great had authorized negotiations from Tobolsk with the Jungars in 1713 to end these conflicts, the Jungars consistently refused to recognize Russia’s claim to that territory and demanded that they destroy their fortresses at Krasnoiarsk, Kuznetsk and Tomsk.19 The Russian –Jungar dispute over

16 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 17.

17 Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 1956), 4. Prior to this, Siberia had been administered by the Siberia Prikaz in Moscow.

18 Igor Vladimirovich Naumov, The , ed. David Norman Collins (New York: Routledge, 2006), 87.

19 Perdue, China Marches West, 211.

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tribute claims were never resolved before the Jungars were defeated by the Qing later in the century. In the meantime, the peoples who lived there paid tribute to both.20

The third river route through which the Russians expanded southwards and clashed with the Jungars was the Irtysh.21 Peter the Great had fought wars for nearly the entirety of his reign and needed more money. Russia thus far had no gold or silver mines of its own. The first Russian treaty with the Qing, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, in 1689, not coincidentally, ensured that the silver mines of Nerchinsk were included in Russia. The

Cossacks sent an expedition down the Irtysh River in 1715 in yet another attempt to build a fortress on Lake Yamish, and to go even further to into Jungar territory in search of gold.22 There was gold in Jungaria, Altishahr, Mawarannahr, and even on the Kazakh

Steppe, but the Russians did not find it at this time. Instead, just a few years later in

1723, they would find copper and silver (and later gold) in the Altai Mountains, and would start to develop these while fighting with Jungars and Kazakhs near the Irtysh

River. 23 The mines would come into full force as a Russian “Potosi” after the state

20 Ibid.

21 Naumov, The History of Siberia, 87.

22 John P. LeDonne, "Building An Infrastructure of Empire In Russia's Eastern Theater, 1650-1840s," Cahiers du Monde russe Vol 47, no. 3 (July-Sept. 2006.), 583.

23 John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1605-1831 (New York: Oxford University, 2004), 43. In contrast, LeDonne claims that Peter the Great deliberately sent two forces to Khiva and up the Irtysh to reach Yarkand as “two detachments of a single expedition designed to place the Kazakh upland and the khanates in a vise – another pincer movement to establish fortified outposts at strategic locations and control trade routes.” These movements, however, had nothing to do with the Kazakhs, khanates, and vises yet. They were, however, on river routes, some of which were used for trade.

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seized the territory in 1747, and turned Russia into the largest supplier of precious metals in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century.24

Around the same time, a Turkmen named Khoja Nefes arrived in Astrakhan in

1713 with gold dust from the Amu Darya, and was sent further to St Petersburg for a personal audience with Emperor Peter I. 25 Peter sent Prince Alexander Bekovich-

Cherkasskii as an envoy to the Khanate of Khiva, whence he was directed to go to the

Khanate of Bukhara and reconnoiter the Amu Darya along the way in 1714.26 The

Caspian Sea and trade with Iran was Peter the Great’s primary focus at the time and

Bekovich-Cherkasskii initially launched this undertaking by exploring sea routes on the

Caspian to Khiva in two failed attempts. On his third attempt, Bekovich-Cherkasskii decided to take a caravan route to Khiva from the northeastern shore of the Caspian Sea in the middle of July, a terribly hot time of year. The newly anointed Khan of Khiva, however, was suspicious of the large Russian expedition that had appeared. Having been warned by Russia’s erstwhile Kalmyk allies that Russia did not have peaceful intentions, the khan promptly attacked and destroyed Bekovich-Cherkasskii’s forces with an army of

24 Alfred G. Lock, Gold: Its Occurrence and Extraction (London: K. & F. N. Spon, 1882), 36; and Baron A. Von Humboldt, "On the chains of Mountains and Volcanoes of Central Asia," The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia 4, (1831). Ironically, “Altai,” comes from the Kazakh word for gold, “altyn.” Geologists were sent all over the Russian Empire to find gold at this time, not just to conquer the Kazakhs. Russia first discovered gold in Archangel in 1737.

25 M.A. Terentiev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, vol. I, (St. Petersburg: 1906). 20

26 Terentiev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 23.

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Khivans, , Uzbeks, and Kazakhs.27 Bekovich-Cherkasskii’s head was cut off and sent to Bukhara, with his body stuffed with grass displayed on the walls of Khiva, and hundreds of Russian soldiers were kept as slaves.28 Ultimately, dead or enslaved,

1500 Yaik Cossacks were lost on this ill-fated expedition.29

By comparison, the Russians were just slightly luckier with the Jungars.

Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Bukhholtz was sent to find gold in July, 1715 with 2932 men down the Irtysh River towards Lake Yamish, where they arrived in October and built a fort.30 Their fort was attacked by 10,000 Jungars (more than a 3:1 ratio) in the spring of

1716, and the Russians suffered from hunger, disease, death and Jungar captivity, until what was left of them retreated in April. The fort was razed to the ground. Bukhholtz returned to Tobolsk by December of 1716 lucky to be alive, with his head still attached.31

It was around this time in 1716 that Tauke Khan, as “Khan of all the Kazakhs,” sent a letter to Governor Gagarin in Tobolsk, along with a Russian officer from

Bukhholtz’s expedition whom the Kazakhs had purchased from the from Jungars that year. Tauke Khan claimed that he wanted peace with the Russians, Tatars and Bashkirs and let it be known that if anyone wanted to fight the Jungars, the Kazakhs were always

27 Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).159-160.

28 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met,159.

29 John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD diss., Harvard, 1964), 10; and Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 31.

30 Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand," 5.

31 Ibid.; and Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Asia (Ann Arbor: G. Wahr, 1951),74.

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ready to fight them too. The Jungars, Tauke warned, were dangerous, and the Kazakhs fought with them frequently.32 Governor Gagarin, responded politely, thanking the

Kazakhs for their desire to live in eternal peace with Russian subjects and assured Tauke

Khan that should there ever be a time when Russia would want to wage war with the

Jungars, they would be sure to let the Kazakhs know.33 Knowing where his real threat in the region was, however, Gagarin wrote Moscow about this exchange hoping that the

Jungars would not find out about his correspondence with the Kazakhs, and fearing that the Jungars would attack if they thought that the Russians and Kazakhs were allies.34

In 1716, besides Tauke Khan, Middle Horde rival Kaip Khan contacted Governor

Gagarin, also seeking an alliance with the Russians against the Jungars; he offered

Kazakh services in catching thieves and returning them to Tobolsk to facilitate trade.

Furthermore, Kaip Khan also offered to facilitate trade between Tobolsk and Bukhara; a profitable trade route with which Kaip could reinforce his own authority as a rival khan.35

Governor Gagarin politely thanked him but avoided an alliance. This time, in order to get a better sense of with whom he was dealing, Gagarin asked Kaip Khan when and where he intended to fight the Jungars and how strong the Kazakhs were, and whether

Kaip Khan had any other khans to whom he answered.36 The Russians would spend

32 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 16.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 17.

35 Ibid., 18.

36 Ibid., 20.

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many years trying to figure out who really ruled the Kazakhs and whether they were actually dealing with credible interlocutors with sufficient authority.37

In 1717, the Kazakhs fought the Jungars at the Ayaguz River on the eastern steppe and lost.38 Kaip Khan wrote to Russian officials in 1718 after he had lost to the

Jungars, again noting that the Russians wanted Lake Yamish, again asking for an alliance with the Russians against the Jungars.39 He did not, however, ask for Russian protection in the form of poddanstvo. Indicating that the Kazakhs under Kaip Khan were not fleeing

Jungar aggression, he proudly noted that he was currently occupying land that once belonged to the Jungars.40 The Russians sent an envoy to Kaip Khan’s Kazakhs in 1718 to find out what happened, and heard several versions.41 Suffice it to say, the Kazakh defeat by the Jungars at the Battle of Ayaguz River in 1717 was largely the result of rivalries among the Kazakhs. The alliance between the Middle Horde’s Kaip Khan and the Junior Horde’s Abu’l-Khayr Khan against the Jungars had apparently collapsed during the battle, and by 1718 both khans sought Russian friendship and alliance in

37 Wolfgang Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia, The Great Steppe And Iran, 1700-1750," in Shifts and Drifts in Nomad-Sedentary Relations, ed. Stefan Leder Et Al (Wiesbaden: 2005), 188. While Kaip Khan is said to have ruled the Middle Horde between 1715 and 1718 in many current history books, Kaip Khan actually was a rival to Tauke Khan and ruled his own group of several Middle Horde tribes and one Little Horde tribe around the Syr Darya. Both Tuake Khan and Kaip Khan died in 1718.

38 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 21.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 24.

41 Ibid., 22.

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reinforcing their own authority by securing trade routes and fighting the Jungars separately.42

In the meantime, the Russians were building more defensive fortresses along the

Irtysh River at (1716) and Semipalatinsk (1718) to establish a boundary with the

Jungars and points of trade with them. By 1719, Peter the Great sent Major General

Likharev down the Irtysh River again, reaching further east into Jungar territory to Lake

Zaysan towards the current border between Kazakhstan and China.43 He was, however, soon forced to retreat due to sickness and fear of Jungar attack when the Jungars returned to the area in their seasonal migration. Despite the fact that the Jungars were already fighting the Qing Dynasty on two fronts at this time, they approached Likharev with a force of 20,000 men and forced him to return to Tobolsk in 1720.44 Even though the

Jungars fought both the Russians and the Qing on three separate fronts in 1720, the

Russians still lost. By 1721, after the Jungars had lost to the Qing, they even briefly appealed to the Russians for poddanstvo.45

Thus far, the various Kazakh leaders were not interested in Russian poddanstvo but rather an alliance with Russia, or any other state, against the Jungars as part of their ongoing conflict with them for pasturage and dominance on the steppe as Inner-Asian

42 Ibid., 23.

43 Strong, "Russian Relations With Khiva, Bukhara, And Kokand," 6.

44 Rene Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, 1939, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 532. The fortress of Ust-Kamenogorsk (current Oskemen) was built in 1720 on the Irtysh River after Likharev’s retreat.

45 V.A. Moiseev, ed., Russko-Dzhungarskie otnosheniia (konetz XVII-60e gg XVII vv) Dokumenty i izvlecheniia (Barnaul: Azbuka, 2006), 25-26.

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nomads. The Russians, however, repeatedly chose to avoid conflict with the Jungars as the most powerful force in the region, and engaged with the Kazakhs as a way of simply managing them, politely deflecting suggestions of an alliance with them, and instead offering poddanstvo to the Jungars in the same way they had offered it to the western

Mongol Kalmyks on the Volga River. Largely as a product of their own strained relationship with the Jungars, the Russians built eleven defensive fortresses along the

Irtysh River between 1716 and 1756, 33 redoubts, and 42 beacons, all designed to fend the Jungars off and trade at designated places. The Siberian Cossacks were officially organized as a military unit in 1745, transferring Russian subjects from Tobolsk, Tara and Tiumen to the Irtysh line of fortresses and turning them into Cossacks, as a reaction to the Jungars. 46 It would be from the Irtysh Fortified Line, known later as the

“Siberian Line,” that the Russians would eventually take the eastern part of the Kazakh

Steppe.

The Caspian Connection

Peter the Great hoped meet Russia’s own growing economic demand as a new modernizing state, and to bypass Central Asian trading intermediaries for Persian and

Indian goods by establishing a trading colony on the western and southern shores of the

Caspian Sea in a similar fashion to the British East India Trading Company.47 During

46 Albert Seaton, The Horsemen of the Steppes: The Story of the Cossacks (London: Bodley Head, 1985), 177.

47 Muriel Atkin, "Russian Expansion in the Caucasus to 1813," in Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, ed. Michael Rywkin (London: Mansell Publishing, Ltd., 1988), 148; Scott Levi, "India, Russia, And The Eighteenth Century Transformation Of Central Asian Caravan Trade," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999), 533.

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Peter the Great’s attempts to establish these trading posts as the declining Safavid Empire in Iran was being invaded by Afghans in 1722, he concluded that it was necessary for both the Jungars and the Kazakhs to come under Russian poddanstvo so Russia could trade with the rest of Asia as well. Perhaps his attention turned to the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea as losses in Daghestan mounted, with more than 100,000 Russians dying from rampant illness in the Caspian lowlands between 1722 and 1735.48 Peter the Great reportedly told his subordinates, “even though the Kazakhs are nomadic and unreliable people, they are both the key and the gates to all of Asia,” and sent envoys to both the

Kazakhs and the Jungars at this time.49

The man who would later become Russia’s envoy to the Kazakh Junior Horde,

Aleksei Ivanovich Tevkelev (Kutlu Mehmed Tefkilev) claimed that Peter the Great spoke of the importance of even nominally incorporating the Kazakhs while he was on his campaign to take the shores of the Caspian sea, “If this Horde does not desire to be truly subject to Russia, then . . . try notwithstanding the great cost, even if it reaches a million, to see that they bind themselves over to the protection of the Russian Empire, even if only on paper.”50 Until the brief conquest of the western and southern shores of the

48 Atkin, “Russian Expansion,” 151.

49 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 150; Levi notes a “policy change” in the early eighteenth-century that led to a Russian commercial focus from Caspian-based Astrakhan trade to overland trade traversing Central Asia for Indian goods, but does not explain why. Scott Levi, "India, Russia, and the Eighteenth Century Transformation of Central Asian Caravan Trade," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999), 533.

50 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria , 44. Tevkelev could have retrospectively claimed that even Peter the Great supported the superficial poddanstvo that he had acquired from the Little Horde Kazakhs as a way to justify himself against critics.

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Caspian Sea, when increased prospects of trade with Asia became more of a possibility in the 1720s and 1730s, Russia probably had negligible use for Junior Horde Kazakhs other than as another group of Inner-Asian nomadic peoples to be managed on its border.

Kazakhs Lose the Syr Darya Cities Again

The Jungar attack on the Kazakhs in 1723, known as the “Barefooted Flight,”

“Great Calamity,” or “Great Retreat” (Aqtaban Shubirindi), is widely considered by scholars of Kazakh history to be a major turning point in Kazakh history, a milestone in the formation of the Kazakh nation, and the primary event that drove the Kazakhs into the arms of the Russians, either because Russian poddanstvo was the “lesser evil,” or because it was the progressive, wise choice to make.51 The Jungar attack on the Kazakhs took place in the spring, somewhere in the Syr Darya valley, forcing the Kazakhs to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs, prompting mass starvation and death.52 In addition to two-thirds of the population of Tashkent and Turkistan reportedly being killed, about a third of the Kazakh population reportedly died, and about half of Kazakh-claimed

51 Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 94; Michael Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography of the Bare-footed Flight: Dynamics of a National History," (master's thesis, Indiana University, 2011), 6; and Ch. Valikhanov and M. Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Darya, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865), 295.

52 Chahryar Adle, Irfan Habib, and Karl Baipakov, eds., History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. V, Development in Contrast: From the mid-16th Century to the Mid- 19th Century, (Unesco, 2003), 98.

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territory was lost.53 Nevertheless, given that the Jungars and Kazakhs fought so often for so many years, and their fights were often quite brutal, it is hard to know or compare how devastating this particular battle was, keep accurate statistics, or know how widespread it truly was.

The Russians wanted no war with the well-armed Jungars and actively worked on maintaining a peaceful, albeit strained, relationship with them. They were also busy fighting Iran on the western and southern coasts of the Caspian Sea. It would be hard to imagine how the Russians could have protected the Kazakhs from the Jungars when, as

Gagarin’s correspondence with St. Petersburg clearly illustrated, the Russians feared the

Jungars themselves, and had lost to them in the past.54 During many of the Kazakh’s battles with the Jungars in the early eighteenth century, the Russian envoys were encamped on the Jungar side, trying to negotiate with them, not the Kazakhs. After

Bukhholtz’s defeat in 1716, Russia reached out to the Jungars in 1717, and sent a

Tobolsk nobleman named Velianov to migrate with the Jungars for a year. While 1717 was the same year that the Kazakhs lost to the Jungars at Ayaguz River, there seems to be no recognition of this battle as an important event from Velianov’s time with the Jungars.

A Cossack emissary, Ivan Cheredov, was sent in 1719, around the same time as

Likharev’s failed expedition to Lake Zaysan. Captain Ivan Unkovskii visited the Jungars

53 G. Kan, Istoriia Kazakhstana: Uchebnik dlia vuzov (Almaty: Almatykitap, 2005), 84; and Didar Kassymova, Zhanat Kundakbayeva, and Ustina Markus, eds., Historical Dictionary of Kazakhstan (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Pres, 2012), 86.

54 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia. 17

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in 1722 on the southern bank of the Ili River and stayed with them until the fall of 1723 with no known report of any major Jungar victories over the Kazakhs at this time either.55

Fig. 6. Kazakh Cemetery near the Syr Darya, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00114 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 42, no. 114))

Unkovskii’s meeting with Jungar leader Tsewang Rabdan in 1722 is particularly interesting. Unkovskii explained to the Jungars that Russian fortresses were not intended to make war on the Jungars, but to search for ore and mines, offering to share the gains

55 V.V. Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, Vol. 1, trans. V. Minorsky and T. Minorsky (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1962). 162-163; Ivan Unkovskii, Posol'stvo k Ziungarskomu Khun-Taichzhi Tsievan Rabtanu kapitana ot artillerii Ivana Unkovskogo i putevoi zhurnal ego za 1722-1724 gody, ed. N.Ev. Veselovskii (St. Peterburg: 1887).

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from such activities with the Jungars, and offered the Jungars Russian poddanstvo just as they had given it to the their western Mongol brethren, the Volga Kalmyks. Tsewang

Rabdan, in return, asked for Russian help in subduing the eastern Khalkha Mongols just as they had helped the Volga Kalmyks defeat their neighbors.56 Ultimately, the death of

Qing Emperor Kangxi in 1722, and the Jungars’ subsequent truce with the Qing, removed the need for Russian assistance, assuming the Russians were capable of providing it.

Hancock-Parmer’s research on the historiography of the 1723 “Barefooted Flight” convincingly argues that the 1723 Jungar attack on the Kazakhs has been exaggerated in its importance.57 While the Jungar attack was devastating, it looked like many other

Jungar attacks going back to the seventeenth century, and the Kazakhs gave as good as they got. Russian emissary Captain Unkovskii was at the Jungars’ main camp at Kulja on the Ili River between 1722 and 1723 as a witness to these events and reported in June,

1723:

It is noted that the troops of the Kontayshi [Jungar leader] have smashed the Kazakh Horde. . . Besides that, . . .last year, the Kontayshi sent his son Shuno Daba against the Kazakh Horde; and now has come with the news that they have conquered three towns in his name and taken 1000 families of Kazakhs. They are expected in camp shortly and the cities that succumbed were Tashkent, Sayram, and Kharamurt. [emphasis added]58

Based on this, the Jungar attacks most likely started up again earlier than 1723, perhaps

1722, while Russian envoy Captain Unkovskii was negotiating with Tsewang Rabdan.59

56 Perdue, China Marches West. 225

57 Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography Of The Bare-footed Flight,” 45.

58 Ibid., 22.

59 Ibid., 23.

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Moreover, a Swedish prisoner of war who had been exiled to Tobolsk and later seized by the Jungars, Johan Gustav Renat, later reported to the Swedish government that he had helped the Jungars by forging cannons and fighting the Qing, never mentioned the

Kazakhs as a major foe.60 Far from a deep wound inflicted against a united Kazakh people, Hancock-Parmer claims that the Kazakhs who lived in the north and west of Syr

Darya were relatively unaffected, and that the Kazakhs of the Greater Horde who were already subjects of the Jungars likely participated in the Jungar attack against other

Kazakhs for their share of the loot.61

The term “Barefooted Flight” and the characterization of this massacre as the purportedly seminal event in Kazakh history only materialized under early Soviet historian Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev in the 1920s, as he and his successors attempted to explain why the Kazakhs sought Russian poddanstvo afterwards. Russian imperial historian M.I. Krasovskii in the 1860s was ambivalent regarding exactly when the

Kazakhs turned to Russia for help, viewing the general time between the death of Tauke

Khan in 1718 and the Jungars taking Turkistan in 1723 as a turning point in Kazakh history towards Russia.62 Russian imperial historian M.A. Terentiev, writing in the late nineteenth century, claimed that the Kazakhs turned to Russia after 1718 and did not single out the “Barefooted Flight” of 1723.63 While Russian historian M. Galkin claimed

60 Ibid., 21.

61 Ibid., 45.

62 M.I. Krasovskii, Materialy dlia Geografii i statistiki Rossii, sobrannye ofitserami generalnago shtaba, Oblast' Sibirskikh Kirgizov (Sanktpetersburg: General Shtab, 1868), 47.

63 M.A. Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1-2, (St. Petersburg: 1876), 16; and Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography of the Bare-footed Flight,”36.

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in 1865 that Abu’l-Khayr lost Turkistan in 1723 (as opposed to the other cities), this just meant that the Greater Horde Kazakhs were left to live under the Jungars alone again as in years past, as the Junior and Middle Horde Kazakhs moved north.64

The Kazakhs at this time were already weak. Tauke Khan’s son Shah

Muhammad (Semeke) took over Turkistan after Tauke’s death in 1718, but the right to control this town was conferred upon him by the Khan of Bukhara. Moreover, the Khan of Bukhara pledged to ally with Shah Muhammad to fight the Jungars.65 Shah

Muhammad Khan had become a vassal of the Khan of Bukhara, who intervened at this time and adjudicated inter-Kazakh disputes around the Syr Darya.66 The Kazakhs, in a weakened position, would later turn to other powerful neighbors as vassals besides

Bukhara for protection and assistance to restore their towns on the Syr Darya.

Nevertheless, the Kazakh loss of the Syr Darya cities to the Jungars yet again was an economic blow to the particular Kazakhs who had ruled them, but then they took the towns along the Syr Darya back. While the Kazakhs had controlled and taxed these cities for many generations, it is unclear how the sedentary inhabitants felt about them as rulers who demanded grain taxes from them. The Jungars, for example, referred to themselves as liberators of these cities. The Jungar ambassador to Bukhara at the time claimed that the Jungars had, “opened the gates of relief [from Kazakh oppression] for

64 M. Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska ob Istoricheskikh Pravakh Rossii na Kokandskie Goroda Turkestan i Tashkent, "Russkii Vestnik" 1865, T 58," in Tsarskaia Kolonizatsia v Kazakhstane (po materialam russkoi periodicheskoi pechati XIX veka), ed. F.M. Orazaev (Almaty: Rauan, 2005), 101.

65 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 653; and Holzwarth, "Relations Between Uzbek Central Asia,”189. Howorth claims that Little Horde Khan Abu’l-Khayr lived in Turkistan until 1723.

66 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 190.

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the khojas, notables, commoners, and poor of Tashkent and Turkistan.”67 Then again, any ruler over these cities would have demanded some form of tax.

While there is great debate over whether the eighteenth century was a time of economic decline in Mawarannahr and on the Kazakh Steppe, and why it happened, trade ebbed and flowed in the region for many different reasons that had little to do with direct sea routes diverting overland east-west trade from Asia to Europe.68 As Scott Levi points out, the region in eighteenth century was responding to changing global economic trends and undergoing a process of re-alignment that intensified economic economic activity in some areas and marginalized others.69 Far from being marginalized by European sea- routes, between 1556 and 1718, Bukharans supplied Russia mostly with cotton and silk textiles and dyes, suggesting a thriving trade with India via Central Asia and a strong motive for Russia to secure direct trade routes to these markets.70 North-south trade -- particularly in horses--thrived as well, contributing to the rise of the in

Afghanistan. 71 Muscovy’s recent border and trade treaty with the Qing Dynasty at

Nerchinsk in 1689, redirected Muscovy/Russian-Qing trade (particularly for tea) through

67 Ibid., 197.

68 James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and the Empire in Qing Central Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

69 Scott Levi, "India, Russia, and the Eighteenth Century Transformation of Central Asian Caravan Trade," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999), 522.

70 Ibid., 533.

71 Jos J.L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c 1710-1780 (Leiden: E.j. Brill, 1995). Gommans argues that the increased importance of the north-south trade at this time – particularly in horses – also led to the rise of the Duranni Empire in what is now , southeastern (), , and southeastern Iran (Baluchistan).

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Siberia away from Kazakh or Jungar territories. The Khanate of Kokand would later rise in power in the eighteenth century due to its trade with the Qing.

These shifting trade routes in the eighteenth century affected the ability of khans on the Kazakh Steppe and in Mawarannahr, who depended upon trade to redistribute wealth and maintain power, to keep their authority, forcing them to adjust and compete with rivals who had benefitted from these changing routes.72 Perhaps the increased importance of north-south trade routes in the region, as the east-west routes via Iran declined after the Safavid Empire fell in 1722, contributed to the increased number of rival Kazakh khans. Scattered by the Jungar invasions of the early eighteenth century, but still benefitting from north-south trade on the Kazakh Steppe to escort, tax and sell horses, the number of Kazakh khans steadily increased: one around 1700, at least two around 1709-1723, and five to six in 1731.73

Events in the eighteenth century forced Central Asian markets to adjust and evolve. With the Kazakh-Jungar fighting, caravan routes were blocked to the northeast

Kazakh Steppe. The collapse of the Safavid Empire in Iran, and subsequent disorder caused by Ottoman and Afghan invasions as well as Turkmen raids of Iran, cut off trade routes to the west of Mawarannahr as well. Even as north-south trade continued, when trade westward came to a halt because of Iran’s turmoil, the Khanate of Bukhara suffered

72 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 191.

73 Ibid.; While Levi’s analysis that eighteenth century trade in the region re- aligned and circumvented previous trading centers is astute, he has not fully considered the role of Kazakhs. Levi erroneously claims that establishment of Russian trading forts throughout southern Siberia did little to foster economic growth among the Kazakhs, that the Russians were not interested in trading with Kazakhs, and that the Kazakhs benefitted little from trading caravans crossing their territories on the steppe. Scott Levi, "India, Russia, and the Eighteenth Century Transformation of Central Asian Caravan Trade," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999), 537.

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a financial crisis.74 Moreover, the Bukharan city of Samarkand rose up and broke off to form its own khanate in 1722 as well. The Jungar attack on the Kazakhs and the sudden influx of Kazakh refugee-invaders compounded Bukhara’s woes.75

The Jungar attack forced the Greater Horde Kazakhs out of Tashkent to Khujand in the Ferghana valley (now Tajikistan); the Middle Horde Kazakhs fled to the new

Khanate of Samarkand, and the Junior Horde Kazakhs moved to Khiva and Bukhara.76

The Kazakhs were destabilized and suffered for a long time after the Jungar attack, prompting them to loot and raid their neighbors in Mawarannahr to compensate for their losses. Cartographer Ivan Kirilov noted in a memorandum from his Orenburg Expedition in 1734 that Bukhara had been destroyed by Kazakhs around 1729, inducing starvation and extreme hardship there.77 Russian envoy Florio Beneveni, who stayed in Bukhara from 1721 to 1725 in an unsuccessful attempt to engage with the Khan of Bukhara, noted the arrival of a Jungar ambassador and the beginning of a Bukharan-Jungar alliance against the Samarkand- Kazakh alliance. The khan of Bukhara offered tribute from both

Samarkand and if the Jungars would defeat the Kazakh Rajab Khan in

Samarkand.78

74 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 191.

75 Ibid.

76 Mambet Qoidelgiev, Istoriia Kazakhstana v Russkikh Istochnikakh (Almaty: Daik Press, 2005),170-171.

77 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,”189, 206.

78 Nicola Di Cosmo, "A Russian Envoy to Khiva: The Diary of Florio Beneveni," XXVIII Permanent International Altaistic Conference (1985), 88.

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The Kazakhs allied with the new Samarkand Khanate against the Bukhara when they were asked for help, but then quickly overran the place and devastated the sedentary agricultural areas.79 In 1727, the Khan of Bukhara appealed to the Jungars to come back and attack the Kazakhs in Mawarannahr, under the command of a Bukharan amanat hostage living in the Jungar court.80 The Kazakhs and nomadic Uzbeks besieged

Bukhara for two months in 1727-1728, demanding ransom, to the point where it was claimed that the inhabitants of Bukhara were “compelled to eat human flesh.” 81 The

Kazakhs left Mawarannahr, looting and pillaging to resupply themselves for their steppe life, after the khan of Samarkand died and the Samarkand khanate was re-absorbed by

Bukhara in 1728. The Kazakhs in the southern Kazakh Steppe tried to compensate for the loss of their access to urban and agricultural centers on the Syr Darya by moving to the Khanate of Khiva. Kazakh Chingissid khans would rule Khiva in a nearly unbroken chain of succession from 1727 until 1758.82 Other Kazakhs turned to Russia instead.

Large groups of Kazakhs moved north and west towards the , Ural, Ilek, Or, and Ui rivers around this time, putting them into conflict with the , Kalmyks,

Bashkirs, and Russians. In 1725, the Russian governor of Ufa reported that, “The

Kazakhs are arriving on the Ilek with their wives and children in great numbers, and the

79 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 194. Kazakh “help” in this regard earned them the sobriquet of “hypocritical Kazakhs” in Bukharan chronicles from then on. Both the Kazakhs and nomadic Uzbek tribes engaged in the fighting between Samarkand and Bukhara, but the Kazakhs were later remembered as the worst offenders.

80 Ibid., 197.

81 Ibid., 198.

82 Ibid.

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Kontaisha [Jungar ruler] has smashed them, the Karakalpaks and the Kazakhs, and has taken two towns [Tashkent and Turkistan] from them, and …has cut many of them off from their habitations and has taken many into captivity.”83 Unlike the 1680s, when the

Jungars took the cities of the Syr Darya, annihilated and re-located entire settlements of agriculturalists, and drove out the Kazakhs, this time there were more sources, albeit sparse, to chronicle that it had happened.

“We Don’t Need You, Steppe Beasts”:

Junior Horde Abu’l-Khayr Khan & Russian Poddanstvo

Amidst this turmoil among the Kazakhs, Junior Horde khan Abu’l-Khayr asked the Russian government in 1726 for permission for his people to cross the Yaik River in the north Caspian region – as the Kazakhs had attempted for many years – and claimed he wanted to live in peace with Russian subjects, but was denied yet again.84 The

Kazakhs had been fighting for that region north of the Caspian sea for many years, first with the Nogays, who had inhabited it in the sixteenth century, and then with the

Kalmyks who had arrived in the seventeenth century. The loss of the Syr Darya region by some of the Kazakhs to the Jungars made it all the more important that Abu’l-Khayr’s

Kazakhs move further north and west for sufficient pasturage and access to revenues from trading cities and trade routes. In his 1726 petition, Abu’l-Khayr claimed that the

Kazakhs wanted Russian protection just like the Kalmyks of the Volga when 30,000 of

83 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria , 43.

84 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 47.

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his people camped two days from the Yaik River and he asked to cross it.85 He was allied to Sultan of the Junior Horde and with Shah Muhammad Khan’s and Sultan

Barak’s factions of the Middle Horde as a sort of rump body of Kazakhs. When Abu’l-

Khayr’s appeal to Russia for access to Kalmyk lands was denied, 10,000 of his Kazakhs raided the Kalmyks in 1726 anyway.86 After a four-day shoot-out over the carcasses of their dead livestock, Abu’l-Khayr’s men returned the spoils of their raid and surrendered

60 hostages to the Kalmyks in defeat.87 While the Kalmyks’ pleas for Russian help were first cautiously rejected, when there were rumors that the Kalmyks and Kazakhs might unite in a combined raid on Russia, Russian officials offered the Kalmyks ammunition and cannons for protection against the Junior Horde Kazakhs.88

Blocked by the well-armed Kalmyks from crossing the Yaik River, what was left of the Kazakhs united once again to fight the Jungars further east.89 That same year,

1726, what was left of the independent Kazakhs fought the Jungars and prevailed.90 The

Jungar leader died in 1727, and the Jungars fell into a succession struggle. Moreover, like the Kazakhs, the Qing Dynasty took this opportunity to launch another war with the

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.; and Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 150, 189.

87 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 89.

88 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier,150.

89 Adle et al., History of Civilizations of Central Asia, 97.

90 Kushkumbayev, Voennoe delo kazakhov. 131.

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Jungars in 1728, forcing the Jungars to focus their forces on their eastern front again until

1735.91

Striking while the Jungars were weak, the Kazakhs briefly united under Abu’l-

Khayr Khan in 1729 to fight the Jungars at the Battle of Angrakai (Anraqay) in 1730, and delivered a crushing blow to the Jungars that forced many of them to flee eastwards across the Ili River, freeing a significant part of the Middle Horde from Jungar vassalage.92 While the shores of Lake Balkhash were taken by the Kazakhs under Abu’l-

Khayr Khan, the Jungars still kept much of Semirechye, the Greater Kazakh Horde, and the Syr Darya valley.93

After the Kazakh’s victory over the Jungars at Angrakai in 1730, as with their defeat at the Battle of Ayaguz further north in 1717, the alliance between the Middle and

Junior Hordes fell apart again. Each of the khans of the Middle and Junior Hordes tried

91 Ibid., 132; and Perdue, China Marches West, 168, 250. They fought on the Bulanty River in 1726. While the Jungars were embroiled in their own internal conflicts, the Russians and Qing empires took this opportunity to negotiate the Treaty of Kiakhta in 1727 to amend their 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk. The Treaty of Kiakhta defined a 2600 mile border between Eastern Siberia and the Khalkha Mongols under Qing control and promised to return each other’s runaways. This border went down the Argun River and Kerulen Rivers and included Lake Orhon, all of which are now in Mongolia, as part of Russia. Through a new trading customs point at Kiakhta, near Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, the Qing and Russian empires could trade via Khalkha eastern Mongol territory – territory that the Qing controlled – thereby giving Russian economic incentives to not support the Jungar western Mongols against the Qing.

92 The Battle of Angrakai (Anraqay) in1730 was east of Lake Balkhash in Semirechye near .

93 Adle et.al, History of Civilizations of Central Asia, 97; Moiseev, Dzhungarkoe Khanstvo, 80-81; Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 47; Levshin, Opisanie, 79; and Didar et al, Historical Dictionary of Kazakhstan, 29.

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to channel trade routes between Mawarannahr and Russia through their own territories, tp profit from trade and transit fees.94

On the heels of the Kazakh’s victory over the Jungars in 1730, it was the power struggle among the Kazakhs –not the “Jungar threat” – that drove Abu’l-Khayr into

Russian poddanstvo. Alan Bodger’s research on the historiography of Abu’l-Khayr’s request reveals a great deal of intellectual gymnastics on the part of Soviet historians to maintain the argument that there truly was a “Jungar threat” that motivated the Junior

Horde Kazakhs to voluntarily seek Russian protection at this time as the “lesser evil.”95

Moreover, through careful analysis of the primary sources and Soviet scholarship,

Bodger even found that at least one historian, V. Ya. Basin, simply changed the text of the eighteenth century Russian government documents he feigned to quote to include

Jungars as a threat.96 It is implausible that the Kazakhs under Abu’l-Khayr Khan would turn from their victory over the Jungars in 1730 to desperately seek Russian protection from immanent annihilation by the Jungars in 1731, while the Jungars were still focused on fighting the Qing Dynasty and embroiled in internal succession feuds.

Despite being refused the right to cross the Yaik River only four years previously, and despite his subsequent raid on the Russian Kalmyks, Abu’l-Khayr sent a letter directly to Empress Anna in St. Petersburg to formally petition for poddanstvo because he needed an ally.97 Even the prestige of his victory over the Jungars, and the support of

94 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 199.

95 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 46.

96 Ibid, 53.

97 N.G. Apollova, Prisoyedineniye Kazakhstana k Rossii v 40-kh godakh XVIII v (Alma-ata: 1949), 183; and Bodger, "Abulkhair,”48.

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powerful Middle Horde warriors did not suffice to win him unchallenged authority over all the Kazakhs. Unable to unite them, Abu’l-Khayr was unable to recapture the Kazakh cities of Syr Darya – the heart of Kazakh strength, religious center, burial place of their ancestors, and source of revenue.

Abu’l-Khayr’s true problem, according to Krasovskii and Bodger, was that he was not from the right Chingissid lineage.98 As previously mentioned, the Kazakhs were formed when Janibek and Kerey broke from the Uzbek Shaybanid Abu’l-Khayr Khan in

1459, by claiming a separate lineage as great-grandsons of Blue Horde Urus Khan (1364-

1397) who had briefly united the Blue and White Hordes. He was allegedly a descendant of Ordu-Ejen, the eldest son of Jochi, who was the eldest son of Chingis Khan. While the

Middle and probably Greater Horde khans claimed to be descendants of Janibek’s eldest son Jadig, the Junior Horde Khans claimed lineage from Janibek’s youngest son, Osek.99

Howorth, however, claims that Abu’l-Khayr was equally descended from Janibeg as

Tauka Khan, the last khan of all the three Kazakh hordes.100 Regardless, Abu’l-Khayr’s pretensions of becoming khan of all the Kazakhs given his allegedly junior lineage, were untenable to many of the Kazakh elite, particularly the Middle Horde’s Kaip Khan, when their alliance fell apart at the Battle of Ayaguz in 1717.

98 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 44; and Krasovskii, Materialy, 57.

99 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 44; Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995), 40. Martha Brill Olcott, however, claims that Abu’l-Khayr Khan of the Middle Horde and Shah Muhammad (Semeke) Khan of the Middle Horde were both brothers, sons of Middle Horde Khan Tauke, although she has not researched this point in depth.

100 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 653.

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The authority of a Kazakh khan was limited, elected from a broad pool of

Chingissid descendants and sultans. A khan did not necessarily have much wealth or power. All a khan had was his charisma, his ability to mediate disputes, protect his people and pastures, and raid for booty to keep his followers together; he had to rule through consultation with the strong members of his horde. 101 With lineage from a junior Chingissid branch, Albu’l Khayr, needed some outside help to strengthen his hand over the many other Kazakh contenders.

Abu’l-Khayr seems to have risen in prominence around the Kazakh defeat at

Ayaguz in 1717, after which both he and Kaip Khan separately reached out to the

Russians for an alliance representing the Kazakhs against the Jungars. From this point on, despite the Jungar threat, there seems to have been a struggle for supremacy between the Junior and Middle Hordes between Abu’l-Khayr Khan and his Middle Horde allies and Middle Horde Jadigid sultans.102

By 1730, the Russians seemed more willing to engage with the Kazakhs on the northern Kazakh Steppe regarding poddanstvo. Whereas Governor Gagarin’s rejection of an alliance with the Kazakhs in 1716 did seem to have the Jungar threat against Russia in mind, by the 1730s on the northwestern side of the Kazakh Steppe on the northern

Caspian shore near Astrakhan there was no such Jungar threat. Besides, the Kazakhs kept raiding Russia’s Kalmyk and Bashkir subjects while Russia hoped to expand to the western and southern shores of the Caspian Sea for trade. Still, Russian engagement with the Kazakhs at this time had more prosaic goals than imperial expansion. They

101 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 44.

102 Ibid., 46; and Audrey Burton, The Bukharans: A Dynastic, Diplomatic and Commercial History 1550-1702 (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 1997), 168.

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hoped for the return of Russians who had been abducted in Kazakh slave raids, hoped that their other subjects like the Bashkirs and Kalmyks would no longer be raided, and hoped that their caravans might be better protected by loyal Kazakhs as they crossed the steppe.103

The role of the Russian Empire’s envoy to the Junior Horde, Russianized Tatar

Aleksei Tevkelev, was instrumental not only in Russia’s initial relationship with the

Kazakhs, but in Russia’s entire policy towards nomads in Siberia in the eighteenth century, with his idea for the foundation of a new trading fortress called Orenburg.

Tevkelev was one of the few survivors of the disastrous Bekovich-Cherkasskii expedition to Khiva (1714-1717), and a veteran of Peter I’s short-lived campaign against the Iranians on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea in 1722.104 When Abu’l-Khayr asked for poddanstvo, the Russian response was cautious, “Although there would be no great gain, there would be no great loss either.”105 Russian officials approached a relationship with the Kazakhs in terms of Russia’s contested relationship with their immediate neighbors, the Bashkirs. While the Bashkirs had been nominally conquered in the mid-sixteenth century, they fought quite frequently in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as

103 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 49; and Perdue, China Marches West, 256. The Qing Empire, meanwhile, tried to negotiate a peace between their subjects, the eastern Mongol Khalkhas and the Jungars in 1734. The Jungars under Galdan wanted their border with the Khalkhas to be further west at the Khanggai Mountains whereas the Qing and presumably the Khalkhas wanted their border to be further east at the Irtysh River, where the Russian forts were. The Qing and Khalkhas essentially wanted the Jungars to move to the Kazakh Steppe and to pay tribute to the Qing Empire from there, a position the Jungars rejected. The Kazakhs were not part of these negotiations, but would have been deeply affected by the outcome had it been agreed upon.

104 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria , 40; and Hancock-Parmer, "Historiography of the Bare-footed Flight,” 25.

105 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 49.

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Russian runaway settlers continued to encroach upon their lands and corrupt officials exacted too many taxes.106 The Russians figured that, at the very least, sending an envoy through contested Bashkir and Kazakh lands would provide more information about those lands, and that the value of that intelligence alone would be worth the cost of the mission.107 Nevertheless, this new relationship with the Junior Horde opened up possibilities for the Russian Empire that had not previously been considered.

Abu’l-Khayr’s initial request to the Russians for poddanstvo was intended to persuade the Russians to help him. While he did not mention any Jungar threat, he claimed that he sought to live in peace with the Russians and their subjects, namely the

Bashkirs.108 Furthermore, as if the Kazakh Junior Horde’s petition for poddanstvo were not enough, Abu’l-Khayr sent the Russian envoy Tevkelev another letter proclaiming not only his loyalty and that of his people, but also that of the khans of Bukhara, Khiva, the rulers of Tashkent, Turkistan and many other nomads whom he claimed had accepted him as leader, and falsely claiming that they all wished to become Russian subjects as well.109

By the time Tevkelev arrived at Abu’l-Khayr’s camp, he discovered how much the khan had stretched the truth. Khan Abu’l-Khayr confessed that he had unilaterally petitioned for Russian poddanstvo, without consulting with the Kazakh elders or anyone from the Junior Horde, admitted that he had lied to Empress Anna, and that that his

106 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 66.

107 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 49.

108 Ibid., 48.

109 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 41.

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people did not really want to become subjects of Russia. 110 Abu’l-Khayr told Tevkelev the real reasons he wanted poddanstvo: having lost both his wife and the cities along the

Syr Darya to the Jungars, he wanted to take them back. While he had managed to secure peace with Bukhara, Khiva, and temporarily with the Kalmyks, he still needed peace with the Bashkirs, who were Russian subjects, in order to successfully attack the Jungars again. 111 Because the Bashkirs refused to make peace with him without Russian permission, he wished Russian poddanstvo to facilitate that. Abu’l-Khayr described the cities of the Syr Darya River as essential because they were the cities of his ancestors and crucial to his authority as a khan. 112

Moreover, Abu’l-Khayr wanted to change the Kazakh tradition of electing khans.

He wanted the Russians to ensure that his position as khan would become hereditary and passed down to his own children.113 Not only was he contravening tradition in his attempt to become khan of all the Kazakhs even though he descended from a junior

Chingissid lineage, he tried to centralize power within his family line as khan by making the position patrilineal and hereditary as well. These were radical changes in how the

Kazakhs organized themselves in the eighteenth century, and were not widely accepted by the Kazakh elite.

110 Ibid., 45.

111 Ibid., 49.

112 M.G. Masevich, Materialy no istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana, 11; and Terentiev, Russia and England , 21. Russian imperial historian, M.A. Terentiev also claimed that Abu’l-Khayr Khan had wanted Russia to establish a fort at the mouth of the Syr Darya from the very beginning, to help him regain the territory, defend him against his enemies, and reinforce his authority.

113 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 99.

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While Soviet scholars would later claim that Abu’l-Khayr was a progressive visionary who understood the best interests of his people in joining Russia, it would seem from Tevkelev’s report that Abu’l-Khayr sought outside assistance to pursue his own personal interests as khan and reinforce his own power at time when Kazakh custom rejected that.114 He then left it to Tevkelev to explain this new arrangement to the Kazakh elite, advising him that “The Kazakhs are a wild people,” and that they have to be

“trapped like wild animals.”115

Abu’l-Khayr’s plan won support from wealthier and influential elders and prominent warriors (batyrs) who already supported him.116 Several of them wanted

Russian poddanstvo anyway because they had trading interests with Russian subjects.117

However, a large assembly of elders turned their anger upon Abu’l-Khayr, accusing him of “leading them into ,” and threatened to kill both Khan Abu’l-Khayr and

Tevkelev.118

Abu’l-Khayr’s response to the Kazakh elders of the Junior Horde made no mention of the “Jungar threat,” nor did it appeal to the best interests of his people.

Rather, he told the elders that he had only the title of khan but no real power, like a horse

114 V. Ya. Basin, "Kazakhstan v Sisteme Vneshnei Politiki Rossii V Pervoi Polovine XVIII v," in Kazakhstan v XVI - XVIII vekakh, ed. B.S. Suleimenov (Alma-ata: 1969). 75

115 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 49-51.

116 Ibid.

117 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 51.

118 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia ,53-54.

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on the steppe without an owner, neglected and abused by all, and prey to wild beasts.119

Moreover, he wanted to live in a civilized manner, and complained – quite surprisingly for a nomad – “I live as if among animals.”120 It seemed as if he had decided to give up the hard life on the steppe as a khan from junior Chingissid lineage with no prospects for advancement, and wanted to retire in Russia by the Yaik River with a safe place for his family. The Kazakh elders were livid.

Tevkelev spoke to the increasingly incensed crowd by telling them that the

Kazakhs were insignificant compared to the might of the Russian Empire, “The Russian

Empire is in high repute among many states in the world, and it is not befitting such an illustrious Monarch to have a peace treaty with you, steppe beasts, because the Russian

Empire has no fear of the Kazakhs and not the least need of them, while the Kazakhs are in great danger from Russian subjects, the Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Yaik (Ural) Cossacks, and from the Siberian towns.”121 In contrast to Soviet historians’ claims, Tevkelev did not mention a Jungar threat.122 In an attempt to argue for his own safety while surrounded by angry Kazakhs, Tevkelev reminded them that Russia was really the Kazakhs’ greatest threat. In the end, twenty-seven Kazakh elders swore an oath of allegiance on the Quran to Empress Anna on October 10, 1731, accepting the same terms of poddanstvo that

Russia gave the Bashkirs and Kalmyks (providing amanat hostages, paying tribute, releasing Russian captives, and ensuring safe transit of caravans), and Tevkelev gave

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid., and Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 153.

122 Basin, "Kazakhstan V Sisteme Vneshnei Politiki," 83.

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them presents. Among these Kazakhs were Shah Muhammad (Semeke) Khan of the

Middle Horde, Batyr Muhamed Sultan (son of Kaip Khan), and Abu’l-Khayr’s son, Nur

Ali Sultan.123 The majority of the elders, however, did not take the oath, and trotted off threatening to kill Tevekelev.124

While Tevkelev was with Abu’l-Khayr, he was visited by the Karakalpak Kaip

(Gayib) Khan in December, 1731, who also inquired about Russian poddanstvo. The

Karakalpaks were closely related to the Kazakhs and mostly lived near the lower Syr

Darya around the Aral Sea. Once the Karakalpaks learned that they would have to send a hostage to Russia, pay tribute to Russia, and return all their Russian captives, they became hostile. Tevkelev, however, claimed he allowed them to take a special, nominal oath to simply be rid of them.125

In the 1730s, the Kazakhs in the southeastern part of the Kazakh Steppe had returned to the Syr Darya region around Turkistan and Tashkent, partly by force, and partly by accepting Jungar supremacy. This was a time of conflict on the Syr Darya, with struggles between Jungars and Kazakhs, Middle Horde and Greater Horde Kazakhs, and even Greater Horde Kazakhs among themselves when it came to ruling Tashkent and the right to exact their own share of taxes on agricultural surplus and transit goods.126 About

12,000 sedentary peoples, , from Samarkand, already devastated by years of

123 Masevich, Materialy no istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana ,20.

124 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 54.

125 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 55.

126 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 200.

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internecine fighting and Kazakh raids, migrated to the .127 The Middle

Horde further fractured into smaller parts in the 1730s as well.128

When Abu’l-Khayr swore allegiance to the Russian Empire in 1731, he offered to bring in the Middle Horde as well, perhaps as a way of claiming authority over it vis-à- vis Russia as an interlocutor. In December of 1731, both Abu’l-Khayr and Tevkelev simultaneously sent emissaries to the Middle Horde’s Shah Muhammad (Semeke) Khan proposing poddanstvo, which he accepted in 1732, but then declined and raided the

Bashkirs twice the following year.129 Shah Muhammad’s acceptance of poddanstvo at this time was probably as superficial as the Karakalpaks’. Shah Muhammad Khan sent a formal apology to Empress Anna for raiding the Bashkirs and asked for poddanstvo again, but by the time the Russians sent an envoy to formalize the deal in 1734, he had already died.130

Tevkelev spent over a year migrating with Abu’l-Khayr, down to the Aral Sea for winter and back north again in the spring. When Abu’l-Khayr asked for Russian poddanstvo, the Junior Horde had about 40,000 households, according to Russian estimates.131 The angered Kazakh elders continued to trail him, threatening to kill him, and occasionally attacking his camp. Tevkelev gave away all his money and personal

127 T.K. Beisembiev, "Farghana's Contacts with India in the 18th and 19th Centuries (according To The Khokhand Chronicles)," Journal of Asian History 28, no. 2 (1994), 125.

128 Masevich, Materialy no istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana ,11.

129 Ibid., 21; and Adle et al, History of Civilizations of Central Asia, 99.

130 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 40.

131 Masevich, Materialy no istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana,10.

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possessions that had not already been stolen by the Kazakhs to fend them off.132 His life was in danger until the moment he left the steppe in 1732. Abu’l-Khayr’s son, Er Ali

(Erali), some other notables, and a representative of a part of the Greater Horde which was not under Jungar control accompanied Tevkelev to St. Petersburg for an audience with Empress Anna.133 Shah Muhammad of the Middle Horde did not join them.134

While in St. Petersburg in 1734, Abu’l-Khayr’s son Er Ali once again reiterated his allegiance to Russia. Given the weakness of their relationship and frequent abrogation of their agreements, Abu’l-Khayr and his followers would have to repeat their oaths of allegiance to Russia several times in exchange for Russian assistance and presents. This Russian assistance, however, seemed to provoke even more disturbances among the Kazakhs.135 Despite Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s oath of poddanstvo on behalf of parts of the Junior Horde that followed him, and Shah Muhammad Khan’s even more tenuous oath of allegiance for his faction of the Middle Horde, their territories were not considered part of the Russian Empire on late-eighteenth century maps. All maps from the late eighteenth century depict the Russian border north of the Yaik River over to

Omsk, and from there to the Irtysh River and Altai Mountains. Kazakh traders in

Orenburg, Orsk, and Troitsk were charged the same tariffs as other foreign traders.136

132 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 81, 98.

133 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria , 58.

134 Masevich, ed., Materialy no istorii, 21; and Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 58. Tevkelev’s arrival in Ufa en route to St Petersburg astonished Russian officials. They had given up on his return and were preparing to ransom him from the Little Horde.

135 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 55.

136 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 32.

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Orenburg – A New City for Abu’l-Khayr Khan

While travelling with Abu’l-Khayr in 1731-1732, Tevkelev pitched the idea of the

Kazakhs trading at a new trading town. Tevkelev offered a Russian fort on the Or River where it met the Yaik River as one of the many benefits of Russian poddanstvo.137 In

Tevkelev’s report to the College of Foreign Affairs in 1732, he promoted the idea of a new town, and a way to manage the Kazakhs, to the Russian government;

First, the Kazakhs have refused to send their children of the leaders as hostages to Ufa, but one person from . . .each clan could live in the town and serve on a court for Kazakh affairs, collect tribute and send it annually to Moscow. The judges would be substitutes for political hostages, and it would be impossible for the Kazakhs to commit offenses against Russian subjects. And if this fort were built, caravans going to Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent, and Turkistan would find it more convenient because Khiva is closer to Ufa than to Astrakhan . . . and the road is very convenient, water is more abundant . . . and the dangers to merchants would not be as great because the Kazakhs themselves would serve as escorts.138

By creating a new trading fort positioned between the Kazakh Steppe and the seat of

Russian government for the Bashkirs in Ufa, and on the edge of Kalmyk territory as well, with economic incentives to cooperate though trade and escorting caravans to

Mawarannahr, and with hostages to ensure compliance, the Russians hoped to be able to tame their neighbors, Kazakhs, and economically integrate the Bashkirs in the region so that they would not need to raid each other.

Abu’l-Khayr also supported Tevkelev’s idea of a new Russian-built fortress town as a way for him to control other Kazakhs by controlling revenues derived from the trade routes there and controlling their access to it. By 1734, in a response to Empress Anna regarding why he could not control his own people, he noted, “I am not able at the

137 Bodger, "Abulkhair,” 55.

138 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 58.

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present time to pacify all the senseless Kazakhs who assault envoys or merchants . . . but as soon as the town is built I will then be able to pacify them.”139 Just as Kazakhs had already appealed to the Bukharans and Jungars for control of Syr Darya cities to reinforce their power over their own people by tapping into trade revenues and agricultural surpluses, Abu’l-Khayr needed his own town too. The Russia’s plan to build Orenburg fit within the Inner-Asian nomadic paradigm of power for the Kazakhs.

Under Peter the Great, Russia had already considered surrounding the Bashkirs and separating them from the Kazakhs in order to pacify, much as Russia had surrounded the Tatars in the sixteenth century. 140 Thus, after Tevkelev’s mission to the Junior Horde

Kazakhs and Abu’l-Khayr’s poddanstvo, cartographer Ivan Kirillov submitted an ambitious plan to the Russian Cabinet in 1734 called, “How to Retain the Kazakhs as

Russian Subjects and the Ways to Govern Them.” It suggested that Russia not only build what became Orsk and Orenburg, but find a way to incorporate the Kazakhs and

Karakalpaks around the Aral Sea into Russia and take the rest of Mawarannahr up to Iran and India:

[N]o matter how incredibly undependable [the Kazakhs and Karakalpaks] may be, it is most fortunate that Abu’l-Khayr Khan . . . wishes to have a Russian fort constructed for his protection near his territory [near the Aral Sea], and obvious gain for us which can be a base for [carrying out] our plans and through which we might with the help of God, step by step take over even Badakhshan’s wealthy lands up to the very borders of Persia and India and from there receive riches of gold, lapis lazuli, Balas rubies, and other things; and prevent our neighbor the Kontaisha [leader of the Jungars] from being strengthened. And we will be able to restrain our subjects, the Bashkirs and Volga Kalmyks, from their designs and from unification (it is necessary to fear this . . .) without the movement of great armies.141

139 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 121-122.

140 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria , 51.

141 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 60.

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To Kirillov, like builders of the Spanish Empire in the or Dutch in the East

Indies, Kazakh Junior Horde poddanstvo to the Russian Empire opened up the Kazakh

Steppe to trade in Mawarannahr and the riches of that region. Kirillov believed that access to Mawarannahr via the Kazakhs would prevent the Jungars from getting stronger and becoming even more threatening to Russia, and help contain the Bashkirs and

Kalmyks.142 Containing the Bashkirs near the Urals was particularly important in the

1720s and 1730s because the Urals region had become Russia’s most important mining and metal-processing center in the Empire, especially iron and copper works, and were vulnerable to Bashkir raids that might be tempered by a Russian alliance with the

Kazakhs.143

Even though the Russians had been disabused of the idea that the Amu Darya flowed into the Caspian Sea after the ill-fated Bekovich-Cherkasskii expedition, the

Russians still believed well into the late nineteenth century that the shallow Amu Darya and Syr Darya, which both flowed into the Aral Sea, were navigable and therefore the key to trade and conquest in Mawarannahr by analogy with rivers in Russia. Kirillov elaborated what access to Junior Horde Kazakh territory implied, “And for the convenience of commerce it is necessary to build a port on the Aral Sea . . . in the territory of Kazakhs and to install cannon in our ships and, in fact, to take possession of that sea.”144 By the 1734, it was clear that Russian control of a pacified Kazakh Steppe and peaceful relations with the Kazakhs who roamed there would allow Russia to access

142 Ibid.

143 Ibid., 48.

144 Ibid., 64.

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the Aral Sea and facilitate trade with neighboring states. Just as Abu’l-Khayr Khan wanted a city on the Syr Darya to increase his power and control over his people by prospering from overland trade revenues on the steppe, Kirillov wanted a fort on the Aral

Sea to increase trade by river in Mawarannahr with Khiva and Bukhara. Russia would spend the next 130 years trying to figure out how to do that.

While many scholars look to how the Russian imperial policymakers applied their experiences fighting Muslim mountaineers in the Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century to their conquest of the sedentary parts of Central Asia, how the Russians fought with the

Bashkirs, learned from their mistakes, and developed a policy to surround and anchor them with trading town fortresses is directly relevant to how the Russians would later approach to the Kazakhs and the Kazakh Steppe.145 Just as the Russians surrounded the

Bashkirs and separated them from the Kazakhs by establishing the forts of Orsk and

Orenburg and the Orenburg line, the Russians would attempt to do the same along the Syr

Darya, separating the Kazakhs from rival hordes, and from the predations of Khiva and

Kokand, until ultimately anchoring their control of the steppe with Tashkent.

After the audience of Junior Horde emissaries with Empress Anna in 1734,

Kirillov was promoted to the rank of State Councilor and charged with leading the

“Orenburg Expedition” to establish this new foothold along the Kazakh Steppe. Tevkelev was made his second in command, and promoted to the rank of colonel.146 On August

15, 1735, Kirillov laid the foundations of Orenburg with Abu’l-Khayr’s eldest son, Nur

145 A.S. Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand: 1868-1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

146 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 64.

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Ali Sultan, and a number of other Kazakhs at his side for a great feast and celebration.147

Building Orenburg, however, proved to be harder than anticipated when the Bashkirs rebelled. 148 From the autumn of 1735 to Kirillov’s death of tuberculosis in the spring of

1737, the Russians fought a brutal war to suppress the Bashkirs, and then many more battles throughout the rest of the century.149 By the end of the war in 1737, the Bashkirs were starving and broken. Kirillov believed that the pacification of the Bashkirs, along with the recent poddanstvo of the Kazakh Junior Horde, was all going according to his larger plan for Russia to conquer the entire region with a string of forts from Orenburg to the Aral Sea.150

Moreover, advocating a policy of “divide and conquer,” Kirillov argued it was in the empire’s interests that the Kalmyks, Kazakhs, and Bashkirs constantly fight each other, “The three Kazakh hordes are now subject to Russia and have informed us of their desire to show their loyalty by serving against the Bashkir bandits. Because Your

Majesty’s best interest will depend upon the fact that these people are always in disagreement, permit them [the Kazakhs] to attack the Bashkirs in the distant Siberian

147 Ibid., 69.

148 Ibid., 66.

149 Ibid., 72, 76, 80, 94 The Bashkirs attempted to interrupt Russian supply chains, compelled Russian forces to eat their own horses and hides, and sometimes annihilated entire detachments. Tevkelev and Kirillov, in turn, launched punitive campaigns killing thousands of Bashkirs, burning villages, executing or exiling survivors, burning hundreds of people alive, and distributing women and children to their troops (loyal Bashkirs). Some Bashkirs had resorted to “eating dogs and cats . . . and in despair . . . [were] compelled to abandon the dead.” Russian conflict with the Kazakhs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never reached this kind of brutality.

150 Ibid., 90.

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and Nogay [territories] in revenge for former injuries.”151 Even though only a small fraction of each of Kazakh horde had sought Russian poddanstvo, they would still be useful. The Kazakhs’ constant raids against the Bashkirs, to Kirillov, could finally be directed to good use.152 The Middle Horde’s Kuchuk Khan offered his help against the rebel Bashkirs in exchange for Russian support to reinforce his own power over his people, so that “the Bashkirs would be fearful of you, General [sic], and our Kazakhs would be in fear of their own khans.”153 This plan, however, backfired.

After Kirillov’s death in 1737, he was succeeded by Privy Councilor Vasily

Tatishchev, the former head of Urals Mining and Smelting Industries. When Tatishchev invited the Kazakhs to raid the last Bashkirs who were still holding out against Russian forces in 1737 – and threatening mines in the Urals – he inadvertently strengthened the

Bashkirs’ resolve to fight. They drew some of the Middle Horde Kazakhs and later the

Junior Horde’s Abu’l-Khayr Khan into an alliance sealed by marriage.154 While Abu’l-

Khayr’s support of the Bashkirs seemed at times to be equivocal, he had promised to send envoys to fetch his son Haji Ahmet who was a hostage of the Russians to become khan of the Bashkirs. Moreover, Abu’l-Khayr competed with Middle Horde to prevent Barak’s son from becoming the Bashkir khan instead. Abu’l-Khayr likely calculated that if he could not have a town on the Syr Darya to strengthen his position, he was determined to have a town of his own in Bashkir territory to serve the same purpose.

151 Ibid

152 Ibid., 33, 52.

153 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 123.

154 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 110-112.

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As he moved towards Orenburg with the Bashkirs, he drew his sword and threatened the

Russian commander of Orenburg, “This is my town and it was built for me. I will cut off the head of anyone who does not obey me.”155

Nevertheless, Abu’l-Khayr was won over by more Russian presents. Oaths of allegiance for poddanstvo were again exchanged in 1738. While the Kalmyks were engaged in helping the Russian Empire fight the Austrian and Ottoman Empires (1735-

1739), the Junior Horde Kazakhs as newly-minted Russian subjects took this opportunity to raid them, taking significant numbers of livestock and captives.156 The Russians were only partially successful in stopping Kazakh raids on Kalmyk lands across the Volga

River, but the Yaik (Ural) Cossack line of fortifications prevented the Kazakhs from driving them away completely.157

Still trying to get a city near the Syr Darya

With the Junior and Middle Horde Kazakhs on the sidelines, Bashkir revolts continued in the 1740s. Still determined to get himself a town, even if he could not have

Orenburg, Abu’l-Khayr offered to escort Russian caravans to Bukhara if Russia provided him with cannons in order to conquer Khiva, which was then already controlled by other

Kazakhs. As a clear illustration of how a Kazakh khan could interpret poddanstvo as a way to advance his own position in Inner-Asian nomadic power struggles – much like the

Jungar requests of Russia in the seventeenth century – Abu’l-Khayr asked Russian

155 Ibid., 113.

156 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 210.

157 Ibid., 219.

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officials to help him conquer Khiva by giving him detachment of Russian soldiers to serve under his command and for Russian craftsmen to build him a fortified town on the lower Syr Darya.158 Only with his own town, he argued, would he be able to address

Russian grievances over Kazakh caravan raids, by having more power to instill fear into

Kazakhs.159 Moreover, control of transit fees would reinforce his own power and ability to redistribute wealth.

Unlike their support of the Kalmyks with cannons to use against the Kazakhs, the

Russians refused to supply cannons to Abu’l-Khayr. They did, however, send a mission and a surveyor with some men to make a map of the lower Syr Darya area where a town could be built.160 The Russian officer on the mission, however, concluded that building a fort there would be unnecessary because, “Abu’l-Khayr wanted it in order to rein in his

Kazakhs, but such a fort would be of no use to Russia.”161 Frustrated that the Russians would not give him what he wanted, and forgetting about the “Jungar Threat,” Abu’l-

Khayr threatened to make an alliance with the Jungars instead.162

Meanwhile, an Iranian commander named Nadir Shah, overthrew the Safavid

Shah in 1736 and moved the Iranian capital to Mashhad in the northeast of the country.

With a state based on an economy of pillage, his heavily armed military invaded

158 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia ,75-77.

159 Ibid.

160 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 134.

161 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 159.

162 Ibid., 160; and Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia ,178-80, 182.

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Mawarannahr the following year.163 The powerful Uzbek Manghit tribe became an ally of Nadir Shah after his invasion helped them overthrow the ruler of Bukhara. When a faction of Kazakhs again invaded Bukharan territories in 1739-1740, Nadir Shah quickly moved to intervene.164 Meanwhile, Abu’l-Khayr had managed to seize Khiva in 1741 without Russian help, and became Khiva’s khan. Claiming that Khivans had attacked his subjects, however, Nadir Shah marched towards Khiva. Fearing Nadir Shah, Abu’l-

Khayr quickly fled, and left the Khivans to their own devices to defend their town.

Khiva fell after three days and Nadir Shah appointed a new governor. Soon after the

Iranians left, however, the Khivans rose up, killed the governor, and chose Abu’l-Khayr’s son, Nur Ali, as their new khan. Nur Ali, like his father, however, quickly fled Khiva upon news that Nadir Shah was sending yet another army to punish Khiva for killing his appointed governor.165

The Jungar Threat

The late 1730s and early 1740s introduced yet another wave of Jungar incursions into the Kazakh Steppe. The chaotic state of the cities of Mawarannahr in the late 1730s invited invasions not only from Nadir Shah from the southwest, but the Jungars from the northeast too. The Jungars attacked more of the Greater Horde near Tashkent, forcing some of them to flee towards Orenburg in 1739. With Jungars on the offensive and pursuing Kazakhs approaching Orenburg, Russian officials went out to meet the Jungars.

163 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 202.

164 Ibid., 204.

165 Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 137.

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Russia claimed that all Kazakhs were now Russian subjects and that all Jungar complaints about Kazakhs should be addressed to St. Petersburg. While the Jungars did not accept Russia’s claims over the Kazakhs, they had no desire to fight with Russia at this time and temporarily called off their campaign. Moreover, as in years past, the

Russian officials attempted to persuade the Jungars to enter Russian poddanstvo too. 166

This was, perhaps, one of the few times that Russia was helpful in protecting some

Kazakhs from the “Jungar threat.”

With Nadir Shah in Khiva, when the Jungars attacked both the Junior and Middle

Hordes the following year in 1740, Abu’l-Khayr temporarily sought refuge near

Orenburg. 167 Another Jungar attack occurred the following year in 1742. Abu’l-Khayr

Khan told the Russian government that he was being threatened by the Jungars. He claimed they demanded that each Kazakh sultan offer up ten hostages and tribute, and, if he refused, the Jungars would attack. Russian officials found out, however, that the

Kazakhs had provoked the Jungars by raiding Jungar caravans and attacking them while they were at war with the Qing. Abu’l-Khayr had approached the Jungars to sue for peace and become their albatu in exchange for the return to him of the two most important cities on the Syr Darya – Turkistan and Tashkent.168

The Jungars explained to Russian officials that the Kazakhs could not be trusted unless they submitted hostages. Moreover, refusing to recognize Russian pretensions of poddanstvo over the Kazakhs, the Jungars insisted that this dispute was a matter to be

166 Ibid., 136.

167 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier,164.

168 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 203, 210; and Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 163.

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resolved between the Jungars and the Kazakhs.169 Abu’l-Khayr Khan, however, in a specious attempt to explain to Russian officials his attempt to cut a deal with the Jungars, claimed that his sole goal in regaining possession of Tashkent and Turkistan was really to make them part of the Russian Empire.170

Between 1743 and 1744, relations between Abu’l-Khayr and the Russians were strained, with frequent Kazakh raids across the Volga and Russian counterattacks. He migrated in the northern regions of Khiva which was then controlled by Nadir Shah, and

Khivan officials reportedly assured him that that his son, Nur Ali, would succeed the throne at Khiva.171 However, he told Russian officials in 1745 that he was doing it for

Russian trade:

Envoys came from Khiva, who want to have my son, Nur Ali Sultan as their khan. They write to me: “The wild Turkmens and Bukhara have received military support from the . We however will only accept a Kazakh ruler. We fear that our caravans will not be able to move to the north and Russia. Your son should come.”172

Denied once again his cities on the Syr Darya, and facing a hostile faction of Kazakhs in his own Junior Horde led by warrior Janibek Batyr, Abu’l-Khayr again appealed to

Russia for help in reinforcing his own power within the Junior Horde.173

Increasingly exasperated, Abu’l-Khayr warned that, if ignored, he might push westward through the Kalmyk territory on the Volga over to the Kuban River under

169 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 163.

170 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 193-194, 202, 212.

171 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 34.

172 Holzwarth, "Relations between Uzbek Central Asia,” 199.

173 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 211-212.

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Ottoman suzerainty.174 Orenburg’s first governor, Ivan Nepliuev, dismissed Abu’l-

Khayr’s long-standing concerns and disparagingly believed that Abu’l-Khayr just wanted more presents and Russian help in his intrigues against other Kazakhs.175 Russian informants reported that Abu’l-Khayr had allegedly boasted to members of the Middle

Horde that Russia was under his sway in order to have more power among the

Kazakhs.176

Just to cover all bases, Governor Nepliuev sent another envoy to the Jungars to remind them that Abu’l-Khayr was a Russian subject.177 The Jungars complained again that the Kazakhs raided Jungar caravans to the Kalmyks, Russia, and Bukhara and raided the Jungars while they were at war with the Qing; they reiterated that taking a hostage was the only way to ensure peace with the Kazakhs. In his attempt to sue for peace with the Jungars and strike a deal for a Syr Darya city, Abu’l-Khayr had sought to exchange the son he had given to the Russians as hostage as part of his oath of poddanstvo for a less senior one.178 Besides, the Jungars asserted yet again, this was a matter between the

Jungars and the Kazakhs.179 While Russia tried to claim the Kazakhs as its subjects, and assume responsibility for their actions, Russia in the end could not control their actions and their claims of poddanstvo were irrelevant. The Russians, however, did not militarily

174 Ibid.

175 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 163.

176 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 237-48, 254-58, 276-81.

177 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier,163.

178 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia ,248, 250, 268, 273-75, 276.

179 Ibid., 220-237.

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intervene on behalf of the Kazakhs, so the Jungars could afford to dismiss Russia’s pretensions without consequences. In contrast, the Jungars recognized the western

Mongol Khalkhas’ albatu vassalage to the Qing, and had to fight the Qing as well as the

Khalkhas.180

Nepliuev prepared not for an attack against the Jungars on the Kazakhs’ behalf, but to defend Russia’s fortresses from a Jungar attack. He feared that should Kazakhs flee to Russian forts for protection on the Orenburg and Yaik (Ural) Lines, they might need reinforcements. He was well aware that Jungar forces had and could try to break through their lines. He recommended that Russian forces that had been sent to the region to reinforce Astrakhan from possible attack by Nadir Shah should remain in the region.181

Abu’l-Khayr’s power continued to deteriorate and his rivalry grew with the Junior

Horde’s Sultan Janibek Batyr. Abu’l-Khayr continued to raid Kalmyk lands across the

Volga in 1746, but suffered heavy losses in 1747. Moreover, much to Abu’l-Khayr’s chagrin, the son of Janibek Batyr became Khan of Khiva instead of Abu’l-Khayr’s son.182

Janibek Batyr’s ambitions did not stop with Khiva. Throughout the 1740s, he continued to raid Jungar-controlled Tashkent, albeit with little success.183

An exasperated Abu’l-Khayr vented his feelings to Governor Nepliuev about how disappointed he was in his relationship with Russia, and how Russia was essentially

180 Perdue, China Marches West, 149-150.

181 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 197-200.

182 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 34.

183 Hancock-Parmer, “Historiography of the Bare-footed Flight,” 28.

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failing to live up to its role as an Inner-Asian ejen, in 1747. Tevekelev was once again sent out into the steppe to mend relations. Abu’l-Khayr claimed that his own people made fun of him by pointing out the small presents that Russia had given him. While he had no cities of his own, the Iranians allegedly gave a Turkmen chief seven towns and so many presents that it required forty camels to transport them. Moreover, Abu’l-Khayr demanded access to pastures across the Yaik River, claiming, “The Kazakhs will not be parted from the Yaik until it runs dry or until the world comes to an end.”184

Nevertheless, he bitterly assured Nepliuev that despite this injustice and his poor treatment, he remained loyal. Indeed, he claimed that he steadfastly refused offers from others to leave Russia in exchange for Turkistan and Tashkent.185 The Kazakhs along the

Russian frontier, however, continued to raid and Abu’l-Khayr could or would not stop them.

Economic Incentives

Tevkelev’s reasoning behind building Orenburg for the Kazakhs in the 1730s, to provide economic incentives to influence Kazakh behavior, continued under the

Orenburg governors of the 1740s and 1750s.186 Russian officials attempted to attract and

184 Alan Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising in Russia 1773-1775,” Papers on Inner Asia, vol. 11, (Bloomington, IN: 1988), 3.

185 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 248, 269-272, 281-282, 290-292; and Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 164.

186 Under Governor Nepliuev (1742-1758), Orenburg moved to a better location further west along the Yaik (Ural) River in 1744, becoming a guberniia, a fully incorporated province within the Russian empire. Orenburg’s old location became Orsk. From Orenburg, the fortresses continued northeastward to Presnoyar on the upper Tobol and then eventually down to Omsk on the Irtysh, with wide gaps through which Kazakhs would raid at will.

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change the Kazakhs by coopting members of the Kazakh elite, allowing them to trade with the settlements along a series of fortresses called the “Orenburg Line” that connected the left bank of the Yaik River with fortified outposts from the headwaters of the river to its mouth at Guriev on the Caspian coast.187 Trade with the Kazakhs became increasingly important both to meet Russian needs, and as a means of coopting the

Kazakhs. As Kalmyk herds declined, the Russian population of Western Siberia increasingly looked to Kazakh supplies for sheep and horses.188 Initially, the Russian official approach followed the pattern established with Abu’l-Khayr: coopt the Kazakhs by strengthening a friendly khan, offering to put a detachment of Cossacks at his disposal, offering to build him a fortress to serve as winter quarters, and provide monetary compensation to the khan and his heirs.189 Over time in the eighteenth century, however, trade with all Kazakhs – not just the khans – became more important as a means to curb their raids.

Under Orenburg’s Governor Nepliuev, a secret commission was set up to study how to manage the Kazakhs. The best way to pacify the Kazakhs, according to this commission and Nepliuev, was not by force, but by allowing them to trade with Russian towns and familiarizing them to aspects of settled life. If Kazakhs were permitted to roam near the Russian frontier and if Kazakh sultans had houses built for them, then the

Kazakhs would learn how to cut and store hay for the winter for their livestock and

187 Albert Seaton, The Horsemen of the Steppes: The Story of the Cossacks (London: Bodley Head, 1985). 177

188 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 219.

189 Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia , 495, 533-34, 577, 584-85.

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discover the benefits of sedentary life.190 The Russians theorized that increased Kazakh access to grain to feed their livestock would encourage them to not migrate in the winter, make them more dependent upon houses and grain storage, and eventually make them stop raiding. Nepliuev argued that if more ordinary Kazakhs were allowed to trade with

Russia without customs tariffs, they would have an incentive to check Abu’l-Khayr’s ambitions and diminish Russia’s reliance on him.191 With an incremental approach to economic development, Russian officials sought to sedentarize the Kazakhs not by force, but by fostering economic dependency on Russia.192

While Russian officials in St. Petersburg were becoming frustrated with what they saw to be Kazakh capriciousness and began to consider more forceful measures,

Nepliuev still argued that force against the Kazakhs should be a last resort, and that persuasion to demonstrate the advantages of peace with Russia through trade was the best approach. He argued against the Foreign Ministry’s proposal to fight the Kazakhs, even if Russian officials believed that the Kazakhs were only troublemakers and of no use to the empire. Given the brutality with which Russian forces treated the Bashkirs around the same time, Nepliuev’s gradualist approach towards the Kazakhs is noteworthy.

While the Bashkirs threatened Russia’s access to mines in the Urals which supplied

Russia’s treasury, the Kazakhs did not threaten such a strategic asset. The Kazakhs were a dangerous nuisance, but manageable. Nepliuev argued that Russian borderlands were actually safer from Kazakh raids when the Kazakhs grazed their herds near the frontier.

190 Ibid., 630.

191 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 165.

192 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 220.

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It was when they planned raids against Russian settlements that the Kazakhs moved farther away. Nepluiev argued for the gradual cooptation of the Kazakhs, first by co- opting the elite, then the commoners, and finally playing the two off each other though economic dependency.193

Trade across the steppe improved in the mid-eighteenth century. Relatively safe travel allowed merchants from Bukhara, Khiva, and Kashgar to bring their goods to

Orenburg, Orsk, Yamyshev, and Semipalatinsk, along the Orenburg and Irtysh fortress lines. This uptick in trade, however, also gave the Kazakhs more to fight over among themselves for control of trade routes and control over a bigger share of trade with

Russian towns. Increased trade allowed rivals in the Junior Horde to prosper and break away from Abu’l-Khayr. Sultan Janibek Batyr controlled the southern portion of Junior

Horde territory with his son, Kaip, as the Khan of Khiva, and began to form a separate break-away khanate, likely financed by increased trade across their territory. Janibek and his son were doing exactly what Abu’l-Khayr had been trying to do since he entered

Russian poddanstvo in 1731. Abu’l-Khayr moved further southeast onto land on the Syr

Darya which was protected by powerful Middle Horde’s Sultan Barak, and was killed by

Barak in 1748.194

A City for Nur Ali Khan

After Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s murder, a new khan had to be selected. Kazakh khans did not inherit their title, but were chosen by the sultans from among men with proper

193 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 165.

194 Ibid.,166; Kireev, Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia, 392-95, 397-98, 424, 425; and Olcott, The Kazakhs, 34.

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Chingissid lineage. It was important to Nepliuev that the new khan be approved by

Empress Elizabeth. There were two main candidates: Abu’l-Khayr’s eldest son Nur Ali, and Abu’l-Khayr’s murderer, Barak. Tevkelev thought that the Kazakhs should be controlled by one strong khan and supported Barak, whereas Nepliuev argued that

Russian interests were best served if the Kazakhs remained divided, so he supported Nur

Ali. Aware that many Kazakhs of the Junior Horde preferred Sultan Barak, Tevkelev suggested that Nur Ali be given cash and a grain annuity to reinforce his power.195 Nur

Ali swore his oath of allegiance to Russian poddanstvo in 1749 and became Russia’s officially recognized khan of the Junior Horde until 1786. There were, however, briefly at least two khans of the Junior Horde at this time, with many people choosing to follow

Sultan Barak, and several increasingly independent sultans.

Nur Ali quickly ran into the same problems as his father and had no control over his people. It was under Nur Ali that the Junior Horde began to fall apart.196 Not only did Sultan Janibek Batyr control the southern portions of Junior Horde lands near the

Aral Sea and Khiva, but Nur Ali’s own brothers were increasingly independent of him as well. He could not return Russians who had been taken captive by his own Kazakhs, and could only offer to help the Russians capture fifty of his own sultans instead. Moreover, even after warning the Russians that the Kazakhs would abandon him as khan if the

Russians continued to take Kazakh pasturelands, the Russians continued to seize lands for their forts.197 In 1750, when Sultan Barak of the Middle Horde died, Junior Horde

195 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier,166.

196 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 2.

197 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 167-168.

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Kazakhs who opposed Nur Ali left to support another Middle Horde sultan, further eroding Nur Ali Khan’s power.198 Nur Ali’s control over the trade routes between

Mawarannahr was further eroded by his rivals to the south, who collected tribute from caravans crossing their expanding territories and fought with Nur Ali over this tribute, hurting trade.199

Nur Ali quarreled with Russian officials shortly after becoming khan of the Junior

Horde. He had requested that Russia send a thousand men to build a monument at his father’s gravesite. Russian officials agreed to build a suitable grave, but only if Abu’l-

Khayr’s remains were moved to a site near Orenburg, but Nur Ali Khan resisted. No monument was ever built.200

Nur Ali, like his father, also wanted to get back the Kazakh cities of the Syr Darya and was open to leaving Russia to forge an alliance with the Jungars to do so. This plan failed after his sister died, making a marriage alliance with the Jungar leader impossible.201 He was, however, willing to act like a loyal subject to Russia when it suited him. Bashkirs who had fled Russian repression of one of their many revolts, warned Nur Ali that the Kazakhs would meet a similar fate someday. Nur Ali, however,

198 Ibid.

199 Nur Ali’s rivals were Khivan Khan Kaip of the Little Horde, and Batyr Khan of the Middle Horde (son of Kaip Khan of the Middle Horde who had a falling out with Abu’l-Khayr at the Battle of Ayaguz in 1717.

200 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 35.

201 Ibid.

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ordered that the 1,500 fleeing Bashkirs be plundered, killing many, and turned the rest of them over to the Russians for a fee or redistributed them among his followers.202

The Jungar defeat by the Qing dynasty in the late 1750s changed Nur Ali’s calculus in negotiating with the Russians. Initially he supported the Jungars against the

Qing, but when it became clear that the Qing forces would win, he received envoys from them as well. He remained somewhat aloof regarding the Qing.203 He had a falling out with Governor Nepliuev’s successor, too, but unlike previous ruptures in their relationship, this time St. Petersburg feared competition with the Qing Empire over

Kazakh loyalties, and ordered the new governor to promptly apologize for any perceived injustices. With the Middle Horde already moving into former Jungar territory that the

Qing claimed, Russian officials sought to anchor the Junior Horde Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo by increasing the number of Kazakh recipients of annual stipends not only for Nur Ali, but for his increasingly powerful brothers.204

By 1762, just after Empress Catherine the Great ascended the throne, Nur Ali sent delegations to both St. Petersburg and Beijing. Although treated well, he was never given the title of khan by the Qing Dynasty.205 Nur Ali was increasingly frustrated that

Russia continued to prohibit him from crossing the Yaik River and was not interested in the houses that the Russian government built for him and his brothers in an attempt to

202 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier,168.

203 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 36.

204 Ibid.

205 Jin Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans Bestowed by the Qing Empire: The Case of Sultan Ghubaydulla in 1824," Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 68, (2010, January 01)66

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sedentarize them. The pastures across the Yaik had become increasingly important to Nur

Ali in the 1760s due to an increase in population and livestock, and because Junior Horde southern pasture lands were taken by his rival, Sultan Janibek Batyr.206 In 1765, 1766 and 1767, Russian Cossacks were dispatched in retaliation for Nur Ali’s attacks on the

Kalmyks across the Yaik River. The Kalmyks, meanwhile, weakened by their service to the Russian Empire, constant Kazakh and Bashkir raids, and increased encroachment of

Cossack and Russian settlers, left for vacated Jungar lands under the Qing in 1771. Even with the Kalmyks gone from the Yaik River area, the Junior Horde Kazakhs were denied this pasturage in favor of the Bashkirs.207

When the Pugachev Rebellion broke out in 1773, Nur Ali and the Junior Horde took advantage of the general unrest, particularly the siege of Orenburg in 1774, to raid across the Yaik again.208 Contrary to Soviet claims that the Kazakh participation in the

Pugachev Rebellion represented the solidarity of the peasants and toiling masses of the

Russian Empire, the Kazakhs of the Junior Horde raided both peaceful as well a rebellious populations during this time, stealing, murdering and seizing captives from both.209

Nur Ali played both sides, maintaining loyalty to Catherine the Great, while making empty promises to Pugachev, for which Pugachev later threatened to kill him by

206 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,”3.

207 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 37.

208 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 4.

209 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 4; and N.E. Bekmakhanova, Legenda o nevidemke (Alma-ata: 1968).

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hanging him by the ribs.210 Junior Horde attacks on Russian fortifications continued from

1773 through 1775. Pugachev’s forces attacked Kazakh auls, stealing property, livestock, and women too.211 From 1773 to 1774, the governor of Astrakhan counted

200 abductions from neighboring farms in only three months, and by the end of the rebellion, 2,700 people had been abducted and sold into slavery in Bukhara and Khiva.212

The most prominent Kazakh leader of these raids against Russian settlements was yet another rival to Nur Ali Khan, Srym Batyr.213

By late 1775, the Junior Horde Kazakhs near the Ural (Yaik) River was divided between Nur Ali and his rival cousin Dos Ali, both of whom wanted to cross the Ural

River to take former Kalmyk pasturelands. In 1775, the name of the Yaik River had been changed to Ural in reaction to the Yaik Cossacks’ support for Pugachev, and the surrounding pasturelands were awarded to the loyal Cossacks instead.214 The Russian government’s determination to keep the Kazakhs on the left bank of Ural River was intended to prevent them from threatening settlements further west or uniting with the

Nogays on the Kuban, under the Ottoman Empire with which Russia was at war. Denied permission to cross the Ural River, however, the competing factions of the Junior Horde

210 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 9; and Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 174.

211 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 14.

212 Ibid., 17, 21,

213 Ibid., 20; and M.P.Viatkin, Batyr Srym (Moscow: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1947). Middle Horde Kazakhs also did not ally with Pugachev, but benefitted from the opportunity to raid and sell fleeing rebels into slavery.

214 John P. LeDonne, "Outlines of Russian Military Administration 1762-1796: Part I: Troop Strength and Deployment," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteruropas 31, no. 3 (1983).

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increased their raids. Russian Cossacks retaliated by launching punitive expeditions against the Kazakhs, killing 470 men, women and children, capturing 200 and seizing several hundred head of livestock.215

The Middle Horde – A City for Abu’l-Muhammad Khan and Ablay Khan

Like Russia’s relations ship with Abu’l-Khayr and his faction of the Junior Horde,

Russia’s relationship with the Middle Horde was primarily with those factions that abutted Russia’s border with the steppe. Other powerful Kazakh sultans and rivals in both the Junior and Middle hordes had their own powerbases collecting protection money from caravan routes further south, near the Syr Darya. While his father, Shah Muhammad

Khan (Semeke), had briefly sworn an oath of Russian poddanstvo in 1732, the Middle

Horde’s Abu’l-Muhammad Khan initially resisted Russian poddanstvo and raided

Russia’s Bashkirs.216 After the Russians had crushed one of the many Bashkir revolts and the Jungars had just negotiated a peace treaty with the Qing, Abu’l-Muhammad and the strong Ablay Sultan turned towards Russia as an ally in 1740.

Even though Abu’l-Muhammad was the Khan of the Middle Horde, he essentially shared power with Ablay Sultan. After his death in 1771, Ablay Sultan succeeded him.

Like Abu’l-Khayr, Ablay Sultan wanted his own town with which he could trade and from which he could benefit from trade revenues and transit fees to enhance his authority over other Kazakhs. When negotiating the terms of Middle Horde poddanstvo with

Russia in 1740, Ablay Sultan urged the Russians to promote Semipalatinsk as a trading

215 Bodger, “The Kazakhs and the Pugachev Uprising,” 18, 23.

216 Olcott, The Kazakhs , 40.

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town on the Irtysh River, opening up more lucrative trade routes for the Middle Horde to serve as guides on more of their own territory.217

By 1741, the Jungars attacked both the Middle and Junior Hordes simultaneously in retaliation for Kazakh attacks while they were fighting the Qing, and took Sultan

Ablay prisoner. A Russian mission to the Jungars failed to obtain his release. The

Jungars, like many of Russia’s neighbors, did not recognize Russia’s claims of poddanstvo over the Kazakhs and preferred to negotiate only with the Kazakhs regarding this matter. The Jungars only released Ablay Sultan when Abu’l- Muhammad gave the

Jungars his son as hostage, a sign of subordination or albatu to the Jungar ejen.218

Ablay, who learned to speak the Western Mongolian dialect of the Jungars, would maintain good relations with the Jungars from then on.

The Jungars, like the Russian or Qing forces, could serve as either a threat or an ally depending on the Kazakhs’ shifting alliances. When negotiations between Junior

Horde Abu’l-Khayr and the Jungars over control over Turkistan and Tashkent broke down in 1741 and Abu’l-Khayr turned back to Russia for help, Turkistan was given by the Jungars to the Middle Horde’s Abu’l-Muhammad instead.219 In contrast to Abu’l-

Khayr, who bitterly complained to Russian officials that Russia had not given him any cities, the Middle Horde under Abu’l-Muhammad just left Russian poddanstvo and made

217 Ibid., The role of Semipalatinsk as a trading center and customs point with the Qing Empire and Mawarannahr expanded in the latter half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

218 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 163.

219 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 40. Abu’l-Muhammad Khan retired to Turkistan in 1744 and left leadership of the Middle Horde to Sultan Ablay, who lived with his tribes close to Semipalatinsk.

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a deal with the Jungars instead. The main difference between Abu’l-Khayr, Sultan

Janibek Batyr of the Junior Horde and Khan Abu’l- Muhammad of the Middle Horde was that, while the latter two could close a deal with the Iranians and Jungars regarding cities respectively, Abu’l-Khayr could not get the Russians to do the same. Russia was not living up to its role as ejen in this Inner-Asian nomadic dynamic.

Ablay Switches Allegiances

Jungar power was undermined by a succession crisis in 1746. Ablay Sultan seized the opportunity to raid Jungar lands and livestock to increase his power. The

Jungar succession struggle drove one claimant, , into becoming a vassal of the

Qing to be installed as leader of the Jungars.220 The Qing Dynasty backed Amursana with two armies of 25,000 men each to fight his rival.221 After Qing forces withdrew,

Amursana expected the Qing emperor to name him the leader of all the Jungars. Instead, in 1755, the Qianlong Emperor offered to only name him leader of one of the western

Mongol tribes as an equal with four other Mongol tribes – an insulting proposition – and one that seemed like the Kazakhs’ situation.222 Amursana rebelled.

When the Qing sent troops against Amursana, he successfully escaped into

Ablay’s territory. Qing forces drove deep into Middle Horde territory, capturing and killing many Kazakhs as well as Jungars along the way. The Qianlong Emperor feared an alliance between the Jungars and Kazakhs, and offered Ablay great rewards if he

220 Perdue, China Marches West, 274.

221 Ibid., 272.

222 Ibid., 275.

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turned Amursana over, but also threatened to annihilate every Kazakh his large army could find if he did not.223 After receiving this threat, and after it became clear that

Amursana had little hope of victory, Ablay expelled Amursana from his lands. Ablay submitted to the Qing Dynasty as a tribute-paying albatu in 1756 and promised the submission of all the Kazakhs. Other Kazakh sultans of the Middle Horde quickly followed Ablay’s example and submitted to the Qing.224 By 1757, Ablay offered the

Qing ambassador in Semipalatinsk his son as hostage, a gesture of subordination, for good measure.225

While Ablay reinforced his submission to the Qing Empire in 1757, Amursana turned to Russia for help. Viewing a relationship with Russia as a part of an Inner-Asian albatu-ejen dynamic, Amursana offered to enter Russian poddanstvo if Russia would build him a fortress between the Irtysh River and Lake Zaysan to attack the Qing. Just as Russia had refused to build a fort for Abu’l-Khayr near the Aral Sea and Syr Darya, the Russians refused to build one for Amursana too. Instead, they offered to protect

Amursana only if he agreed to resettle his people between the Volga and Ural Rivers to live with the other western Mongol tribes, the Kalmyks.226 Some Jungars actually did.227

In July 1757, Amursana, dying from smallpox, showed up at Semipalatinsk seeking refuge, and died at the age of 35 in Tobolsk. Of the roughly 600,000 Jungars

223 Ibid., 281-282.

224 Ibid., 287.

225 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 42.

226 Perdue, China Marches West, 288.

227 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, 230.

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under Amursana, forty percent reportedly died of smallpox, twenty percent fled to the

Kazakhs and Russia, and thirty percent were killed by Qing forces. Jungaria was depopulated, and was left to the Qing Empire to resettle with state-sponsored Han

Chinese peasants, Manchu banner-men (hereditary military servants of the Qing Empire),

Turkic agriculturalists from Altishahr, Dungans (Hui Chinese Muslims), exiled convicts, and Kazakhs of the Middle Horde.228 This open territory vacated by the Jungars served as a constant draw for the Kazakhs of the eastern Kazakh Steppe and Semirechye, and would significantly affect Russia’s relationship with the Middle and Greater Horde throughout the latter half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.

As the Jungars declined, Ablay’s power over the Middle Horde Kazakhs continued to grow. While many called him khan by the 1760s, he officially became khan of the entire Middle Horde in 1771 upon the death of Abu’l-Muhammad Khan, and held that title for the last ten years of his life. Ablay’s success as a khan was largely derived from his flexible loyalties to Russia, the Jungars, and the Qing, combined with his ability to play them all off against each other, in ways that Abu’l-Khayr of the Junior Horde tried but failed. With his vassalage to the Qing as the Jungars declined, Ablay became one the strongest Kazakh leaders on the steppe at the time. As he started to lose his strength, however, he turned to Russian poddanstvo once again.

Qing Inroads after the Jungar Defeat

The Qing’s conquest of the Jungars in the mid-eighteenth century changed the dynamics of relations in the region, not only between the Kazakhs and the Russians, and

228 Perdue, China Marches West, 285.

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among the Kazakh factions, but also between the sedentary cities of Mawarannahr and

Altishahr and the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes who lived around them. The disappearance of the Jungars left a vacuum that the surrounding states of region would spend the next century trying to fill, contributing to the Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe, the short-lived rise of Khanate of Kokand out of the Emirate of Bukhara, and the even shorter-lived Khanate of Kashgar in Altishahr.

The Qing Empire made inroads on the Kazakh Steppe in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Kazakh delegations travelled to Beijing to pay tribute, and received hereditary titles from the Qing court, such as khan, prince, duke, and nobleman.229 The Qianlong Emperor, in fact, seemed pleasantly surprised that the Middle

Kazakhs reached out to them from so far away: “The Kazakhs dwell more than ten thousand li [unit of measurement] away, and up until now have not sent envoys, nor have we summoned them. But now they call themselves my subject and pay tribute; this is of their own accord.”230 The Qing’s approach to the Kazakhs would therefore not demand much of them, but would not require much of the Qing in return as well.

As Jin Noda has pointed out, the Kazakhs expressed their allegiance to the Qing

Emperor within the Inner-Asian schema of the “ejen-albatu” or “master-servant” relationship, where obligations and tribute are owed to the emperor, but not necessarily as

229 Jin Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans,” 65.

230 James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and the Empire in Qing Central Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).39; Jin Noda and Onuma Takahiro, A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the Qing Dynasty, special Issue 1st ed (Tokyo: University Of Tokyo Tias Research Center For Islamic Area Studies, 2010), 97.

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controlled subjects as in a sedentary state. 231 The Qianlong Emperor explicitly did not want to govern the Middle Horde Kazakhs or force them to serve in his military banner system with his Manchu, Mongols, and Han subjects;

I will exercise only a loose-rein policy [over the Kazakhs]. As done over Vietnam, Okinawa and Thailand, we convey voice and precept of our dynasty [over the Kazakhs]. We never hope to establish a county [jun] or a prefecture (xian) in their land, nor do we seek to dispatch a governor or to post an officer. Also, unlike the Khalkha, we will never set up a Banner, or form the niru [a smaller unit of a Banner]…”232

The Middle Horde Kazakhs and the Qing were just neighbors who traded. Just as the

Russians managed the Kazakhs under their poddanstvo from a distance – even while enlisting other nomads under their poddanstvo such as the Bashkirs and Kalmyks in military campaigns – the Kazakhs’ ejen-albatu relationship with the Qing was not like that of the other vassals in the Qing Empire either. The Mongols used the same ejen- albatu terminology, and were required to pay tribute and serve in the military. The ejen- albatu system on the Kazakh Steppe was particularly relevant to the context in which the

Middle and Greater Horde asked for and received titles from the Qing emperor. 233 They were not vassals with taxes and service obligations in the Qing military; rather they gave the Qing deference, were allowed to trade, and attempted to use their relationship with the empire against their internal rivals.

231 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents, 99, 104.

232 Ibid., 98.

233 James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 73. In contrast to the Latin-derived word “tribute,” from “tributum,” that implies a heavy tax levied upon a conquered territory, the Chinese term for “tribute,” or “gong,” consists of symbolic giving of gifts representing the place from which it came, and could be of quite low value. James Millward suggests a less misleading translation of gong could be “Gifts to the Emperor” in this ritualized relationship of diplomacy and trade.

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James Millward argues that relations between the Qing and the Middle Horde were particularly important for the Qing’s campaign against the Jungars and for stabilizing their newly acquired western territories. The Qing needed a cheap and plentiful supply of horses to carry out their military objectives closer to home, and thus treated the Kazakhs more favorably than their other neighbors when it came to terms of trade.234 When diplomatic and trade relations were first established with the Middle

Horde in the 1750s, the Qianlong emperor established the nature of his approach, “We are certainly not employing this trade as a “loose reign” tactic, nor to profit at the

Kazakhs’ expense, but, rather, we hope to obtain horses at a low price. When you trade you should not be overly mean, nor need you be too compromising, but operate on the principle that both parties get a fair deal.”235 Jin Noda, however, qualifies these instructions by the Qianglong Emperor for a “loose-reign” rule of the Kazakhs as if they were one of the Qing Empire’s southeastern dependencies were intended for the

Emperor’s domestic audience, and not for the Kazakhs.236 More importantly, this “loose reign” relationship as a dependency was not how the Middle or Greater Hordes saw their relationship with the Qing Empire within the Inner-Asian ejen-albatu, master-servant, system.

The Qing did not recognize the three Kazakh hordes as “Junior,” “Middle” and

“Greater,” as Russia did. Instead, the Qing saw the Middle Horde as the “Left Horde,”

234 Millward, Beyond the Pass, 47.

235 Ibid.

236 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents,104.

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the Greater Horde as the “Right Horde” and the Junior Horde as the “West Horde.”237

Moreover, those who were considered khans by St. Petersburg were not necessarily considered khans by Beijing, and vice versa. There was considerable rivalry amongst the

Kazakhs sultans to achieve one title or another from either Russia or the Qing.238 Thus far, much of the archival evidence regarding how the Qing bestowed titles on Kazakhs sultans seems to be contradictory and indicates a haphazard process.239 In bestowing these titles, and engaging with the Kazakh elite, the Qing Dynasty sought to draw those elite closer to itself, and also helped reinforce the authority of the Kazakh elite over their own people. By recognizing different khans and sultans, the Russian and Qing empires helped the Kazakh elite in its internal struggles, thus further atomizing the Kazakhs.

Middle Horde and the Qing Empire

After the Jungar defeat, Ablay Sultan of the Middle Horde, sent a letter and a horse to the Qianlong Emperor (Ejen) in Oirat Mongolian in 1757 describing himself as the emperor’s servant (albat) and claiming that he and his followers hoped to become servants (alban) of the the Qing Dynasty forever. He was recognized by the Qing emperor and given the title of khan.240 As tribute, Ablay paid one horse or head of cattle out of every hundred and one sheep out of every thousand to Qing detachments that were

237 Ibid., 99.

238 Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans,” 66.

239 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents , 132.

240 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents ,16.

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sent annually to collect them.241 Merchants accompanied these Qing officials to barter their goods for livestock, and the Qing Empire opened its markets in Kulja and

Chuguchak for Kazakh trade as well, competing with Semipalatinsk on the Irtysh Line for trade. The Qing took their authority over the Kazakhs in what they considered to be

Qing territory fairly seriously and threatened to kill anyone making disturbances. 242

Ablay was not particularly interested in the honors that Russia offered to bestow upon him in 1760, with promises to invest him with the title of khan of the Middle Horde and give him a pension, if he agreed to send his son to Russia to live in Orenburg as a hostage. 243 Ablay already called himself khan by this time anyway even if he was not technically made khan of the entire Middle Horde until Abu’l-Muhammad’s death in

1771. Moreover, since the Qing were not committed to recognizing only one khan per

Kazakh horde, Ablay was made khan by the Qing along with Abu’l-Muhammad in the

“Left Horde.” Nevertheless, the Russian government was concerned by Ablay’s aloofness to Russian offers of poddanstvo and began to court him.

Meanwhile, Ablay focused his attention on acquiring favors from the Qing.

When he, Abu’l-Muhammad and a few other Middle Horde leaders had an audience at the Qing court in 1760, the Qianlong emperor rejected the Middle Horde’s request to take

241 Ch. Valikhanov and M. Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865), 191.

242 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 192.

243 Olcott, The Kazakhs,42.

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Jungar lands as far as the Ili River.244 The Qianlong emperor had previously rejected a

Middle Horde’s request to migrate in the Jungar’s Tarbagatai region (in current northeastern Kazakhstan between Lakes Zaysan and Ala Kul). Even though the

Qianlong Emperor appreciated the Middle Horde’s desire to pay tribute to him, he noted that the Middle Horde already had very large pasturelands and wanted them to stay on their side of the border.245

The Middle Horde violated Qing Empire’s borders frequently. Between 1760 and

1762, the Qing government established guard posts along the frontier that ran from the northwestern side of Lake Zaysan through the Tarbagatai region to the Ili River. Even though the territory of Semirechye and the lands around the Chu and Talas Rivers were beyond the line of guard posts, and they were still considered by the Qing Empire to belong to them, they were not worth vigorously defending. The Qing Empire, however, threatened to execute anyone who crossed their line of posts without permission, thereby cutting off their Kazakh alban outside their area of direct control. 246 Between 1766 and

1779, however, when Kazakhs of the Middle Horde demanded to cross the line of posts and asked for permission to permanently immigrate to the Qing side, they were often permitted and incorporated into a Kazakh niru, the smallest unit of the Qing hereditary military banner system, with the same obligations as the Qing Empire’s Mongol subjects.247 While the Qing permitted some Kazakhs to permanently live south of the

244 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Document ,111.

245 Ibid.,112. The Middle Horde Kazakhs would lay claim to land around Lake Balkhash and clash with the Greater Horde over it anyway, well into the mid-nineteenth century. 246 Ibid.,113.

247 Ibid.

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Tarbagatai region ,where they were incorporated into military units, the Kazakhs north of

Tarbagatai were kept out. Moreover, Noda and Takahiro claim that the line of guard posts north of the Tarbagatai region shifted east and west according to the summer and winter migrations of the Middle Horde just to keep them out.248

In 1762, the same year that the Junior Horde’s Nur Ali Khan sent a delegation to

Beijing and was welcomed warmly but not given a Qing title of khan, Catherine the Great offered not only Nur Ali and his rival cousin Dos Ali houses, she offered to build Ablay a house as well. The Russians gave Ablay a house and a small village opposite Fort

Petropavlovsk, but he declined to live there. He did, however, accept a Russian allowance of 7,640 pounds of grain from 1761 to 1764 as part of Russia’s sedentarization efforts. In 1764, he accepted a Russian delegation of ten farmers to teach the Kazakhs how to farm. 249

Empress Catherine II and Ablay had different visions of how to promote trade.

She was convinced that the Kazakhs would continue to be a barrier to trade as long as they were nomads. In contrast, he was not interested in settling down, but sought to facilitate trade through his control of the trade routes through his territory. Increased

Russian fortifications along the Siberian line on the Irtysh River interfered with the migration routes of the Middle Horde, and even though Russian officials pointed out at this time that these fortresses were impoverishing the Junior and Middle Hordes, the practice continued.250 A commander of the Siberian fortification line along the Irtysh

248 Ibid.,116.

249 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 42.

250 Ibid.

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River argued that this policy of impoverishing the Kazakhs and forcing them to stop migrating as their herds diminished might be for their own good, to make the Kazakhs more dependent upon hay and feed for what was left of their livestock instead of migrating with large herds. The counter-argument to that policy at the time was that increasingly impoverished Kazakhs on the Irtysh Line would be more likely to raid

Russian settlements; therefore, the Kazakhs should not actively be encouraged to settle just yet.251 It does not seem that any deliberate policy prevailed. Even if the Russians were probably not actively trying to impoverish the Kazakhs, Russian settlement on the

Irtysh River infringed upon Kazakh access to pasturage in that area and made vacant

Jungar lands even more appealing.

Kokand and the Qing Empire

The Qing defeat of the Jungars had a ripple effect in Turkestan; the people of

Andijan, Namangan, Tashkent and Kokand soon followed in becoming albatu of the

Qing emperor, at least in the minds of the Qing translators. Irdana ’s letter to the

Qianglong emperor in 1760 said, “as long as we exist, we are friendly and sincere toward the nation under the king’s protection; we never break our word.”252 Manchu translators, however, interpreted this letter to say, “We are the albatu of the Great Ejen for generations to come. We will do everything to follow [the Qing Emperor].” 253

251 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 171.

252 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents ,109.

253 Ibid.; Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 189; and Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 675.

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The towns of Chimkent, Sayram, and Tashkent were still in the hands of Kazakhs as independent city states after the Qing defeat of the Jungars, and Tashkent was under the control of the Kazakh Greater Horde.254 By 1762, however, a feud had developed between the khojas, Muslim sectarian leaders, who governed Tashkent.255 The Greater

Horde backed one khoja and the Junior Horde backed another. After one khoja killed another one, Irdana Bey (Erdeni Bek, Irdeni-bi), the leader of the Uzbek Ming tribe in

Kokand, intervened in 1765 and took Tashkent from both feuding Kazakh hordes with the help of two Kyrgyz tribes. Ablay and his Middle Horde allies saw this as an opportunity to invade as well, took Tashkent, and drove Kokandian Irdana Bey out.256

In this struggle, Ablay asked the Qianlong Emperor to send him 20,000 soldiers and cannon to attack Irdana Bey.257 Ablay’s battle against Irdana was not just about control of Tashkent and surrounding pasturelands, but also revenge for attacks against his family.258 By 1767, Irdana Bey had fled Tashkent and Ablay wanted Qing

254 L. Sobelef, Latest History of the Khanates of Bokhara and Kokand, trans. P. Mosa (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1876), 27.

255 Devin DeWeese, "Foreword," in Izlamizatsiia i sakral'nye rodoslovnye v Tsentral'noi Azii (Almaty: Daik Press, 2008), 6-33. Khoja or Khwaja, is a Persian word that means “master,” and was used in Central Asia as a title of the descendants of famous sufi saints like Ahmad Kasani, Makhdum-i A’zam, and Ahmad Yasavi, and ultimately from the family of the Pophet Muhammad. The Khojas often played, or aspired to play, ruling roles in the Mawarannahr and Altishahr.

256 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents ,119.

257 Toru Saguchi, "The Eastern Trade of the Khoqand Khanate," in Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), 24 (Tokyo: Tokyo Press, 1963), 90.

258 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents,119. Kokandian forces had killed Ablay Khan’s sworn brother, Iskandar Khan with his two younger brothers and four sons, taking his sons’ wives prisoners. Irdana Bey slit open Iskandar’s wife’s pregnant belly and killed his child.

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reinforcements and munitions to continue his siege on the fortified town of Pishkent

(between Khujand and ) where Irdana Bey had fled.259 Without any means to besiege the fortress, their war came to a standstill. When asked by Ablay Khan to intervene, the Qing court opted to stay out of this conflict and advised Ablay to reconcile,

“If you continue killing each other as before, you will never see peace! Such conduct only hurts each other.”260 While Ablay’s alliance with the Qing would help him gain access to pastures in Jungaria and more independence from Russia, it would fail him in acquiring cities in Mawarannahr.

Kyrgyz and the Qing Empire

After the Qing defeated the Jungars and sought to stabilize their borders, they issued an edict to the Kyrgyzes to urge them to submit in 1758. The Kyrgyz manaps agreed, with one Kyrgyz leader from Talas somewhat obsequiously telling Qing officials that most of the Kyrgyzes had been thinking about becoming albatu of the Great Ejen for some time but had been prevented because the Jungars were in the way.261

The following year, Kyrgyz envoys in Beijing asked the Qing court for permission to migrate to the area around Issyk-Kul. As with Ablay’s request to migrate to the Ili River, however, the Qing emperor, denied the Kyrgyz request, claiming that the land which the Kyrgyz sought had belonged to the Jungars for a long time. The response implied that it was the Qing Empire’s right to keep the Jungar lands they had conquered,

259 Toru Saguchi, "The Eastern Trade of the Khoqand Khanate," 91.

260 Noda and Takahiro, A Collection of Documents, 122.

261 Ibid., 107.

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including Issyk-Kul.262 The Russians would insert themselves into this contested territory a century later.

Ablay Khan becomes Khan Again

Upon the death of the Middle Horde’s Abu’l-Muhammad Khan in 1771, Ablay was named the khan of the Middle Horde in the holy city of Turkistan. Empress

Catherine the Great, however, refused to acknowledge Ablay as khan of the Middle

Horde, and insisted that she be approached by Ablay with a request to be named khan instead. Moreover, she claimed that since Shah Muhammed’s fleeting oath of allegiance for poddanstvo in 1732, the right to name Kazakh khans rested in St. Petersburg and not among the Kazakhs themselves.263 She attempted to treat Ablay the way she had treated the Kalmyks and Junior Horde Kazakhs, but by selecting their khans, she had undermined their legitimacy. The Qing, however, had no such pretensions and had recognized Ablay, and others in the Middle Horde who claimed to be khans, long ago.

The Russian Empire had very little control over its Kazakh neighbors. Even as it sought to govern and control them, the fractious Junior and Middle Hordes in the eighteenth century could easily trot off and find a different ejen in their ejen-albatu relationship dynamic. Despite imperial pretensions from St. Petersburg on how power and authority were recognized on the Kazakh Steppe, alliances between the Russian

Empire and the various Kazakh hordes were constantly renegotiated and contested.

262 Ibid., The land around Issyk-Kul was already occupied by the Kyrgyz Bugus tribe who were also albatu of the Qing Empire.

263 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 43.

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Neither party was capable of dominating the other nor of fully getting what it wanted in this middle ground.

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Chapter 3 -- Transitional Empire & Khanates: Russia’s Transformation from an Inner- Asian to European Empire & Changing Concepts of Modernity & Backwardness

Russians and Kazakhs were both changing in the eighteenth century as empires and nomads. Russian officials in the mid-to-late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, influenced by the principles of the Enlightenment and by the desire to be perceived as civilized and European, began to change from an Inner-Asian empire like the Qing and Iran with a long history of alliances with Inner-Asian nomads on its borders, to a self-consciously European one that sought to emulate Western empires and “civilize” its nomadic neighbors instead. The Russian official debate regarding their relationship with their Kazakh neighbors evolved in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the Russian Empire attempted to reorganize itself as a modern European state and redefine modernity and backwardness. The authority of the Kazakh khans of the Junior and Middle Hordes, meanwhile, continued to erode as they further lost access to their cities on the Syr Darya and the socio-economic power associated with controlling that region. Powerful clans within each horde continued to break off and form alliances elsewhere to compete with each other, or attempted to forge new rival alliances with

Russia, which ultimately undermined the position of khan entirely.

Russia as a “European” Empire

Empress Catherine the Great, who was heavily influenced by the French philosophe Montesquieu, attempted to selectively establish some of Montesquieu’s

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reforms promoted in his L’Esprit des lois in her 1766 Nakaz (Instructions ) to the

Legislative Committee to establish laws that would universally govern her multifaceted and immense empire, while maintaining her hold on power.1 Lest there be any confusion, Catherine declared, “Russia is a European state,” in her Nakaz as well.2

Influenced by Voltaire, and also attempting to promote the Russian Empire as a European country abroad through her correspondence with him, Catherine the Great portrayed herself as continuing Peter the Great’s legacy of modernizing and Westernizing Russia.3

Kazakhs fit within that projected image of Russia as a European Empire during the eighteenth century, not as later philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of

“noble savages” as inhabitants of the , whose innocence and purity represented an early uncorrupted mankind that was nostalgically celebrated, but as

Voltaire, Montesquieu and others portrayed Tatars – as ruthless nomads on the fringe of

Europe, who had threatened to destroy European civilization in the past, and who should be civilized by Europeans in the future.4 Joseph de Guigne’s famed Histoire des ,

Turcs et Mongols, published between 1756 and 1758, helped characterize all nomads to

Europe’s east as “savages” and “” in the Enlightenment with nothing “noble”

1 Isabel de Madariaga, "Catherine II and Enlightened Absolutism," in Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Collected Essays by Isabel de Madariaga, ed. Isabel De Madariaga (New York: Longman, 1998), 198.

2 W.F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 216.

3 de Madariaga, "Catherine II and Enlightened Absolutism," 218.

4 Larry Wolff, "Anthropological Thought in the Enlightenment," in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres, 2007), 12-14.

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about them.5 Moreover, merging all nomads east of Moscow together, Montesquieu blamed the Tatars for holding Russian civilization back. Nevertheless, Montesquieu was convinced that – despite Russia’s despotic traits –Russia’s cold climate would eventually allow Russia to re-develop as “European” once again.6

While Russian officials looked down for many years upon the Kazakhs’ pastoral nomadism as a less evolved form of human development, the philosophes of the eighteenth century, like Voltaire, who promoted education or “enlightenment” as the key to social reform and progress, gave Russian officials great hope that the Kazakhs (and

Russian peasants, serfs, etc.) would eventually develop under the tutelage of the Russian state.7 Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s Description de toute le nations de l’empire de Russie in

1776 even claimed that the Tatars (and all lumped under that generic category) would benefit from the “secure and quiet happiness” under Russian rule instead of the “caprice and despotism” of their oriental masters.8 Rather than annihilate the

Kazakhs as Qing had done to the Jungars when many had betrayed their alliances, Russia sought to attract the Kazakhs to the Russian empire to change and “enlighten” them.

5 J.G.A. Pocock, "Barbarians and the Redefinition of Europe: A Study of Gibbon's Third Volume," in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 37. The eighteenth century distinction between “noble savages” of the New World and “Tatars” of Inner- Asia has been intellectually blurred in later scholarhip comparing the Russian Empire and the United States, lumping all encounters of empires with any kind of nomad together.

6 Charles de Montesquieu, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 278, 287.

7 de Madariaga, "Catherine II and the Russian Educational System," 168-191.

8 Giulia Cecere, "Russia and Its ‘Orient’: Ethnographic Explorations of the Russian Empire," in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 203.

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Changing the Kazakhs was also necessary to Russia on a more self-interested level, to ensure the safety of trade routes to Qing Empire and Mawarannahr, with St. Petersburg preferring Kazakhs to be under Russian poddanstvo, rather than remain a band of raiding brigands on their borders or subjects of other states. A policy of courting Kazakh loyalty while trying to change them ensued.

A Kazakh alliance with Russia, however, failed to sufficiently reinforce the power of Kazakh khans over their respective peoples. Moreover, Russia’s paltry assistance undermined the khans’ power instead. Deprived of the very cities that the Kazakh khans had long wanted to secure to reinforce their own power, and the revenue streams for taxing both the sedentary populations and the traders passing through to reinforce the khan’s power, the khan’s control over his horde continued to dissolve until the khans had no power at all. Eventually in the nineteenth century, the disparate Kazakhs tribes, no longer led by khans, would no longer seek control over cities on the Syr Darya, but just attempt to access pasturelands around them instead. These Kazakhs in the mid- nineteenth century would grow to resemble the kinds of nomads that other European empires encountered in the nineteenth century. The Kazakh-Russian relationship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, is a history of the Russian

Empire and the Kazakhs failing to live up to each other’s respective expectations – of either providing cities or becoming “civilized” – as both sides transformed into different kinds of empires and nomads.

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An “Enlightened” Approach

The Russian Empire’s policy of attracting and attempting to change the Kazakhs

— which vacillated between punitive campaigns and appeasement to mitigate Kazakh raids – was often frustrating for Russian officials on the steppe. Likely looking to the

Qing’s brutal example of annihilating the Jungars further east, several local Russian military commanders suggested that the Russian Empire should just try to “destroy several tribes” or force them to leave rather than trying to please and pacify them.9

Orenburg’s first governor (1742 to 1758), Ivan Nepliuev, proposed trade and economic dependency as the primary way to handle the Kazakhs, rather than force. Nepliuev and

Orenburg Expedition members Petr Rychkov and Major-General Alexei Tevkelev insisted that a military solution against the Kazakhs was futile because they would flee, ally with other states, and then retaliate later in guerilla raids. Moreover, these Russian officials argued, the abandoned land would only become a haven for other rebels such as the Bashkirs, leaving Russia no safer.10 Besides, unlike the Qing which had the organizational capacity to dispatch 25,000 troops—many of whom were also Inner-Asian nomadic bannermen—to attack the Jungars, Russia did not have enough troops or capacity to chase and route the Kazakhs even if it had wanted to.11 Rychkov and

9 F.N.Kireev, ed., Kazakhsko-Russkie otnosheniia v XVI-XVII vekakh (Sbornik dokumentov i materialov) (Alma-ata: 1961), 574.

10 Ibid., 575.

11 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 8, 272; Nicola Di Cosmo, "State Formation & Periodization In Inner Asian History," Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999, Spring): 1-40. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 169. Russia’s chronic inability to deal with their nomadic neighbors like the Qing throughout the 18th and early 19th century calls into question Di Cosmo’s and Perdue’s theory that inner

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Tevkelev argued in 1759 that the Kazakhs were much more receptive to Russia’s purported civilizing influence than the Bashkirs and urged the Russian government to be patient with the Kazakhs until they finally “evolved” over time into civilized peoples.12

In his History of Orenburg, Rychkov even went so far as to assert that God had ordained the Russians to Christianize the barbarians and idolaters of the steppe, who were too lazy and unimaginative to “enlighten” themselves.13 While in the long run, the Russian government expected the Kazakhs to settle down and become “civilized” peoples, they were to be tolerated in the meantime, and kept weak and economically dependent upon

Russia.

The topic of driving the Kazakhs away from the Russian border was broached yet again from St. Petersburg in 1763 after Catherine the Great took the throne, and rejected yet again by Governor Nepliuev’s successor, Dmitri V. Volkov. In a letter to Catherine,

Volkov emphasized that the interests of the empire were not served by ruling over depopulated lands. He argued that the Russian empire should not follow in the footsteps of Chingis Khan, who turned productive regions into wastelands (or pasturelands), nor emulate the Spanish Empire, which bloodily conquered Central and .14

Asian nomadism ended because nomads lacked “breathing space” between the Russian and Qing empires at that time. What was true for the Qing’s relationship with inner Asian nomads was not necessarily true for Russia’s.

12 Kireev, Kazakhsko-Russkie otnosheniia, 575.

13 Colum Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment: The Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Newark: University Of Delaware Press, 2011). 109

14 Dov B. Yaroshevski, "Imperial Strategy in the Kirghiz Steppe in the Eighteenth Century," Jahbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 39, no. 2 (1991), 222.

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Russia, instead, was to govern its neighboring nomads in a more organized, enlightened, way.

The Kazakhs, meanwhile, still viewed their relationship with the Russian Empire as they would their relationships with other Inner-Asian states surrounding the Kazakh

Steppe like the Qing Empire, Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand. For many years, these states had permitted the use of pasturelands and control of cities that were nominally under their suzerainty in exchange for deference, tribute, and secure trade routes, so the Kazakhs reasonably expected Russia to do the same. This arrangement enabled the Kazakhs to control Syr Darya cities often in recent centuries, which had helped maintain their authority over other Kazakhs. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted a transitional period for both Russians and Kazakhs in redefining how they would relate to each other.

Just as the Jungars had asked Muscovy in the seventeenth century for assistance in building a fort and for a couple of thousand Cossacks to help them attack the Qing

Empire, the Kazakhs followed a similar pattern in relations with the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. As any other Inner-Asian state, they asked for assistance to build forts or take cities. The Russian Empire, however, would not play the role that was expected of it. While Tevkelev had proposed building Orenburg as a place to trade with the Kazakhs in the 1730s, it was not built for the Kazakhs to control, no matter what

Abu’l-Khayr Khan later claimed. Moreover, much to Abu’l-Khayr’s chagrin, Russia would not build him a fort on the Syr Darya, nor help him take or keep Khiva when he

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briefly claimed it. Instead, Russian officials sought to change the Kazakhs in addition to demanding their loyalty and obedience as part of their alliance.15

Orenburg’s Governor Dmitri V. Volkov once patronizingly tried to explain his theory of human development to the Junior Horde’s Nur Ali Khan in 1763. Nur Ali sought to plead his case to cross the Yaik (Ural) River, the return of Kazakh runaways, and requests for duty-free trade, all of which Russia had ignored for years. Already derided by his people as “the Russian khan,” Nur Ali hoped that the Russians might actually do something to help him.16 Governor Volkov dismissed most of Nur Ali’s concerns but granted him three years of duty-free trade. As a true acolyte of the

Enlightenment regarding the power of man and science over nature, Volkov then expanded upon how fortunate he thought Nur Ali was to be able to become more civilized and to enjoy Russia’s protection and help. The development of peoples, according to Volkov, was similar to the development of human beings: from child, to young man, and then adult. The Russian people, too, Volkov claimed, had gone through these stages and had reached their adulthood. Volkov implied that in time, if the Kazakhs

15 Perdue, China Marches West; Jin Noda and Onuma Takahiro, A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the Qing Dyansty, special Issue 1st ed (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Tias Research Center for Islamic Area Studies, 2010); and Toru Saguchi, "The Eastern Trade of the Khoqand Khanate," in Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), 24 (Tokyo: Tokyo Press, 1963). While the focus here is on how the European Enlightenment influenced Russian official thinking about the Kazakhs as the Russian Empire changed, Qing attitudes towards nomadism seemed to change in the eighteenth century as well from initially allowing the Jungars to control the cities of Altishahr and collecting tribute, to taking these cities away from nomad rule and governing them directly when these alliances proved to be unstable, and also refusing to help Middle Horde Kazakh Sultan Ablay take and tax Tashkent.

16 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 171-172.

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settled down, they would mature into adults with the parental guidance of their Russian patrons.17

Volkov’s implication that the Kazakhs were similar to children was not lost on

Nur Ali. He patiently agreed with Volkov that the Kazakhs were like small children, but argued that he could improve them much more quickly if he actually had more control over them with his own city—and he needed Russian help to do that. Returning to a strategy that had served Inner-Asian nomads well for centuries, he focused on the importance of cities in reinforcing nomadic power. Without a town or the Cossack reinforcements that both he and his father had repeatedly requested from Russia, Nur Ali argued that he was powerless to enforce Kazakh obedience.18 His relationship with the

Russia, as in centuries past, still hinged on the importance of cities and trade routes as a means of reinforcing his authority over other Kazakhs. In contrast, Russian officials, now influenced by European ideas of the modernizing state espoused by philosophes in the Enlightenment, looked at the Kazakhs and many of its other peoples as subjects in need of improvement through state guidance, ignoring the economic underpinnings of what ensured the khan’s authority. Nur Ali, like his father, was right that a fort on the

Syr Darya on key trade routes near Kazakh winter pasturelands played a significant role in governing the Kazakhs, but he would not be the one to benefit from that strategy when it was eventually enacted by the Russians in the mid-nineteenth century.

While their conflicting expectations of each other regarding cities would never be resolved, the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

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still work within the Kazakhs’ concept of alliances in the “middle ground” to jointly fight mutual enemies until the mid-nineteenth century. Both still needed each other to survive on the steppe, to reinforce the Kazakh elite’s power over other Kazakhs, defend their allies from their enemies, curb Kazakh raids on Russian settlements, and protect trade routes. As the Kazakh elite further fractured, as the position of the khan further atrophied, and as Kokand solidified its control over the Syr Darya region, the Kazakhs eventually stopped laying claim to cities on the Syr Darya in the nineteenth century as a reason for an alliance with Russia. While Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs would grow to resemble other European empires with their nomads in the late nineteenth century as Russia’s capacity as a state and perception of itself as a European empire developed, this transitional period in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries complicates any direct comparison between the Russian Empire to other

European empires during Russia’s conquest of the Kazakh Steppe. The nature and motives for initially seeking an alliance with the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century and the evolution of that relationship as both sides changed in this transitional period affected how and when the Russian Empire subsequently conquered the Kazakh

Steppe itself. 19

19 Igor Grachev and Pavel Rykin, "A European's View of Asiatic History: A Response to Willard Sunderland. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe." Forum for Anthropology and Culture, vol. 4, (2008). Although there is value in comparing France’s experience in North , Britain in South Africa, or the United States’ experience in in the nineteenth century to Russian official views of its relationship with the Kazakhs in the late nineteenth century – as Russian officials themselves often attempted – a more direct comparison in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century would be with the Qing Empire and Iran which interacted with Inner-Asian nomads instead.

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The Khan is Dead! Long Live the Khan!

While the khans of the Junior and Middle Hordes had little power in the late eighteenth century, there was no shortage of claimants to the position among the Kazakhs themselves who petitioned to Russia for support. This put Russian officials in an awkward position of trying to find a credible interlocutor who was situated in a leadership position that the Kazakhs would respect, even as the khan was less and less capable of providing his people with protection, access to pastures, and trade revenue that would win him respect. As the Kazakhs continued to fracture in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, Russian officials would experiment between recognizing different contending khans and imposing new governing institutions. Both strategies failed.

The dilemma of how to change the increasingly fractious Kazakhs into loyal

Russian subjects had captured the imagination of Empress Catherine the Great.

Catherine seems to have been intrigued with the Kazakhs and their way of life. She even wrote exoticized allegorical tales about nomads such as “A Tale of Prince Cholor” and

“A Tale of Prince Favei,” which earned her the title “The Princess of the Kirghiz-

Kaisaks” from Russian poet Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin.20 Much of her approach towards the Kazakhs was a product of the universalistic notions espoused by the

Enlightenment and a reflection of how she governed the rest of her empire. When

Catherine the Great visited Kazan in 1767, she wrote of her impressions to Voltaire

“Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my own eyes. In this city there are twenty different peoples who have no resemblance to one another. But we have to clothe them in

20 Yaroshevski, "Imperial Strategy in the Kirghiz Steppe,” 223.

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something that will be appropriate for all. There are plenty of general principles, but what about the details? It is almost a whole world that must be created, unified, and preserved.”21 An Enlightened state that reigned over all peoples of the realm was her solution. She was convinced that nomadism was the crux of what she perceived to be the Kazakhs’ developmental problem and that economic engagement with Russia would encourage them to both change their morals and sedentarize. While the Kazakhs had special privileges under Russian poddanstvo and were not forced to serve in the Russian military as others were, Catherine attempted to universalize Russian governance in other ways. As equal human beings with equal potential for development, she erroneously believed the Kazakhs could and would participate in the governing institutions established by Russia for their benefit, just as she had established other governing institutions for her other peoples. Indeed, Catherine the Great and Russian officials had as many ideas about the role of the state in developing and civilizing the Russian peasant as they had about their Kazakh nomads, if not more.22 Russian theories of economic development and enlightenment towards the Kazakhs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must be viewed within the context of Russian official thinking about developing the Russian peasant and liberating the serfs. To the Russian bureaucrat there was a lot of work to be done just about everywhere in the Russian Empire, curing the

Kazakhs of nomadism, like freeing the serfs, was just one of their many problems to

21 Michael W. Johnson, "Imperial Commission or Orthodox Mission: Nikolai Il'minskii's Work among the Tatars of Kazan, 1862-1891," (Ph.D. Diss: University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005) , 73; and Reddaway, Documents of Catherine the Great, 17-18.

22 de Madariaga, "Catherine II and Enlightened Absolutism,"; and Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment.

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address from a top-down approach through imposing new governing institutions that the population was expected to accept.

Catherine’s the Great Reforms of 1775, which reorganized the Russian Empire into fifty provinces, were implemented in Siberia in early 1780s, where the provinces were rearranged. Orenburg was put under the rule of Governor-General Baron Igelstrom

(1784 to 1790), who reported to the provincial capital in Ufa. Baron Igelstrom was a

Baltic nobleman who had served in Russia’s latest war against the Ottomans for Crimea, and had become a protégé of Catherine the Great’s favorite Prince Grigory Potemkin after he carried out Potemkin’s orders to capture the Crimean Khan Shahin Girey in

1784. Having already fought nomads loyal to the Ottomans and helped Potemkin colonize the steppe of “New Russia” in what is now eastern Ukraine, Igelstrom was sent to Ufa to handle the disintegrating Junior Horde Kazakhs. 23 Igelstrom became the architect of Russia’s failed policy towards the Kazakhs of setting up “Frontier Tribunals” for the rest of the century known as the “Igelstrom Reforms.”

Junior Horde Kazakhs Further Atomize

While no cities were ever provided to the Junior Horde Kazakhs as a result of their alliance with the Russian empire, after nearly fifty years of repeated requests,

Russian authorities in 1782 finally allowed the Kazakhs limited access to former Kalmyk pastures between the Ural and the Volga rivers. The Russians referred to lands on the west bank of the Ural River as “inside the border” and stipulated that the Kazakhs could only cross the Ural River if they had been given official permission and had paid crossing

23 John P. LeDonne, "Governors General 1772-1825, Part III: The Eastern Frontier," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 48, no. 3 (2000), 324.

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fees. The Kazakhs of the Junior Horde rejected these fees and accused Nur Ali Khan of being a Russian puppet. A terrible winter in 1783 froze Kazakh pastures, killing off much of their livestock. When the Kazakhs tried to cross the Ural River to save what was left, they were denied access by the Ural Cossacks. At this point, Srym Batyr, a rival of

Nur Ali Khan who made a name for himself raiding Russian settlements during the

Pugachev Rebellion, joined the other disaffected Junior Horde sultans and began to raid

Russian settlements again.24

After the majority of Junior Horde Kazakhs rebelled against Nur Ali Khan,

Governor-General Igelstrom became convinced that Nur Ali was no longer capable of controlling the situation. In 1785, Igelstrom established a “Frontier Council” or “Frontier

Tribunal” at Orenburg that consisted of the commander of the fort at Orenburg, two

Russian government officials, a Kazakh sultan, six noted Kazakh elders (or biis) from each tribe, and a representative from the Bashkirs and Siberian peoples who lived in the region too.25 A and new schools were built for Kazakhs in Orenburg and Troitsk as well.26 Igelstrom toyed with the idea of recognizing the facts on the ground and dividing the Junior Horde into three separate hordes with three separate khans for the three dominant tribes – Zhetiru (Semirodsk), Bayuli (Baiulin), and Alimuli (Alimul). He would have abolished the title of khan for the Junior Horde entirely.27 Igelstrom reached out directly to Srym Batyr, seven sultans, and 168 notables who had rebelled against Nur

24 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 175.

25 Alexis de Levchine, Description des hordes et des steppes des Kirghiz-Kazaks ou Kirghiz-Kaissaks, trans. Ferry De Pigny (Paris: E. Charriere, 1840), 271-274.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

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Ali, promising to forgive them if they returned their captives, stopped their raids, and once again swore an oath of allegiance for Russian poddanstvo. These Kazakh rebels, in turn, demanded that Nur Ali be removed as khan, that they be allowed to cross the Ural

River for pasturage without paying crossing fees, and that the Cossacks stop raiding them on punitive expeditions. Just as the Kazakhs raided the Cossacks, the Cossacks raided the Kazakhs, and it was difficult to assess who started these fights or to stop them. The rebellion was forcibly resolved in 1786 when Srym Batyr attacked Nur Ali Khan, seized his wives, and forced the khan to flee, thus losing his position as khan.28

The Kazakh raids on Russian settlements and caravans, however, continued. The

Junior Horde continued to implode, with some leaving to rule the Karakalpaks, others turning to Khiva, and others joining the Middle Horde. 29 Frontier Tribunals, which consisted of a president, two members and a secretary to keep records, multiplied and met regularly. A chief of each tribe and two subordinates were authorized to rule each of the tribes, and were paid salaries in money and grain. Srym Batyr, as a chief of the Bayuli tribe, sat on a Bayuli Frontier Tribunal.30 Order on the steppe, however, was not established. When war broke out with the Ottoman Empire, Srym Batyr was implicated

28 Ibid.

29 Henry H. Howorth, The History of the Mongols: From the 9th to 19th Century, vol. 2, Part II: The So-Called Tatars of Russia and Central Asia, (New York: Burt Franklin, 1880). 670-680. Nur Ali’s son, who ruled over the Karakalpaks since 1781, led a small force to fight Srym Batyr. Another faction of the Little Horde turned to the Khanate of Khiva, and chose Kaip as their khan. Another faction of the Little Horde, joined by some tribes of the Middle Horde and Vali Khan in 1787, petitioned Empress Catherine II to restore the title of khan to Nur Ali, to no avail.

30 Levchine, Description, 271-274.

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in supporting the Ottomans, Russian officials became more receptive to Junior Horde petitions to reinstate a more loyal khan.31

After Nur Ali died in 1790, his son Esim (Ishim) was chosen to be khan by the majority of Junior Horde Kazakh notables, but was deemed unacceptable by Russian authorities. Instead, Russian officials declared Nur Ali’s brother, Er Ali, khan in 1791. 32

Srym Batyr, believing that he had been promised by Governor-General Igelstrom that no heir of Abu’l-Khayr Khan would become khan, and that Russia would make direct payments to sixty-one Junior Horde notables like himself, launched another rebellion against Russia. He called a general meeting of Junior Horde Kazakhs near the mouth of the Emba River in 1791, to organize an attack on Russia, but Abu’l-Khayr’s descendants warned the Russians.33 Igelstrom’s successor, Governor Peutling, offered a 3000 ruble bounty for Srym’s head and unleashed the Cossacks on him, which exacerbated the situation.34 By 1794, Er Ali Khan had died, Governor Peutling had been replaced, and the Junior Horde Kazakhs were allowed to cross the Ural River without fees; Ishim was named khan in 1795, and a policy of conciliation and gradualist reform of the Kazakhs was reinstated as the Junior Horde disintegrated.

After Ishim Khan was assassinated by Kazakhs the following year, however,

Russian officials decided that the Junior Horde would be governed by a Frontier Tribunal again. This tribunal was composed of two representatives from each of its tribes, and

31 Ibid.

32 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 180.

33 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 679.

34 Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier, 181.

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presided over by another son of Abu’l-Khayr, Aichuvak Sultan. Baron Igelstrom was pulled out of retirement to govern Orenburg once again. He personally selected each member of the Frontier Tribunal. By 1797, however, the Junior Horde Kazakhs demanded a khan again. The two candidates were Aichuvak and Nur Ali’s son Karatai.35

The Russians backed Aichuvak, who was elected at a general meeting, and abolished the

Frontier Tribunal again in 1797. Srym Batyr fled to Khiva where his son lived, and died several years later.36

The Junior Horde Kazakhs continued to disintegrate under the aging Aichuvak

Khan. One of Nur Ali’s sons, Bukey (Bukei), asked the Governor-General of Georgia and Astrakhan, Knorring, for permission for his followers to live separately and permanently reside on the western or “inner” side of the Ural River, which had recently been abandoned by the Kalmyks. He moved with 10,000 Kazakh households from the

Junior Horde, who were mostly from Srym Batyr’s Baiulin tribe, across the Ural River in

1801 and formed what became known as the “Bukey Horde” or “Inner Horde.” He was invested with a title of khan in 1812. His son succeeded him shortly thereafter and remained khan until 1824 when the position was eliminated.37

With chaos reigning on the western Kazakh Steppe, Aichuvak and his loyal sultans took refuge in Russia and finally abdicated in 1805 due to old age and infirmity.

Aichuvak was succeeded by his son, Jantiura, who was soon assassinated by his cousins,

35 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 670-671.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

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Nur Ali’s sons.38 The Junior Horde went without a khan for two years until another son of Aichuvak, Shirgazy (Shir ), was made khan of the Junior Horde in 1812, but had little power over the Junior Horde.39 In an attempt to bolster his authority over the Junior

Horde, he appealed to the Khanate of Khiva for recognition as khan as well, paid tribute to khan of Khiva, and married one of the khan’s relatives.40 After Shirgazy Khan’s death in 1819, the Khan of Khiva named Shirgazy’s son khan of the faction of Kazakhs under

Khivan rule.41 By the 1820s and 1830s, the Junior Horde had divided into three sections, some as vassals of Khiva, and was de facto ruled by three sultans who frequently fought among themselves.42

Middle Horde Kazakhs Atomize

By 1775, the Middle Horde’s Ablay Khan’s power was waning, and he could not control a city to bolster his authority and access to resources. In an attempt to keep

Tashkent, he offered the city, with its population of 30,000 people from whom he wanted to collect taxes, as a gift to the Qing Dynasty, but the Qing rejected the offer. In 1778, he sent a subordinate to Tashkent with a forged letter and intended to persuade the

Tashkentis that the Qing Emperor himself had authorized Ablay to collect taxes anyway,

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Nikolai Nikolaevich Muraviev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva through the Country, 1819-1820, trans. P. Strahl and W.S.A. Lockhart (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1871), 122-123.

41 Ibid.

42 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 671.

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but the tactic failed. 43 Ablay’s alliance with the Qing had outlived its usefulness for both sides.

Ablay in 1777 again broached the topic of being recognized by the Russian

Empire as khan of the Middle Horde towards the end of his life. Perhaps as a way to secure his son, Vali, as khan, Ablay sought to cover all alliance options in the region and deny his rivals the opportunity to maneuver. It was not until 1778, three years before his death, that Ablay was offered a diploma from Catherine the Great, naming him as khan, as well as several gifts of honor. The elderly Ablay refused to travel to a Russian post in order to receive this title, so a Russian officer was sent to Ablay’s aul to confer the title and receive his oath of loyalty for Russian poddanstvo. He never picked up the remaining gifts that were held for him at Petropavlovsk.44 Ablay Khan died at the age of

70 and was buried in the holy city of Turkistan, which belonged to the Middle Horde.

Towards the end of his life, Ablay also faced challenges to his authority within the Middle Horde. His son, Vali, nominally succeeded him as khan but only ruled over the northernmost tribes, near Russian settlements and with Russian protection, although the Qing had recognized him as one of the khans of the “left horde” as well. 45 Vali then swore an oath of loyalty to Russian poddanstvo the following year in 1782, and was considered the last khan of the Middle Horde by the Russians.46 Only about a quarter of

43 Saguchi, "The Eastern Trade of the Khoqand Khanate,” 91.

44 Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995).

45 Jin Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans Bestowed by the Qing Empire: The Case of Sultan Ghubaydulla in 1824," Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 68, (2010), 67.

46 F.A. Brokgaus and I.A. Efron, Entsikopedicheskii Slovar, vol 9, ed. I.E. Andreevskii, K.K.Arseniev, and F.F. Petrushevskii (St. Petersburg: 1890-1907). 415, in

159

Ablay Khan’s territory of the Kazakh Middle Horde was under Russian poddanstvo after

1781, the rest was independent or subject to the Qing.

The powerful Nayman tribe, which roamed in the eastern pastures that had been taken from the Jungars, immediately seceded from the Middle Horde after Ablay’s death and elected their own khan, Abulfeiz, who was soon recognized as another khan of the

“left horde” by the Qing. Abulfeiz, however died in 1783 and the Naymans fractured into two camps.47 As the Naymans broke off from the Middle Horde to the east, the Greater

Horde, already albatu of the Qing after their Jungar overlords were defeated, moved northwards around Lake Balkhash, took more land, and carried off a great number of livestock from the Naymans.48

Not only did the Middle Horde suffer dissention between the powerful tribes as well as attacks from the Greater Horde, the Middle Horde struggled to keep control of what remained of Vali’s domains as well. After the rump Middle Horde elected Vali as

Ablay’s successor in 1782, Vali Khan sent his brother Jingis to lead an army to suppress a revolt in Middle Horde-controlled Tashkent in 1784.49 A prolonged, gruesome, and

P.P. Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Liudmila Gilmour, Colin Thomas, and Marcus Wheeler (London: Haklyut Society, 1998), 26.

47 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 650.

48 Levchine, Description , 164-165, 271-275. As will be demonstrated later in this dissertion, the Greater Horde tribes and Nayman tribe of the Middle Horde would continue to fight over vacated Jungar lands well into the nineteenth century.

49 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 650.

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vengeful war between the Middle Horde and the Kyrgyzes was also inherited from Ablay as well.50

Vali Khan’s relationship with the Qing and Russian Empires was turbulent. While he still sent missions to the Qing, they were less frequent than those sent by his father.51

Vali was unhappy that his petition to Russia to restore the title to Abu’l-Khayr’s son, Nur

Ali, as khan of the Junior Horde in 1786 was rejected. Moreover, he was annoyed that the Russians gave powerful Middle Horde Sultan Khudai Mendi a land grant on the

Russian frontier and money too, which further undermined his own authority over the

Kazakhs.52 He punished Kazakh elders who sided with the Russians. A large number of

Middle Horde Kazakhs left for Russia with a Greater Horde Sultan after receiving a land grant to live near the fort of Ust Kamenogorsk near the Irtysh River in 1789. 53 After

Major-General Gustav von Strandmann, a Baltic German in command of the Siberian

Line at Omsk, sent a Russian detachment into the steppe to force the release of a prisoner held by Vali Khan in 1793, Vali countered by sending his son to offer submission to the

Qing again in the winter of 1794-1795. Sultans under Vali, however, broke with him and petitioned for Russian poddanstvo without him. In 1795, about 122,000 Middle Horde

Kazakhs asked Russia for poddanstvo without Vali Khan. Russia, however, refused to

50 Ibid. The Kyrgyzes captured Kazakh Middle Horde elder Berdi Khoja, decapitated him, cut off his hands and feet, slit open his stomach, and then shoved all the detached parts of his body into this cavity. When the Kyrgyzes who did this were captured by the Middle Horde, they were beaten to death by Berdi Khoja’s wives.

51 Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans,” 69.

52 Howorth, The History of the Mongols,651.

53 A.I. Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana i postupatelnago dvizheniia v nego russkikh (St. Petersburg: 1890). 136

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accept them, perhaps not wanting to further alienate Vali Khan who had by then repented his submission to the Qing and returned to Russian poddanstvo. Meanwhile, Middle

Horde Kazakhs to the north living near Bashkirs in 1795 continued to conduct punitive raids on Chelyabinsk and the upper Ural River area in retaliation for Bashkir raids.54

By 1798, as with the Junior Horde, Russian officials attempted to establish a

“Frontier Tribunal” composed of Russians and Kazakhs in Petropavlovsk to govern. This

Tribunal however did not function until 1806. Vali Khan by 1806 had migrated briefly into Qing territory but returned again. Finally, by 1816, Emperor Alexander I nominated

Sultan Barak’s son, Bukey as co-khan of the Middle Horde to govern jointly with Vali, just as the Qing had recognized multiple khans in the “Left Horde” all along. Bukey

Khan and Vali Khan both died in 1818. With them, Russian title of khan died for the

Middle Horde, but the fight for dominance between their two lineages would continue in the form of the Kenesary Rebellion later. 55

Greater Horde Further Atomizes

Information about the Greater Horde between the defeat to the Jungars in the mid- eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century is as fragmentary as the Greater

Horde itself. Unlike the Middle and Junior Hordes, the Greater Horde had been subjugated by the Jungars and then broke into fragments under the Middle Horde, Junior

Horde, the Qing Empire, Russia, and atomized into smaller independent units governed by begs and sultans for many years. While the khans of the Junior and Middle Horde

54 Howorth, The History of the Mongols, 652.

55 Ibid.

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continued to lose their power and their hordes disintegrated, the Greater Horde had lost their khan and cohesiveness much earlier and were just ruled by a collection of several strong sultans.

When the Jungars invaded in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they conquered some of the Greater and Middle Hordes and incorporated them. While many in the Greater Horde and a small section of the Middle Horde fled to the Ferghana

Valley, others stayed or eventually returned to Semirechye when the Syr Darya region fell to the Jungars. By 1734, after the Junior Horde’s Abu’l-Khayr Khan had already entered Russian poddanstvo, Greater Horde warriors, batyrs, accompanied his son Er Ali to St. Petersburg to swear their loyalty to Empress Anna, but nothing came of it.56

There is fragmentary information about a Kolbars Khan, based in Tashkent in

1738, who claimed to be the “Khan of the Greater Horde” in correspondence with the

Russian government, and sought trade relations with Orenburg, but not submission to

Russia. He was permanently encamped around the city of Tashkent, plundering the

Tashkentis and caravans at will, but had very little power over the rest of the Greater

Horde. By the 1740s, however, the Tashkentis had had enough and killed Kolbars Khan.

The Kazakh Greater Horde in that area retaliated by attacking Tashkent and caravans again. Kolbars Khan had shared power with a powerful elder named Tole Bi (Tiul bi), who briefly attempted to rule Tashkent after Kolbars Khan’s murder. Tole Bi, however, was driven away by a Kazakh ally of the Jungars, Kusiak Bi.57

56 Ibid., 673

57 Ibid., 675. Many years later, by 1749, a very weak Tole bi requested Russian poddanstvo, but nothing came of it

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Kusiak Bi ruled Tashkent from the early 1740s and paid tribute to the Jungars.

Unlike under Kolbars Khan, the Greater Horde Kazakhs no longer dominated Tashkent, but instead encamped around it and kept it under a permanent state of siege, ready to attack at any moment. Meanwhile, the holy city of Turkistan, was controlled by the

Middle Horde. Both hordes occupied the small villages between these two cities.

Moreover, in the 1740s, Kazakhs of both hordes settled in the Ferghana valley as subjects of the Jungars, dominating the local inhabitants, but not officially governing them. 58

When the Jungars were defeated and dispersed in the mid-eighteenth century, the

Greater Horde broke into even more fragments. The Qing annihilation of the Jungars opened up more territory for the Greater Horde and many migrated to Jungaria and came into conflict with the Qing authorities and Middle Horde Kazakhs. Some Greater Horde

Kazakhs became vassals of the Qing Empire, while others remained independent, and continually fought with the Kyrgyzes.59

The Greater Horde Kazakhs had a reputation for being fiercely independent. They moved to recently vacated and acquired Qing territory after the Jungars’ defeat, and paid a nominal tribute to the Qing Emperor that was mostly symbolic. Howorth claims that the Greater Horde Kazakhs would destroy Qing imperial diplomas and other marks of distinction they received, and did the same to Russian gifts too – except for money and luxury items, which had intrinsic value. The Kazakhs reportedly told a Qing official who had asked them for tribute, that the grass and water were the products of heaven and

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 676.

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cattle its gift, and that they grazed the pasturelands by themselves; why then should they pay tribute to anyone? 60

By 1798, Yunus Khoja led the people of that city in a revolt against the Greater

Horde, which regularly raided the city. The Tashkentis proceed to exact revenge upon the Greater Horde, building pyramids of skulls of their prisoners in front of them and terrifying them. The tables had somewhat turned. Instead of looting towns and demanding tribute, as the Kazakhs had done for centuries, , as the ruler of a city, taxed the nomadic Kazakhs one sheep out of every hundred and drafted them into his army to create an independent city-state.61 These Greater Horde Kazakhs subject to

Tashkent became subjects of the Khanate of Kokand when Tashkent fell to Kokand in

1808.62 A number of Greater Horde Kazakhs around Chimkent, however, withdrew to the Qing border as Kokand expanded, joined the Middle Horde on the banks of the

Irtysh, or ran off to the nearby the mountains.63 Until 1798, the holy city of Turkistan was ruled by Sultan Taghai of the Greater Horde, but after his defeat by Yunus Khan of

Tashkent, he fled to Bukhara.64 The holy city of Turkistan remained inhabited and controlled by Kazakhs until the Kokandians took it from them in the early nineteenth century.

60 Ibid., 678.

61 Ibid., 677.

62 Baron Georges von Meyendorf, A Journey From Orenburg to Bokhara in the Year 1820, ed. Pierre Amadee Jaubert, trans. Dr. Carl Hermann Scheidler (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1870), 39.

63 Howorth, The History of the Mongols,677.

64 Meyendorf, A Journey From Orenburg to Bokhara, 39.

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By the early nineteenth century, the three Kazakh hordes had fractured into small clusters governed by sultans and warrior batyrs and had lost their claims to the cities of the Syr Darya as well as Russian recognition of the title of khan. They sought recognition and patronage from other states around the Kazakh Steppe to buttress their internal social order instead. Russia, meanwhile, attempted to manage its Kazakh neighbors by establishing Frontier Tribunals in similar arrangements with other peoples of the empire, giving incentives both to trade with Russia and sedentarize. As the Russia

Empire sought to govern based on the principles of the Enlightenment, it slowly transformed into a different kind of empire than it was when it initially began its relationship with the Kazakh hordes. Meanwhile, as the Kazakhs’ social organization as

Inner-Asian nomadic khanates based on the control of cities and trade routes came to a slow end, the Kazakhs motives for an alliance Russia changed as well.

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Chapter 4 -- Keep Your Kazakhs Away from My Kazakhs: Competition & Changing Motives for Alliances between States & Kazakhs

Conflict among the Kazakhs ultimately drew Russia further into the Kazakh

Steppe as an ally competing with other neighboring states for Kazakh loyalties. As the authority of the khan in Kazakh society continued to attenuate, and as Kazakh society continued to disintegrate during increasingly hard economic times, the Russian Empire spent the first half of the nineteenth century in a protracted struggle with the Kazakhs and neighboring states of the Kazakh Steppe to maintain stability on the frontier, access to trade routes, and to stop Russian subjects from being sold as slaves. Even as Russia no longer recognized the title of khan after 1822, and sought to establish a more systematized form of governance and tax collection with the Speranskii Reforms, Kazakh sultans of the Junior and Middle hordes reached out to Khiva, Bukhara, Kokand and the

Qing Empire in alliances for patronage and recognition as khan instead. Once loyal to rival states, these newly-appointed Kazakh khans would prey upon the Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo and demand taxes from them as well, prompting further instability and caravan raids. The early years of the nineteenth century, therefore, became a struggle to keep the loyalty of Russia’s khan-less Kazakhs, and to protect them from the predation of other states’ Kazakhs, combined with attacks from a series of independent state-less

Kazakh brigands who ricocheted between all of them on the steppe.

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The Lines

The main problem with Russian fortifications on the Kazakh Steppe was that they followed rivers. These lines of forts along rivers, like the Ural, Or, Ui, and Irtysh – forming the Ural, Orenburg, Uisk, and Siberian Lines – flowed northwards from the

Kazakh Steppe into the Arctic basin. While the defensive lines were strong longitudinally, they were latitudinally weak as just a series of forts in parallel lines with little connection across the arid expanse of steppe. A particularly vulnerable stretch of borderland was between the Ui River (a tributary of the Tobol River) and the Or River, with hardly any communication between the two lines.65 These parallel lines, therefore, left Russian subjects in Siberia open to Kazakh raids in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Russia’s primary concern in the first two decades of the nineteenth century in the western Kazakh Steppe was to govern and stabilize the fractious Kazakh Junior Horde to stop the trade of Russian subjects as slaves, and to increase other kinds of trade.

Although Russian subjects had been abducted and sold into slavery for hundreds of years, the sale of Russian slaves took on more urgency in the early nineteenth century as Russia militarily strengthened and trade with the Qing Empire expanded in the wake of the

Jungar defeat. When Kazakhs fought among themselves, caravan trade routes shifted according to the level of unrest in either the Junior or Middle Horde areas of the steppe, negatively affecting the economies of Orenburg, Troitsk, and Petropavlovsk.66 During

65 M. A. Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1, (St. Petersburg: 1876), 20.

66 Baron Georges von Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara in the Year 1820, ed. Pierre Amadee Jaubert, trans. Dr. Carl Hermann Scheidler (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1870), 27.

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particularly restive times, fear of being raided and sold into slavery stopped trade entirely. Trade between Mawarannahr and Russia declined in mid 1830s because of threats of raids on caravans on the steppe; the danger of being enslaved once Russians reached Khiva halted trade with Khiva almost entirely. Bukhara’s forty-percent tax on non-Muslim merchants distorted terms of trade and irked Russian traders as well.67

In the first half on the nineteenth century, Khiva was Russia’s primary threat in the western Kazakh Steppe. Khiva not only interfered in Russian trade with

Mawarannahr by interfering with trade routes, it competed with Russia for the loyalty of the Junior Horde, and provided a large market for Russians slaves. Bukhara and Kokand also had their share of Kazakh vassals who preyed upon the Kazakhs of other states, further contributing to strife on the steppe, hindering trade, and enslaving more Russians.

The primary focus of Russia’s defense line on the eastern Kazakh Steppe in the first half of the nineteenth century, the “Siberian Line” along the Irtysh River, had transitioned from maintaining Muscovy’s border with the Jungars to maintaining the

Russian Empire’s border with the Qing Empire, as well as and maintaining the Middle

Horde Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo. The Middle Horde was administered by the

Governor-Generalship of Western Siberia, but also spent the first several decades of the nineteenth century appealing to the Qing Empire for the title of khan and paying the Qing symbolic tribute. Military action in the first half of the nineteenth century was mostly focused on Khiva and keeping Kazakhs loyal to Russia, but Kokand – and the loyalty of

67 General Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, Under General Perofski in 1839 (Calcutta: Foreign Department of the Government of India, 1867), 61.

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its Greater Horde Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes – became the main focus of both the Orenburg

Line and the Siberian Line by the middle of the century.

Desperate Times on the Steppe

Environmental conditions played a significant role in the early nineteenth century political and economic situation of the Kazakhs. While the Kazakhs benefited from plentiful rainfall between 1780 and 1820, weather patterns changed for the worse in the

1820s to 1840s.68 Increased rainfall on the steppe had produced fertile pastures, increased livestock and simultaneously had reduced the need to migrate long distances to find good pasturage. This relative increase in prosperity and decline in migration distances, decreased the need of Kazakhs to unite under a single khan to compete with other hordes for pasturelands. By the 1820s, however, weather patterns had changed, rainfall had decreased, competition over good pasturelands increased, and many Kazakhs began to suffer from increased poverty and strife. While some sought the protection of other states to find better pastures and authority to tax other Kazakhs, others united under tribe-less, independent robber-bands as way to improve their living conditions by preying upon others, and still others desperately turned to Russia for help and sold their children into slavery to survive. Dire poverty on the steppe greatly contributed to the unrest and social disorder among the Kazakhs in the first half of the nineteenth century and the collapse of their social order.

In the early 1820s, when the rainfall declined and famine befell the Kazakh

Steppe, Kazakhs tried everything they could to save their children and themselves.

68 Ian Blanchard, Russia's "Age of Silver" Precious-metal production and economic growth in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 1989).

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Impoverished Kazakh families were particularly vulnerable. Kazakh children of impoverished families, for example, often did not wear clothes until they were about eight years old. Instead, their parents would coat them in mud to protect their skin from the sun during the summer, and wrap them in rags in the winter.69 Kazakhs often tried to exchange their children for supplies at Russian fortresses on the defensive lines, or abandoned them at frontier posts to the mercy and charity of the Cossacks. This situation encouraged the slave trade and created opportunities for the exploitation and inhumane treatment of Kazakh children by merchants. Kazakh children were exported and sold in great numbers on the markets of southwestern Siberia in the 1820s.70

It was often the case that these children, often kidnapped, were sold under false pretenses by other Kazakhs who were not their parents. In one report from 1830, a

Russian official noted that many Kazakh children for sale had been kidnapped in raids and sold along with stolen livestock at the Fair (the main trading fair in Siberia).

The price of a Kazakh child at the Irbit Fair in 1830 ranged from ten to twenty-five rubles. Sometimes these children were just bartered or given as gifts.71 Well into the

1830s and 1840s, there were reports of Kazakh children who had come of age and sought

69 Thomas Witlam Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1858), 255; and Thomas W. Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China. With Adventures among the Mountain Kirghis; and the Manjours, Toungouz, Touzemtz, Goldi, and Gelyaks: The Hunting and Pastoral Tribes (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1860), 55.

70 Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 1956), 63.

71 TsGARK Fond 427, Opis 1, Delo 57.

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Russian help in finding the people who had wrongfully told them that their parents had died and then sold them.72

The sale of Kazakh and Kalmyk children had been the main source of slaves among Russian subjects in Siberia since the eighteenth century, and there had been attempts to regulate the sale of Kazakh and Kalmyk slaves for nearly just as long. An imperial order in 1808 declared that all Russian subjects were free to buy Kazakh children but they must be freed at the age of twenty-five.73 Economic conditions in the early nineteenth century contributed to a new influx Kazakh children for sale, although

Russian officials tried to stop it. Governor-General Speranskii tried to free Kazakh slaves in 1820 by disbursing 150 rubles for each one.74 His Statute of 1822 attempted to regulate slavery even further by declaring that children and other relatives of slaves were not slaves, and that no parent could sell his or her child into slavery.75 Russian officials in St. Petersburg wanted to put an end to this trafficking in Kazakh children entirely, but

Speranskii emphasized in 1825 that many Kazakhs were starving and only abandoned or sold their children out of absolute necessity so that they could live. He argued that local authorities should be allowed to take in children and place them in foster homes with

Russian peasants in the agricultural districts of Siberia. In exchange for being fed and

72 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 864; and Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995), 50.

73 Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia: 1450-1725 (Chicago: University Of Chigago Press, 1982), 709.

74 Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822, 62.

75 Ibid, 13-14, 62; and TsGARK Fond 427, Opis 1, Delo 57, (ll 1-4).

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clothed, these Kazakh children would work for a specific period and then be free to go and live as they wished. This measure, he argued, would help the Kazakhs live, provide

Russian peasants more agricultural labor, and make these nomadic children accustomed to a sedentary life.76 Nevertheless, the sale of Kazakh children to Cossacks on the

Orenburg and Siberian lines continued in the 1830s. They were frequently sold when they were around four to five years old, sold for 10-25 rubles, and immediately baptized and given Russian names.77

Thus, as the socio-political organization of the three Kazakh hordes continued to disintegrate, and as the weather turned hostile, the Kazakhs became increasingly disparate, desperate, and impoverished. Raids on Russian settlements through Russia’s parallel lines of fortifications became more frequent, and facilitated the capture and sale of Russians into slavery in Mawarannahr when they were not selling their own children to Russians.

Khivan Claims on Kazakhs

A large part of Russia’s problems with Khiva was due to the market it provided for Kazakh booty and captives, providing a source of revenue that maintained a Kazakh sultan or warrior’s authority over other Kazakhs. While trade between Russia and the

Khanate of Khiva more or less continued via Tatar merchants, diplomatic relations between them never really recovered after Khiva killed and mutilated Prince Alexander

76 Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822, 62.

77 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 4619, (l 3); TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 1560, (ll 1-3); TsGARK Fond 4, Delo 4678, (l 1); and TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 4678, (l 110).

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Bekovich-Cherkasskii and slaughtered or enslaved 1,500 of his men in 1717. Attempts a century later to improve diplomatic relations with Khiva to control its respective Kazakh subjects met with a tepid response. Although trade relations did not improve, Russian envoy Nikolai Muraviev came back with reports of about 3,000 Russian slaves held in captivity for periods ranging between 30 to 55 years, and descriptions of how cruelly they were being treated, which further darkened Russia’s view towards its neighbor to the south.78

The Khivan economy needed slaves to work in the fields and grow enough grain for its people. The increasingly impoverished Kazakhs, who also needed grain

(particularly in times of poor rainfall and hence poor pasturage), seized Russian subjects and sold them in Khiva to buy that grain, thus reinforcing a vicious economic cycle.

Khiva’s prime location on the shortest trade route between Mawarannahr and Russia’s main markets, which it taxed transiting merchants, further antagonized Russia. Russian attempts to lure Junior Horde Kazakhs to Orenburg and allow them to buy grain there instead barely altered the slave trade in Khiva as an entrenched economic system geared at Russia’s expense.

The khanates of Mawarannahr fought over the right to tax the main trading routes to Russia as well as over the Kazakhs who migrated along them, and established forts on the Syr Darya with this goal.79 While Bukhara had briefly conquered Khiva in the early

1800s, and forced Khiva to pay tribute to Khiva had stopped paying Bukhara tribute by

78 Nikolai Nikolaevich Muraviev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva through the Turkoman Country, 1819-1820, trans. P. Strahl and W.S.A. Lockhart (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1871), 58; and Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 65.

79 Muraviev, Muraviev's Journey to Khiva,123.

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1820 and continued to raid Bukharan caravans with its Kazakh and Turkmen allies.80

Kazakh raids from Khiva continued unabated throughout the 1820s and 1830s.81

Fig. 7. Caravan Cargo on the Steppe, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00118 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 44, no. 118))

Bukharan Claims on Kazakhs

As Khiva grew in strength to Bukhara’s west and benefitted from intercepting trade between Russia and Mawarannahr, and Kokand grew to its east also benefitting

80 Ibid., 11, 39

81 Hugo Stumm, Russia in Central Asia: Historical Sketch of Russia's Progress in the East to 1873, and of the incidents which led to the Campaign against Khiva, trans. J.W. Ozanne and Captain H. Sachs (London: Harrison And Sons, 1885), 23.

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from intercepting trade between Mawarannahr and the Qing Empire, Bukhara’s economic dominance in the region was challenged. Squeezed between its growing neighbors by

1820, Bukhara did not have any forts on the Syr Darya to capture trade revenues between

Russia, Mawarannahr on the Kazakh Steppe, and (like Russia) complained of Kazakh raids on its caravans. Bukhara, however, did have a few Kazakhs under its suzerainty and sold Russian slaves on its markets.82

Kazakhs loyal to Bukhara were mostly members of the Junior Horde who had broken away and chosen to live southeast of Bukhara around Karshi or with the

Karakalpaks. They left Bukhara and returned to the steppe, however, whenever they felt like it.83 Other Kazakhs had a more contentious relationship with Bukhara in the early nineteenth century. Some Junior Horde Kazakhs sought an alliance with the of

Bukhara against Khiva, but were rejected, much to their chagrin. One Kazakh sultan was so incensed that he even declared war on Bukhara. This Kazakh sultan cut off the tail of his horse and presented it to the Emir’s vizier, declaring, “As the tail is cut off my horse,

I cut myself off from you, and will in the future become your implacable foe,” and proceeded to raid Bukharan caravans from then on.84

Just as Muraviev attempted to reach out to Khiva, Alexander Negri was sent to

Bukhara in 1820 with a large Cossack, Bashkir, and Kazakh escort to establish better

82 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 33.

83 Ibid., 22.

84 Ibid., 8.

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trade relations. Baron George von Meyendorf, a geographer who accompanied the mission, recalled seeing between 500 and 600 Russian slaves:85

We were very much pained at seeing mixed up with this crowd of Asiatics a few poor Russian soldiers who had unfortunately fallen into slavery, most of them were weak old men. On recognizing their countrymen they could not refrain from tears; they stammered a few words in their mother-tongue and tried by every means to make their way through the crown to approach us: great was their delight at making our acquaintance. I cannot properly describe this touching scene, which tore my heart asunder.86

Meyendorf concluded that, “it would be quite impossible for me to describe the joy of those Russian slaves whose freedom we had bought, now and then, on our way,” and suggested that Russia retaliate by holding Khivan and Bukharan merchants and their wares captive until all Russian slaves were freed.87 Thus, although Bukhara’s Russian slave trade was smaller than Khiva’s, and it did not compete for Kazakh loyalties as much, its nearly constant wars with either Khiva or Kokand contributed to general instability in the region, and its slave trade continued to be an irritant in relations with

Russia.

Kokandian Claims on Kazakhs

After the Qing conquest of the Jungars, trade between Mawarannahr, Altishahr and the rest of the Qing Empire flourished. Kokand’s prime location on the main trading route between Altishahr and Mawarannahr helped it separate from the Emirate of

85 Ibid., 33.

86 Ibid., 13.

87 Ibid., 34.

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Bukhara to form its own khanate, economically thrive, and expand two to three times in the second half of the eighteenth century.88

Fig. 8. Palace Courtyard of the Khan of Kokand, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00225 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 158, no. 486)

Kokand’s used his increased tax revenues to build a standing army and expand the khanate beyond the Ferghana Valley to take Tashkent from independent

88 Scott C. Levi, "Ferghana Valley at the Crossroads of World History: The Rise of Khoqand, 1709-1822," Journal of Global History 2, (2007), 226. The rise of Kokand at this time draws into question the widely-believed theory that Silk Road trade in the region declined because European traders established sea routes to the Qing Empire, and that these traded goods were re-routed.

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Kazakh Yunus Khan in 1808. Alim Khan then installed his own Kazakh hakim

(governor) Salimsaq Tura to rule Tashkent and conquer the Kazakh holy city of Turkistan shortly thereafter. Kokand took the land around the ruins of Aq Masjid in 1817 and built a fort by 1820 on the land inhabited by the Jhun tribe of the Kazakh Greater Horde.89 In

1821, about 12,000 of the Greater Horde Kazakhs who lived along Syr Darya cities of

Turkistan, Chimkent, Sayram, and Aulie-Ata, which had only recently been conquered by

Kokand, rebelled against Kokand but were suppressed.90 While it is unclear what prompted the rebellion, a change in Kokandian leadership on the Syr Darya ameliorated the situation. After the rebellion, the Kokandian forts along the Syr Darya were governed by an Indian from Chitral (now in Pakistan) known as Lashkar Beklarbegi, for more than a quarter century until 1841. Lashkar Beklarbegi’s “moderate” policy towards the

Kazakhs, according to Kokandian chronicles, attracted more Kazakhs to Kokand.91

Kokand’s trade disputes with Altishahr had reverberating effects on the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz nearby. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kokand’s trade with Altishahr had dramatically expanded, with thousands of Kokandian merchants living along the trade routes and outnumbering all the other trading communities from

Tashkent, Bukhara or .92 Kokandian merchants prospered and grew in such numbers in Altishahr that Umar Khan of Kokand in 1814, and again in 1820, sought to

89 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 39.

90 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 73.

91 T.K. Beisembiev, "Farghana's Contacts with India in the 18th and 19th Centuries (According to the Khokhand Chronicles)," Journal of Asian History 28, no. 2 (1994), 126.

92 L.J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1750-1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 64.

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supervise and tax them independently from the local Qing official in Kashgar.93 While it is not clear whether the Khan of Kokand actively supported the rebel khoja leaders of

Kashgar in their uprising in 1826, or whether rogue military adventurers from Kokand sought fame and fortune in Altishahr by supporting the rebellion, the Qing punished

Kokand afterwards. After the uprising was suppressed, the Qing Empire expelled its

Kokandian merchants in 1828 and cut Altishahr’s trade off from Kokand, causing great financial hardship in Kokand.94

While Kokand was embargoed by the Qing, others in Mawarannahr were allowed to trade with Altishahr freely. Bukharan merchants were still allowed to trade on more circuitous routes with Altishahr, thus strengthening Kokand’s rival to its west.95

Moreover, merchants from Russia could reach Altishahr via a northern route through

Issyk-Kul. Kokand therefore expanded into former Jungar territory that nominally belonged to the Qing, to control these alternative e trade routes with Altishahr. This entailed expanding further into the Chu and Talas regions of what is now northern

Kyrgyzstan to tap into Altishahr's trade with Russia, and also building more fortresses all along the Syr Darya to intercept Russian trade with Mawarannahr. Kokand also expanded further south into the Pamirs to tap Bukharan trade with Yarkand (southeast of Kashgar) and Ladakh, Tibet, Badakhshan and Kashmir. To secure the northern route via Issyk-Kul in 1827, Kokand sent troops to Pishpek, near the Chu River, and demanded taxes from

93 Ibid., 68; and Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 39. Trade with the Qing Empire was so robust that Meyendorf, in 1820, believed that Kokand had effectively annexed Altishahr in 1815.

94 Ibid.,102, 135.

95 Ibid.,143.

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the Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribes living there. These Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes had considered themselves to be tax-paying subjects of the Qing Empire for the past seventy years. After a Qing patrol clashed with Kokandian forces at Pishpek in 1832, however, the Qing forces were ordered to retreat and defend positions at their frontier outposts closer to

Altishahr.96 The Qing Empire did not want a war with Kokand. Qing officials had concluded that there would be no gain in fighting or conquering Kokand, that Kokand’s territory would not bring them wealth, and that its people would not make good soldiers.97

After Kokand succeeded in controlling most trade routes between Mawarannahr and Altishahr, Kokand and the Qing Empire came to an agreement in 1832 that allowed

Kokandian trade with Altishahr to resume. The Qing Empire thought that it had granted tax-free status to all foreign traders in Altishahr, but Kokand believed that the Qing

Empire had agreed to let Kokand collect all the taxes on foreign merchants in Altishahr.98

By 1833, Kokand sent an envoy into the Ili river valley to demand taxes from the

Kazakhs who had migrated to the safety of the Qing Empire’s border posts, threatening attack.99 While the Qing court objected to Kokand’s “insatiable covetousness” and

“reckless self-aggrandizement,” it was not willing to fight to protect these Kazakhs from

96 Ibid., 200-201.

97 Ibid., 202.

98 Ibid., 193. L.J. Newby disagrees with other prominent scholars like W.H. Watham and Joseph Fletcher Jr., who claim that this was the Qing Empire’s first “unequal treaty” granting extraterritorial privileges.

99 Ibid., 202.

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Kokand, and did not consider the conquest of Kokand to be worth the cost and effort.100

Instead, faced with an agrarian crisis within the Qing Empire and an intensified British trade dispute in the east, they had more pressing concerns elsewhere; Qing military forces declined in Altishahr from 9,000 troops in 1831 to 2,500 in 1833 serving as border guards.101 Qing officials told their nominal Kazakh and Kyrgyz subjects that they were to continue to pay the Qing tax of several dozen horses annually, but whether or not they chose to pay Kokand taxes was their own concern.102 Many Greater Horde Kazakhs, however, supported Kokand’s expansion because they were authorized to collect taxes on behalf of Kokand from other Kazakhs.103 Pishpek and the Talas region, with the Greater

Horde Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes who lived there, effectively fell under Kokandian rule thereafter.

Left to their own devices when it came to Kokandian expansion into former

Jungar territory in Semirechye, Greater Horde relations with the Qing remained contentious, even though they were nominally Qing albatu. Russian geographer

Meyendorf noted on his report of his 1820 trip to Bukhara that the Greater Horde

Kazakhs acknowledged no khan as their chief, and did not seek this title from the Qing court, but were instead ruled by several sultans who vacillated between seeking protection from the Russian and Qing empires regarding Kokandian expansion, offering presents to both. The Kazakhs of the Greater Horde, however, feared the Qing more than

100 Ibid., 202.

101 Ibid., 206.

102 Ibid., 202.

103 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 73.

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Russia, Meyendorf maintained, because the Qing officials had “bad and often cruel policies” regarding the Greater Horde that was “justified by necessity.”104 Meyendorf claimed that when caravans were plundered by the Greater Horde Kazakhs, Qing forces launched punitive campaigns in which thousands of Kazakhs were killed.105

In reaction to Kokand’s expansion into former Jungar lands, Greater Horde

Sultan Siuk (Souk), a son of Ablay Khan who lived south of Lake Balkhash between the

Ili and Karatal rivers with 55,000 followers in the Jalair tribe, turned to Russian poddanstvo in 1818. The Governor-General of Siberia sent a Cossack detachment of

120 men to Greater Horde territory to secure trade routes in the region in 1820, and built

Sultan Siuk a house and mosque at Russian state expense in 1825.106 Another 50,000

Greater Horde Kazakhs from former Jungar lands, likely feeling a similar squeeze between Kokand tax collectors and Russia, entered Russian poddanstvo in 1824, exempt from taxes.107 Russian forces would be invited by the Greater Horde Kazakhs later in the century to help drive the Kokandians out of the Ili River valley.108

104 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 9.

105 Ibid.

106 V.E. Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo (Vernyi: Semirechenskogo Oblastnogo Pravleniia, 1910), 14.

107 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 73.

108 A.I. Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana i postupatelnago dvizheniia v nego russkikh (St. Petersburg: 1890), 136.

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Speranskii’s Reforms

Just as Khiva expanded to the east, and Kokand expanded to the north, south, and east, Russia expanded to the south and east, each allying with their respective Kazakhs.

Russia began to systematize how it engaged with its Kazakh subjects as it reformed its own bureaucracy as an Enlightened European autocratic empire. The fleeting attempts to establish “Frontier Councils” to govern the Junior and Middle Hordes in the early nineteenth century had become standard practice after 1822. No amount of lobbying the

Russian government by the Chingissid Kazakh sultans would return the title of khan that held so little authority by that time anyway. Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs also changed as Russia changed its own relationship with the rest of Siberia, administratively integrating the entire region into the empire more systematically.

When Alexander I ascended the throne in 1801, it was clear that Siberia was in disorder. Catherine the Great’s reform of 1775, which established fifty provinces throughout Russia had been abolished by her son and successor, Paul, in 1796, and by

1801 no one knew who governed what in Siberia.109 The area was much too large to be governed by a single Governor-General in one location. Mikhail Mikhailovich

Speranskii (1722 – 1839), who had already been banished from the court to Penza in

1812 for allegedly being a Francophile, was given this thankless and daunting task in

1819. Speranskii, the son of a priest, had been well educated at seminaries before entering government service, and was familiar with liberal and progressive ideas. When appointed governor-general of all of Siberia, he attempted to rectify generations of

109 Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822,10; and John P. Ledonne, "Governors General 1772-1825 III: The Eastern Frontier," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 48, no. 3 (2000), 331

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neglect and corruption and returned to Petersburg in 1821 to draft the “Statute for the

Siberian Kazakhs” among other reforms.

Speranskii’s 1822 “Statute for the Siberian Kazakhs” (Ustav o Sibirskikh

Kirgizakh) abandoned Paul’s attempt to centralize administration of Siberia through a single regional authority in Tobolsk and returned to Catherine the Great’s policy of dividing Siberia into two provinces: Western Siberia, governed from Tobolsk (later

Omsk) and Eastern Siberia, governed from Irkutsk. Speranskii also divided Western

Siberia into two regions: Tobolsk and Tomsk. The Statute sought to incorporate the

Middle Horde or “Siberian” Kazakhs as Russian subjects, in the same way it sought to administratively treat all of Siberia as part of in terms of a uniform government.110 Just as the title of khan was no longer recognized by Russia for the

Junior Horde by Russian officials in Orenburg, the 1822 Charter no longer recognized the title of khan for the Middle Horde Kazakhs either.

The Siberian territory where the Middle Horde migrated was divided into six circuits (okrugi) between 1824 and 1831, joining the outpost of Kokpekty, which had been established in 1820: Karkaralinsk (1824), Kokchetav (1824), -Aul (1826),

Aqmola (1827), and Ayaguz (1831). Each circuit was administered by a senior sultan

(aga-sultan or starshii sultan) who chaired a consultative committee called a tribal council (rodovaia uprava) that included two Kazakh officials who had been elected by aul elders and respected judges ( biis), and two Russian officials.111 The circuits were divided into parishes (volosti) that were governed by sultans, who usually inherited the

110 LeDonne, "Governors General 1772-1825," 321-340.

111 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, ser. 1,Vol. 38. No. 29, 4-9, 15-20, 25, 36, 48

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position after confirmation by local biis, aul elders, prosperous Kazakhs, and the Russian civilian governor in Omsk.112 Each parish was divided into auls (a collection of Kazakh households, usually related, that migrated together); each aul was governed by elders or biis. Each circuit had a detachment of Cossacks led by a commander (prikaz) who served in these outposts as police in the region. The borders of these circuits were usually negotiated beforehand with prominent sultans in the area, such as the descendants of

Ablay Khan or of his Middle Horde rival Bukey Khan. Kazakh officials who served in this governing capacity would receive stipends from the Russian government. 113 This administrative arrangement was often challenged and manipulated by Middle Horde

Chingissid elite to serve their own interests as they still competed with Kazakh rivals for recognition and support from both Russia and the Qing.

Qing Empire Claims on Kazakhs

The Speranskii statute established fortresses throughout northern Middle Horde territory that were intended to help govern the Kazakhs. This became especially important when the Middle Horde Kazakhs appealed to the Qing Empire for access to pastures and recognition of a khan. Even though the position of khan no longer had any authority in the Middle Horde, and even though Russian officials no longer recognized it after 1822, the descendants of Ablay Khan still turned to the Qing court for recognition as khan anyway. Just as Shirgazy Khan of the Junior Horde sought recognition from Khiva

112 Yuri Anatolyevich Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture: Myths and Realities of Cossack-Kazakh Relations in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," (PhD Diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006), 223.

113 Jin Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans Bestowed by the Qing Empire: The Case of Sultan Ghubaydulla in 1824," Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 68, (2010), 70.

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as khan after 1812 and paid Khiva tribute, so the Middle Horde descendants of Ablay

Khan sought recognition as khan from the Qing and paid them tribute as well.114

As Japanese scholar of nineteenth-century Kazakh-Qing relations, Jin Noda, has noted, relations between Kazakh sultans and the Qing were still quite fluid in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Middle and Greater Horde still sent tribute missions to

Beijing every three years. While the Qing Empire was unwilling to fight Kokand to protect the Greater Horde Kazakhs on former Jungar territory they nominally claimed, the Qing court was more than willing to diplomatically recognize khans in the Middle

Horde beyond their frontier posts and receive symbolic tribute from their albatu as a way to encourage trade and meet their demand for horses.

Ablay Khan’s grandson, Ghubaydulla, sought the Qing title of khan in 1822. The

Qing emperor sent 500 troops to formally confer the title of khan to Ghubaydulla on the

Kazakh Steppe the following year in a secret ceremony. The Russians only found out about it because rival sultan Tursun, grandson of Ablay Khan’s rival Bukey Khan, informed them. Tursun Sultan had been proposed to become the next khan after before the Speranskii Reforms abolished the position, and he was still ambitious. Ghubaydulla was captured near Bayan-aul by a Cossack captain Kalbyshev and was forced by Russian officials the next day to meet the 500- man Qing army with a detachment of Cossacks.

Even after Kalbyshev explained to Ghubaydulla that receiving a title from the Qing Court was illegal, he still wanted to do it. According to the 1822 Statute, however,

Ghubaydulla’s actions were considered treasonous. In a meeting with the Russian and

114 Ibid., 70-71.

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Qing forces, the captive Ghubaydulla sultan renounced his request to the Qing Emperor for title of khan.115

Sultan Ghubaydulla’s letter to Qing authorities in Chuguchak hints that his rejection of the Qing title was probably written for him, “I wish to inform Your Majesty that I wish to leave Ejen Khan [the Qing Emperor], I do not seek the position of khan, I would like to take orders from the major of the Russian Arms and the captain of the

Cossacks, and I would like to return to my pastureland.”116 It seems highly unlikely that the captured Ghubaydulla sultan would have voluntarily expressed in writing a desire to take orders from anyone – let alone a Russian major or Cossack captain – unless under duress or unaware of what had been written for him by Russian scribes. Whereas both his grandfather and his father could claim to be both under Russian poddanstvo and Qing albatu, after 1822, Ghubaydulla could not.

Moreover, the Russian government declared its control over the Kazakhs on the steppe after 1822 to the Qing Empire as well. Captain Kalbyshev told the Qing officials that had come out to make Ghubaydulla khan, that in the future, Russian officials should always escort Qing officials from their entry into “Russian territory” until they return home in order to protect them, noting that the Russian Empire had just recently made the

Middle Horde Kazakhs full subjects.117 After 1822, the Kazakh Steppe was now Russian, and the Qing Empire had been notified.

115 Ibid., 70-74.

116 Ibid., 76.

117 Ibid., 77.

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Nevertheless, Ghubaydulla did not give up. He attempted to continue relations with the Qing Empire through a Qing official at Ili in 1826, but was refused.

Ghubaydulla’s son, Bolot, went to St. Petersburg to deliver Ghubaydulla’s petition to abolish the circuit system and to reinstate the rank of khan for Middle Horde, which was also denied. Instead, Emperor Nicholas I responded, “Under the previous khan, not only did disturbances and baranta [raids] continue; they actually increased. The rule of most of the Middle Horde is entrusted to honorable sultans elected by the people, and the Russian government judges this to be an improvement.118 Moreover, Nicholas

I’s letter noted that Bolot’s father, Ghubaydulla had even petitioned earlier to have his own parish (volost) according to the new 1822 regulations. As a result of Ghubaydulla’s petition and the voluntary petitions of other sultans, the Kokchetav district was established just for him, Ghubaydullah was elected senior sultan, and given the position of district chairperson.119 The letter sternly concluded by informing Bolot that further petitions to abolish the Kokchetav district would not be entertained. Ironically,

Ghubaydulla had previously sent numerous requests to Russian officials to establish his own administrative district, believing that it would protect him from the frequent raids of his neighbors.120

Ghubaydulla then asked the Qing Emperor for an audience in 1828, and sent another mission led by his son, Bolot, in 1828 that the Russians tried to head off. By this time, Russian officials viewed the Qing title of khan as an appellation for the rank of

118 Ibid., 81.

119 Ibid.

120 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture," 232.

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senior sultan created after 1822, and not their version of “khan” of the Middle Horde prior to 1822. Other Kazakh sultans, like Altinsari, managed to still get the khan title conferred by the Qing in 1826. Nevertheless, Russian officials did not see Altinsari’s

Qing title of khan as having much gravitas. They were much more concerned about the descendants of the famed Ablay Khan reclaiming the title of khan.121

By 1830, Ghubaydulla contacted the Qing Emperor again. An official replied reasserting his emperor’s right to confer titles to the Kazakhs, and the Kazakhs’ right to receive them, despite Russia’s 1822 Statute:

I order you, who have received the rich blessings of the Bogda Khan [emperor] to follow the example of your forbearers, and like them receive the titles of khan , . . . and live in peace. You thus should follow the example of your forbearers . . . the Great Bogda Khan will think of you as his own children. Hence enjoy the blessings of the Great Bogda Khan, rule your people in the best way possible, and in all matters show fairness.122

The Qing treated Ghubaydulla as a khan, not a senior sultan, the way they always had.

After 1822, the Kazakhs of the Middle Horde continued to elect khans from among themselves, without acknowledgement of that rank from Russia, and attempted to have their choices reinforced by the Qing Empire. Based on this 1830 letter, Governor-

General Veliaminov concluded that the Qing Emperor regarded all of the Middle Horde as belonging to the Qing Empire, and began to adopt a harder line towards the Qing government regarding the Kazakhs.123 The Russian fort of Ayaguz (later renamed

Sergiopol after Alexander II’s son, Sergei), was built on the Ayaguz River as the northern

121 Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans," 80, 82, 83.

122 Ibid., 84.

123 Ibid., 83,85.

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border of former Jungar territory in 1831 to reinforce the point that the Middle Horde belonged to Russia.

Kazakh sultans along the eastern frontier of the Kazakh Steppe would continue to swear oaths of loyalty for Russian poddanstvo as well as receive titles from the Qing court for many years, allowing them to migrate and trade wherever they wanted under the protection of both empires.124 The forts established to implement the Speranskii Statute were used to keep an eye on the loyalty of Russia’s Middle Horde subjects. Ghubaydulla was eventually accused of supporting the 1839 revolt of Kenesary Kasymov (another descendant of Ablay Khan), was arrested, and exiled to a penal colony north of the Arctic

Circle. He returned from exile in 1847 after Kenesary had been killed.125

From Bad to Worse in the 1830s

Russia’s initial response to unrest on the steppe as Kazakh socio-political organization continued to unravel was to implement to Speranskii Statue of 1822 and build more forts. The new forts beyond the Orenburg Line, such as Aktan and Ulutan, to govern the Junior Horde were very expensive to maintain, difficult to inhabit, and often attacked by members of the Junior Horde loyal to Khiva.126 Similar forts beyond the

Siberian Line established after the Speranskii Statute, such as Karkarlinsk (1824) and

Bayan-Aul (Bayanaul) (1826), served similar purposes with the Middle Horde and were

124 Ibid.

125 M.K. Kozybaev, ed., Nationalno-osvoboditelnaia borba kazakhskogo naroda pod predvoditelstvom Kenesary Kasymova (sbornik dokumentov) (Almaty: Gylym, 1996), 482.

126 Stumm, Russia in Central Asia, 19-20.

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also difficult to maintain. Even these forts to the east, without the predations of the

Khivan Kazakhs, were quite vulnerable. The Karkaralinsk fort, for example was frequently attacked and difficult to supply. Any Cossack who went hunting for food ran the risk of being captured and sold into slavery.127 Nevertheless, Russian officials in the

1820s believed that they were building forts among Kazakhs who were already under

Russian poddanstvo, and were protecting their Kazakhs from the predations of other

Kazakhs.128 Flying detachments were sent into the steppe between the defensive lines to curb the raids to no avail. In addition to the Kazakhs who were loyal to Khiva, like the

Adayev tribe which raided Russians with impunity, the Jegalbai, Kipchak, Yapas and

Durt-Kara tribes were hostile to Russia and implacably fought with Russian forces quite frequently.129

Raids and strife continued into the 1830s as poor rainfall reduced good pasturage on the steppe. Khiva’s harvest had failed and had fallen into turmoil, prompting more caravan raids.130 Russia considered more aggressive measures to stabilize the steppe.

Orenburg’s Governor-General Perovskii built the “New Line” south of Orenburg to curb the raids in 1833, carving out a portion of land for Cossack settlement, and further antagonized the Junior Horde by taking its pasturelands in the process. To make matters worse, by 1836, Perovskii attempted to tax the Junior Horde for the first time, demanding

127 Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia, 142.

128 Ibid.; and Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara.

129 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 20, 55.

130 Ibid., 51.

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one ruble and fifty kopeks per household to cover the expense of protecting them against other Kazakhs.131 Kazakh tribes and errant robber-bands sprung up and retaliated by attacking Russian caravans and selling even more Russians into slavery. Junior Horde sultans Kaip Ali and Issetai tried several times to cross the Ural River in the late 1820s for pastureland, but after a siege of several weeks, the Orenburg Cossacks drove them back.132

Fig. 2. Kazakh Travelling Yurt on the Steppe, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, . LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00044 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 92, no. 305))

131 Ibid., 55.

132 Stumm, Russia in Central, 24; and Olcott, The Kazakhs, 63.

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The Novo Aleksandrovsk fort was built on the Caspian Sea in 1834 to protect

Russian fisherman on the Emba River from raids by the Turkmens and of the Adayev tribe of the Junior Horde. It’s unfortunate location, however, left it prone to flooding and disease, and gave it brackish drinking water, contributing to high death tolls. Troops at the garrison had to be relieved every six months, and only half would live to return home.133

In addition to building the new forts, General Perovskii hired Bashkirs in 1833 to build a six-foot earthen wall and six-foot defensive ditch running 66 miles to protect parts of the western Kazakh Steppe taken by the Russians that were not guarded by the fortification lines.134 This wall was intended to start at Orsk and follow the Ural River down to the Caspian Sea. By 1836, twelve miles had been completed.135 This Russian not-so-Great Wall, however, did not stop the Kazakh raids.136 To add insult to injury, a

Khivan customs collector travelled to Orenburg in 1835 and informed the Russian and

Bukharan merchants there that all trade from Orenburg to Mawarannahr had to pass

133 Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, 166.

134 Ibid., 20.

135 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 55. The “Great Wall” project was allotted 2.5 million rubles and six years to complete.

136 Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156; and Arthur Waldron, The : From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Nicola Di Cosmo and Arthur Waldron argue that China’s fortified walls and “Great Wall” were intended to protect the new lands that had been taken through military expansion, with nomadic raids taking place as a result of expansion, and not as a purely defensive position to protect lands already long settled and inhabited. By the time the Russian Empire attempted to build a wall, the Qing Empire no longer used the Ming’s Great Wall.

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through Khivan territory or else it would be plundered by Khiva’s Kazakhs.137 Russia retaliated by ordering the detention of all Khivans (572 in total) in Astrakhan and on the

Orenburg and Siberian Lines until Russian captives were freed from Khiva, and prepared for war.138

The object of Russia’s war against Khiva, according to Perovskii, was to “inspire fear and respect” for Russia in Central Asia, explore the Aral Sea, and “curb the insolence” of the Khivan Khan who inspired Kazakhs to attack Russian subjects and sell them into slavery.139 The Russians assumed that their punishment of the Khivans, whom they considered the prime instigators of disorder on the Kazakh Steppe, would put an end to the plunder of Russian caravans and sale of Russian subjects as slaves in the region, and that Bukhara would fall in line to release their Russian slaves and negotiate better trade terms soon thereafter.140

The ill-fated Perovskii Expedition of 1839-1840, however, was a disaster. Launched in the winter and hampered by terrible snow storms, Russian forces never actually reached

Khiva. Because of the severe drought that year, Perovskii chose to attack in winter to ensure sufficient water and pasturage for his troops and horses, and to prevent the

137 John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD Diss., Harvard, 1964), 5.

138 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 62; and M.L. Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853 godu kak nachalo zavoevaniia kokandskago khanstva (Moscow: 1912), 40.

139 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 177.

140 Ibid., 52.

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Kazakhs from setting fire to the steppe as part of their defense.141 Moreover, Perovskii was no stranger to winter campaigns and hardship; as a young man he was forced to walk from Russia to France as a prisoner of Napoleon’s retreating army in the winter of

1812.142 Aside from skirmishes living at frontier posts, the poorly trained Orenburg

Corps had never seen combat before.143 About half of General Perovskii’s “Russian” infantry in the Orenburg Corps were actually Poles who had been exiled to Siberia after the 1830 uprising, and criminals who had been exiled to the Orenburg frontier as punishment.144 Of the 5,235 men Perovskii led on his campaign, however, 1,054 died, of whom only five died in battle with Khivans.145 The poorly armed Khivans, however, suffered significant losses in battle even though Perovskii’s forces travelled less than half the distance to reach Khiva from Orenburg; about 1,000-1,500 Khivans were killed in skirmishes along the way.146 The weather ultimately took the greatest toll on Perovskii’s supply line. Of the 10,500 Kazakh camels supplied by Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo, only 1,500 survived the weather.147 There were also more than 2,000

Kazakh camel-drivers on the campaign to facilitate the attack, and when two hundred

141 Ibid., 83, 128.

142 Iu. D. Garankin, ed., Orenburgskii gubenator Vasilii Alekseevich Perovskii (Orenburg: Orenburgskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo, 1999), 30.

143 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 103.

144 Ibid., 104.

145 Ibid., 99, 107.

146 Ibid., 177.

147 Ibid., 173.

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attempted to rebel, two were shot for insubordination.148 Nevertheless, although the campaign was a military disaster, the threat of another Russian campaign, and British pressure on Khiva, prompted Khiva to release of 843 Russian slaves in 1840.149

Fig.10. Orenburg Governor-General Perovskii, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00001 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 1, no. 1))

148 Ibid., 99, 143, 149.

149 Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand," 298, 323, 102.

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General Perovskii later noted Europe’s hypocritical outcry over Russia’s attack on

Khiva to curb the raids and free its captives when France was conquering Algeria around the same time and had launched its attack under the pretext that its consul had been offended by the Algerian beg. Unlike France’s fight against remnants of the Ottoman

Empire over an escalated trade dispute that was linked to France’s past trade debts,

Russia was up against a different kind of Inner-Asian nomadic threat in the 1830s.

Khiva instigated and enabled Kazakh raids on Russian caravans and settlements on their defensive lines as a way to reinforce Khiva’s Kazakhs’ control over other Kazakhs and to serve their own economy.150 Indeed, Khiva’s economy depended upon raiding Russian caravans and settlements. A comparison between Russia’s attack on Khiva and France’s attack on Algeria would be more appropriate if the Barbary pirates off the Algerian coast still frequently raided southern France, sold French captives as slaves, and the Beg of

Algeria insisted that all trade from France in the Mediterranean only go through Algeria through Muslim traders.

150 Perofski, A Narrative of the Russian Expedition to Khiva, 181.

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Fig. 3. Caravan, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00115 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 43, no. 115))

Still Trying to Be Khans

Trade and security for Russian subjects on the Kazakh Steppe went from bad to worse in the 1830s as Khiva and Kokand fought over trade routes and Kazakh loyalties.

In response to Kokand building a fortresses along the Syr Darya to capture revenues from trade routes from Bukhara to Russia in the 1820s, Khiva built two new forts on the left bank of a branch of the Syr Darya in 1830 to collect taxes from the Kazakhs and trade

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routes too.151 When Kazakhs were not switching back and forth between Russia and

Khiva, they switched between Bukhara, Kokand, and the Qing Empire.

Russia’s engagement with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand – as strained as it was – could not even have happened without Russia’s Kazakh allies to guide Russian forces through the Kazakh Steppe. These Kazakhs, in turn, needed Russian allies on these trips to fight their own enemies. Junior Horde sultan Arun Ghazi (Harun Ghazi, or Aryngazy) guided Alexander Negri’s mission to Bukhara in 1820 with several hundred men, in order to both demonstrate his loyalty to Russia and because he needed Russia to support his own war against Kazakhs loyal to Khiva who had plundered his auls and captured his relatives.152 Moreover, he was paid 110 rubles.153 Sultan Arun Ghazi, together with the

Cossacks who escorted the Negri mission to Bukhara, attacked his Khivan Kazakh enemies on their way to Bukhara.154

At some point, however, Arun Ghazi became too powerful. In a time of social disorder and fragmentation, he sought to reorganize and centralize his Kazakh followers into what he believed to be a more functional social structure. While still loyal to Russia, he centralized and consolidated his strength, contravening Kazakh customs in the process. In 1816, he issued a decree proclaiming that only he could issue orders to tribes

151 Ch. Valikhanov and M. Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and the Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865), 4.

152 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 4; and Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 259.

153 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 2, 4.

154 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture.”

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who followed him, not the elders of these tribes, and appointed personal representatives to each aul to collect taxes.155 He also took control over the appointment of traditional judges, biis, instead of their being chosen by the people according to tradition, and insisted that his appointed judges rule by Islamic Shari’a law rather than Kazakh customary law, adat. Unlike most Kazakhs at the time, he insisted on wearing a large as an expression of his religious devotion, turning to Islam as a source of authority rather than blood lineage to Chingis Khan.156

Despite his loyalty to Russia and his perpetual war with Kokand, Sultan Arun

Ghazi was arrested by Russian officials in 1821. There is some debate over the reason for his arrest, with some claiming that he had switched sides to join Khiva, and others claiming that his war against Khiva was too destabilizing, his growing power among his people alone could have been a reason to remove him.157 It is possible that Khiva might have offered to make him a khan, but we do not know. Like Sultan Ghubaydulla of the

Middle Horde at this time, Arun Ghazi aspired to become a khan, but he sought a new kind of centralized social organization and legal system through which to govern as well.

Under the pretext of elevating Arun Ghazi to the status of khan in 1821, Russian officials invited him to St. Petersburg and arrested him. He died in prison in 1833. His arrest and imprisonment led to renewed Kazakh raids on the steppe and further instability in the already difficult 1820s and 1830s.158

155 Ibid., 258.

156 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 4.

157 Ibid.; and Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 259.

158 Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand,"195.

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The Kenesary Rebellion

In the midst of this chaos in the mid-1830s, with poor rainfall devastating the

Kazakh nomadic economy and Kazakh society fragmenting, the “New Line” and a

“Great Wall” being built in the western steppe to keep out Kazakh raids, preparations for war with Khiva underway, sporadic rebellions against Russia’s new forts and new demand for taxes, continued demands for Kazakh taxes by Kazakhs loyal to neighboring states, and continued machinations by Junior and Middle Horde sultans to be recognized as khans by neighboring states if not by Russia, yet another dispute arose between Middle

Horde rivals which spun out of control. This dispute became known as the “Kenesary

Rebellion.” Kazakh history treats it as either a Kazakh national struggle for liberation against Russia or as a conservative movement to restore the great Kazakh khanate of years past, or both.159

Like Sultan Ghubaydulla’s 1826 appeal to Emperor Nicholas I to reinstate the position of khan for the Middle Horde and abolish the okrug of Kokchetav, even after it had been created just for him in 1824, another descendent of Ablay Khan, Sultan Kasym, asked Russian officials in Omsk in 1825 to abolish the same okrug. Sultan Kasym, however, engaged the Russian government at a lower level, and did not petition to be recognized as khan.160 This request was denied as well. The timing of these two requests from both sultans Ghubaydulla and Kasym, from the same Kokchetav okrug in the mid-

159 Steven Sabol, "Kazak Resistance to Russian Colonization: Interpreting the Kenesary Kasymov Revolt, 1837-1847," Central Asian Survey 22, no. 213 (2003, June); and Yuriy Malikov, "The Kenesary Kasymov Rebellion (1837-1847): A National- Liberation Movement or a ‘Protest of Restoration’?," Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 33, no. 4 (2005, December).

160 Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans," 81; and Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 224.

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1820s, clearly indicates that descendants of Ablay Khan were not happy with the okrug system recently established by the Speranskii Statute. Moreover, when Sultan

Ghubaydulla originally requested an okrug in his territory he believed that it would help protect him from the frequent raids of his neighbors.161 It would seem that this plan backfired in the mid-1820s, and that descendants of Ablay Khan’s main rivals – the descendants of Bukey Khan –were more than happy to ally with Russia against them.162

The Kenesary rebellion began as a dispute between two sultans who descended from two rival Middle Horde khans, one of whom used the Russian government and

Cossacks as allies to hurt the other. The two rival khans, Vali (son of Ablay) and Bukey

(Bokey) both died in 1818, and with them, Russian recognition of the title of khan died.

Their descendants, however, continued to compete against each other for supremacy, with the Russian Empire caught in the middle.

It is difficult to know exactly what happened. Russian records reflect what Bukey

Khan’s family informed government officials, but Kenesary Kasymov maintained that his family had been slandered.163 According to the Russian account, Sultan Kasym’s eldest son, Sarjan, had abducted the twelve-year old son of the aga-sultan of the Karkaralisk okrug, Sultan Tursun Chingizov, a grandson of Bukey Khan, in August 1824. This boy had been travelling around Sultan Kasym’s okrug inviting the chiefs of his rival’s auls to his father’s camp for a feast in 1824.164 Sultan Tursun had also recently informed the

161 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 232.

162 Noda, "Titles of the Kazakh Sultans;" Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 225

163 Sabol, "Kazak Resistance to Russian Colonization," 242.

164 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 225

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Russians of Sultan Ghubaydulla’s attempt to obtain the title of khan from the Qing

Empire. There was no love lost between these families. Sarjan probably resented Sultan

Tursun’s pretentions of entertaining Kazakhs from his father’s auls over in Karkaralinsk, which threatened his father’s authority in Kokchetav. In February 1825, six months after the abduction of his son, Tursun Chingizov told Russian officials in Omsk that Sarjan had attacked peaceful auls and robbed caravans between Tashkent and Semipalatinsk, and asked that a Cossack detachment to be sent to defend his people.165

A council of biis found Sarjan guilty; the boy was released and Sarjan was fined

53 horses. Sarjan refused to pay so Russian authorities ordered the Cossacks of the

Karkaralinsk okrug to confiscate Sarjan’s horses in Kokchetav and enforce the ruling of the biis in favor of Bukey Khan’s family. Sarjan retaliated by raiding the auls of Sultan

Tursun Chingizov and the Karkalinsk Cossacks, who had just built a fort that year.166

Raids and massacres continued, with both sides feeling that they had been wronged.

While Sultan Kasym and his sons Sarjan and Kenesary, as descendants of Ablay Khan, did not initially seek independence from Russian poddanstvo, they did have a grievance against Russia for siding with their main rivals, the descendants of Bukey Khan.

Kenesary Kasymov explained why his family rebelled in a letter to Russian officials in Orenburg in 1841. He maintained that his family, as descendants of Ablay

Khan, followed Ablay’s example of taking an oath of allegiance to Russia, until his family was grievously wronged in 1825. Kenesary maintained that a descendant of

Bukey Khan, Yamantai Bukeyev, had slandered Sultan Kasym and his sons to the

165 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 409, (ll 6-7, 12, 14); and Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 241

166 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 226.

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Cossack official of Karkaralinsk, who then sent 300 Cossacks and 100 Kazakhs to sack

Sultan Sarjan’s auls, taking livestock and killing 64 people.167 This was probably when the descendants of Bukey Khan allied with the Cossacks to enforce the biis’ decision and

53 horse penalty.168 Cossacks and Kazakh allies attacked again in 1827, destroying two auls and killing 58 people.169

In 1827, Sultan Sarjan and his family fled to the Khanate of Kokand, which was expanding northwards across the Syr Darya at the time, and proceeded to raid Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo from Kokand as allies of Kokand. Both sides killed hundreds of people.170 Sultan Sarjan reportedly died in Tashkent in 1836.171 In 1837, another 400

Cossacks and Kazakhs sacked three more of Sultan Sarjan’s auls and killed 350 people, leaving Sarjan’s younger half-brother, Kenesary Kasymov, to take up the mantle of rebellion for his family.172

While Kazakhs from all three hordes participated in Kenesary Kasymov’s rebellion at one time or another, it was not a united struggle against Russia for national liberation, attempting to reinstate the Kazakh khanate with Kenesary as khan, as has been claimed.173 In addition to the descendants of Bukey Khan directly benefitting from their

167 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 2622, (l 1059).

168 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 353.

169 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 2622, (l 1059).

170 Ibid.

171 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 65.

172 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 2622, (l 1059).

173 Malikov, "The Kenesary Kasymov Rebellion,” 569-597.

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alliance with the Cossacks against their main rivals – descendants of Ablay Khan – members of the Middle Horde ultimately rejected Kenesary as their khan as well. In

1841, a gathering of Middle Horde elders convened and considered electing Kenesary

Kasymov khan of the Middle Horde. However, some refused to recognize his rule, and nothing ever came of it.174 While Kenesary’s rebellion is commonly understood as a rebellion against Russia, Kenesary mostly attacked other Kazakhs, and most Kazakhs tried to remain neutral.175 Yuri Malikov argues that while Kenesary claimed to be a khan, he had 7,000 followers at most, half of whom were slaves, and the others a motley crew of Russian, Bashkir, Tatar, or runaway criminals from the Qing Empire, Polish exiles, captives, Kazakh tribal outcasts, and Kazakh tribes which cooperated under duress.176

Moreover, like Junior Horde Sultan Arun Ghazi, Sultan Kenesary discarded traditional forms of a Kazakh khan’s authority and attempted to centralize his power.

Like Sultan Arun Ghazy, he appointed his own representatives to each aul to collect taxes, allocate pasturelands, and ensure that his orders were followed, and did not rely on aul chiefs to do those things for him.177 Moreover, he taxed his followers much more onerously than Russia, demanding five head of livestock out of a hundred instead of just one.178 Like Sultan Arun Ghazi, he appointed his own biis to adjudicate disputes and

174 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 1997, (ll 1-6).

175 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 240, 244.

176 Ibid., 228-243.

177 Ibid., 250.

178 E.B. Bekmakhanov, Kazakhstan v 20-40e gody XIX veka (Alma-Ata: 1947). 241

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reportedly divided judicial authority between customary courts headed by biis who followed adat and Islamic courts chaired by qazis who ruled by the Shari`a.179 Like

Sultan Arun Ghazi, Sultan Kenesary sought to form a new kind of Kazakh social organization. Even though he found followers from all three hordes at one time or another, he could not find many who would follow him for long.

Nevertheless, for all the things that the Kenesary Rebellion was not, it was truly terrifying for Cossacks to encounter Kenesary on the Kazakh Steppe. His band of followers wreaked havoc on trade routes in the steppe in the 1830s and 1840s. An account by a Cossack named Melnikov, who was abducted with his daughter in 1843 while fishing in the Akmolinsk area, details the abuse and terror they endured at

Kenesary’s hands. His daughter was forcibly married off to one of Kenesary’s personal slaves; he was made a personal slave himself and forced to serve in Kenesary’s army. He escaped one night by fleeing into the steppe (and abandoning his daughter). He only managed to survive because he was found by Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo, who escorted him to safety for a reward. 180 Another Cossack woman in their fishing group was beaten with a whip and killed because she refused to eat Kazakh food. This was nothing compared to what Kenesary did to fellow Kazakhs, like cutting the nose off one of his own wives who was related to someone who had become his sworn enemy, and raping the daughters of the aga sultan of Bayan-Aul, who refused to provide him with horses.181 He killed an uncooperative bii from the Jappas tribe of the Junior Horde by

179 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 255; and Olcott, The Kazakhs, 67.

180 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 1335, (ll 5-12).

181 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 238-239.

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cutting off his leg, then his arm, and then setting his corpse on fire, just to teach others a lesson to comply with his wishes.182

By 1845, Kenesary had moved to or near Kokandian territory again and warned emissaries from Kokand that Russia was building forts on the steppe and intended to build forts on the Syr Darya, too. His offer to help Kokand fight Russia, however, seems to have been declined.183 Later that year, Kenesary fought with Kokand and Kazakhs loyal to Kokand, took the fortresses of Julek, Yany-Kurgan, and laid siege to Aq Masjid fortress on the Syr Darya.184 He asked the Kazakh tribes under Kokand to recognize him as khan but they refused. He ended up leaving Kokand and moving into former Jungar territory inhabited by the Greater Horde and Kyrgyzes, but reportedly took a contagious disease with him, possibly smallpox or the cholera, that killed sixty people in one night.185

Kenesary did not seem to have much more success with the Greater Horde either.

Other descendants of Ablay Khan, like Greater Horde Sultan Siuk of the Jalair tribe, claimed to not support the Kasymov family and had even asked for Cossack protection in

1831.186 All the sultans of the Greater Horde swore allegiance to Russia against

Kenesary in 1846. Sultan Siuk’s Jalairs fought with Kenesary later that year, forcing

182 Ibid.

183 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 2327, (ll 120-121).

184 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis1, Delo 2332, (ll 325-326).

185 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 2333, (l 247).

186 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902, (l 113, ob).

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Kenesary to cross into Kyrgyz territory.187 Russia had reached out to ally with the

Sarybagish and Solto Kyrgyz tribes of the Chu River valley against Kenesary as well.188

By the end of 1846, Kenesary was isolated and weak. He had reportedly come down with smallpox, and there were reports that he had allowed his Kazakh followers to return to their own tribes, or was at least unable to stop them.189 After a three-day siege in

1847, the Kyrgyzes killed and beheaded Kenesary Kasymov.190

Russian officials had worried that the Greater Horde’s land dispute with the

Middle Horde over the Lepsi River might provide Sultan Kenesary an opening, and began to consider expanding its presence in the former Jungar territory at this time.191

Threats from Sultan Kenesary provided the Russian Empire with opportunities to engage with more remotely situated Kazakh sultans like Greater Horde sultans Siuk and Ali, further drawing them into Russian poddanstvo. In a letter that Kyrgyz tribal leader manap Jantai Karabekov sent after his men killed Kenesary, he complained that there was no peace in the region with Kokand trying to make them join them from one side, and

Muslim sectarian leaders or khojas in Kashgar making demands on the other -- leaving an

187 Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture,” 231-232; TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902, (ll 36-37ob); TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 1669, (ll 59-60ob); and TsGARK Fond 374. Opis 1. Delo 2902, (ll 41-42ob).

188 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902,( ll 25-126ob); and V.E. Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo, 21.

189 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902, (ll 203,ob); and TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 1921, (l 4, ob).

190 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902, (ll 40-41). Kenesary’s head is still in St. Petersburg at the Kunstkamera Museum.

191 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2902, (ll 36-37, ob).

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opening for Russia to further engage.192 Ironically, even after the Kazakhs had long abandoned their claims on the cities of the Syr Darya as reason to ally with Russia to strengthen their power as khans, the Kasymov family revolt, Kokand’s rise in power, and instability in Altishahr pulled the Russian Empire even further into the eastern

Kazakh Steppe into alliances with even more of the Middle and Greater Hordes and

Kyrgyzes to provide protection against other Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes.

192 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2920, (ll 40-41).

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Chapter 5 -- A Toe-Hold on the Syr Darya: Russian-Kazakh Alliance against Khiva & Kokand

After over a hundred years of Junior and Middle Horde oaths of poddanstvo to

Russia, the Kazakh Steppe was still not safe for Russians or trade. Years of Russian policy vacillations between patient attempts to “civilize” and co-opt the Kazakhs and punitive attacks of flying detachments from their defensive lines in the north had not contributed to stability on the steppe. Perovskii’s ill-fated 1839 attempt to attack the

Khanate of Khiva, combined with Russia’s prolonged hunts of Kenesary Kasymov had not pacified the steppe. As the Kazakhs continued to fracture, they continued to seek alliances with neighboring states of Khiva and Kokand for access to more pasturelands and more power to fight other Kazakhs in their internal disputes. Continued caravan raids, internal Kazkah strife involving Russia’s Kazakh allies, competition with neighboring states over Kazakh loyalties, and the internal weakness and civil wars in both

Khiva and Kokand that increased tax collection with every change in ruler, pulled Russia even further into the steppe to protect their Kazakh allies and secure trade routes.

The Toe-Hold

Governor-General Perovskii reportedly first proposed establishing a toe-hold on the Aral Sea at the mouth of the Syr Darya at the edge of Russia’s claim to the Kazakh

Steppe when he served in the 1830s, but it was his successor, Governor-General

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Obruchev, who carried out this idea by establishing Fort Raimsk in 1847.1 This toe-hold on the lower Syr Darya would expand in in the 1850s to become the “Syr Darya Line,” ending at the Aq Masjid fort.

While there were many rumors of Russia’s larger ambitions after Russia’s failed attempt to attack Khiva, from the 1840s onwards, Russia’s official decision to surround the Kazakh Steppe in a “pincer maneuver” to unite the Orenburg and Syr Darya Lines with the Siberian Line along the Syr Darya, was not definitely made until December 20,

1863 – or rather, like many plans in Russia, it was proposed several times earlier, debated, tentatively approved but delayed for a more opportune time, and then finally approved again by late 1863.2 All of the forts and military engagements until 1864 had immediate and localized reasons for taking place that would have occurred with or without a grand master plan to surround and conquer the entire Kazakh Steppe. Russian officials only seriously began to think about forming a policy in Central Asia in the late

1850s. The period from the 1840s until 1864 was characterized by numerous skirmishes between Russia’s Kazakh and Kyrgyz allies and the Kazakh and Kyrgyz allies of other states; these had no larger strategy than immediate retaliation for previous attacks and the return of livestock with Russia’s nomadic allies often drawing them into further conflict.34 While Khiva was the primary threat in the 1840s, Kokand became Russia’s main source of conflict in the 1850s.

1 M.L. Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853 godu kak nachalo zavoevaniia Kokandskago Khanstva (Moscow: 1912), 40.

2 Aleksandr Osipovich Diugamel', Avtobiografiia Aleksandra Osipovicha Diugamel’ia (Moscow: 1885), 224-225.

3 M. Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question (Calcutta: Office Of Superintendent Of Government Printing, 1870), 7.

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Fig. 4. Preparing to Migrate, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00112 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 40, no. 112))

Migrating Subjects

A large factor in Khiva’s, Kokand’s and Russia’s mutually conflicting claims on the Kazakhs was due the fact that the Kazakhs migrated. Russia claimed Kazakhs who spent their summers near Russia’s fortified lines in the north. Khiva and Kokand claimed many of the same Kazakhs who then spent their winters in the south near the Syr Darya.

All these states that surrounded the Kazakh Steppe used their own Kazakh allies to collect taxes from other Kazakhs and reinforced the power of their Kazakh allies over

4 N.A. Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii 1857-1868 (Moscow: 1960), 163.

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other Kazakhs. It thus became clear to the Russians that the key to stability on the

Kazakh Steppe was to attract as many Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads to Russian poddanstvo as possible to protect both their summer and winter pastures of its nomadic subjects, and to deny other sedentary neighbors the benefits of their alliance.5

It had long been clear to Russian officials that the Syr Darya was important to the

Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo. Russian geographer George von Meyendorf noted in 1820, “The spots watered by the Syr represent the paradise of the steppe to the

Kazakhs, who are proud to possess so great a river in their territory. Their chief desire is to be able to winter their flocks upon its banks, where the cold is not ever so severe.”6

These Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo, however, had been driven out by the Khivans in 1814, and the struggle among the Kazakhs over who could migrate there continued.7

Kazakhs from the Greater Horde had controlled Tashkent and Turkistan and its surrounding environs until Khoja Yunus in 1798, and the Kokandians drove them out or subjected them in 1808.8 Russian officials, however, believed that the steppe north of the

Syr Darya technically belonged to them, even if they had never actually physically controlled it, since it belonged to Kazakhs under their poddanstvo who sometimes did.9

5 Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853, 40.

6 Baron Georges von Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara in the Year 1820, ed. Pierre Amadee Jaubert, trans. Dr. Carl Hermann Scheidler (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1870), 7.

7 Ibid.

8 A.I. Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana i postupatelnago dvizheniia v nego russkikh (St. Petersburg: 1890), 136.

9 M. Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska ob Istoricheskikh Pravakh Rossii na Kokandskie Goroda Turkestan i Tashkent, "Russkii Vestnik" 1865, T 58," in Tsarskaia Kolonizatsia v

214

Fig. 13. Kazakh Winter Camp, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00100 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 34, no. 100))

Fort Aralsk – the Third “Khivan Campaign”

After Russia’s failed diplomatic missions of M. Negri to Bukhara, and of Captain

Nikiforov and Colonel N. Danielevskii to Khiva – all between 1840 and 1842 – it had become clear that diplomacy alone was futile. By 1843, Russia had failed to free all of its enslaved subjects in Khiva and Bukhara, could not negotiate better terms for trade, was not given permission to navigate the Amu Darya, and could not convince

Kazakhstane (po materialam russkoi periodicheskoi pechati XIX veka), ed. F.M. Orazaev (Almaty: Rauan, 2005), 106.

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neighboring states to keep their Kazakhs from raiding and taxing Russia’s Kazakhs or to stop harboring those who had committed crimes in Russia. Moreover, Russian attempts to negotiate a mutually recognized border with Khiva at the north bank of the Syr Darya, northern coast of the Aral Sea, and northern foothills of the Ust Urt plateau between the

Aral and Caspian seas were to no avail.10 An exasperated Russian diplomat, Captain

Nikiforov, finally threatened in 1841 that all Khivans attempting tax Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo north of the Emba River or north of the Syr Darya would be killed, and that all Khivans found agitating unrest among Russia’s Kazakhs would be killed as well. Allah Quli Khan, however, coolly responded to Nikiforov that it was his understanding that Russia’s border was the Ural River, not the Emba, or the Syr, nor any other river in the Kazakh Steppe. They were at an impasse.11 While Central Asian issues had been managed by the “Asian Committee” which had been established by Tsar

Nicholas I in 1827 to handle Russia’s relations with all of Asia, a “Special Committee” was formed in 1847, led by Tsar Nicholas I himself, to become the highest policy-making body that dealt specifically with Central Asian affairs.12 While Central Asia had gained the attention of Russian officials as a long-standing problem on its borders, Russia would make no further attempts to diplomatically engage either Khiva or Bukhara until Count

Ignatiyev’s mission to both states in 1858 after the Crimean War.

10 John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD Diss., Harvard, 1964), 400.

11 Ibid., 336.

12 N.A. Khalfin, Rossiia i Khanstva Srednei Azii (pervaia polovina XIX v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 21-22.

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The Khanate of Khiva, on the lower course of the Amu Darya and south of the

Aral Sea, was Russia’s long-festering source of aggravation in the 1840s, blocking its theoretical river access to its main trade partner, Bukhara, on the Amu Dary. Kokand further east on the mid-Syr Darya was only a minor concern. General Alexander I.

Verigin, a specialist on trade with Asia, had already written a memo to Emperor Nicholas

I in 1826 entitled, “On the Necessity to Occupy Khiva as the Sole Means of Widening and Conducting Trade Safely in Central Asia,” focusing on the Amu Darya; and General

Perovskii had already tried and failed to do that once.13

Governor-General Obruchev’s determination to build a fort on the Aral Sea was initially intended to serve as a base from which to better define its borders with Khiva.

Plans to build the fort were even called the “Khivan campaign.”14 The goal of the fort on the Aral Sea was to cut the Kazakh Steppe from the north to the south, with the western steppe between the Caspian and Aral Seas left to the Khivans. Obruchev also wanted to build a fort on the Emba River against the slopes of the Ust Urt plateau when he had initially proposed building the Raimsk fort. After he had built Raimsk, however, and faced more hostilities and raids from Kokand, he was forced to recalibrate his plans to neutralize Kokand’s attacks further east. He attacked Kokand’s Aq Masjid fort and take the lower portions of the Syr Darya in 1853, and then returned to his initial plan to attack

Khiva by destroying Khiva’s Khoja Niaz fort in 1856.15

13 Ibid., 33; and Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 57.

14 Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853, 42.

15 Ibid.

217

Fort Raimsk was part of Obruchev’s larger attempt to secure the northern and central part of the Kazakh Steppe as Russia’s main trade route to Bukhara and protect

Russia’s Kazakh subjects. It was, however, a miserable place to live. The story goes that when a surveyor was sent to inspect locations to build a fort in 1846, he saw the young green reeds near the shore of the Aral Sea and mistook them for grass, concluding that there were ample supplies of hay and fertile land in the area. By the summer, however, those reeds had turned into thick, dry, inedible stalks, but the Russian officials went ahead with building a fort with about a thousand troops anyway.16 While the story may be true, there seem to be several versions of this kind of story regarding how Russian forts on the Kazakh Steppe were built without much thought. Obruchev named the new fort on the mouth of the Syr Darya, in a location that was difficult to supply or even contact, “Raimsk,” that ironically had nothing to do with rai, the Russian word for

“paradise.”17 It was renamed and re-located after Obruchev left to “Aralsk.”18

The same year he proposed Raimsk, 1846, he evacuated the deadly fort of Novo

Aleksandrovsk that Perovskii had built in 1834, renamed it Novo Petrovsk, and moved it to a healthier location on the Mangishlak peninsula.19 The “New Line” that Perovskii had started in 1833, when he had attempted to build a “Great Wall” to keep the Kazakhs

16 Ibid., 41.

17 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 6; and M.A. Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1, (St. Petersburg: 1876), 25. Raimsk was moved by Perovskii to Kazalinsk and re-named Aralsk in 1855.

18 Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853, 41.

19 Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, 168. Novo Aleksandrovsk (1834) moved and became Novo Petrovsk in 1846, but was renamed Aleksandrovsk in 1859.

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out, was expanded in the 1840s. In addition to the two forts that were built on the Aq

Bulak and Emba Rivers in preparation for Perovskii’s expedition in 1839, Obruchev built four military outposts on the northern steppe in 1845 and 1846 to protect trade routes and logistically provide forward positions for future punitive attacks against raiding bands of

Kazakhs.20 Moreover, General Obruchev tried to attract the Kazakhs to these trading forts by not levying taxes (in contrast to the tax-collecting raids of the Khivans and

Kokandians) and offering Russian protection against their enemies.21

Life in these remote postings, however, was bleak. Large tracts of fertile lands next to the rivers that were prime Kazakh pasturelands were appropriated by Cossacks for settlement, further angering the Junior Horde. The Cossacks, meanwhile, were equally unhappy to be there, tired of being forced to live in a dangerous location and constantly attacked by Kazakhs. At times, Cossacks in these remote forts broke out into armed and open revolt against Russian authorities.22

Abu’l-Khayr was Right!

By establishing the Raimsk fort on the northeast coast of the Aral Sea in 1847,

Russia was finally carrying out what the Junior Horde’s Abu’l-Khayr Khan had asked of

20 Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995), 73. These forts were called Orenburgskii (now Amangeldy) in Turgai and Uralskii in the Irgiz region in 1845, and Atbasar in 1846.

21 Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853, 40.

22 Hugo Stumm, Russia in Central Asia: Historical Sketch of Russia's Progress in the East to 1873, and of the incidents which led to the Campaign against Khiva, trans. J.W. Ozanne and Captain H. Sachs (London: Harrison and Sons, 1885), 24.

219

them in the eighteenth century when he had initially sought Russian poddanstvo.23 When

Russian officials first sent a surveying mission with Abu’l-Khayr to the lower Syr Darya to determine where a fort should be built in 1740, they concluded that a fort on the Syr

Darya was unnecessary because, “Abu’l-Khayr wanted it in order to rein in his Kazakhs, but such a fort would be of no use to Russia.”24 After a hundred years of ineffectively trying to manage Kazakhs from the north while Kazakh society and the authority of the khan continued to unravel, Russian officials had finally come to agree with Abu’l-Khayr that Kazakhs, and the transit routes they raided or protected, could only be “reined in” with a fort on the Syr Darya. Unlike Khan Abu’l-Khayr, Russian officials no longer supported the authority of a khan as an intermediary to pacify the steppe and Kazakhs in the mid-nineteenth century no longer laid claim to controlling cities along the Syr Darya.

Russian officials, however, believed that they had a right to claim Tashkent and Turkistan because the Kazakhs who had once ruled them, and who still sought the surrounding winter pasturelands of these cities, had entered Russian poddanstvo long ago. 25

The Deceptive Allure of the Syr and Amu

Ever since Muscovy’s and Russia’s conquest of Siberia and Ukraine, if not before, Russia’s first choice in transportation was by river. Russia saw transportation in the Kazakh Steppe and Mawarannahr in terms of its rivers as well. For many years –

23 Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1, 21; and F.N. Kireev, ed., Kazakhsoe-Russkie Otnosheniia v XVI-XVIII vekakh (Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov) (Alma-ata: 1961), 75-77.

24 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 159.

25 Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska,"100-106.

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well into the late nineteenth century –Russia saw the Aral Sea, Syr Darya and Amu Darya as a potential means of transport to other Asian markets as far as India. Moreover, river transport was much easier than horse and camel transport through deserts and open steppes, and served as better protection against predations by nomads. While Russian explorers had concluded that the Aral sea was not connected to the Caspian Sea in the eighteenth century, that did not stop them from thinking that this perceived shortcoming in nature could somehow be remedied with the help of science and a little ingenuity in a modern age of progress when canals were being planned or built in Suez and Panama.

Optimism about the importance of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya in Central Asia in the mid-nineteenth century reflected the same misplaced enthusiasm as claims at the time that the recently seized Amur River in Russia’s would serve as the “Siberian

Mississippi” to open up Siberia to trade on the Pacific.26 While Russia’s fixation with river transport in Central Asia would finally be replaced by railroads in the late nineteenth century, much of Russia’s military activities in the first half of the nineteenth century were focused on gaining access to the Amu and Syr for their own sake as arteries for supplies and trade.

Russia did not really know that the rapidly changing, shallow and shifting Syr

Darya and the Amu Darya were not easily navigable rivers until well after they had already established a base on the banks of the Aral Sea to explore these rivers. The very year Fort Raimsk was established in 1847, Orenburg Governor-General Obruchev ordered two ships to be built, carried 600 miles in pieces across the steppe, and then

26 Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the , 1840-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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reassembled on the Aral Sea to ply the waterways of the Amu and Syr. One, the Nikolai, was intended for military purposes to survey the Aral Sea, the Syr and Amu, the other, the Mikhail, was intended for a commercial fishery, which soon failed.27 Shortly afterwards, a larger military vessel, the Constantine, was built in Orenburg and

Fig. 14. Steam-Powered Boat, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00046 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 93, no. 307))

transported to Raimsk to survey the Aral Sea in 1848.28 Two 40-horsepower steamships were ordered from Sweden in 1850 to provide transport for trade with Kokand; they

27 Henry Lansdell, Russian Central Asia, Including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva and Merv, vol. 1, (London: Sampsonlow, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1885), 409.

28 Lansdell, Russian Central Asia, vol. 1, 409.

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arrived in parts and were assembled in 1853, christened the Perovskii and Obruchev, but required a great deal of coal or wood as fuel which was in short supply on the steppe.

Coal had to be transported from what is now Ukraine to Orenburg, and then by camel and horse to the Aral Sea to fuel these steamships at extraordinary expense.29

While Russia’s focus on river trade and forts along major rivers followed a long traditional means of Russian expansion, establishing a naval base on the Aral Sea and a fort on the main trade route between Bukhara and Orenburg did not imply Russia’s intent to completely surround the entire Kazakh Steppe in 1847.

Fig.15. Russian Flotilla on the Aral Sea, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00047 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 93, no. 308))

29 Ibid., 410.

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Protecting the Kazakhs from Khiva and Iset Kutebar

One of the driving forces behind Russia building forts deeper into the steppe and on the Aral Sea was to stop raiding bands of Kazakhs under Khivan protection, like Iset

Kutebar’s, from robbing caravans and Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo. Just as the fight against Kenesary Kasymov facilitated Russian inroads with the Middle and Greater

Hordes and Kyrgyzes to ally against him, Iset Kutebar’s predations around the Aral Sea forced many Kazakhs to take sides; many allied with Russia for protection.

Iset Kutebar first established his reputation raiding a Bukharan caravan in 1822 and proceeded to raid, pillage and kill on the steppe for the next forty years, alternating submission to the Khivans and Russians several times over the decades. While Kenesary

Kasymov and his men were wreaking havoc all over the steppe in the 1840s, Iset Kutebar and his men moved over to Khiva, and gained favor with the Russians by informing on

Khiva and Kenesary’s movements.30 In 1845, he made overtures to Sultan Bai

Aichuvakov, one of the most powerful sultans of the Junior Horde and great ally of

Russia, for help in returning to Russian poddanstvo, and to receive a gold medal for his help in Russia’s fight against Kenesary Kasymov.31 While Sultan Aichuvakov was in the process of interceding on his behalf, however, Kutebar formed a large group of Khivan

Kazakhs to pillage Russian Kazakhs again.32 He did this several times, much to the

30 Ch. Valikhanov and M. Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865), 372.

31 Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand," 465.

32 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 371-380.

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irritation of Russian officials. In 1848 he attacked a Russian caravan near Fort Raimsk, but was beaten off, helping to fulfill part of the reason why fort Raimsk was built in the first place.

Kokand – The New Threat from Aq Masjid

One of the drawbacks to establishing a fort on the borderlands between the

Khanates of Khiva and Kokand was that the Russians and the Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo, were attacked from both sides. In addition to Khiva’s Kazakhs raiding

Russians and Russian Kazakhs, the Kokandians repeatedly attacked as well. These

Kokandian attacks ultimately precipitated Russia’s attack on Kokand’s stronghold of Aq

Masjid in 1852 and 1853.33

So focused on Khiva for years, Russia did not seem to have anticipated Kokand as an implacable threat once they established a foothold on the lower Syr Darya to protect their Kazakhs’ winter pasturelands. Moreover, Kokand, like Russia, was a relative newcomer to the neighborhood. As Khiva drove out the Kazakhs on the Syr Darya near the Aral Sea in the early nineteenth century, the growing Khanate of Kokand took

Tashkent and Turkistan, and conquered the Kazakhs in that area as well. By 1817,

Kokand took the land around the ruins of Aq Masjid, and built a fort by 1820 on the land inhabited by Greater Horde Kazakhs.34 In 1821, about 12,000 of the Greater Horde

33 Ivan Franko, "Taras Shevchenko," The Slavonic Review 3, no. 7 (1924, June), 114. Ukrainian nationalist poet Taras Shevchenko, who had been exiled to Fort Raimsk and other forts on the Kazakh Steppe between 1847 and 1854, helped explore the Aral Sea and participated in the attack on Aq Masjid. After his reports on the Aral Sea expedition, however, he was forbidden to write while in exile.

34 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 39.

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Kazakhs who lived along Syr Darya cities of Turkistan, Chimkent, Sayram, and Aulie-

Ata, rebelled against Kokand but were suppressed.35 Some of these Kazakhs moved north and joined Russian poddanstvo instead. The Aq Masjid fortress was the strongest in the region and controlled trade routes between Kokand and Russia. While it had withstood Kenesary Kasymov’s attacks in 1845, its loss to Russia in 1853 would be a severe blow to Kokand.

Kokand had demanded taxes from Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo and tried to make them subjects of Kokand for many years. Increased Kokandian tax collection, of

Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo and engaging in large-scale theft around the

Kokandian fort of Aq Masjid began in earnest in 1850 when Yakub Bek was assigned to head the fort for Kokand. Tens of thousands of heads of livestock were taken from

Russia’s Kazakhs. When they were not paid by Russia’s Kazakhs, Kokand would invade deep into the Kazakh Steppe and attack Russian fortresses not only at Raimsk, but also further north at Irgiz, economically devastate the Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo and capture their women and children.36 When Kokandians tried to raid Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo again in 1851, Russian forces at Fort Raimsk pursued them, took the

Kokandian fort of Kosh Kurgan by storm, and took their Russian Kazakhs’ livestock back in a joint baranta raid, but this did not stop Kokand for long. Russian forces became embroiled in a seemingly endless series of baranta raids to assist their Kazakh allies against the Kokandian Kazakhs.37

35 Olcott, The Kazakhs, 73.

36 M. Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska,” 48-49.

37 Yudin, Vziatie Ak Mechet v 1853, 48.

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Both Russia and Kokand were drawn in to their Kazakh allies’ conflicts. Russia and their Kazakh allies were frustrated that Kokand was not even adhering to Kazakh customs regarding redressing grievances through barantas. Instead, Kokandian officials denied that they had anything to do with these raids, and accused the Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo of lying.38 Kokand’s response offended the Russians at Raimsk. In response, they destroyed the Kokandian forts of Kumush and Chim-Kurgany. The

Kokandians, however, did not yield when Russia demanded their stolen livestock back.

Instead, they coaxed several Kazakhs to join them.39 The Kokandian interlocutors probably genuinely did not know which of their own Kazakhs had raided Russian

Kazakhs, or whether Russia’s claims were true, as it was hard to keep track of such things. For example, in response to a Kokandian raid in 1850, Russia sent 150 men on a punitive campaign against Kokand. When they came across the Kokandian fort of Kosh

Kurgan, he demanded the return of the stolen livestock. The Kokandians of Kosh Kurgan had no idea what he was talking about and refused, killing the Kazakh messengers who were approaching the fort to negotiate. The Russians, in turn, attacked and killed five

Kokandians, taking the other seventeen prisoners in a fairly pointless exercise of force.

This punitive engagement in 1850 not only failed to prevent future predations on Russia’s

Kazakhs, it engendered further Kokandian hostility towards Russia, with both Russians and Kokandians fighting over what their respective Kazakhs were allegedly doing to each other.40

38 M. Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska,” 104.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 49.

227

By 1851, Russia and Kokand had clashed further east, south of Lake Balkhash, in the Greater Horde territory of Semirechye.41 Kokand had rallied several thousand of

Greater Horde Kazakhs to surround and attack Russian forces on the Ili River and the

Fig. 16. Ruins of Kokandian fort, Aq Masjid, after 1853 Russian campaign, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00012 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 13, no. 12))

Russian fort of Kopal. After the Kazakhs were defeated at Kopal, however, Greater

Horde Kazakhs either moved to Kokandian territory or allied with Russia against Kokand in Russia’s 1851 attack on the small Kokandian fort Tauchubek. Open conflict with

41 See Chapter 7: Connecting the Lines

228

Kokand, therefore, had already commenced by 1852 when Orenburg Governor-General

Perovskii ordered Colonel Blaramberg to “survey” what he considered to be Russia’s side of the Syr Darya from Fort Raimsk to Kokand’ Aq Masjid stronghold, but was a poorly veiled deliberate attack.42 The land between the Syr Darya and the Kara Uziak tributary to the Syr was inhabited by about 5,000 Kazakhs who were under Russian poddanstvo.

They wintered in the region and were forced to pay Kokandian taxes.43 If confronted by the Kokandians (which was sure to happen), Blaramberg was ordered by Perovskii to attack Aq Masjid immediately and to raze it to the ground.44 Blaramberg led his men on a 334 mile march through prickly underbrush and swamps, swam across five rivers, scaled the outer moat of Aq Masjid with picks and axes (because they forgot to bring ladders), and then set the outer defenses of Aq Masjid on fire. As they returned to Fort

Raimsk, they destroyed three small Kokandian forts along the way.45 Blaramberg’s failed attack on Aq Masjid by land convinced Russia that they needed to find a better way to attack that fort in the future, and made them determined to take both banks of the lower

Syr Darya between Raimsk and Aq Masjid, where Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo wintered. When Perovskii led the next attack in 1853, he used a transport ship on the Syr

42 N.A. Khalfin, “Zhizn i Trudy Ivana Fedorovicha Blaramberga” in I.F Blaramberg, Vospominaniia (Moscow: “Nauka”, 1978), 1-24. I.G. Blaramberg (1800- 1878) spent his entire professional life serving in Asia, first in the Russo-Turkish War (1828-1829), then in the Caucasus, then as military advisor to the Russian consulate in Persia where he witnessed the Persian siege of in 1838. He served in the Orenburg Corps 1840-1852, until transferred to St. Petersburg.

43 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 338.

44 Ibid., 332.

45 Ibid., 336.

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Darya, and brought ladders. Aq Masjid fell in twenty minutes and was renamed Fort

Perovskii.46

Fig. 17. Remains of Kokandian Citadel at Aq Masjid, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00013 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 14, no. 13))

After Aq Masjid was taken in 1853, Governor-General Perovskii wrote to the vizier of Kokand explaining that Russia was obliged to protect its subjects, the Syr Darya

Kazakhs, but he assured Kokand that Russia had no intention of building forts on the upper Syr Darya. Instead, Perovskii asked Kokand to destroy the Yani Kurgan fort near

46 Ibid., 356.

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Turkistan, just as Russia had destroyed the Julek fort near Aq Masjid, in order to create a neutral zone and keep the peace.47 Moreover, Perovskii threatened that if Kokand attempted to rebuild the forts Russia had already destroyed, or build new ones, Russia would have to come and permanently take them just as they had taken Aq Masjid.48

Perovskii concluded by saying, “Therefore I advise you to think carefully about what I have said, and given that a solid peace with a powerful and just neighbor is preferable to stubbornness and hostility, which cannot lead to good, I ask that you fulfill our reasonable demand and let us live in friendship and good accord,” and asked for compensation according to Kazakh custom for the Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo who had been looted by the Kazakhs and Kipchaks under Kokand.49 Kokandian officials never replied. Moreover, Kokandians told their subjects that it was actually the Russians who had been routed by Kokand, and that so many Russians had been killed that a horse could not step over their corpses.50 Russia would have to defend Aq Masjid from further

Kokandian attacks launched from Tashkent well into the 1850s and 1860s.

Khiva’s Khoja Niaz

Russia was not the only state building forts in the Kazakh Steppe in the 1840s to control trade routes and Kazakhs. While the Khivans had driven out the Kazakhs who had lived there much earlier at the start of the nineteenth century, in 1846 the Khanate of

47 Galkin, "Kratkaia Zapiska,” 105.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 368.

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Khiva got around to building the fort of Khoja Niaz, on the left bank of the Syr Darya west of Aq Masjid, and garrisoned it with about 100 men. It was the most distant fortified point of the northern Khivan frontier. All Bukharan caravans going to Russia had to pass through it and were forced to pay considerable transit fees on the shortest trade route to Russia.51 It was also a collection point for taxes that the Khanate of Khiva imposed upon the Kazakhs whom Russia also claimed.

Throughout the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the

Khanate of Khiva was Russia’s largest problem on the steppe, but it was soon surpassed by the Khanate of Kokand. The strength of Khiva in the 1850s declined quickly and it was not in a position to enforce its disputed territorial claims against Russia on the

Kazakh Steppe. Khiva had about 10,000 Kazakhs, who roamed in the northeastern portion of the khanate, but many had migrated away. Many of the Turkmens had also already seceded from Khiva, were independently ruled by their own elders, and wanted their own khan. The Khivans, however, opposed this, which led to the Turkmens killing three Khivan khans in a row in the first half of nineteenth century, and considerable instability in the khanate. Moreover, the decline in trade on this route, from which customs duties once contributed considerable revenue to its treasury, really hurt Khiva’s budget, causing further decline.52

Hostilities ensued after Khiva discovered that Russia had built Fort Raimsk at the mouth of the Syr Darya. A force of 2,000 Khivans (with their Turkmen allies) crossed the Syr Darya and attacked the Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo, looting more than a

51 Ibid., 385.

52 Ibid., 4, 41.

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thousand households.53 Russian forces, with their Kazakh allies, counterattacked the

Khivans, forcing them to flee and leave their captives behind. A few months later, however, the Khivans returned with their Turkmen allies and pillaged more Kazakh auls, murdering many old men, seizing women, scattering children on the steppe, and robbing two caravans. Russian forces from Fort Raimsk responded again and the Khivans fled beyond the Syr Darya. The following year, 1,500 Khivans returned and started to pillage the Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo again with their Kazakh and Turkmen allies, while three hundred horsemen rode directly past Fort Raimsk within gunshot range, and visited the new wharf that the Russians had built on the Aral Sea. They proceeded to pillage, and slaughter the Russian Kazakh auls for nearly twenty-four hours before crossing the Syr Darya once again, and the outnumbered Russians were not in a position to stop them. Khivan officials also wrote to Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo living along the Emba River, demanding that they submit to the previously mentioned Iset

Kutebar under Khiva. All the while, Khiva continued to capture and sell Russian slaves.54

After Perovskii conquered Kokand’s Aq Masjid fortress in 1853, he turned his attention westward to Khiva again. The Kazakhs under Khivan rule had rebelled against

Khiva in 1856, burned down the Khivan Fort Khoja Niaz, plundered Khivan property, destroyed their guns, and hacked their carriages to pieces.55 After the Khivans were driven out of the area and prevented from taxing passing caravans, the Kazakhs started to

53 Ibid., 322.

54 Ibid., and Strong, "Russian Relations With Khiva, Bukhara, And Kokand," 433.

55 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 386.

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raid caravans for themselves instead. Perovskii sent a force to occupy what was left of

Fort Khoja Niaz to prevent Bukhara or Kokand from taking it. It was such a miserable place to live and so hard to supply, however, that Russian officials decided to destroy what was left of the fort and leave.56

Kazakh Allies

Russia could not have established a fort on the mouth of the Syr Darya at the Aral

Sea in 1847, nor could they have conquered the Kokandian stronghold of Aq Masjid in

1853, nor last for very long on the lower Syr Darya in general without significant help from their Kazakh allies under Russian poddanstvo. When Perovskii tried to take Aq

Masjid again in 1853, like his attack on Khiva in 1839, his attack could not have taken place without Kazakh help. Perovskii’s 2,168 men needed horses, camels, and oxen to carry their supplies, as well as Kazakh drivers to lead them. As Perovskii’s men marched towards Aq Masjid, Kazakhs provided reconnaissance and guides as well.57

In order to prevent a Khivan attack on their convoy as they crossed the steppe to

Fort Raimsk, Perovskii ordered Kazakh sultans under Russian poddanstvo who migrated in that area to clear the center of the steppe so that there would be sufficient pasturage for

Perovskii’s forces. The Kazakhs complied and not a soul was to be found on the steppe the entire way between Orenburg and Fort Aralsk.58

56 Ibid., 388.

57 Ibid., 318, 465.

58 Ibid., 340.

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Not all Kazakhs rallied to Russia’s side. The Kazakhs around Aq Masjid, whom

Russia claimed were under Russian poddanstvo, feared Kokand more than Russia, and refused to sell their livestock to Russian soldiers out of fear of retribution. Another

Kazakh, Jan Khoja refused to allow his people to give Russia supplies as well.59 When it became clear that Russian forces intended to stay throughout the winter on the lower Syr and were making long-term preparations, however, one hundred and fifty of the Kazakhs around Aq Masjid helped Russian forces by providing them with yurts.60

Russian forces in the steppe in the 1840s and 1850s, at Forts Aralsk (Fort Raimsk) and Perovskii (Aq Masjid) and other forts along the way could barely defend themselves let alone anyone else. They were completely dependent upon their Kazakh allies to sustain them. Russia’s communication lines between Orsk and Aralsk depended upon

Kazakh-manned post stations. It was impossible to maintain post stations at all on the land between Fort Aralsk and Perovskii – the Kara Kum desert – forcing Russian forces to rely on Kazakh-driven camels to slowly cross the desert with intelligence and correspondence on a regular basis. Moreover, the land around the Syr Darya could not supply Russian forces with sufficient food or fodder. The impoverished Kazakhs and

Karakalpaks who practiced subsistence agriculture in the area were plundered quite frequently by Khivans or Kokandians. While these Russian forts were supposed to protect caravans, many merchants would not stop at them en route to Russia, nor on their way back, and those who did charged outrageous prices. Furthermore, the cost of

59 Allworth, Central Asia, 17.

60 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 351.

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transport from Orenburg kept rising because the cost of pack animals kept rising, and because the Kazakhs knew that they were the only ones who provided these services.61

Fig. 5. Kazakh awarded the Cross of St. George for his service in the campaign against the Kokand at Aq Masjid, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00038 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 25, no. 38))

Russians who were assigned there were not the only ones unhappy to be there.

The Syr Darya region was a miserable place for horses and livestock in the summers too.

Kazakhs and Cossacks would cover their horses with blankets from hoof to tail when out riding, and would sometimes wrap a rug under their horses’ stomachs to protect them

61 Ibid., 392-394.

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from biting gadflies and gnats. These insects were so menacing that animals would become exhausted and emaciated from fighting them off, and died in great numbers.

While the Kazakhs may have considered the Syr Darya their “paradise” according to

Meyendorf, it was only paradise in the winter.62 Kazakhs left the Syr Darya in the summer to avoid these pernicious insects, which made it even harder for Russian forces stuck there all year to find enough Kazakhs and animals to maintain communications between their forts.63 Russia’s position on the Syr Darya, therefore, left them dependent upon Kazakh help that often fell short.

Fig.19. Horse in the Summer, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00142 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 56, no. 142))

62 Meyendorf, A Journey from Orenburg to Bokhara, 7.

63 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 396.

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Iset Kutebar and more instability in the 1850s

The Crimean War between 1853 and 1856 limited Russian engagement on the Syr

Darya and allowed for even more opportunities for Kazakh bands to increase their raids on the steppe. The Russian forts of Aralsk (formerly Raimsk) and Perovskii (formerly

Aq Masjid) were not capable of controlling or containing these Kazakh raids – particularly the ones supported by Khiva led by Iset Kutebar.

While Iset Kutebar had made sporadic gestures over the previous two decades that seemed to indicate he was willing to ally with Russia, he was less than helpful when

Russia needed supplies to attack the Kokandian fort of Aq Masjid in 1853, and returned to Khiva as an ally in 1855.64 After the fall of Aq Masjid, General Perovskii sent a

Kazakh sultan to go after Iset Kutebar and punish him, but Kutebar’s men killed the sultan, causing the rest to retreat. After this 1855 defeat, Russian forces pursued Iset

Kutebar in earnest, but still failed to capture him after several bloody clashes on the steppe. In order to secure communications between Fort Aralsk and Orenburg, a joint

Cossack and Kazakh force attacked 146 of Kutebar’s auls and attempted to surround them, but Kutebar’s men just fled into the steppe and attacked later.65 In 1856, two of

Kutebar’s family members and 900 head of livestock were seized, but Iset had moved further east to live among the Turkmens. The two captured family members were tried,

64 Terentiev, Russia and Engliand in Central Asia, vol. 1, 234-240. Another Kazakh brigand in the Syr Darya was Jan Khoja, who also refused to help Russia attack Aq Masjid.

65 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 372.

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found guilty, and executed at Fort Aralsk in front of a large number of Kazakhs who had been summoned to watch.66

Russia’s cycle of punishment and conciliation with the Kazakhs under Kutebar had run its course by the mid-1850s. Russia and Kutebar had reached an impasse on the steppe. Despite everything that had happened with Kutebar, it was better for Russia to attempt to maintain an alliance with its often capricious Kazakh neighbors than to fight them indefinitely or drive them to ally with other states. The more Kazakh allies on

Russia’s side, the safer the Kazakh Steppe. After Orenburg’s Governor-General

Perovskii retired in 1856, his replacement, General A.A. Katenin, offered Kutebar and his men forgiveness in 1857 if they returned to Russian poddanstvo. Katenin’s pardon of

Kutebar encouraged other Kazakhs along the Syr Darya to return to Russian poddanstvo as well. Iset Kutebar eventually appeared on the steppe to meet General Katenin and submit to Russian poddanstvo in person in 1859.67 This relationship between Russia and

Kutebar was not one of dominance and submission, but more an arrangement to mutually accommodate each other’s respective needs as circumstances on the Kazakh Steppe continued to change.

Russia’s decision to finally establish a fort on the Syr Darya to protect its Kazakh allies and main trade route between Siberia and Mawarannahr finally followed Junior

Horde Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s advice regarding the need to govern Kazakhs from their winter pastures on the Syr Darya. Russia could only have accomplished this undertaking with the help of their Kazakh allies, and tried to serve Kazakh interests by protecting

66 Ibid., 382.

67 Ibid., 385.

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them against the predations of Khivan and Kokandian Kazakhs when they were not outnumbered.

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Chapter 6 -- Friends & Foes on the Siberian Line: Russian-Kazakh-Kyrgyz Alliance against the Qing Empire & Kokand

Russia’s alliance with the Kazakhs of the Middle and Greater Hordes as well as the Kyrgyzes drew them further into the eastern Kazakh Steppe as well. Like Fort

Raimsk near the Aral Sea, which was built at the nexus between Russia’s Kazakhs, Khiva and Kokand to defend Russia’s Kazakh allies, Kopal in the eastern Kazakh Steppe was placed at the edge of Qing, Middle and Greater Horde territories, and Vernoe at the edge of Qing, Greater Horde, and Kyrgyz-Kokandian territories were intended to defend

Russia’s Kazakh allies as well. Like Fort Raimsk, they were built with support of many of the Kazakhs who lived there.

While officials in St. Petersburg and Omsk entertained ideas of “civilizing” their nomadic subjects, Cossacks at a local level had no such pretensions. Indeed, Cossack-

Kazakh alliances continued to pull the Russian Empire further into the Kazakh Steppe as

Cossacks frequently joined their Kazakh allies on barantas, fought according to Kazakh customs, and were pulled into unauthorized engagements further afield to protect and aid their Kazakh allies. Thus, while Russia officially entertained a civilizing mission at a distant elite level, Cossacks on the eastern Kazakh Steppe grew to resemble Kazakhs at a closer and lower level in the “Middle Ground” they had created on the frontier.1

1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Yuri Anatolyevich

241

Siberian Line and Trade

Long before Middle Horde Kazakhs were under Russian poddanstvo, the Siberian line was originally built by Russians to fend off the Jungars and attempt to trade with

Mawarannahr and the Qing Empire through Jungar territory. The city of Omsk was founded in 1716 as a fortification along the Irtysh River, as was Semipalatinsk two years later, and Russia engaged with the Jungars all along that river. As the Jungars declined and the Middle Horde Kazakhs moved into these Jungar territories, trade increased and both fortifications established customs houses in the mid-eighteenth century for trade with the steppe and beyond. Siberian Cossack Host was established in 1808.2 By the mid-nineteenth century, Omsk was the capital of Western Siberia, responsible for governing a huge swath of land stretching from the Arctic Sea to the mining regions around the Altai mountains, and all the way south and southeast to the undefined furthest points of pasturelands of Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo that abutted the nebulous border with the Qing Empire (which had also claimed former Jungar lands).3 While for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Western Siberian was a well-known destination for Russia’s political exiles, many of the Russian military officers who served there considered their assignments there to be a form of punishment as well.4

Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture: Myths and Realities of Cossack-Kazakh Relations in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006).

2 P.P. Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Liudmila Gilmour, Colin Thomas, and Marcus Wheeler (London: Haklyut Society, 1998), 14.

3 Ibid., 14.

4 Ibid., 21, 45-46.

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With too little rain in the 1820s and 1830s, and increased fragmentation of all the Kazakh hordes, conditions on the entire Kazakh Steppe worsened. Khiva continued to encourage Turkmen and Junior Horde raids on caravans between Russia and Bukhara, providing a market for their loot, and sometimes cutting off trade across the steppe entirely.5 Officials in Omsk in the mid-1820s began to explore the possibility of trading with Bukhara down the Siberian Line and transiting Kokand to Bukhara from the east, instead of taking a more direct route through the middle of the steppe.6

Increased Russian fortifications in the 1820s and 1830s in the eastern steppe were intended under the Speranskii Reforms to stabilize the steppe and govern the Kazakhs at a sultan level as the Middle Horde’s khanate disintegrated, and to keep Kazakhs loyal to

Russia instead of leaving for former Jungar lands on Qing territory. Beyond stability on the steppe, Russia’s Siberian Line was very much oriented towards trade with the Qing

Empire. Russian and Qing officials had agreed to open trading points and consulates in the Qing Empire at the towns of Kulja as well as Chuguchak in 1825.7 Russia suffered from a trade deficit with the Qing and the states of Mawarannahr in the nineteenth century, with its trade partners taking Russian silver and gold in lieu of Russian wares.8

Trade records from the early nineteenth century reflect that silver was exported almost as much as goods to the Qing Empire in the 1820s and 1830s, as Russian goods were not as

5 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 621, (ll43-46).

6 Ibid.

7 V.E. Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo (Vernyi: Semirechenskogo Oblastnogo Pravleniia, 1910), 25.

8 TsGARK Fond 825, Opis 1, Delo 22, (ll 17-26); John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD Diss., Harvard, 1964). 18-19, 460.

243

valuable as the tea, silk, porcelain and leather goods coming out of the Qing Empire. 9

Along with gold smuggled to the Qing Empire from the state mines in the Urals and

Altai, opium sales helped compensate and subsidize the price of other exported goods to make them more competitive in Qing markets.10 Kokand was the primary depot for opium sales in the region, controlling much of the opium grown in Mawarannahr and in the northern Subcontinent for export eastward to the Qing Empire. 11 Initially, the Qing merchants were willing to buy opium in silver pound for pound. Later, Tatar merchants in Siberia bought opium from Mawarannahr at the Irbit Fair for about 214 to 228 rubles and then sold it in Qing lands for 628 to 800 rubles. Merchants unloaded their opium in

Qing territory before they reached their official trading points, and then sold their other wares at a discount subsidized by the opium trade.12 While Soviet scholars maintain that opium only entered the Kazakh Steppe much later, and was introduced by refugees from the Qing Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia’s participation in the opium trade thrived much earlier in the century.13 The opium trade declined considerably

9 TsGARK Fond 825, Opis 1, Delo 22, (ll 17-26).

10 Thomas Witlam Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1858), 135.

11 David Bello, "Opium in Xinjiang and Beyond," in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley, CA: University Of California Press, 2000), 141.

12 TsGARK Fond 825, Opis 1, Delo 22, (ll 17-26); and Thomas W. Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China. With Adventures among the Mountain Kirghis; and the Manjours, Toungouz, Touzemtz, Goldi, and Gelyaks: The Hunting and Pastoral Tribes (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1860), 159.

13 N.A. Bazilevskaya, On the Races of the Opium Poppy Growing in Semirech'e and the Origin of Their Culture [Semirechenskie Rasy Opiinogo Maka, Genetiki is

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when Qing officials made a concerted efforts to curb opium imports in the late 1830s through increased interdciction and import substitution, and after the First Opium War.14

Fig. 6. Opium Smoker, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00032 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 87, no. 293))

Further disruption on the steppe caused by the Kenesary Rebellion in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as frequent insurrections in Kashgar and conflict between the Qing

Empire and Kokand, re-routed trade from Tashkent and Bukhara that went to Russia over to the Qing instead, prompting traders from Russia to ask for Russian protection for their caravans in the steppe and attempt to tap into trade between Mawarannahr and the Qing

Rastenievodstva 1928, Vol 19, Part II, pp. 95-184], ed. Agricultural Research Service and USDA (New Delhi: Amerind Publishing Co., Pvt. Ltd, 1976), 39.

14David Bello, "Opium in Xinjiang and Beyond," in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley, CA: University Of California Press, 2000), 141.

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Empire further east as well.15 As Russia established closer relations with the Greater

Horde from the 1820s, Russian trade with the Qing Empire improved.16 Thus, the better

Russia’s relations with the Middle and Greater Horde on former Jungar lands in the eastern Kazakh Steppe, and the more peace and stability among them, the more trade with the Qing Empire was possible.

Fig.21. Caravan Sleeping on the Steppe (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00119 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 45, no. 119))

15 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 578, (ll 2-5).

16 TsGARK Fond 825, Opis 1, Delo 22, (ll 17-26).

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Tatar merchants dominated Russian trade with Mawarannahr and the Qing in

Semipalatinsk.17 The Tatars who mostly engaged in long-distance trade with the sedentary states neighboring the Kazakh Steppe lived in separate settlements apart from the Russian officers on the right bank of the Irtysh. However, the Tatars who traded among the Kazakhs and migrated with them on the steppe lived with the Kazakhs and

Cossacks together on the left bank, and all benefitted from trade and smuggling.18

British traveler Thomas Atkinson noted in 1850 while passing through, “Here exists a curious population of Russian Cossacks, Tatars, Kalmyks, and Kazakhs, and a singular mixture of races is springing up, which will greatly puzzle the future ethnologist.”19 As with the rest of the Siberian Line, the Cossacks who lived with and engaged most often with the Kazakhs grew to resemble them the most.20

Aside from long-distance trade with Bukhara and the Qing Empire, the Siberian

Line was the main gateway for Kazakh livestock into Siberia and the rest of Russia.

Kazakh horses and oxen were exchanged for Russian wares and grain and driven from the steppe to work in the Altai and East Siberian mines, playing an integral part of

Russia’s economy.21 Moreover, over a million Kazakh fat-tailed sheep a year were driven to Petropavlovsk and were taken westward to where they were

17 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 5.

18 Ibid., 26.

19 Ibid.

20 Yuri Malikov gives an excellent description of the kind of Kazakh-Cossack culture that evolved around the Irtysh River. Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture.”

21 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 6.

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slaughtered for meat and their fat rendered into tallow for candles. By the mid-nineteenth century, all of Siberia and a great part of Russia consumed these sheep and tallow candles.22

Expansion of the Siberian Line in the 1840s

Governor-General Prince Petr Dmitrievich Gorchakov, who administered Western

Siberia from 1839 to 1851, expanded the Siberian line to protect Russia’s Kazakh allies from other Kazakhs, and to better define a border with the Qing Empire, where renegade robber- bands thrived in the liminal spaces between. As in the 1820s and 1830s,

Gorchakov attempted to counter Kazakh attempts to seek Qing vassalage, by expanding further east, and established a new territory north of Lake Zaysan, occupying the pasturelands where Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo migrated.

The undefined borderlands between Russia and the Qing Empire on former

Jungar territory, particularly the lands east of Ala Kul, were considered in the 1840s to be one of the most dangerous places in the steppe, inhabited by a large band of robbers who had lost all contact with their tribal allegiances, called the “Baijagat.” They were reportedly comprised of Kazakhs from different hordes who had escaped punishment after committing serious crimes, as well as escaped Qing convicts from penal colonies in

Jungaria.23 Together, they formed a hybrid band of thieves, carried out depredations with impunity, and forced the Kazakhs and everyone else on the steppe to fear for their lives.24

22 Ibid.

23 Didar Kassymova, Khanat Kundakbayeva, and Ustina Markus, eds., Historical Dictionary of Kazakhstan (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 42.

24 Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia, 154.

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Another threat to Kazakhs on the eastern borderlands was the influence of the opium trade with the Qing Empire. Opium smoking was quite prevalent among wealthy

Kazakhs, and especially the sons of sultans and notables who were easily supplied by

Tatar merchants crossing the steppe.25 Atkinson claimed that this drug usage, even in small quantities, had a “most enervating effect” on the Kazakh elite he had met in his travels, as well as the Tatars who trafficked in opium.26

Russia’s long history of allying with one group of Kazakhs against their enemies and establishing a fortification at the edge of that new territory to defend them continued as the Siberian Line expanded in the 1850s to include the Kyrgyzes as well. Russia’s tendency to gather nomads until their borders abutted sedentary states was noted by

Atkinson as he travelled down the Siberian Line in the 1840s and 1850s. Noting this dynamic, he did not, however, expect Tashkent to be Russia’s primary objective, but rather predicted that Russia would soon establish Cossack forts near Kashgar instead.27

Ayaguz and Kopal

The fort of Ayaguz, established 200 miles south of Semipalatinsk in 1831 on a caravan route that crossed the first of the seven main rivers that flowed into Lake

Balkhash, was formally the seat of Russia’s representative for administrative control over the Middle and Greater Kazakh Hordes of the eastern Kazakh Steppe, and situated at the

25 Ibid., 159.

26 Ibid., 159, 190-191.

27 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 294. Russian officials actually considered building a Russian fort near Kashgar to protect the Russian warehouse they were permitted to build after the Treaty of Peking in 1860.

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edge of Qing claims to former Jungar lands. More alliances forged during the Kenesary

Rebellion, as well as the enduring land dispute between the Middle and Greater hordes south of Lake Balkhash, however, prompted Russia to build a fort at the edge of Middle

Horde territorial claims further south.

Middle Horde Sultan Uchin, who had been a vassal of the Qing with the rank of Major, turned to Russia for protection from another Middle Horde sultan, Suvankul

Khankhoji. Sultan Sart’s alliance with Russia opened up his lands on the Ayaguz River, and thus opened up trade routes linking Russian Siberia to the trade entrepôt of

Chuguchak in the Qing Empire.28 Russia built a fort on Sultan Sart Uchin’s land and made him a Senior Sultan in 1831. Sultan Suvankul, Sultan Sart’s nemesis, however, trotted off to the Qing Empire and launched more baranta raids from there against Sultan

Sart’s auls and caravans en route to Chuguchak and Kulja. His incessant raids prompted

Kazakhs to go to Qing territory for safety. Finally, a Russian military expedition against

Sultan Suvankul was launched in 1839 and he was captured, and sent to Tomsk where he died several years later.29 Suvankul’s capture pacified the region considerably and allowed the Kazakhs who had left for Qing lands to return to Russian poddanstvo. 30

Some Kazakhs around the Ayaguz River, however, decided to move across the Ili

River to join Kokand in 1839. Cossacks from the Siberian Line followed the Kazakhs who had left to join Kokand, and caught up with them later in the summer south of Lake

Balkhash, intending to persuade them to come back. After about a hundred Kazakhs

28 Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo, 15.

29 Ibid., 16.

30 Ibid., 15.

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surrounded the Cossacks on all sides to return to Russian poddanstvo, the Kokandians opened fire. The badly wounded Kazakhs returned to Russian poddanstvo to live around the Ayaguz River.31

Fig. 22. Kazakh Migration, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00105 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 37, no. 105))

The Kenesary Kasymov rebellion prompted Russian forces to move even deeper into Semirechye. In order to curb Kenesary’s influence on the Greater Horde Kazakhs, a detachment of Cossacks was sent to the Lepsi River in 1846 to invite all the Greater

31 Ibid., 16.

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Horde sultans, biis, and elders to enter Russian poddanstvo.32 Just as Russia claimed the right to protect Junior Horde pasturelands on the Syr Darya with Khan Abu’l-Khayr’s

1731 oath of loyalty, Russia now claimed the right to protect all the Greater Horde’s pasturelands down to the Chu River with their 1846 oath of loyalty.

Kenesary Kasymov, upon hearing of the Greater Horde’s collective entrance into

Russian poddanstvo, sent his men to intervene. Just when Russian forces had left the

Lepsi River, Kenesary’s men appeared on the Kök Su River and attacked the Jalair tribe.33 A more permanent fort in the region would be necessary to keep Kenesary at bay, with a small encampment set up in 1846 until a more substantial fort, Kopal, was built in 1848.

While the Russian representative to the Middle Horde was still assigned to Fort

Ayaguz to govern with a ruling council of Kazakh notables, a lower ranking Russian marshal, together with a Kazakh council, to govern the Greater Horde was assigned to the new fort at Kopal.34 Even though plans for Kopal were made back in 1841, the fort on the borderlands between the Middle and Greater Hordes in the former Jungar territory of

Semirechye, and an advance team was sent to secure the area in 1846 when the rest of the

Kazakh Greater Horde entered Russian poddanstvo, Kopal was not officially established until 1848.35 Situated on a trade route between Mawarannahr and the Qing and Russian

32 Ibid., 19.

33 Ibid., 20.

34 Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1995), 72.

35 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 51. All land annexed south of the Ayaguz River in the 1840s in the former Jungar lands of Semirechye would become part of the

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empires, it was intended to diffuse tensions between the Middle and Greater hordes and initially had nothing to do with a “pincer maneuver” to annex the entire Kazakh Steppe.

Travel on the eastern steppe in the 1840s was not safe and large groups of up to twenty-five Cossacks armed with guns and swords, plus a contingent of a dozen Kazakhs with their battle-axes and long lances, were required escorts for the eighteen-day journey between Ayaguz and Kopal.36 Superior weaponry did not necessarily ensure safety. One of the stations in 1848 on the way to Kopal had been attacked by a large body of

Kazakhs, who murdered and mutilated all eight of its defenders.37

The Russian officials who administered the Middle and Greater Horde from

Ayaguz and Kopal in the 1840s extended the Speranskii Reforms further south. The sultans were courted, given honors and marks of distinction – medals, swords, or coats –

paid a stipend, and given the privilege of attending an annual council at Ayaguz to deliberate on laws regarding the Kazakhs. Cossacks were assigned to live with different

Kazakh sultans under Russian poddanstvo, helped the sultans with their correspondence, and also spied on them.38 Kazakh sultans’ alliances with Russia also served their own purposes and gave them more authority over other Kazakhs, particularly if they could request Cossack protection to fight their enemies. Russian gifts to Kazakh sultans were

newly formed guberniia of Turkestan after 1867. The fort of Ayaguz was later renamed Sergiopol in 1860 after Alexander II’s youngest son, Sergei.

36 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 50-51.

37 Ibid., 32.

38 Ibid., 34.

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widely sought after, to the point where Russian representatives on the Siberian Line sometimes ran out of presents.39

Fig. 23. Kazakh Bii with a Russian Medal, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00002 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 1, no. 2))

The 700 Cossacks with their families who were sent to build Kopal in 1848 were told that they were moving to a warm and fertile land with lots of trees from which to

39 TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 518, (l 6); Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 181.

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build their houses. This proved not to be the case. As winter set in, over a hundred people died of diseases like scurvy, dysentery and fever brought about by daily exposure to the elements, inadequate shelter, and lack of fruits and vegetables in just eight months.40 With Kulja only three days away, and the even larger trading city of Kashgar a bit further away, desertions from Kopal were not uncommon. The surrounding Kazakhs, however, would catch and return Russian runaways for a reward.41 While one deserter, claiming that the Devil made him do it, seems to have gone insane, others who were caught simply explained that they were drunk, and that running away, often to the Qing

Empire, seemed like a good idea at the time.42

Alcoholism was a problem on the steppe. One of the few ways to escape the bleakness of life in a remote outpost on the eastern Kazakh Steppe for a Russian official and Cossack was with alcohol. The official ban on distilling and importing vodka into the steppe appeared to have had no impact whatsoever except for raising its price and enriching the Russian officials who permitted alcohol smuggling.43 Wine merchants smuggled outrageously priced bottles of vodka, as well as wine and champagne spuriously claimed to have come from France, to meet the large demand in Ayaguz.44

Since alcohol was expensive, and salaries often did not cover their costs, money had to be made through other less legal means on this trading town among the Kazakhs near the

40 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 182.

41 Ibid., 181.

42 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 47, (l 1); TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 2, Delo 48, (l 1); and Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor,181.

43 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 18, 217

44 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 28.

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Qing border. The Russian administrative representative for the Middle Horde at Ayaguz was known, according to Atkinson, as “in no way scrupulous how profit was obtained from the inhabitants of the steppe.” 45 Since there was no hope of the wine merchants making their way as far as Kopal (an 18-day journey away from Ayaguz), the Cossacks there opted for a camel-laden booze-run to Kulja for Chinese brandy instead.46

The government not only futilely attempted to ban the sale of alcohol in the region, but its consumption and distillation as well. It was, however, impossible to prevent bootlegging and smuggling. The Cossacks managed to distill vodka from rehydrated raisins, which were brought in huge quantities on camel caravans from

Tashkent to Russian forts.47

Middle and Greater Horde Land Dispute

The Kazakhs of the Middle and Greater Hordes both complained to Russian officials in Ayaguz about incursions of the other horde onto their pasturelands in 1848 and started conducting barantas against each other – the same year Russia built the fort of Kopal between them. In particular, the powerful Jalair tribe under Sultan Siuk of the

45 Ibid., 34.

46 Ibid., 171; Eugene Schyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, vol. 2 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876), 196. Chinese brandy, knowns as ju, junjun, or Shau-ju, was 120-proof liquor made from fermented barley, sorghum, rice and other grains, containing a great quantity of fusel oil and sometimes a mixture of opium. It tasted like “liquid fire.”

47 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 216.

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Greater Horde complained that the powerful Nayman tribe under Sultan Boulania of the

Middle Horde had seized land along the rivers flowing into Lake Balkhash that did not belong to them. 48 He reminded the Russian officials that he had sworn allegiance to

Russia in Semirechye in 1822 and had even had an audience with Emperor Alexander I the following year. 49 The Naymans responded that their territory stretched from Ayaguz to the Lepsi and Aksu Rivers, and that the gravesites of their ancestors were near these rivers, thereby indicating that this land belonged to them. 50 Moreover, the Naymans claimed that the Russians had already resolved this long-standing dispute in 1824 and again in 1846, concluding that the Naymans had used this land for over 91 years after the

Jungars left and that it should be theirs already.51 The Jalairs retorted that their summer and winter pastures had stretched from the Chu River to the Ak Su and Lepsi Rivers since ancient times. The Naymans’ baranta raids had driven the Jalairs to seek other pastures near Tashkent and in Qing lands. Qing forces had pushed many of the Jalairs, as well as

Kyrgyzes and Kipchaks, out of Qing lands, forcing the Jalairs back to their now- diminished pasturelands in Semirechye. When the Jalairs returned to the region, they wanted their ancestral lands back.52 Twenty-five Cossacks who were assigned to be embedded with Sultan Siuk and his Jalair tribe, helped drive off the Naymans from what

Russian officials determined to be Jalair land in late 1848, but the Naymans returned with

48 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2097, (l 1).

49 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2097, (7-10).

50 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2097, (ll 5-6).

51 Ibid.

52 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2097, (ll 7-10).

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more baranta raids. The problem festered, threatening caravans that traversed the contested territory.53 It was at this time that the fort of Kopal was built.

In March 1851, after much negotiation, Governor-General Prince Gorchackov convinced both the Middle Horde Naymans and Greater Horde Jalairs to send about one hundred people to meet to negotiate their differences at Kopal, with Russia mediating.54

Sultan Siuk insisted that the border between the Jalairs and Naymans be the Ak Su River, including the shores of Lake Balkhash.55 This time, however, Russian officials sided with the Naymans instead of the Jalairs, insisting that the Greater and Middle Hordes share the former Jungar territory south of Lake Balkhash. Sultan Siuk rejected Russia’s proposal and threatened to push Greater Horde territory up to the Lepsi River if he did not get the

Ak Su. Sultan Boulania of the Naymans, however rejected the Ak Su as the border and threatened to push the Middle Horde territory well past the Kopal fort to the Kök Su.56

The cycle of violence between the two powerful tribes of the two hordes continued.

Despite this failed diplomacy, Russian officials had a vested interest in protecting

Sultan Boulania and the Naymans. Besides the lucrative trade route to the Qing Empire through Nayman territory, Russian mining engineers had discovered silver north of the

Ayaguz, which Sultan Boulania sold Russian officials mining rights for handsome remuneration in 1852.57 Sultan Siuk received a pension from Russia, but still continued

53 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 2097, (ll 70-71).

54 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 501, (l 46); Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 174-175.

55 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 176.

56 Ibid., 177.

57 Ibid., 178-179.

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his war on the Naymans. Many Greater Horde Kazakhs, however, turned against Russia or left for Kokand.58

The very year that Fort Kopal was built, Kokand sent 3,000 men to their

Tauchubek fort on the Keskelen River in response. Kokand attempted to convince the

Greater Horde Dulat tribe under Russian poddanstvo to become subjects of Kokand instead.59 To counter Kokand, the Russian marshal to the Greater Horde, Major Baron

Vrangel (Wrangel), made preparations to move Russian forces across the Ili River and build a fort at Chubar Agach that year. Before Russian forces were mobilized, however,

Tashkent was attacked by the Emirate of Bukhara and Kokandian forces departed to defend it.60

Kokandian forces returned to the Ili River valley the following year, but this time the Greater Horde rejected Kokand’s overtures and demands for tribute. In response,

Kokand attacked the Jalair tribe’s herds in a baranta raid and took their livestock over to the left bank of the Ili River to their Fort Touchubek. From the Kokandian fort, the commander sent out letters to all the Greater Horde Kazakhs urging them to leave Russia and join Kokand.61 After Kokandian forces raided Semirechye with help from the

Greater Horde, another 12,000 Greater Horde households left to join them across the Chu

River.62 Russian Greater Horde marshal Major Vrangel sent about 175 Cossacks and

58 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 501, (ll 46, 80, 263).

59 Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo, 23.

60 Ibid., 23.

61 Ibid., 24.

62 B.A. Balskaia, Puteshestviia Egora Petrovicha Kovalevskogo (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Geograficheskoi Literatury, 1956), 69.

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fifty Russian infantry under Captain Gutkovskii to drive Kokand out of Fort Tauchubek in the spring of 1850. Tauchubek was defended by only 150 Kokandians and had 280 feet of clay redoubts on each side. Gutkovskii and his men, however, were prevented from attacking Tauchubek when they were surrounded by about 6,000-7,000 Greater

Horde Kazakhs who had nominally been under Russian poddanstvo but had switched to

Kokand’s side. Gutkovskii and his men were forced to retreat, fighting these Greater

Horde Kazakhs with two cannons as they fled, and finally retreated to the right side of the

Ili River.63 The Russians would only be able to stay in Semirechye and attack Kokand if the Greater Horde Kazakhs were on their side.

Several thousand Greater Horde Kazakhs continued their attack on Russian forces by attacking Fort Kopal. They underestimated the range of Russian cannons and grapeshot, however, which killed many and forced the rest to scatter.64 Sultan Siuk of the

Jalairs perhaps disingenuously claimed later in an interview with a Russian official that he was not part of this attack at Kopal, even though Russia had ruled against his territorial claims, and continued to receive his Russian stipend.65

Egor P. Kovalevskii, Director of the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, was in Kopal shortly after the attack on his way to Kulja to finalize a trade agreement with the Qing Empire (the Treaty of Kulja) and used his stay in Kopal to

63 A.I. Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana i postupatelnago dvizheniia v nego russkikh (St. Petersburg: 1890), 137.

64 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 296-297.

65 Ch Valikhanov and M Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865).

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consider Russia’s next steps in the region.66 In his memo “On the Organization of the

Greater Horde Kazakhs and the Improvement of the Routes that Run through the Steppe,”

Kovalevskii argued that the Russian government was “morally obliged” to shield the

Kazakhs who were Russian subjects from attacks from other Kazakhs who were influenced by Kokand, and concluded that further control of Greater Horde territory by driving out Kokand was necessary to ensure their safety.67 In the meantime, some

Kazakhs of the Greater Horde continued to cross the Ili River and join Kokand.68

General Adjutant Annenkov, who was temporarily administering Western Siberia before the next Governor-General was appointed, went to Kopal shortly thereafter in

April 1851 to inspect the Siberian Line. He personally ordered Colonel Karbyshev to lead a new expedition to cross the Ili River, destroy Kokand’s Fort Tauchubek, punish those Kazakhs who had attacked Russia, and firmly establish Russia’s control of the Ili

River valley.69 A battalion of Russian infantry and 500 Cossacks under Colonel

Karbyshev left the next month with heavy artillery. Unlike the last attack on Kokand, however, the Russians had more Kazakh allies. Russian forces were escorted by a cavalry detachment led by Greater Horde Sultan Diuche Siukov of the Jalair tribe (son of

Sultan Siuk) and Sultan Ables Aliev of the Dulat tribe (son of Sultan Ali). Moreover, as they marched towards Tauchubek, they were joined by other Greater Horde sultans and

66 Balskaia, Puteshestviia Egora Petrovicha Kovalevskogo,.69.

67 Ibid.

68 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 339, (ll 5-6).

69 Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo, 25. Western Siberia Governor General Gorchakov had already left his post in 1851 and his replacement, Governor-General Gasfort, would not be named and in place until 1853.

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their men from the Alban and Suvan tribes.70 By the time they had all reached

Tauchubek on the Keskelen River, the Kokandians had abandoned it and fled across the

Chu River to another fort at Pishpek. Russian forces destroyed the abandoned fort, camped on the left bank of the Ili River the entire summer just to make sure the

Kokandians did not return, and then returned to Kopal.71 All the Kazakh sultans who participated in this attack received awards.72

Two years later, by the summer of 1853, with Gustav Ivanovich Gasfort as the new Governor-General of Western Siberia, Russian forces under Kazakh Greater Horde marshal Major Peremyshlskii left Kopal with only forty men and a cartographer to permanently occupy the Ili River valley on a trade route to the Qing Empire, where they established Fort Vernoe on the Almatinka River the following year. This was only possible with Greater Horde assistance; the Dulat and Alban tribes provided the pack animals and camels to carry Russian provisions from Kopal to the new fort.73 The

Russian marshal to the Greater Horde Kazakhs was ordered to move to Vernoe as well, and Cossack settlements were established the next year.74

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 “Istoriia Goroda Alma-Ata i drugi arkhivnye dokumenty 1851-1862” (Rukopis), 127.

73 Nedzvetskii, Uzun Agachskoe Delo, 28.

74 Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana, 137.

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Qing Empire Claims on Semirechye

The same year Russia failed in its attempt to negotiate the land dispute between the Middle and Greater Horde in 1850, Russia had its own territorial and trade interests to defend with the Qing Empire in the disputed former Jungar territory of Semirechye.

Russian forces encountered a detachment of Qing forces south of Lake Balkhash near the

Kök Su in 1850 looking for stolen livestock. They were attempting to conclude a trade agreement with the Greater Horde.75 Qing officials in the region had also heard of the

Russian defeat at the Ili River and subsequent withdrawal, so the detachment Beijing sent to the region was also probably there to investigate.76 Russian officials, with their convoy of 150 Cossacks and artillery, warned the Qing officials at the Kök Su that negotiations with the Greater Horde Kazakhs of Semirechye should be handled through

Russia, “as a good neighbor,” and further requested that Russian merchants be allowed to trade in the trading towns of Chuguchak, Kulja, and Kashgar as St. Petersburg officials were then asking in negotiations for what would become the 1851 Treaty of Kulja.77

Not deterred by this warning, three Qing officials and a detachment of fifty soldiers were again intercepted by Russian forces the following year (1851) south of Lake Balkhash at the Karatal River, claiming that they wanted to head to the Lepsi River.78 Captain

Peremyshlskii, in Kopal, forbade them to travel further without more senior permission

75 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 329, (l 13); and TsGARK, Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 327, (ll 7-8).

76 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 329, (ll 21-22).

77 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis, Delo 327, (ll 15-18).

78 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 360, (ll 2-3); and Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 123. Semenov claims Captain Peremyshlskii was rumored to be former Western Siberia Governor-General Prince Gorchakov’s illegitimate son.

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from Omsk, and escorted them back to the Kök Su. At one point in Peremyshlskii’s mostly friendly discussion with the Qing officials over tea, one of the officials retorted,

“This is our land,” after Peremyshlskii explained that it now belonged to Russia.79

Peremyshlskii noted in his memorandum of his encounter with the Qing officials

Fig.24. Kazakh Bii with Chinese Coat, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00001 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 1, no. 1))

79 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 360, (ll 2-3, 7-9).

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to Governor-General Gasfort that the Qing government, “without any kind of doubt, still has not ceased to think that the places we now occupy in the Greater Horde, belong to

China.” In contrast to Qing claims on former Jungar lands that they did not actually control, Peremyshlskii believed that the Qing officials saw Russia as ”already stronger in these places, occupying them not in name, but in a real way.” Russia’s physical possession of the land, he argued, gives them, “the ability to wait, without resorting to any kinds of measures that would alarm the Qing or lead to clashes.”80

Russia’s policy in the mid-nineteenth century with the Greater Horde in

Semirechye was to avoid conflict with the Qing Empire if at all possible, without giving the Qing any cause to complain, and to try to avoid discussions at a lower level out in the field about the official location of the Russian-Qing border.81 While a series of treaties later attempted to clearly define the new border between the Russian and Qing empires on former Jungar lands and establish trade relations, border disputes and access to trade in Qing lands over this relatively unmapped region were a constant source of tension and a significant focus of the Siberian Line’s efforts.82

Greater Horde Kazakh Allies

As demonstrated by the clashes near the Ili River and Kokandian Fort Tauchubek, just as Kokand had Greater Horde allies to attack Russia, Russia had Greater Horde allies

80 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 360, (ll7-9).

81 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 360, (ll7-9).

82 M.I. Sladkovskii, History of Economic Relations between Russia and China: From Modernization to Maoism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishing, 2008 [1966]), 81-85. The Treaties of Kulja (1851), Tianjin (1858), Beijing (1860), and Protocol of Chuguchak 1864 all attempted to address this issue.

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to attack Kokand.83 The Greater Horde Kazakhs had their own motives for siding with

Russia against Kokand, hoping to leverage these alliances for their own interests in inter-

Kazakh struggles. Greater Horde Sultan Tezek of the Alban tribe was particularly adept in leveraging his relationship with Russia to increase his power over other Kazakhs.84

Like Junior Horde Sultan Bai Aichuvakov who had helped the Orenburg Corps establish themselves at Fort Raimsk near the Aral Sea, Sultan Tezek helped the Siberian Corps establish themselves in Semirechye in a way that benefited his interests. However, despite Tezek’s assistance and loyalty, the Russians suspected Tezek of becoming too powerful and carefully watched him.85 Tezek had expanded his claim to pastures for the

Albans at the expense of the Jalair and Dulat tribes of the Greater Horde, and Russian officials received many negative reports about Tezek from other Kazakh tribes. While

Russia needed Sultan Tezek’s alliance, Governor-General Gasfort warned Captain

Peremyshlskii not to trust anyone in the Alban tribe, for this “power-hungry horde is wily like a fox, and cruel like a tiger.”86 Despite this initial distrust, Sultan Tezek was very useful in just about every major Russian campaign against Kokand, helping Russia conquer the cities of the Syr Darya all the way to Tashkent.

Greater Horde Kazakh sultans, having submitted to three different states in their own lifetimes, were quite adept at speaking the language that their interlocutors sought to hear. Russian orientalist scholar and expedition leader M. Veniukov noted that Sultan

83 “Istoriia Goroda Alma-Ata i Drugie Arkhivnye Dokumenty 1851-1862” (Rukopis), 127.

84 Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 130, 137, 220.

85 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 348, (ll 60-62).

86 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 348, (ll 60-62).

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Ali, leader of the Dulat tribe, was quite skilled: “This old man has seen a great deal of adventure in his day, and having at various times been subject to three states, he has learned to adapt himself to the customs of different countries. In many ways his natural cunning and ready wit were remarkable.”87 When he was asked by the Russian official if his people were happy to have him as their ruler, Sultan Ali obsequiously responded:

I govern my people according to the decrees of the Padishah [Tsar] – may Heaven protect him! – and his deputy, the pristav [local marshal]. As you must know, a piece of timber is a rude block at first, but becomes seemly and serviceable as this arm-chair, under the skillful hands of the joiner. I and my people are the block, the deputy is the joiner. Were it not for him and the Padishah, we should always remain blocks.88

Not only did Sultan Ali know how to flatter his powerful Russian patron, he managed to weave the language of woodworking and furniture into his language when these skills and items hardly played a significant role in his own life as a nomad. He spoke the

Russians’ language even with his metaphors, if not in the itself. After

Veniukov demurred that Sultan Ali was being too modest, and noted that the allegiance of the Dulat tribe to the Padishah depended upon him, Sultan Ali responded:

My people cannot but be faithful to the Padishah [Tsar] and obedient to those he sets over us. We live together here as two hands. You Russians are the right hand, we the left, and the pristav [local marshal] is the head. It would be bad if the left hand disobeyed the right, and if both did not fulfill the orders of the head.89

Thus, as two separate peoples, Russians and Kazakhs were joined at the head by the same local marshal to the Greater Horde at Fort Vernoe. Representing Russia, however,

Veniukov specifically chose to meet Sultan Ali in Russian quarters, “in order that the

87 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 242.

88 Ibid., 244.

89 Ibid., 245.

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dignity of a Russian officer, sent as they supposed direct from the Emperor, should not be compromised in the eyes of the [Kazakhs],” and not a neutral spot as equals.90

For all Veniukov and other Russian officer’s pretensions of superiority over the

Kazakhs, at a lower Cossack and foot-soldier level, Russians and Kazakhs fought side by side and participated on joint barantas together as well. While Veniukov took pride in

Russia’s “civilizing mission” among the Kazakhs, he also feared that prolonged interaction with Russians was harming the Kazakhs, turning them into “inveterate drunkards” like the Cossacks and Russian soldiers who lived with them.91

Bugus Kyrgyzes Seek Protection

Kokandian taxes on the Kyrgyzes had become quite onerous in the 1850s. Rather than rebel against Kokand, the Kyrgyzes attempted to pay the rising tax demands by raiding their neighbors for livestock. Their increased predations in the 1850s increased calls by the Greater Horde upon Russia to defend their allies. Moreover, according to survivors of Kyrgyz raids, Kyrgyz barantas were more cold-blooded and vicious than

Kazakh barantas because the Kyrgyz aimed to not only steal livestock, but murder its owners too.92

While the Kyrgyz Bugus, who lived on former Jungar territory, were still technically subjects of the Qing Empire on the eastern side of Issyk-Kul and paid tribute, they were also were forced to pay Kokand taxes, and wanted to enter Russian poddanstvo

90 Ibid., 243.

91 Ibid., 247.

92 Ibid, 284-285.

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for protection from the Kokandian Sarybagish Kyrgyz who were in a blood feud with them.93 Initial contact between the Bugus and Russia was through a Russian official who was a Volga Tatar, Faizullah Nogayev, who persuaded the Bugus to write the

Russian government a letter asking for poddanstvo in 1853.94 The war between the two tribes began when Bugus manap Burambai’s eldest son Klych, who was married to

Sarybagish manap Urman’s daughter, killed his father-in-law. By the time the 80-year old manap Burambai entered Russian poddanstvo in 1855, the Sarybagish had already driven the Bugus out of most of the Issyk-Kul area, and had seized members of

Burambai’s family, and had slaughtered thousands of the Buguses in relentless ambushes as they tried to escape.95 Buramabai asked both Greater Horde Alban Sultan Tezek and

Russia for help. Moreover, the Bugus specifically asked Russian officials to build them a fort and to send them a Cossack detachment for their protection like the Kazakhs and

Jungars before them.96

Like the Bugus, Russia did not have a good relationship with the Sarybagish

Kyrgyzes of Kokand either. Around this time the Sarybagishes raided a group of

Cossacks who were grazing their horses just outside of the newly established Fort

Vernoe, killing twelve and mounting their heads on lances as a sign of protest.97

93 Ibid., 105.

94 TsGARK, Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 348, (l 1); T. Chorotegin, "The Kyrgyz," in History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. 5 (Geneva: Unesco, 1996), 125; and Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 95-97.

95 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 144-145.

96 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 348, (l 1).

97 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 23.

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Governor-General Gasfort resolved that if the blood feud between the Sarybagishes and

Buguses did not end by the spring of 1856, Russia would send a Cossack detachment to

Issyk-Kul to build a small fort for the Bugus’ protection.98

By the summer of 1856, the Sarybagishes had raided not only the Greater Horde , but also a caravan in Semirechye en route to Tashkent, prompting Russia to join the

Greater Horde in a baranta raid on the Sarybagishes. As with Governor-General

Perovskii’s attempts to protect the Junior Horde from Kokandian raids along the Syr

Darya in the early 1850s, Governor-General Gasfort sought to protect the Greater Horde from Kokandian raids. Along with a very large contingent of Greater Horde Kazakhs, the Russian marshal for the Greater Horde Colonel Khomentovskii led a large force of

Cossacks, infantry and artillery to take back their Kazakh allies’ livestock from the

Sarybagishes.99

The Russo-Kazakh contingent descended upon the Sarybagish auls in the Chu

River valley, devastated them, took their herds, and headed back. The Sarybagishes, however, chased after the already over-extended Russian and Kazakh forces. Despite the heavy losses inflicted by Russian gunfire and artillery, they continued to pursue the

Russians and Kazakhs, seizing the wounded who had fallen behind and hacking them to pieces with battle axes.100

When Petr P. Semenev “Tien-Shanskii” wanted to diplomatically engage with the

Sarybagishes later that same year as part of his explorations of the Tien-Shan Mountains

98 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 348, (ll 60-62).

99 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 91-91.

100 Ibid., 92.

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for the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, the Cossacks at Fort Vernoe considered marching through the narrow gorge up the Chu River to meet with their battle-axe wielding enemies an “act of madness.” According to Semenov, it was “not easy to maintain the spirits and self-confidence among the Cossacks” on this leg of the trip.101

Russia once again established itself as a neutral arbiter between the clashing Kyrgyz and

Kazakh parties. Semenov’s meeting with the Sarybagishes and exchange of presents, established Russia as a neutral party between the Buguses and Sarybagishes to settle later disputes. Semenov warned the Sarybagishes that Russia, “never had been, and never would be the first to attack the Kyrgyzes, but if on the part of the latter any kind of baranta were to be carried out, not only against the Russians themselves, but also against their subjects, the Kazakhs of the Greater Horde, retribution would be immediate, as had happened.”102

With the war between the Buguses and Sarybagishes still in full force the following year in 1857, Semenov Tien-Shanskii returned with fifty Cossacks, Alban

Sultan Tezek, and a large contingent of his trobe to “explore” the eastern portion of

Issyk-Kul and engage with the besieged Buguses in Qing lands who still sought Russian poddanstvo. Sultan Tezek had agreed to be Russia’s imperial proxy in this matter, overcoming his own purported personal dislike for the Buguses’ manap, Burambai and agreeing to protect the Buguses against the Sarybagish.103 Moreover, by allying with

Russia, and by marching 1,500 of his own Alban men through his own territories with

101 Ibid., 94.

102 Ibid., 97.

103 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 348, (ll 60-62).

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fifty Cossacks, he reinforced his own power over his own tribe, collecting tribute along the way. He also reaped the benefits of Burambai’s gratitude when the eastern half of

Issyk-Kul was restored to him.104 Sultan Tezek may have been, “wily like a fox and cruel like a tiger,” but he was exactly what Russia wanted at the time as Russia’s Kazakh allies helped expand the Russian empire’s domain. Tezek’s help for the Buguses enabled

Russia to claim the Buguses territory, stretching from the eastern half of the Issyk-Kul up to the peak of the highest summit of the Tien Shan Mountains, countering the Qing’s claim.105 After Burambai’s passed away, the Buguses split into numerous factions, and they were greatly weakened by their war with the Sarybagishes.106 Russia’s claim to

Bugus territory, enforced by the Albans of Greater Horde, was later formalized with the

Treaty of Peking in 1860.

As Kokand fell into further internal dissary and continued to demand more taxes from the Kyrgyzes and Kazakhs with each change in leadership, other Kyrgyz tribes wanted to join Russia as well. Kyrgyz manap Jangarach (Jan Karatch), nick-named “the

Big” for being “fat as a bullock” wanted to join the Cossacks with his men and become a major.107 His Solto tribe, which migrated between the Chu and Talas Rivers in the vicinity of the Kokandian fortress of Pishpek, was considered the most predatory of the

Kyrgyz.108 Kazakhs who had previously left Semirechye and crossed the Chu River also

104 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 124, 138-139.

105 Ibid., 179.

106 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 276.

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid., 276, 284-285.

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wanted to return in the late 1850s and early 1860s.109 The borderlands between Russian claims on the Ili River valley and Kokandian claims on the Chu River valley were increasingly ungovernable, with caravans raided by the “renowned robber chief Janet” and his band of seventy Kyrgyz.110 There were also unsubstantiated rumors that

Kenesary Kasymov’s son, Sultan Ali, had assembled 7,000 men to cooperate with

Kokand and raid the Kazakhs, to force them to submit to Kokand.111 These raids and rumors of immanent raids heightened the sense of vulnerability that both Russians and

Greater Horde Kazakhs felt in Semirechye, giving them even more reason to need each other in an alliance.

By the late 1850s, continued instability in the region and appeals from Russia’s

Kazakh and Kyrgyz allies drew Russia further into the steppe. The Russian Siberian line continued to focus on managing its undefined borders with the Qing Empire and Kokand by attracting more Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes to Russian poddanstvo and protection, and dealing with the brigands in the borderlands in between. This strategy became even more important as both neighboring states of the Qing Empire and Kokand continued to lose more and more control over their subjects through internal unrest. For Russia, the best way to ensure safety and stability on the steppe for trade and to protect their Kazakh and

Kyrgyz allies was to attract as many other Kazakh and Kyrgyz allies to Russian poddanstvo as possible in order to deny competing states the opportunity to use these nomads against them. This strategy pulled them deeper and deeper into the steppe.

109 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (ll 1-4).

110 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 107.

111 Ibid., 370.

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Chapter 7 -- Connecting the Lines: The "Pincer Maneuver" & the Alliance to Reclaim the Syr Darya

A large reason behind the difficulty of many Western scholars in discerning exactly when the Russian Empire actually decided to formulate a “pincer maneuver” plan to surround and occupy the Kazakh Steppe is because the participants themselves – well into the late 1850s – did not have a plan, and not knowing what they were doing beyond addressing immediate threats and opportunities, did not have a coherent strategy to go about implementing that elusive plan.112 The Siberian Line forts of Kopal and Vernoe were established for their own reasons in 1848 and 1854 at strategic points – between the

Middle and Greater Kazakh Hordes and the Qing, and between the Greater Horde

Kazakhs, Kyrgyzes and the Qing respectively – based on the logic of defending their allies against other raids and Kokandian claims, while attempting to define a border with the Qing Empire and increase trade. Their focus was on finding a way to trade with the

Qing Empire and on making the region safe for traders to do so. Formulating the plan to do this was a largely contentious and divisive undertaking both in Petersburg and on the

Kazakh Steppe where key officials rarely agreed, and were forced to muddle through with temporary compromise solutions. By 1863, the compromise plan drafted to unite the Orenburg and Siberian Lines with a “pincer maneuver” at Turkistan did not include

112 John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD diss., Harvard, 1964); Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

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Tashkent. Throughout this process, Russia’s Kazakh allies helped Russia fight Kokand to unite their defensive lines, and Russia could not have done it without them.

Coming Up with a Plan

The Orenburg Line stretched out to establish the Syr Darya Line beginning with

Fort Raimsk in 1847 near the Aral Sea and expanded eastward along the Syr Darya to capture Aq Masjid in 1853. The Syr Darya Line was established by Russia largely to protect their Kazakh allies in their winter pastures and caravans from the predations of

Khiva and Kokand, and to increase water-born trade on the Amu and Syr Darya at a strategic nexus between the two states bordering the Kazakh Steppe. Russia’s initial focus was on Khiva, which blocked water transit on the Amu Darya and threatened caravans to Bukhara. This attention eventually turned to Kokand after incessant raids from Kokand’s allies and tax collectors began, and as trade with the Qing Empire via the

Syr Darya grew more attractive than the Amu.

While Orenburg’s Governor-General Obruchev had proposed uniting the

Orenburg and Siberian Lines at the end of his tenure in 1851 to encircle the Kazakhs just as Russia had encircled the Bashkirs, even before Aq Masjid had been taken or Fort

Vernoe built, his proposal languished.113 Adjutant-General Annenkov, as a member of the State Senate who was in Kopal that same year reviewing the strength of the Siberian

Line in between Governor Generals Gorchakov and Gasfort, proposed in 1851 to reinforce the Siberian Line and extend it further to the Chu River. Annenkov argued that it would be easier for Russia to defend the space between Fort Raimsk and the Chu River

113 M.A. Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1, (St. Petersburg: 1876). 24-26

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further south (about 734 miles) than defend a larger break in Russia’s defenses up north between Aqmola and Orsk (927 miles).114 Annenkov’s proposal did not intend to unite

Russia’s defensive lines or surround the Kazakh Steppe; he sought a more defensible border and envisioned leaving most of Kokand’s territory alone. Moreover, the Siberian

Line at Kopal was being repeatedly attacked by Kokand at the time from across the Chu

River and he wanted to stop these attacks. Tsar Nicholas I approved Annenkov’s 1851 proposal to extend the Siberian Line to the Chu River, but Obruchev’s proposal to connect the lines stalled when the newly re-appointed Orenburg Governor-General

Perovskii roundly condemned both Annenkov’s and Obruchev’s proposals, claiming that they were not feasible. Perovskii (who had previously attempted to build a Great Wall to keep the Kazakhs out) argued that the Kazakhs could best be managed with flying detachments rather than establishing more permanent forts on the Kazakh Steppe. 115

Meanwhile, Western Siberia’s newly-appointed Governor-General, Gasfort, supported the idea.116 While Fort Vernoe had been established in 1854 to protect the

Greater Horde from Kokand, Gasfort’s plans for a fort on the Chu River were put on hold.117 Nevertheless, he and his officials on the Siberian Line continued to explore the

114 Ibid., 26; and Edward Allworth, "Encounter," in Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview, ed. Edward Allworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 56. Edward Allworth claims that Gasfort and Annenkov had jointly proposed a pincer maneuver when Gasfort was Governor-General as early as 1841, but Gasfort was not in the region and did not become Governor-General of Western Siberia until 1853, and Annenkov was only there in 1851.

115 Terentiev, Russia and England in Central Asia, vol. 1, 26.

116 Ibid., 26; and Seymour Becker, Russia's in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 15.

117 A.I. Maksheev, ed., Istoricheskii Obzor Turkestana i postupatelnago dvizheniia v nego russkikh (St. Petersburg: 1890), 137.

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idea of connecting the two lines in 1856. 118 Semenov “Tien-Shanskii” recounted that when he met with Gasfort on his way to explore the Issyk-Kul region in 1857, Gasfort dearly wanted to unite the two lines and despaired that he did not get enough credit for expanding Russia’s territory. Gasfort had started his military career as a veterinarian surgeon in the Prussian army and joined Russia during the Napoleonic Wars.119

Although bright, Gasfort was sometimes seen as impractical. Fyodor Dostoevsky is believed to have satirized him in one of his works, while in exile to Semipalatinsk, as the impenetrably obtuse “Governor von Lemke” who did not understand the slightest thing about the responsibilities of government and spent his time making elaborate cut-out toys.120 In short, Gasfort did not feel appreciated or respected. According to Semenov,

Gasfort deeply envied young General Nikolai Muraviev who had seized the Amur River in 1854 in the Far East, for which he was awarded with the title of Count and sobriquet of

“Amurskii” after his name. 121 Gasfort, who was well into his 60s, felt his accomplishments in fighting Kokand and taking Semirechye for the Russian Empire at the same time had gone unnoticed by Petersburg authorities.122 He even lobbied

Semenov Tien-Shanskii to put in a good word for him at the capital. Gasfort, “hope[d]

118 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (ll 1-4).

119 P.P. Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Liudmila Gilmour, Colin Thomas, and Marcus Wheeler (London: Haklyut Society, 1998), 16.

120 Joseph Frank, Dostoevskii: The Years of Ordeal: 1850-1859 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 187. Governor Gasfort is believed to have been satirized by Fedor Dostoevskii as “Governor von Lembke” in The Devils.

121 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 18, 23.

122 Ibid., 110.

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that his role as bearer of enlightenment to Central Asia could bring more benefit to

Russia than the [premature], in his opinion, occupation of the waterway [Amur River] passing through a foreign state [the Qing Empire] by his renowned neighboring governor- general [Muraviev], and that his peaceful conquest of a territory richly endowed by nature would later be appreciated by history.”123 This, however, did not come to pass, and no “Semirechinskii” ever followed Gasfort’s name. Even Petr P. Semenov ended up with the sobriquet “Tien-Shanskii” after his name when the mountains between what is now Kyrgyzstan and China were taken for Russia under Gasfort’s tenure. If the conquest of the Kazakh Steppe with Semirechye as a base for operations was a priority for the

Russian Empire in the 1850s, Western Siberia’s Governor-General Gustav Gasfort did not know it.

By the mid-1850s, enduring repeated clashes and participating in retaliatory joint baranta raids with their Kazakh allies, Russia was at a standstill at two separate points on two separate defensive lines as it attempted to protect their Kazakh allies and secure trade routes with Bukhara and the Qing Empire. Moreover, as the war in the Caucasus began to wrap up in the late 1850s, the newly appointed Viceroy of the Caucasus and commander of the Caucasus Corps, A.I. Bariatinskii, proposed in 1856 that Russia – under his command – invade the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea and build a railroad to the Aral Sea to trade via the Amu Darya with Bukhara, thus re-routing caravan routes away from the Kazakh Steppe and Orenburg entirely.124 Russia’s first railroad from St.

Petersburg to Moscow had just been completed five years prior, and the idea of building

123 Ibid.

124 N.A. Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii 1857-1868 (Moscow: 1960), 66.

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railroads as a means to traverse Russia’s vast countryside and trade had seized the popular imagination. Tsar Alexander II was intrigued, found the idea to study the potential of the Ust Urt plateau as a route to Central Asia to be “highly important and useful,” and asked that it be considered by a Special Committee of government officials that was convened for that purpose in January 1857. Orenburg’s Governor General

Perovskii and the newly appointed Foreign Minister, Prince A.M. Gorchakov, vigorously opposed the idea, claiming that it would lead to unrest among the Junior Horde Kazakhs of the Ust Urt plateau, complicate Russia’s international relations with Britain, and required sufficient information about the region which Russia lacked to make an informed decision on the efficacy of this plan.125 While the idea was supported by most of the Special Committee, a decision to equip an expedition to study the matter was postponed until a more favorable time.126

The Anglo-Iranian war of 1856-1857 over competing ambitions in Afghanistan also piqued Russia’s attention in Central Asia and gave rise to increased concern. Not only had the British invaded the Crimea and demilitarized the after the

Crimean War as part of their terms for peace, Russian officials believed that they could now possibly make inroads on the Caspian Sea too. The Iranians had invaded the Afghan city of Herat to reclaim territory that had once belonged to and to buttress the legitimacy of Qajar rule, and to curb the incessant Turkmen slave raids on their population. The British feared a pro-Russian Iran making headway into their buffer state

125 Ibid., 67.

126 The first Russian railroad to Central Asia, built from the Caspian Sea directly to Bukhara and Samarkand, was started in 1879 after the Russian conquest of Transcaspia (now ). The railroad from Orenburg to Tashkent was eventually started in 1900.

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of Afghanistan.127 In protest, the British invaded southern Iran in 1856 and occupied the port of Bushehr until Iran agreed to leave Herat alone. The threat of a British foothold on the Caspian, Bariatinskii argued, made it all the more important that Russia build a strong navy on the Caspian Sea, and build a railroad to the Aral Sea.128

Discussion in St. Petersburg about this railroad and the alleged threat of the

British inroads into Iran highlighted to Russian officials the large gaps in their knowledge about Central Asia. Russia had not really diplomatically engaged with the Emirate of

Bukhara and Khanate of Khiva since the early 1840s, and it was time to reach out to

Afghanistan as well after the latest Anglo-Iranian war and Indian Mutiny. Furthermore, widespread upheaval in Altishahr and Jungaria, with the Qing government distracted by the Taiping Rebellion and Second Opium War, prompted a call for more information regarding Kashgar as well. In 1857, plans were made to send N.V. Khanykov to Iran and

Afghanistan, Ch.Ch.Valikhanov under cover to Kashgar, and N.P. Ignatiev on a diplomatic mission to Khiva and Bukhara the following year.

Later that year, the Commander of the Aral Sea Flotilla, A.I. Butakov, presented his plan for a “water route” in Central Asia for trade down the Syr and Amu Darya to the

Central Asian khanates to Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaievich, Tsar Alexander II’s brother. The Special Committee convened to consider this issue in 1858 and weakly supported it provided it did not lead to conflict.129 N.P. Ignatiev’s diplomatic mission to

127 “Anglo-Persian War 1856-1857,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. II, Online Edition 2012 at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/anglo-persian-war-1856-57, (accessed on line October 28, 2012) , pp. 65-68.

128 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 66-67.

129 Ibid., 85.

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Khiva and Bukhara, therefore, was not only an attempt to improve diplomatic and trade relations and prevent the British from making inroads, it was also used as cover to enable the Aral flotilla to further explore the navigability of the Amu Darya, while serving as his supply escort.130 Chokan Valikhanov, a Russified Kazakh member of the elite serving in the Russian military and great grandson of Ablay Khan, who had accompanied Semenev

Tien-Shanskii on his expedition around Issyk-Kul, was sent to Kashgar disguised as a caravan merchant in 1858 as well. While important for filling knowledge gaps and exploring trade routes, Ignatiev’s, Khanykov’s, and Valikhanov’s assignments had nothing to do with fighting the Khanate of Kokand or uniting the Syr Darya and Siberian lines in a “pincer maneuver,” as the policy did not exist yet.131

It was only after Ignatiev’s disillusioned return from his failed mission to Khiva and Bukhara, unsuccessful in improving trade relations or opening the Amu Darya to

Russian navigation that Russian officials began to develop a more coherent policy for forts in the Kazakh Steppe. Although Ignatiev managed to secure the release of a dozen

Russian slaves, access and trade for Russian merchants in the region was no better than it had been before. Ignatiev claimed that his trip to the region helped “remove the fog” regarding Khiva’s and Bukhara’s strength in relation to Russia, and certainly informed his own opinions when he helped shape Russia’s policy in the region later in the Russian

Foreign Ministry in the 1860s.132 Ignatiev concluded that armed force, not diplomacy,

130 N.P. Ignat`ev, Missiia v Khivu i Bukharu v 1858 godu fligel'-adiutanta Polkovnika N. Ignat`eva (St. Petersburg: 1897), 30-32.

131 Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 1999), 152.

132 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii., 103.

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was the only way to “negotiate” with these states who did not comply with Russia’s wishes.133

By the fall of 1858, officials on the Orenburg and Syr Darya Lines began to formulate a strategy for the Orenburg Governorship-General. While Captain Butakov still advocated focusing Russia’s attention on Khiva and gaining access to the Amu

Darya with his flotilla, the rest of the officials in General Katenin’s ad hoc committee in

Orenburg favored lobbying Petersburg to forget Khiva and the Amu and focus on

Kokand and the Syr instead.134 The Orenburg officials wanted to take Fort Julek, which

Kokand rebuilt after the Russians destroyed it in 1853, and from which Kokand continued to attack the Russians and their Kazakh subjects. Lieutenant-Colonel

M.G.Cherniaiev, who was serving on the Syr Darya line and later to played a prominent role in the conquest of Central Asia, bluntly stated in exhasperation:

We have the means to do this, but are hiding under a bushel. Really, why have we come here -- to comfortably arrange ourselves and set up house? For this we have a lot of land in Russia – and more comfortable land. We need this frontier to expand Russian influence in Central Asia…For what is this outdated mission to Khiva? . . .We are lost in the details and have lost sight of the main idea.135

Orenburg’s Governor-General A.A. Katenin agreed with Western Siberia’s Governor-

General Gasfort in his appeal to the Foreign Ministry that Russia, “could no longer remain in this situation,” and urged the conquest of Turkistan and Tashkent as necessary

133 John Wentworth Strong, "Russian Relations with Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, 1800-1858," (PhD Diss., Harvard, 1964), 28.

134 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii,103-104.

135 Ibid., 105; and N.P. Ignat`ev, Mission of N.P. Ignat`ev to Khiva and Bukhara in 1858, ed. John L. Evans, trans. John L. Evans (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1984), 114. Cherniaiev and Ignatiev had attended the General Staff Military Academy together.

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to project Russia’s influence on Central Asia.136 In his memo to St. Petersburg,

“Assessment of the Situation on the Syr Darya Line,” Katenin complained that Russia had long neglected its policy towards Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire and Iran due to

Russia’s preoccupation with . While Russia had invested in building a flotilla on the Aral Sea and establishing the Kos-Aral fort to develop shipping down the

Amu Darya, Russia’s presence on the Aral Sea did not receive much higher level attention. Moreover, although the Syr Darya Line had been built to Aq Masjid, it was not carried out to its “logical conclusion”— connecting to the Siberian Line. In frustration,

Katenin noted, Russian forces, “took a barren desert, when the northern part of the

Khanate of Kokand between Forts Perovskii and Vernoe [was] famous for its fertile soil and excellent climate.” Russian policy in Central Asia, he lamented in 1858, lacked a defined plan of action.137

In light of this, Katenin literally sought to re-orient Russia’s trade routes further east. He advocated abandoning Russia’s previous focus on establishing a shipping route down the Amu Darya through Khiva to Afghanistan, the and India, and instead re-orient Russia to focus on trade with western Qing lands via Mawarannahr. His proposal, nevertheless, still listed the need for Russia to do nearly all of what had been previously proposed in the region regarding both Khiva and Kokand. Re-prioritizing – but not completely shifting away from Khiva—he proposed that Russia hem in Khiva from three sides by accepting the Turkmens of the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea who had sought Russian poddanstvo, reinforcing the Aral flotilla, and building a fort on the

136 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 95.

137 Ibid., 120.

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Emba River. While Russia did this on the western Kazakh Steppe, it would also somehow focus their main efforts on uniting the Orenburg/Syr Darya line with the

Siberian Line by conquering a string of Kokandian fortresses. Furthermore, after this new

Kokandian Line had been established, Katenin advised that Tashkent, “the center of all

Central Asian trade,” should be taken as well. With the Kokandian Line in place,

Katenin argued it would be feasible to influence the Emirate of Bukhara either by military force or economic means. By incorporating the Turkmens under Russian poddanstvo and establishing a fort at the Emba River, the Russian empire would attempt to more firmly establish the border it had long sought with Khiva since the 1830s and generally be in a better position to influence Khiva. Katenin assured officials in

Petersburg that the cost of doing all this would somehow be covered by the taxes Russia would collect from the local population.138

Shortly after Ignatiev’s return from Khiva and Bukhara, but before Orenburg

Governor General Katenin had submitted his portmanteau of proposals for Russia’s future strategy in Central Asia in December 1858 that included an appeal to unite the

Orenburg Line with the Siberian Line with a newly-proposed “Kokandian Line,” Western

Siberia Governor- General Gasfort issued instructions in September 1858 to Fort Vernoe to collect intelligence necessary to unite these lines. Gasfort explained that because internal disorder in Kokand, baranta raids, and invasions by Kokand’s Kazakhs on

Russia’s Kazakhs would eventually lead to armed conflict, Russia needed to be prepared.

Therefore, Gasfort requested as much information as possible about Kokand’s fortresses, the roads to key locations, the nomadic tribes of the area, sources of food and feed for

138 Ibid., 104-105, 120-123.

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soldiers and horses, the depth of the Chu River to see whether it could be used, and whether there was a convenient direct route from the southern tip of Lake Balkhash through Merke to Aulie-Ata, places that would unite Russia’s defensive lines.139 As in

Governor-General Katenin’s all-encompassing proposal, seizing Tashkent seemed to be under consideration in Gasfort’s orders.

As with much of Russia’s intelligence collected on the Kazakh Steppe, Governor-

General Gasfort requested that loyal Kazakhs be asked to gather this information for them, mentioning several Greater Horde notables who had been very helpful in the past as “capable and enterprising people.”140 In particular, he wanted these loyal Greater

Horde tribes to cross the Chu River, “under the pretext of belonging to the tribes of the

Greater Horde on the other side,” to find out the state of the roads to Kokand’s forts as well as the condition of their defense fortifications and supplies.141 There was a flurry of activity in 1858 and 1859 on the Siberian Line collecting information that would contribute to connecting the lines, mostly dependent upon Kazakh informants.142

By early 1859, officials in St. Petersburg began to work upon a plan for Central

Asia to take into account the results of N.P. Ignatiev’s mission and Orenburg Governor-

General Katenin’s ambitious proposal by establishing a “Consultative Meeting” that included Ignatiev, Katenin, Gasfort, Kovalevskii, Minister of Foreign Affairs A.M.

Gorchakov and Minister of War N.O. Sukhozanet. While the Petersburg officials liked

139 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (ll 1-4).

140 Ibid.

141 Ibid.

142 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (ll 14-37); TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (l 38); and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (l 43).

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the idea of establishing trade warehouses on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, they did not want to accept the Turkmens into Russian poddanstvo – the likely next step in order to establish those warehouses. When faced with the choice between strengthening the Aral Sea flotilla or building more forts on the Kazakh Steppe, they opted for strengthening the flotilla, still assuming that Russia would be better able to project its power and expand trade routes by boat than by horse and camel. They did, however, agree to invite the Khivan Kazakhs and Karakalpaks to enter Russian poddanstvo, seize the Khivan city of Kungrad, establish a Russian administrative post there, and drive

Kokand out of Turkistan and Tashkent. These measures aimed at both Khiva and

Kokand, they determined, would establish Russian predominance in Central Asia, foster trade, and keep out English traders.143

At these 1859 proceedings, Ignatiev still favored a Russian focus on the Amu

Darya over the Syr Darya and uniting the lines. His last posting before his mission to

Khiva and Bukhara had been as Russia’s military attaché in London, where he reported on British policies toward India, their fears of Russian intensions in the region, and their devastation and shock at the 1857 Mutiny in India. He believed Russia should take the lower Amu Darya, organize a Russian expedition up to and Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan, and send Bukhara a trade agent to establish a Russian consulate no later than 1860. Focusing on exploiting England’s fears, not trade with the Qing, he believed that only Russia’s presence on Amu Darya, not the Syr Darya, would teach the

143 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 122, 127. Governor-General Katenin sent Captain Butakov and his flotilla to ally with Turkmens in Kungrad who had rebelled against Khiva in 1859. When Butakov forbade the looting and sale of slaves, the Turkmens became hostile, and the Russians had to leave. Kungrad later fell under Khivan forces again.

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English to “value [Russian] friendship” in international affairs. After the Mutiny, he claimed the English in India were not as threatening. This, he argued, took priority over uniting the two lines; Russia should wait until Bukhara and Kokand were no longer allied.144

After confirming much of Governor-General Katenin’s comprehensive proposals for Russia’s policy for the Orenburg Line in January 1859, the Consultative Meeting met to consider Governor-General Gasfort’s proposals for the Siberian Line. Gasfort had proposed that his Western Siberian Corps cross the Chu River and occupy the Kokandian fort of Pishpek as part of the “next point for the future border.”145 He argued that taking

Pishpek was necessary to protect the Greater Horde tribes that were under Russian poddanstvo from Kokandian attacks and to strengthen Russia’s influence among the

Kyrgyzes. Officials in St. Petersburg considered his proposal but concluded that these plans should be postponed until further reconnaissance of the local terrain.146

Gasfort had already sent out a request for more Kazakh reconnaissance on this issue a few months prior. Staff Captain M.I. Veniukov, with his Kazakh guides, set out to explore the right bank of the Chu River across from Pishpek and its surrounding areas.147 Veniukov successfully and peacefully ventured more than 400 miles into

Kokandian territory, with the help of Russia’s Kazakh and Kyrgyz allies, surveyed the

144 Ibid., 124.

145 Ibid.

146 Ibid.

147 Ch Valikhanov and M Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia: Their Occupation of the Kirghiz Steppe and The Line of the Syr Daria, Their Political Relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan, Also Descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzhungaria, trans. John Michell and Robert Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1865).

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area, made drawings of Kokand’s forts at Pishpek and Tokmak, and measured the Chu

River in 1859.

Skirmishes at Kastek

In order to better protect the Greater Horde tribes south of the Ili River, Veniukov was also ordered to build a fort on the Kastek River not far from where Kokand used to have Fort Tauchubek before the Russians destroyed it in 1851.148 The powerful Dulat tribe, particularly the Shaprashty clan, was being squeezed in the Kastek River area between the Cossacks’ increased demand for agricultural land to supply their settlements around Fort Vernoe on one side to the north (for which the Dulat were remunerated), and other members of the Dulat tribe returning to Semirechye from Kokand and the Qing

Empire, as well as the rival Greater Horde Jalair tribe’s demand for more pasturage on the other side. Their situation was compounded by Kokandian Kyrgyz raids making it impossible to safely use land between Kastek and the Chu Rivers. Russian officials were frequently called upon to resolve land disputes between the Dulat and Jalair on the

Kastek River, which further justified the need for a fort at Kastek to be built.149

According to Kazakh informants at the time, the Kokandians in Pishpek were under no illusions after the fall of Aq Masjid that Russia had peaceful intentions in the region and were preparing for war, reinforcing the walls of their forts, gathering food supplies, and amassing a strong division of soldiers from their other forts in Pishpek and

148 “Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata i drugie akhivnye dokumenty 1851-1862, (Rukopis), 150-154.

149 Ibid.

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Tokmak.150 In a 1859 letter from Veniukov, who had been promoted to Adjutant

Governor-General of Western Siberia, to the ruler of the fort of Pishpek, Atabek Datkha,

Veniukov asserted that Russian forces were simply going about their own business on their own territory by visiting their side of the Chu River, and that there was nothing to fear. Veniukov disingenuously lamented in the letter that it was “such a shame” that the

Kokandians could not just simply “stop by for a friendly visit” when they saw Russian forces at the Chu River, instead of wasting money on posting and maintaining a hundred extra troops at Tokmak.151 Meanwhile, Russian officials had received information from caravan leaders passing through that not only had the Khan of Kokand prohibited the

Kyrgyz and Kazakhs from eating horses that were suitable for cavalry service, but had

British Indian weapons experts in his service making European-style cannons for him, and had unsuccessfully attempted to ally with the Emirate of Bukhara against Russia.152

Kokand and the Kyrgyz tribes like the Sarybagish and Solto under its suzerainty did not like the fact that Russia built a fort on the Kastek River in 1859 and were moving into what they considered their pasturelands. Kyrgyz raiders continued their predations.

Around noon on May 23, 1859, Kazakhs galloped up to a Russian detachment south of

Fort Kastek and asked for help. They had heard that over 500 Solto Kyrgyzes had raided what they considered to be their pastures. They asked for fifty Cossacks to back them up as they chased after the Kyrgyzes to reclaim their livestock. The Russians readily

150 Ibid.

151 Ibid., 174.

152 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 128.

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obliged. When the Kazakhs caught up with the Kyrgyzes and entered into negotiations, the Soltos turned on them and took five of them captive.153

Relations escalated when about 500 Kokandian Kyrgyzes and Tashkentis attacked

Russian forces later that summer just south of Kastek. Russians returned fire, forcing the

Kokandians to move back two miles. More fighting between and the Kokandian

Kyrgyzes followed later that day, but by the next day the Kyrgyzes were gone.154

This engagement, along with the raid earlier that year on Greater Horde tribes and their abduction earlier that year, prompted Russian forces to prepare for stronger attacks from Kokand in the future, and to reach out to the commander of the Kokandian Fort of

Pishpek to negotiate. The Kokandian commander’s reply expressed a desire for friendly relations with Russia, but accused Russia of taking unfriendly actions. The commander claimed that the former lands of the Jungars belonged to Kokand and that the Greater

Horde Jalairs, Albans and Dulats who migrated from Kopal to the Chu River had long paid Kokand tribute. Moreover, Russia’s presence on the banks of the Chu River, taking the land where Kokand’s Solto and Sarybagish Kyrgyzes migrated, was not the behavior of a good neighbor.155 Russia responded that the Kazakhs of the Greater Horde and many

Kyrgyzes considered themselves to be Russian subjects, thereby making Kokand’s claims on them and their pastures moot.156 Whoever controlled the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyzes

153 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 157.

154 Ibid.,168.

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid., 174.

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controlled the trade routes. Russia and Kokand would spend the next several years competing for the loyalty of the nomads who migrated between them.

Like Russia, Kokandian officials had very little control over their Kazakh and

Kyrgyz subjects. The Kokandian commander at Pishpek assured Russian officials that he had ordered the Kyrgyzes to return from across the Chu River, but they chose to attack

Russian forces anyway without consulting Kokandian officials.157 Moreover, he urged

Russian officials that future correspondence between Kokand and Russia not be conveyed by nomadic Kazakhs or Kyrgyzes, but by more trustworthy sedentary peoples like Russians and sarts:158

When you send an ambassador, send a Russian, so that he can transmit your words exactly. If you send a Kazakh, he does not convey what you are saying faithfully, and if we send an ambassador, we will send one of our loyal people. Do not send Kazakhs or Kyrgyzes between us. They do not want peace, and therefore do not believe them; they arrive and tell you one thing, and come to us and say another, and therefore do not serve to foster a friendly relationship between us. Therefore, when there is an emissary from you, let him be a Russian, and when there is an emissary from us, let him be a sart. Let there be peace between our two countries.159

The Kokandians were just as challenged as the Russians in maintaining control over their nomadic subjects, and were just as wary of being manipulated by the Kyrgyzes and

Kazakhs to serve their own objectives in fights over contested pasturelands.

The Siberian Line officials complied with Pishpek’s request for a more trustworthy, non-nomadic Russian emissary and sent one of the Siberian Corps’ interpreters, Borodin, on the next trip to again request the release of the five Kazakhs

157 Ibid., 172..

158 Sarts are sedentary, town-dwelling peoples in Mawarannahr.

159 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 172.

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whom the Kyrgyzes had taken captive in the May 1859 raid near Fort Kastek, but to no avail.160 After three months of waiting for Kokand to release the Russian Kazakh captives, Russia sent a more menacing message to Pishpek from Fort Vernoe in August

1859. The Russian marshal to the Greater Horde, Major Gerasim Kolpakovskii, admonished the commander of Pishpek:

Three months have now passed and you have not thought to carry out your word. You did not take into consideration that you were being asked by your forgiving and stronger neighbor – Russia – which now finds itself asking for a second time, …to compel you to do that which is in your interests and necessary…You must now free our captives, otherwise [our Governor General] will consider you not a friend, and his wrath will be set forth upon you, and it will already be too late! Think about this very carefully….if not …you will be reckoned with. Don’t be foolish.”161

Major Kolpakovskii, who also spoke Kazakh, then delved into the customary rules of

Kazakh and Kyrgyz baranta etiquette to clarify Russia’s interpretation of what captives were worth ransoming and which others were wrongly taken and should therefore be released for free.162

Gerasim Kolpakovskii was a key figure in Russia’s relationship with the Greater

Horde Kazakhs and their alliance to fight Kokand. Unlike many well-educated Russian orientalists from elite backgrounds, Kolpakovskii entered Russian military service as a common soldier from Kherson in what is now Ukraine.163 He suppressed the Polish uprising in 1830-1831, served in the Caucasus, helped suppress the Hungarian revolution

160 Ibid., 174.

161 Ibid., 177

162 Ibid.

163 Eugene Schyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, vol. 2 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876), 149-159.

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in 1849, and then was assigned to be chief of the Siberian exile settlement in Berezov in the Arctic Circle until he was transferred to Semirechye in 1858. He learned Kazakh and was called “the iron seat” by the Kazakhs for his ability to ride his horse all day and was known.164 He would later become the first Governor-General of the Steppes in the 1880s.

Fig. 7. Governor-General “Iron Seat” Gerasim Kolpakovskii, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca- 09957-00003 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 5, no. 3))

164 Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, vol 2 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1876), 149-150.

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While there was no known official response from Pishpek, the Kokandian

Bulekbai Kyrgyzes attacked Fort Kastek again in October of 1859. The Russian garrison heard a Kyrgyz cry in the night surrounding the fort just as the Kyrgyzes launched their attack with guns and battle axes. After the Kyrgyzes failed in their first attempt to drive off the Cossack’s horses during the attack, they returned the next night and tried again.

While they failed to seize the Cossack’s horses on the second attack, they managed to set fire to the surrounding area, and drove off the Cossack’s livestock.165 It was difficult for the Russians to know if these attacks were at the behest of Kokand, or if they were just baranta raids by Kokandian Kyrgyzes.

They’re Our Nomads Now…

Besides fighting with Kokand over the Kazakh and Kyrgyz pasturelands between

Fort Vernoe and the Chu River, and a prolonged back and forth over who had the right to tax the Greater Horde tribes up to Lake Balkhash, Russian officials asserted their rights to protect the nominally Qing Bugus Kyrgyzes on the eastern side of Issyk-Kul as well.

Kolpakovskii reminded the Kokandians that the Bugus were under Russian poddanstvo, should not be taxed by Kokand, and warned that any Kokandian tax collectors found among them would be seized and punished.166 Kokand responded, implausibly claiming that the Buguses, all the other Kyrgyzes, and all the Middle and Greater Horde had been subjects of Kokand for over two hundred years –well before Kokand even existed as a

165 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 349, (l 4).

166 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 177.

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state. Kolpakovskii tersely responded to Pishpek that he was not going to argue over the validity of that claim, but merely point out that circumstances had changed, that the

Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes considered themselves to be independent, and that they had voluntarily chosen to enter Russian poddanstvo taking an oath on the Quran.167

Kolpakovskii, clearly becoming annoyed with what he saw as Kokand’s pretensions, laid down his bottom line to the head to the commander of the Pishpek fort.

Kolpakovskii informed him that, “after tolerating every unsubstantiated claim of [his] regarding the Buguses” and wishing to save “friendship and peace” with him, he would ask him one last time to not interfere in the affairs of Russia’s subjects and to leave them in peace.168 Otherwise, Kolpakovskii threatened in February 1860, “even the most minor of your interferences would be received by us [the Russian Empire] as a declaration of war by you.”169 The next month, however, two Kokandian tax collectors were captured trying to collect from the Greater Horde, indicating that Kolpakovskii’s warnings went unheeded.170

Kazakhs in Russian Campaigns

In March 1859, even before a plan had been approved in St. Petersburg, the

Siberian Line was preparing for war with Kokand and deliberating how to use and incorporate its Kazakh allies in the fight. They began to work out the details of how to

167 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 365, (l 5).

168 Ibid.

169 Ibid.

170 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 47(l 1),

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invite well-known Kazakh warriors and horsemen to participate in Russian divisions.

Kolpakovskii, the Russian marshal to the Greater Horde, did not think that Kazakhs would volunteer to join Russian forces as individuals, but in groups since group affiliation was very important for Kazakhs. In Kolpakovskii’s request for permission to allow groups of Kazakhs to join, due to Russia’s successful relationship with the Greater

Horde he also asked whether there should there be a limit to the number of Kazakhs allowed to do so.171 Furthermore, Kolpakovskii noted that although he believed that it would be beneficial for the Kazakhs to be integrated in groups with Russian forces, he warned that it would not be feasible at that time. Kolpakovskii warned that the Greater

Horde warriors could not be expected to refrain from looting and that they would have to be fed at state expense.172

As with General Perovskii’s disastrous campaign to Khiva, the Russian military still depended upon the Kazakhs for transport animals. Since Kazakhs were not accustomed to renting out their livestock, Kolpakovskii proposed that Russian authorities

“invite” the senior sultans and biis to “voluntarily” supply horses and camels in the quantity needed, and Russia would “voluntarily offer them a reward,” as well as compensation if the camel or horse died.173

171 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 150-154.

172 Ibid.

173 Ibid.

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More Skirmishes at Kastek

In late June 1860, a Greater Horde warrior, Suranchi, informed the Russian garrison at Kastek that about 8,000 Kokandian sarts had launched a new military campaign against Russia, crossed the Chu River, and were congregating at the Kara

Kunuz River (where the aforementioned Kazakhs had been taken captive the year prior).

The large body of Kokandians broke up into groups of thirty or forty and dispersed into the countryside. One group came upon Suranchi’s men near Kastek on the night of June

24 and took two of them captive.174

The sixty-five soldiers assigned to Fort Kastek woke up on July 4 to a Kokandian raid in 1860, but this time they were ready. Suranchi and his men from the Shaprashty clan of the Dulat tribe had spied on the Kokandian sarts and Kyrgyzes mustering for battle, and had warned his Russian allies. Despite the advanced warning and an exchange of gunfire two Russian artillerymen were taken captive and the garrison’s horses were driven off. Upon interrogation, Kokandian sart captives told Russian officials that there were 3,000 soldiers gathered in Pishpek and that their raid on Kastek was intended to collect intelligence, ascertain how many Russians and forts were in the area, and steal their horses.175 Kokandian forces were defeated on the Jirenaigyr River on July 17, and retreated to Pishpek.176

This uptick in Kokandian attacks and the rumored presence on Russian territory of thousands of other Kokandians who had already crossed the Chu River in the summer

174 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 48, (l 1).

175 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 48, (ll 4-5).

176 TsGARK Fond3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 9-12).

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of 1860 was cause for Russian alarm. Russian officers scurried to defend themselves.

Colonel Zimmerman left the Russian garrison at Uzun-Agach with a battalion and sixty more Cossacks while Fort Vernoe was reinforced by more battalions sent down from

Kopal further north.177

Russia’s asked their Greater Horde allies for help as well. Russia asked Sultan

Ables Aliev of the Dulat tribe, who had helped Russia drive Kokand out of fort

Tauchubek, to go to Kastek with his men to gather information on the movements of other Kazakhs and whether they were about to cross the Chu River to join Kokand.178 By late July, warrior Suranchi of Shaprashty clan of the Dulat tribe, continued to report that there were a thousand sarts ready for war in Pishpek, but that the remaining sarts had returned to Aulie-Ata. According to Suranchi, the authorities in Kokand were trying to figure out what happened at Kastek as well, and were very angry with their Kyrgyz Solto,

Bulekbai and Sarybagish tribes for their role – or rather, lack of role – in the Kokandian attack on Kastek that month. These Kyrgyzes had separated from the Kokandian sarts during the attack and stood above Kastek in the hills opting not to fight. Highlighting the fluidity of Kazakh and Kyrgyz alliances, one Kazakh who was part of the Kokandian attack on Kastek and sought to return to Russia wrote Kolpakovskii claiming that he was not told by the Kokandian sart commanders where they were going, and perhaps disingenuously claiming that he went with them because his migration went in that direction anyway.179

177 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 48, (ll 31-32).

178 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 48, (l 87).

179 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 147.

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The commander of the Kokandian fortress and city of Aulie-Ata, had reportedly called upon Kokand’s Malliabek Khan to intervene and question the sarts at Pishpek for their actions, and was angry that they had attacked the Russians in the first place.180 He urged Kokandian forces to “remain without movement, so that the Russians do not cross the Chu.”181 Despite this report, Governor-General Gasfort was convinced that Kokand, after gathering so many forces in Pishpek, would not limit itself to just one incursion, particularly one that they lost.182 By August 1860, the Siberian Line began more urgent preparations for war.

May We Please Start Now?

Both the Orenburg and Siberian Lines and their Kazakh allies continued these low-level skirmishes in 1859 and 1860. Despite lobbying from both lines, Petersburg was not ready to commit to larger plans to unite the two lines. Still financially recovering from the Crimean War, and in the process of planning sweeping domestic reforms that included the emancipation of the serfs, Russia was reluctant to launch large military engagements anywhere at this time.183 Petersburg officials were also concerned that they might be drawn into another war in Europe as well. In 1859, Russia allied with

France against the Hapsburg Empire because Russia was still smarting from what they

180 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 48, (ll 100-101).

181 Ibid.

182 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 9-12).

183 W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1990), Ben Eklof, John Bushness, and Larissa Zakharova, eds., Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

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believed to have been Austria’s betrayal in the Crimean War after Russia had helped them put down the Hungarian uprising in 1849.184 Russia had agreed to support France by sending four army corps to the Russo-Austrian border as Piedmont-Sardinia and

France fought Austria in the Franco-Austrian War or Second War of Italian

Independence.185 With war in Europe potentially on the horizon for Russia, this was no time to launch another prolonged and expensive war like the one in the Caucasus, particularly as that war was finally coming to an end.

There was also the question of the Western Siberian Corps’ readiness for battle in

1860 and the availability of food supplies. Governor-General Gasfort, as part of his request for more intelligence to prepare for war in 1858, indicated a need to increase the local food supply and expand the arable land in the Ili River valley area.186 The Cossacks of Western Siberia and Semirechye were, for the most part, just peasants from Siberia who had been drafted into the Cossack Host; they were not well trained and lacked the military tradition of the Don or Ural Cossacks. The Cossacks of Semirechye were considered the worst of all Cossacks serving in Central Asia.187 Moreover, general readiness in Semirechye in the late 1850s and early 1860s was somewhat hampered by the robust trade in alcohol production and smuggling in the area. Cossacks distilled their own liquor from raisins they imported from Tashkent, or smuggled liquor from the Qing

Empire. Their preoccupation with producing alcohol and growing crops for the

184 Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972).

185 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 124.

186 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 11, (ll 1-4).

187 Schuyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 151.

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distillation of alcohol instead of growing staple crops for food drove up other food prices in the region as well. Even more worrying were reports that Cossacks were distilling their own vodka using parts of their guns, pouring liquid down the muzzle and through a canvas-wrapped breech, and were thus not ready to fight.188

Nevertheless, armed with new intelligence collected on the Trans-Chu region with

Kazakh and Kyrgyz help, more reports of the Kokandians arming themselves for war, and after a year of fighting with Pishpek over Kazakh captives and Kokandian tax collectors, and enduring Kokandian raids on the Russian fort at Kastek, Governor-

General Gasfort again presented his proposal to St. Petersburg officials that he take and destroy the Kokandian forts of Tokmak and Pishpek and acquire the upper Chu River in

1860.189

The Western Siberian Corps’ War with Kokand

Some of the first orders Gasfort gave in preparation for war with Kokand in

August 1860 pertained to the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes. He asked that the Kazakhs who normally migrated across the Chu River to Russia’s side that year be prevented from doing so at this time, since it would crowd the region and upset the already land-hungry

Dulat tribe.190 Next, he sought the arrest of Kazakhs who were suspected of having betrayed Russia to Kokand, and their detention in Kopal.

188 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 437, (l 1).

189 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 129-130.

190 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 9-12).

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For all the partnership at a lower level between the Cossacks and Kazakhs embarking on joint baranta raids against the Kyrgyzes, Russian officers at a higher level did not trust their Kazakh allies. Just as he had previously cautioned his subordinates to keep an eye on the ambitions of Sultan Tezek and his Alban tribe as being “wily as a fox and cruel like a tiger,” Gasfort identified the very helpful and informative Suranchi – who warned Russia of Kokand’s imminent attack just a month prior – as someone to watch as a potential traitor in August before the war began. Gasfort asked that Suranchi’s brother be taken hostage as a way to endure Suranchi’s loyalty during the campaign.191

Moreover, he encouraged his subordinate officers to play the Kazakh tribal leaders and elders against each other as a way to discover incriminating information against them.192

On August 23, 1860, Colonel Zimmerman and Lieutenant-Colonel Shaitanov moved two columns of troops across the Chu River towards the Kokandian fortress of

Tokmak, and over an arid mountain pass. While on route to Tokmak, manap Jantai of the Sarybagish Kyrgyzes asked for Russian poddanstvo and joined them.193 Zimmerman sent a few Kazakhs ahead for reconnaissance. The Kokandian fort at Tokmak originally had two hundred men, but the Kyrgyzes there ran away along with twenty sarts, leaving only seventy men with their wives and children.194 Zimmerman informed the Tokmak commander’s emissaries that they had an hour to surrender or

191 Ibid.

192 Ibid.

193 M. Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question (Calcutta: Office Of Superintendent Of Government Printing, 1870), Appendix I, ii.

194 Ibid., iii.

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Fig. 8. Kokandian Fortress at Tokmak, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00022 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 20, no. 22))

Russia would open fire upon them. When there was no response, Zimmerman sent a

Kazakh to the fort to try to persuade them. Terrified of both the Russians and his own

Kokandian leadership, the commander of Tokmak, Khankulla, responded that he dared not surrender or defend the fort. Russia opened fire for about an hour, inflicting considerable damage to the fort, at which point Tokmak surrendered unconditionally.

Khankulla reportedly sat on the walls of the fort, determined to die, but surrendered when he heard the cries of the fifteen women and children living in the fort.195 The vanquished

Khankulla told Colonel Zimmerman that if he returned to Kokand the khan would cut off

195 Ibid., ii.

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his head, and asked to be allowed to settle in Russian territory.196 The defeated

Kokandians were reportedly surprised that they had been allowed to collect their things and only had their guns taken from them, to which Zimmerman explained that “Russians carried on war differently.” 197 Zimmerman destroyed the fort shortly thereafter.

Resting a couple of days after their victory over Tokmak, Colonel Zimmerman’s forces were joined by Lieutenant-Colonel Kolpakovskii with ninety Cossacks, and Sultan

Tezek with 150 Greater Horde Albans, to take the Kokandian fort of Pishpek.198 Pishpek did not fall easily and only unconditionally surrendered on September 4, 1860 after a five-day siege. Despite Veniukov’s best efforts in intelligence collection, the fortress of

Pishpek turned out to be three times as large as the Russians had been led to believe and much stronger than Tokmak. The walls of the fort were lined with men in the red uniform of the Khan of Kokand’s regular troops. Given its size, it was easier to besiege on the fort than to storm it.199 The Kokandians were well armed. Each side subjected the other to heavy fire. As Russian forces closed in, Kokandians resorted to throwing stones, and would have continued to defend the fort had they not run out of projectiles.200

Russian forces had already damaged one corner of the fortress and were preparing to storm it the way they had Aq Masjid. On the fifth day, the Pishpek commander, Atabek-

Datkha, and his officers surrendered along with 627 people, and were allowed to take

196 Khankulla was allowed to live near Vernoe.

197 Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question, Appendix I, iii

198 Ibid., iv.

199 Ibid.,

200 Ibid., Appendix II, vi-vii

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their property with them. Ironically Atabek Datkha had just hanged the three messengers from Tokmak who had informed him of their surrender there. While the Russians had killed twenty Kokandian men and wounded fifty, the Russians lost one officer, one soldier, one Kazakh, and six men were wounded.201

Fig. 27. Kokandian Fortress at Pishpek, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00023 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 20, no. 23))

In the middle of Colonel Zimmerman’s siege of Pishpek, about 400 Kokandian

Kyrgyzes appeared at a distance, but they were driven back up to the hills by the Alban

Kazakhs under Sultan Tezek and 200 Cossacks. After the surrender of Pishpek, Colonel

Zimmerman reported that many Kyrgyzes asked for Russian poddanstvo. All in all, of

201 Ibid.

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the 2,174 men in Russia’s forces sent against the Kokandian forts of Tokmak and

Pishpek, 232 or 11% were Kazakhs, and the Kazakhs supplied Russian forces with 485 camels and 182 horses for the campaign.202

A Triumphant Return for Cossacks and Kazakhs

A joint force of Russians and Kazakhs returned to Fort Vernoe on September 19.

Colonel Zimmerman made sure the Kokandian military prisoners, with Russia’s Kazakh allies, were positioned to observe Russian troops as they marched into town, and ordered

Russian troops to spread out as much as possible so that they looked more numerous.

Gathered in the center square of the fort, by the church, they collectively prayed and gave thanks. The next day, Kolpakovskii hosted a celebration baiga for the Kazakhs who participated in the campaign, inviting the Kokandian military prisoners to celebrate their victory. A baiga is a festive event for Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, entailing horse races and contests, with prizes for the victors, and a large feast. 203 A Sarybagish Kyrgyz bard spent that evening extolling the virtues of Kolpakovskii and Russia’s conquest.204 On the third day of celebrations, beyond attempts to portray Russia’s as a humane conqueror, Colonel

Zimmerman showed off Fort Vernoe’s artillery to the Kokandian military prisoners, stretching them all out in two long lines. He claimed that he made an impression upon

202 Ibid., Appendix III, viii.

203 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 91-95).

204 Valikhanov and Veniukov, The Russians in Central Asia, 291.

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them.205 The Kazakhs in this region who participated in this campaign later requested in

1877 that a memorial be constructed to commemorate their defeat of Kokand as well.206

Of the seventy-five Kokandian prisoners, some were Kazakh sultans. Nine of the total prisoners were from Kulja and many were Tashkentis. While Tokmak commander

Khankulla was allowed to live in Vernoe, Pishpek commander Atabek-Datkha and his senior officers were sent to Semipalatinsk, where they were followed by other captive

Kazakhs who served Kokand. Kazakhs from Kokand were sent to migrate under observation by senior sultans of the Greater Horde’s Jalair, Dulat and Alban tribes.207

Found among the Kokandians at the fall of Pishpek were a number of Russian soldiers, who had either run away or had been abducted and sold into slavery.208

Kokand –Down but Not Out

After the September 1860 campaign to destroy Tokmak and Pishpek, the

Kokandians were down but not out, and Russia had every reason to fear a retaliatory strike would soon follow. After having fought at Tokmak and Pishpek, and after having seen Kokand’s munitions, Colonel Zimmerman urged Governor-General Gasfort to build a wall around Vernoe as soon as possible. He argued that it was necessary to build walls now while there were men with free hands assigned to Semirechye, before further fighting on the Chu River planned for the next year. Comparing the current state of

205 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 91-95).

206 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 32674 (Tom 23).

207 Ibid.

208 See next chapter. TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 64, (l 8, 19, 57-58).

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hostilities in Semirechye to his experiences in the Caucasus, he expressed chagrin that while every outpost in the Caucasus had a wall around it, Fort Vernoe was wide open. In the wake of the July Kokandian attack on the garrison at Kastek, and Russia’s return attack on Tokmak and Pishpek, the residents of Vernoe were now fearful, particularly the women, he claimed. He ominously noted that even the imprisoned Kokandian sarts were surprised that Russia did not have a wall around Vernoe. One never knew when or whether the Kokandians would strike back.209 There were official plans already underway, approved by St. Petersburg, to build a substantial wall around Fort Vernoe, but

Colonel Zimmerman demurred that Fort Vernoe did not need such an “Egyptian work” that would take ages to complete. Moreover, he argued that while plans for a large citadel may be appropriate for Europe, these officially approved fortification designs were still untested in Semirechye, and seemed superfluous given that neither the Kazakhs nor

Kokandians had siege weapons.210 Despite Zimmerman’s sense of urgency, Vernoe’s defenses were still not complete two years later. The Cossacks who were supposed to build them did everything they could to avoid manual labor, and pressed Russian peasant settlers and children to do it instead. Because the peasant settlers worked on the defensive walls, they did not have time to harvest their crops, which created a problem for food supplies.211

Sure enough, a month after Russia’s victory over Kokand in Tokmak and Pishpek in 1860, Russia’s Kazakh informants claimed that the Kokandians were preparing for war

209 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 50, (ll 91-95).

210 Ibid., TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 53, (ll 19-20).

211 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 205-206.

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with Russia. Now that hostilities had escalated, the commander of the Kokandian city of

Aulie-Ata summoned all the Kazakh biis migrating around the Talas River to prepare to fight Russia. About 3,000 Kokandians left Aulie-Ata in October for the ruins of Pishpek;

2,000 of them were Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes, according to one of Russia’s Kazakh sources.

Some of the Kazakhs ran away en route but there were many who stayed, like those under Russia’s former ally, the warrior Suranchi of the Shaprashty clan of the Dulat tribe, who had just left Russia to join Kokand as feared.212 The Sarybagish Kyrgyzes who had just asked for Russian poddanstvo during Russia’s campaign against Tokmak also returned to Kokand.213 Jangarach “the Big,” manap of the Solto Kyrgyzes, who had asked for Russian poddanstvo several times in the 1850s and wanted to become a

Cossack but was denied because he lived too far away to protect without a Russian fort on the Chu, was now compelled by the Kokandians to provide supplies and taxes to rebuild Pishpek.214

Just as Russia had destroyed Tokmak and Pishpek, Kokand intended to destroy

Kastek and Vernoe and prepared to launch a major campaign. While the Kokandian sarts had guns, the Kyrgyzes and Kazakhs under Kokand mostly had pikes and swords.215

Russia’s former ally, Suranchi, reportedly led the Kokandians to the Russian garrison at

Kastek to attack it, and ordered his men and the Kyrgyzes to spread out between Vernoe and Kastek to attack the supply road. As with the last attack on Kastek, the closer the

212 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 57, (ll 4-9).

213 Ibid.

214 Ibid.

215 Ibid.

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Kokandians moved to Kastek, the more the Kyrgyzes ran away. The Kokandian sart commanders of this campaign were determined in this attack and wore white as if to prepare for their own deaths.216

While Russian forces focused on defending Kastek, a large number of

Kokandians – with estimates reaching up to 20,000 – surprised the Russians by attacking a small Russian fort at Uzun-Agach in October of 1861. Thousands of Kokandians surrounded the small Russian garrison, which blocked Kokand’s route to Vernoe.

Lieutenant-Colonel Kolpakovskii quickly moved a column of 800 troops and six guns to rescue the trapped Russian garrison, defeated the Kokandian forces, and prevented them from making deeper incursions to attack the larger, but poorly fortified, Fort Vernoe.

Kyrgyzes under manap Jantai of the Tynai clan of the Sarybagish tribe, who had earlier entered Russian poddanstvo when Russia crossed the Chu River to attack Tokmak and

Pishpek, helped Kolpakovskii against the Kokandian invasion. Jantai later became the senior manap of the Sarybagish and received a gold medal and the rank of Colonel from the Russian government.217 Russia and Kokand’s success or failure in fighting each other depended upon the shifting alliances of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes who migrated between them.

Maintaining and Expanding the Kazakh Alliance

While it was by now no surprise to Russians, Kazakh and Kyrgyz loyalties were often fickle, and had to be carefully nurtured. In the build-up to the Siberian Line’s war

216 Ibid.

217 O.J. Osmonov, Istoriia Kyrgyzstana (s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei) (: Ministry of Education and Culture of the Kyrgyz Republic, 2005), 267, 277.

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with Kokand, Russia attempted to gather as many Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes to its side as possible, and then continued to do so after the war by offering forgiveness, pasturelands, and awards. Lieutenant-Colonel Sultan Tezek of the Greater Horde’s Alban tribe helpfully sent Russian officials a long list of the people under his command who participated in the Pishpek campaign, and what they should be awarded.218 Tezek’s ability to procure Russian awards for his subordinates reinforced his own power over his people, maintaining important patron-client relationships. Along these lines, after the conquest of Tokmak and Pishpek, Governor-General Gasfort asked subordinates which

Kazakhs should be rewarded and which Kyrgyz tribes to continue to court.219 This task was left mostly to the Fort Vernoe’s marshal to the Kazakh Greater Horde and Kyrgyzes,

Lieutenant-Colonel “Iron Seat” Gerasim Kolpakovskii and other loyal Kazakhs.

The recent trans-Chu battle confirmed to Gasfort that the Dulat tribe of the

Greater Horde Kazakhs, who migrated between the Ili and the Chu and claimed the land upon which Fort Vernoe was built, had become unreliable in the build-up to the war against Kokand. Despite the fact that warrior Suranchi of the Dulat’s Shaprashty clan, served in the Russian military as a lieutenant as a loyal informant and had been the one to alert the Russians to the coming invasion of the Kokandians in July, by August he was under suspicion, and by October he led the Kokandians to attack the Russians at

Kastek.220 During the Russian campaign against Tokmak and Pishpek, Suranchi joined

218 TsGARK Fond 427, Opis 1, Delo 24, (l 6).

219 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 110-111).

220 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 57 (ll4-9); and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll 9-12).

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the Kokandians with several hundred men. The Kokandians awarded Suranchi ornate knives and swords, a silk robe, and a silver inlaid bridle for his horse.221

Russian officials began to doubt Dulat loyalty because its senior sultan, Ali, who was also a colonel in the Russian military, was getting old, and because “Muslim fanatics” (pro-Kokandians) were influencing him to oppose another Russian-favored

Kazakh ally, the Alban’s sultan Tezek. Sultan Ali’s spiritual practices aside, Russians tended to call people in Central Asia “Muslim fanatics” as a general phrase to characterize those who opposed Russia in the region. Gasfort believed that the Dulat tribe was weakening and that it was time for Russia to diversify its allegiances and support those who opposed the Dulats.222 While General Gasfort supported Sultan Ali’s nomination for an award for his “zealous participation” in the fight against Kokand and asked Kolpakovskii to personally convey Russia’s appreciation to him, Gasfort also advised that Russian officials should, “support all who are unhappy with Sultan Ali” as well, even the Bugus Kyrgyzes in their feud with the Dulat Kazakhs.223 Moreover, by supporting those who opposed the Dulats, Russia could court those who also had claims on Dulat pastures, such as the Kyrgyzes.

Russia had not written off Suranchi of the Dulat’s Shaprashty clan as an enemy just yet, particularly at a time when Russia needed as many powerful Kazakh allies as possible. Russia would continue to court him for several years. In a letter to Suranchi,

Kolpakovskii wrote that it was a pity that the Shaprashtys were taken in by the power of

221 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 57, (l 4-9).

222 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 50, (ll 110-111).

223 Ibid.

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Kokand, and that he understood that Suranchi allied with Kokand under duress because he could not fight Kokand’s raids. Kolpakovskii assured Suranchi that he did not blame him and urged him to come back to Russia right away, “Do not fear me. I will not blame you, and promise you a kind reception.”224 Kolpakovskii continued, “We have lived together many years…you know me and I know you…therefore leave the

Kokandians….The Russian government does not wish you ill…I will forget everything and await your coming to me. Peace be with you!”225 By 1863, Suranchi was back under

Russian poddanstvo as a lieutenant, serving with the Cossacks at Kastek to catch Kyrgyz baranta raiders.226

Courting the Kyrgyzes in 1860, however, had its limitations unless they moved across the Chu River. While Russia had already taken in the Buguses on eastern Issyk-

Kul, Russia at first said it would be unable to accept Solto manap Jangarach’s renewed request for Russian poddanstvo just yet without a new fort on the Chu River.227 After the

Russian attack on Tokmak and Pishpek, Jangarach and the Solto Kyrgyzes were forced by Kokand to rebuild Pishpek.228 Kolpakovskii sent Jangarach a letter of condolence for the fines and taxes the Kokandians were forcing him to pay, and (now that the Dulat tribe was no longer favored by Russia) invited him to move his people across the Chu:

224 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (l 2ob).

225 Ibid.; and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 34, (l 3),

226 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 210, (ll 1-7).

227 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50 (ll 110-111); and TsGARK Opis 1, Delo 51, (l 3).

228 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 57, (ll 4-9).

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Do not make peace with [the Kokandians], what do they want from you except taxes. They will deceive you and feed themselves at your expense. We Russians will steal nothing from you. I invite you to come visit me [in Russia] where you will only grow richer and land for you will be found.229

Other Kyrgyzes were invited to migrate across the Chu as well, where Kolpakovskii assured them that they would, “become wealthy under the shadow of our Mighty

Ruler.”230

Even the Buguses were tempted to join Kokand, but Kolpakovskii reminded them that, “no kind of strength of the Kokandians can resist [Russia’s] might,” and those

Buguses who joined Kokand, “will be severely punished for daring to go into battle

…and fight with Russians.”231 He also attempted to meet the needs of the Buguses by mediating a dispute between them and Sultan Tezek’s Greater Horde Albans and gave the senior manap of the Buguses a Kokandian gun and sword for good measure.232

Relations with the Sarybagish Kyrgyzes at first were conducted through Kazakh intermediaries. Tazabek Busurmanov often interceded for Russia to convince the

Kyrgyzes and Kazakhs under Kokand to side with Russia. Russia had brokered a peace between the Sarybagishes and the Buguses, but the Sarybagishes had broken it and supplied Kokand, and now they feared Russia. They did not want to be under Kokand’s control, but they feared what Russia would do to them. Tazabek Busurmanov assured the

Sarybagishes on Russia’s behalf that Russia would not punish them if they decided to

229 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (ll 6).

230 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 401, (ll 7-8).

231 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 401, (ll 1-2).

232 Ibid.

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come over to Russia’s side.233 Moreover, while Sarybagish manap Jantai entered Russian poddanstvo when Russia crossed the Chu River to attack Tokmak and Pishpek, his loyalties vacillated. Kolpakovskii wrote Jantai’s brother, manap Khudoyar, inviting him to join Russia as well. Kolpakovskii argued, “Since your brother Jantai is wealthier, let him pay the Kokandian sarts taxes, and you can join me and not pay anything.”234 Jantai eventually joined Russia again as well and helped Russia defend Uzun Agach against

Kokand in 1861.

Even though Kolpakovskii threatened those Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes who were tempted to join Kokand, he offered forgiveness to those who already had. To a Greater

Horde bii allied to Kokand, Kolpakovskii not only offered to release his hostage son in exchange for two prisoners taken by the Kokandian sarts, he said that there was no reason to fear Russia and invited him to migrate back across the Chu, “no one should fear our Merciful Leader who gives everyone forgiveness.”235

After the Kokandians were defeated at Kastek in the fall of 1860, Kolpakovskii again reached out to the Greater Horde Dulat’s warrior Suranchi of the Shaprashty clan through a Kazakh intermediary. Kolpakovskii claimed that he understood that the

Kokandians forced him to their side, but Suranchi should not fear Russia, and he urged him to return. In Russia, Kolpakovskii claimed, “you will find defenders, but the sarts will only ruin you.” 236 Suranchi finally responded and said that he had been slandered by

233 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata,144-146; and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 39, (ll 1, 20-21, 22). 234 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (l 6).

235 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 401, (l 9).

236 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (ll 19-20).

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other Kazakhs, particularly a Shaprashty rival, Narbuta Bii, but that he was still loyal to

Russia.

Russia’s war with Kokand aside, Suranchi had more pressing concerns regarding his own disputes within his clan and sought Russia’s assistance in resolving them. He asked that his men who had been taken captive by Russia’s Kazakhs be released if

Kolpakovskii truly believed in his good will towards Russia, otherwise, he threatened that there would be more barantas and disorder. In particular, he threatened that if his

Shaprashty rival Narbuta Bii did not release one of his men, he would find a way to come to Almaty and hack him to bits, “either I die or Narbuta.”237

Contributing to the defection of Suranchi and others to Kokand, were the internal problems in the Greater Horde’s Dulat tribe. The elderly Sultan Ali’s power over the

Dulats in the early 1860s was rapidly declining, and the clans of the Dulat tribe began to fight among themselves for dominance. Even as Russian officials attempted to lure

Suranchi back to Russia, other rivals, like Narbuta Bii, assured Suranchi that Russia would kill him if he returned.238 Kolpakovskii went to great efforts, both in direct correspondence and through several trusted Kazakh intermediaries, to persuade Suranchi to return.239

By 1861, with more of the Dulat tribe trotting off to join Kokand, Russian officials felt compelled to intervene. Just as Russia attempted to maintain order through the Kazakh khans in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century Russia tried to

237 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (ll21-22).

238 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 484, (l 5).

239 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 484, (l 20, 27); and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 402, (ll 19-20).

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maintain order through the senior sultans. Russian officials warned Dulat senior sultan

Ali that the Kazakhs in western Dulat territory were “in disorder and confusion” regarding who their leader was, and accused senior sultan Ali of forgetting that he was their leader. They informed him that there were baranta raids every night and begged Ali to either come and govern this unruly region, or send his son Ables to establish order.240

Moreover, they warned senior sultan Ali that if he did not step up and rule, Russians would appoint someone on his behalf who would rule.241 After asking Ali to forcibly block the Altynyshbai and Yamanak clans from crossing the Chu River by taking their yurts, Russian officials sent a division of twenty-five Cossacks to live with and monitor the Dulat tribe’s activities. Russian officials asked Ali to provide them with Kazakh horses and food while they were there.242

Throughout the early 1860s, Russian forces continued to participate in the thick of

Kazakh-Kyrgyz barantas, and sometimes had to be reminded that they were not Kazakhs.

For example, along with a general directive issued by Gasfort to wear Russian, not

Kazakh, clothes Governor-General Diugamel’ later had to remind Semirechye Cossacks which Kazakh customs not to practice.243 For example, while praising the Cossacks for their success, along with their Kazakh allies, in preventing a large body of Kokandian

Sarybagish Kyrgyzes from keeping the livestock that they had just raided, Governor-

General Diugamel’ chastised them for redistributing “defenseless women and children”

240 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 491, (l 2-3).

241 Ibid.

242 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 491, (l 15).

243 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 123.

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to Russia’s Kazakh allies as part of the spoils of victory, and asked that they be returned to their families immediately.244

In the Name of Islam

Just as Russia sought to gather the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes under Russian poddanstvo, the Kokandians were trying to do the same in the name of Islam. Russian officials learned earlier in 1859 through their Kazakh allies like Dulat senior sultan

Lieutenant-Colonel Ali that Khan Malliabek of Kokand sent him and several other influential Dulat biis a letter, pleading with him “in the name of Islam” to return to

Kokandian territory of Talas. Khan Malliabek offered forgiveness to all Kazakhs who had entered Russian poddanstvo.245 Bii Supotai of the Dulat’s Butai clan took the khan up on his offer and set off for Tashkent to join Kokand’s forces. Supotai, however, sent a letter promising to return if his prospects did not turn out to be better across the Chu

River.246

Later, Kokand began to send out more threatening letters to Kazakhs under

Russian poddanstvo and declared Kazakhs to be bad Muslims if they allied with Russia:

If you consider yourselves children of Muslims and recognize God and His Prophet, then with whom should you ally? To us in faith, show your weapons and serve the throne of the khan... if you do not do this, the coming war against Islam will be on your heads…Peace to those who come to us and give and believe in Him, and slavery to those who do not.247

244 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 34, (l 3).

245 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata,150-154.

246 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata, 167.

247 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1,Delo 365, (l 10).

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Moreover Kokand lied to the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs that the Emir of Bukhara, the religious center of Mawarannahr, had allied with Kokand against the infidel Russians.248

Russia countered this Kokandian propaganda by having its own Kazakhs tell everyone that the Emir of Bukhara was not allied with the Khan of Kokand and that the

Emir and Tsar had friendly relations.249 Moreover, Russia attempted to convince the

Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes that Russia was the true defender of Islam, not Kokand. In one of

Kolpakovskii’s many letters to the Kyrgyz manaps, he warned against Kokand’s pretensions to being the true defender of the faith when the sarts, “are deceiving you by assuring you that they fight with us for the faith…but what have they done for faith!

We, in contrast, protect your faith, and build .”250 Kolpakovskii assured the

Kyrgyzes that Russians were not like the sarts – they did not deceive people – and that

Russia “wanted nothing but peace.”251

Governor General Diugamel’ – “Inertia Incarnate”

Both the Orenburg Line and the Siberian Line changed leadership in rapid succession between 1860 and 1861: General A.P. Bezak replaced Orenburg Governor-

General A.A. Katenin in 1860 and General A.O. Diugamel’ replaced Western Siberia

Governor-General G.Kh. Gasfort in 1861.252 There were only a few years in the late

248 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1,Delo 365, (l 10).

249 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 50, (ll110-111).

250 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 401, (ll 13-14).

251 Ibid.

252 Nathaniel Knight, "Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalist in the Service of the Empire?," Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000, Spring), 89.

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1850s and early 1860s where the two governors-general who governed the western and eastern parts of the Kazakh Steppe actually agreed on Russia’s policy in the region. In the early 1850s, Orenburg Governor-General Perovskii opposed connecting the two lines

– but had to expand the Syr Darya line anyway due to the Kokandian threat from Aq

Masjid – and Western Siberia’s Governor-General Gasfort supported it. By 1858, both

Governors-General Katenin and Gasfort were in agreement, but needed to prepare the groundwork in St. Petersburg as well as in the region. Finally, in 1861, Orenburg

Governor-General Bezak supported uniting the two lines, but Western Siberia’s

Governor-General Diugamel’ adamantly opposed it. Nevertheless, with all his reservations and delays, Diugamel’ ended up reluctantly participating in plans to unify the two lines to the very end.253 It was for this reason that Minister of War D.A. Miliutin later characterized Governor-General Diugamel’s as “inertia incarnate.”254

Alexander Osipovich Diugamel’ (Duhamel) was no stranger to the Kazakh Steppe or the when he was appointed in 1861. He had participated in a scientific expedition on the western Kazakh Steppe in 1825 to compare the water levels of the

Caspian and Aral Seas for potential trade routes, and represented Russia in , the

Ottoman Empire and Iran, throughout the 1830s and 1840s.255 His French father, who joined the future French King Louis XVIII while he lived in exile in Mitau (Jelgava) in what is now Latvia during part of the Napoleonic Wars, entered the service of the

253 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 137

254 Ibid.

255 Aleksandr Osipovich Diugamel', Avtobiografiia Aleksandra Osipovicha Diugamel’ia (Moscow: 1885), 8-10, 48, 101.

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Russian Empire under Alexander I.256 Diugamel’, contrasting himself in his autobiography to the other military officials who sought to “conquer some kind of piece of territory hoping to receive a title for it, “like Count Muraviev-Amurskii, was not interested in expanding the Russian empire at all. Diugamel’ was deeply convinced that

“the expansion of our borders . . . into Central Asia did not bring us any kind of benefit, but brought upon us new difficulties and would weaken Russia.”257 Therefore, even before his departure for his post in Omsk, he wrote to Tsar Alexander II and assured him,

“If I have to stay ten years at that post in which you have assigned me in trust, I would consider myself only worthy of that trust if I made sure that Your Empire is not expanded one inch.”258 Diugamel’ believed that the parts of the Kazakh Steppe that Russia already controlled could only be further linked to Russia through colonization by settlers – not more Cossacks –invited from the internal provinces to live on the steppe exempt from military service and taxation, but even in the 1880s he bemoaned the fact that this idea had been ignored.259 He felt that the fertile soil along the Siberian Line needed good agriculturalists to produce food, that self-sufficiency should not depend on the “lazy”

Cossacks who did not love to work the land. Most of the steppe, however, he considered barren, not worth keeping, and if Russians did settle that land to farm, they would run into conflict with the Kazakhs who needed large expanses of pasturelands. Moreover,

256 Diugamel', Avtobiografia, 3. Diugamel’s father named him after Alexander I.

257 Ibid., 201.

258 Ibid. The fact that Diugamel’ did not succeed in carrying out his oath he later blamed on Minister of War D.A. Miliutin, who caught the attention of the Emperor with his “bombastic” memos regarding expeditions.

259 Ibid., 204.

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Diugamel’ asserted, the Kazakh Steppe was so unworthy of keeping that if the Cossacks were not compelled to live on it, they would “abandon the steppe in mass” and return to their former residences north of the Irtysh River.260

Like Governor-General Gasfort’s warnings regarding the Greater Horde sultans

Tezek and Ali, Diugamel’ had a wary view of Russia’s Kazakh allies on the Siberian

Line even as they used these Kazakh allies to achieve their goals. He noted that the

Kazakhs, “very much love statements of loyalty,” but he believed none of them. Instead,

Diugamel’ observed, “While Russia is strong, the Kazakhs will be submissive, but if our power suffers the slightest misfortune, they will turn against us.” In contrast to Russia’s civilizing mission and purported moral obligation to defend its nomadic subjects from

Kokand, he viewed Kazakh “loyalty” to Russia as purely opportunistic and self- serving.261

Since Russia was still in financial difficulties in 1861 while it recovered from the

Crimean War and underwent social, political and economic reforms, Diugamel’ did not think taking even more of the Kazakh Steppe was worth the money or effort. He focused his attention, instead, on finding way to cut spending on the Siberian Line. His largest cost-saving measure was to cancel Governor-General Gasfort’s plans to build a fort on the Chu River, even though construction had already been authorized and money had already been allocated by St. Petersburg.262

260 Ibid.

261 Ibid.

262 Ibid. 205

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Diugamel’ stood out among high-ranking Russian officers in Central Asia at the time for his restraint and practicality regarding imperial expansion. He considered “every step across the Chu River dangerous” and warned that Russia would end up taking the entire Khanate of Kokand “against our wishes.”263 Instead, he proposed turning Vernoe into a solid bulwark to withstand any attacks from Kokandian forces and sought to focus on developing the parts of the Kazakh Steppe Russia had already acquired. While the current situation in Semirechye offered only an uneasy truce with Kokand, negotiations with Kokand, he argued, could lead to prosperity and further development in the Trans-Ili valley which needed only one thing – lasting peace.264

Diugamel’s concerns were reviewed by both the Ministry of War and Ministry of

Foreign Affairs in June 1861 and a Special Committee was chaired by Tsar Alexander II determine a policy for Central Asia. They concluded that the Chu River was not a viable natural boundary since the shallow river was freely crossed by Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes under Kokand. Nevertheless, they agreed that it was an “ inopportune” time to move

Russia’s border further south, and authorized Governor General Diugamel’ to engage in peaceful negotiations with Kokand in the meantime, without committing Russia to a permanent border on the Chu River.265

Before Governor-General Diugamel’ learned of the Special Committee’s decision, he had informed Fort Vernoe in July 1861, that he wanted peaceful relations

263 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 136-138.

264 Ibid. Major-General Zimmerman, who had just destroyed Tokmak and Pishpek, however, was a true believer in the need for Russia to dominate Central Asia in order to threaten Britain. War Minister Sukhozanet at that time considered Zimmerman’s views a “chimera.”

265 Ibid.

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with Kokand, but that he would not prohibit retaliatory baranta raids to recover stolen livestock. While “it would be desirable to maintain friendly relations with the people migrating across the Chu River,” and Russian forces should “avoid clashes with them,” neither Russian forces nor Kazakhs under Russian poddanstvo were prohibited from the use of force to recapture stolen livestock and punish Kokandian raiders without significant loss of life.266 Once informed of Petersburg’s decision in early August,

Diugamel’ clarified his orders and repeated Petersburg’s directives to Vernoe: that peaceful relations with Kokand was not the goal, but not impossible either. If Kokand proposed peace negotiations, they would not be refused, but these negotiations would only be considered a form of truce and would not restrict Russia’s borders to the Chu

River under any circumstances. Moreover, he ordered Russian forces to be vigilant, and prepared for hostilities with Kokand and their Kyrgyzes at any moment.267

While Western Siberia’s Governor-General Diugamel’ was authorized to engage in peace talks should the occasion arise, Orenburg’s Governor-General Bezak launched an attack on the Kokandian fortress of Yani Kurgan on September 23, 1861, disarming and disbanding the Kokandian soldiers stationed there. Afterwards, Bezak wrote to

Petersburg in 1861 again extolling the virtues of the Syr Darya as a natural boundary, with fertile soil that could more adequately supply Russian troops. He rejected merely uniting the two lines at Turkistan. Seizing Tashkent, he argued, would make available a more convenient trade route via Aulie-Ata to Kulja and Chuguchak. Bezak reiterated his

266 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 34, (l 6).

267 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 34, (ll 8-9).

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proposal that the Siberian Line take Pishpek and Aulie-Ata, and then meet the Orenburg and Syr Darya Lines at Turkistan to move jointly against Tashkent.268

In 1861, Dmitri Miliutin replaced N.O. Sukhozanet as Minister of War and would become one of the most influential occupants of that office. He shared the same views as

N.P. Ignatiev in the Foreign Ministry and Governor-General Bezak regarding the need to unite the two lines.269 Rumors of Russia’s intentions to take the Kazakh Steppe were already widespread on the Kazakh Steppe and Mawarannahr. A strong advocate for war with Kokand, Miliutin warned Diugamel’ that his long-sought peace talks with Kokand in Omsk might only be used as a distraction while Kokand attacked Russian forces on the

Syr Darya Line. If Kokand attacked, he urged Diugamel’ to be ready to carry out a diversionary maneuver to distract Kokandian forces from the Syr Darya Line.270

Diugamel’ drolly responded that a Kokandian attack in the middle of winter was “highly unlikely,” rightly noted that sending a large Russian contingent from the Siberian Line across the Hungry Steppe to fight in Suzak, as General Bezak had requested, was “utterly impossible,” and that crossing the Chu River as a diversionary tactic was tantamount to launching military operations against Kokand, which he did not feel authorized to do.271

Miliutin, however, snapped back that it had already been decided that Chu River was not

268 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 140-141

269 Diugamel’, Avtobiografia, 215; and David MacKenzie, "The Conquest and Administration of Turkestan, 1860-1885," in Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, ed. Michael Rywkin (London: Mansell Publishing, Ltd., 1988), 212.

270 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 145.

271 Ibid., 145.

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going to be Russia’s border, and that it would therefore behoove Diugamel’ to be prepared for the inevitable Kokandian attack anyway.272

The Special Committee met again in March 1862 to review Governor-General

Bezak’s plan for a joint attack on Tashkent, which he intended to launch in 1863.

Diugamel’ grudgingly noted that, in taking Tashkent, there might be a “moral advantage” even though it was clear to him that there was no economic benefit from it. He reluctantly submitted a plan for the Siberian Line to move “in the direction of Tashkent,” for which he requested the astronomical sum of 900,000 rubles.273 Miliutin ordered

Diugamel’ to focus just on connecting the Siberian Line to the Orenburg and Syr Darya

Lines, at less expense.274

Finally, in attempt to “avoid any responsibility for this matter,” Diugamel’ wrote

St. Petersburg in May 1862 expressing his discomfort with Russia’s plan to unite the two lines, take Tashkent, and the difficulty of such an “endless, incessant campaign.”275

Diugamel’ feared, “that we are being drawn into an unprofitable undertaking, the final result being that which we cannot foresee.”276 He warned that moving to unite the two lines and take Tashkent would encumber the state with a heavy financial burden, and that it would “deeply and profoundly absorb Russia’s revenue like Russia’s campaign in the

272 Ibid., 146.

273 Ibid., 146-147.

274 Ibid.

275 Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 215.

276 Ibid.

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Caucasus.”277 In early May, he received information that the Tashkentis were fighting the Kokandian Kipchaks and that about 18,000 Kipchaks has surrounded the city, blocking trade.278 Even Tashkent’s reported dissatisfaction with Kokand did not entice

Diugamel’ to want that city under Russian poddanstvo.

Foreign Minister Prince A.M. Gorchakov, quickly wrote back to Diugamel’ and conveyed that he had shown Diugamel’s letter to Tsar Alexander II. The Emperor considered Diugamel’s concerns to be “very thorough and prudent,” and Gorchakov personally concurred “with all his strength.”279 Gorchakov concluded with a postscript expressing his pleasure that they agreed on this issue, “I am happy that we go hand in hand.”280

Nevertheless, Diugamel’s autobiography bemoans the fact that his concerns did not even delay Russia’s plans for Central Asia. War Minister D.A. Miliutin carried through his plans in less than a year and half after Diugamel’ attempted to stop it in May

1862. Diugamel’ believed Miliutin to be “extraordinarily prone to novelty,” and too enamored of untested theoretical ideas both in reforming the military at the time as well as in planning a war in Central Asia.281

Kokand Implodes

277 Ibid., 216.

278 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (l 13).

279 Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 217.

280 Ibid.

281 Ibid., 218; and Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff & Asia, 1800-1917 (London: Routledge, 2006).

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Despite Diugamel’s best efforts to not cross the Chu River and attack Kokand, the

Kyrgyzes of the Talas and Chu River valleys independently rose up against Kokand and voluntarily asked for Russian protection. In the same month that Diugamel’ wrote to

Petersburg arguing against further expansion in May 1862, the Trans-Chu Kyrgyzes rebelled against Kokand’s harsh rule, attacking the Kokandian fortress of Merke (230 miles west of Vernoe and 37 miles east of Aulie-Ata) and forced it to surrender. The surrounding Kyrgyzes asked for Russian poddanstvo.282 By October, the Solto and

Sarybagish tribes had permanently broken from Kokand. Baytik Kanaev (Baitik Batyr,

Baitik Kanai uulu), manap of the Solto tribe, had invited Pishpek’s commandant

Rakhmatulla to a feast not far from the fort, but then killed him on his way home. The

Kyrgyzes then proceeded to lay siege to Pishpek on October 13, but since they lacked artillery, Baitik sent his younger brother to ask the Russians for help. Colonel

Kolpakovskii sent in 1,400 troops with siege weaponry to attack Pishpek by October 24,

1862. They destroyed what left of the fort and returned to Vernoe. Russia not only accepted the Soltos into Russian poddanstvo, they gave Baitik a gold medal. 283

After the fall of Pishpek again in 1862, Kokandian forces moved towards Aulie-

Ata in November with 500 Kipchaks and a thousand Bagish Kyrgyzes under manap

Sarymsak. Aulie-Ata, defended by two-thousand sarts and Kazakhs of the Greater Horde from around Talas, resisted them. The Kipchaks and the Bagish Kyrgyzes asked the

Solto and Sarybagish Kyrgyzes to join them in taking the city. Most members of the

Greater Horde Kazakhs stayed on the sidelines while the Kokandians fought among

282 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (l 13).

283 O.J. Osmonov, Istoriia Kyrgyzstana (s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei) (Bishkek: Ministry of Education and Culture of the Kyrgyz Republic, 2005), 277.

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themselves at Aulie-Ata.284 Kokandian forces tried to return to Merke in 1863 with a detachment from Aulie-Ata, demanding that the Kyrgyzes in the area return to

Kokandian suzerainty and pay taxes, and threatened to punish them if they did not. The

Kyrgyzes near Merke replied, however, “Those who can destroy Pishpek will be those to whom we are under poddanstvo,” and wrote to Kolpakovskii to assure him of their loyalty to Russia.285 A small detachment of Kokandian Kipchaks moved into the fort at

Merke later that year, however, the Kyrgyzes did not resist.286 By this time, the Kipchaks were rebelling against khan of Kokand too and the Kipchaks’ loyalties were also uncertain at Merke.

By 1863, Kokand’s leadership had changed hands yet again. Khudoyar took the throne, and called in support from Kokandian garrisons in Tashkent and Turkistan to help him fight the rebelling Kipchaks, which significantly reduced Kokand’s strength in those

Syr Darya cities.287 Khudoyar Khan had also married the sister of the Emir of Bukhara, thereby strengthening their alliance. There were rumors that Bukhara now wanted to drive Russia from the Syr Darya and Russia strengthened its garrison at Fort Julek just in case.288 Shortly thereafter in 1863, however, power in Kokand changed hands yet again to

Madali Khan, a twelve-year-old under the regency of Mulla Alim Kul, with the support

284 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 73, (ll22-23).

285 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (l 88).

286 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (ll91-93).

287 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (l 36).

288 Ibid.

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of the rebelling Kipchaks.289 Leadership in Tashkent had also changed hands again, and the Kazakhs who lived around the city rebelled against onerous taxes, and laid siege to the city.290 With Kokand in turmoil, and no longer allied with Bukhara, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for Russia to connect their defensive lines, and yet Russia delayed.

Fig. 28. Khudoyar Khan of Kokand, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09951-00032 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 1, pl. 11, no. 32))

289 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1,Delo 167, (ll 91-93).

290 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii 1857-1868 (Moscow: 1960), 149.

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Next Steps

While the Orenburg Line had already finished its preparations to move the Aral flotilla up the Syr Darya in 1863, and the Kokandian fortress of Pishpek had fallen the year prior, the Special Committee convened in Petersburg in February 1863 and decided to postpone its plans to unite the two lines for the time being in favor of more reconnaissance. The delay was largely due to the continuing disagreement between

Orenburg’s Governor-General Bezak who wanted to annex Tashkent outright, and

Western Siberia’s Governor-General Diugamel’, who sought to turn Tashkent into a .291 The Polish Uprising of 1863 was also a likely distraction. During this delay, the Aral flotilla was ordered to explore the Syr Darya upstream from Aq Masjid into Kokandian territory, Lieutenant-Colonel Cherniaiev was ordered to reconnoiter the area between Fort Julek and Turkistan (the next Kokandian city that the Orenburg/Syr

Darya Line wanted to conquer), as well as the Kokandian fort at Suzak. The Siberian

Line was ordered to explore routes to Aulie-Ata (the next city it was supposed to take) as well as explore the former Kokandian territory up the Naryn River valley to Kashgar in the Qing Empire.292

The mere fact that Russian forces were moving around the area prompted the local inhabitants to rebel against Kokand. For example, upon Lieutenant-Colonel

Cherniaiev’s approach toward Suzak, the local population rose up and asked for Russian poddanstvo.293 This, combined with the ease in which Pishpek fell the year prior, and the

291 Ibid., 158.

292 Ibid., 158-159.

293 Ibid.

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way small Kokandian garrisons in the Naryn River valley suddenly surrendered without a fight in 1863, encouraged officials in Petersburg to agree to a compromise proposal.

Russia would unite its Orenburg and Siberian lines via Suzak, Cholak-Kurgan and Aulie-

Ata instead of taking larger cities like Turkistan or Tashkent by force. Orenburg’s

Governor-General Bezak, however, believed that this proposed line would not hold and that it would have to be pushed further south almost immediately to include Turkistan and the River.294 Soviet historian N.A. Khalfin argues that British plans to establish a trade fair in Peshawar near the Afghan border and designs on posting a British trade agent in Yarkand in the Qing Empire in 1863 prompted Minister of War Miliutin to draft another plan to unite the two lines. This time, Miliutin planned for the Orenburg/Syr

Dary Line to officially occupy the rebelling city of Suzak with Russian forces in 1864, while the Siberian Line would simultaneously seize Aulie-Ata. From there, the border would shift down to the Arys River to include Chimkent to create the “New Kokand

Line.” Tsar Alexander II approved this plan in December, 1863.295

Trade with the Qing Empire

Meanwhile, the Siberian Line had to manage its border with the Qing Empire as well as Kokand. Russia’s successes in driving Kokand out of the Chu River valley in

1860 and 1862 was more significant after Russia won the right to establish a trade warehouse in the lucrative Kashgar market with the 1860 Treaty of Peking (Beijing).296

294 Ibid., 161.

295 Ibid., 163.

296 Ibid., 130. N.P. Ignatiev negotiated Russia’s terms for the 1860 Treaty of Peking, establishing Russia’s border with the Qing Empire to the Tian-Shan Mountains

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In the Treaty of Peking, the Qing recognized Russia’s annexation of Semirechye and

Issyk-Kul, and Russia’s conquest of what became northern Kyrgyzstan. These annexations established a direct border between Russia and Altishahr, theoretically opening up more direct trade routes from Russia to Kashgar. The Russian General Staff in St. Petersburg even proposed in 1860 to establish a fort to defend Russia’s warehouse in Kashgar as well. Just as Orenburg’s Governor-General Katenin advocated shifting

Russia’s trade priorities away from the Amu Darya and India to the Syr Darya and the

Qing Empire in his 1858 proposal, this proposal focused on linking the Syr Darya Line to trade with the Qing Empire as well. In order to foster Russia’s trade routes with the Qing

Empire, the General Staff proposed that Russia first take Aulie-Ata and then Tashkent from Kokand, thereby also linking the Orenburg/Syr Darya Line to the Siberian Line and defining Russia’s borders with Kokand in the process.297

Unrest in Altishahr and Jungaria in the 1850s and 1860s, however, made it nearly impossible for the Treaty of Peking to be enforced and direct overland access to Altishahr was mostly controlled by Kokand. Orenburg’s Governor-General Bezak, astutely observed that Altishahr was the “regulator” of Central Asian trade. Disorder in Altishahr, he observed, reverberated in the surrounding areas. For example, when trade was cut off between Kashgar and Kokand in 1857, after the Qing Empire kicked Kokandians out for

and extracted concessions as the Qing dealt with the Taiping Rebellion and sought peace with England, France and the United States in the Second Opium War. The treaty confirmed Russia’s borders in the Russian Far East, the southeastern parts of Semirechye, as well as the frontier on the Eastern Kazakh steppe near Lake Zaysan and the lower course of the Black Irtysh. In addition to the warehouse and consulate Russia was allowed to build in Kulja in 1851 at the Treaty of Chuguchak, the Qing Empire allowed Russian warehouses and consulates at Kashgar and Urga (Ulaan-Baatar, Mongolia).

297 Ibid., 132.

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their support of yet another rebellion, the markets of Bukhara were flooded with Russian and British wares. Deprived of more trade outlets, Kokandian traders overwhelmed the

Bukharan market with Russian goods, which caused prices to fall, and the there to drop in value. Thus, Governor-General Bezak observed, Russia had to pay attention to what happened in Kashgar since a disturbance in trade there ultimately affected Tashkent’s trade with Troitsk and Orenburg.298

Even though Russia had the right to establish a warehouse in Kashgar, a Special

Committee chaired by Tsar Alexander II met in June of 1861 and decided that it was not worth going to war over the issue if the Qing Empire could not live up to its treaty obligations at the moment. Moreover, Russia feared that if they invaded Altishahr, other foreign powers would do the same in eastern Qing territories and take the Korean peninsula next to Russian holdings in the Far East.299

Hostilities with the Qing Empire

Diugamel’ warned St. Petersburg officials in May 1862 that Russia needed to watch the Qing Empire as a threat to the Siberian Line. In his opposition to plans to unite the two lines, Diugamel’ despaired that Orenburg’s Governor General was only focused on one thing, and did not see the real threat Russia faced from the Qing Empire.300 He argued that it did not make sense to remove significant parts of Russia’s military strength for the Siberian Line, leaving Russia’s border with the Qing almost completely exposed,

298 Ibid., 135.

299 Ibid., 133-134.

300 Diugamel’, Avtobiografiia, 216

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particularly since Qing officials nearby had a hostile attitude about the recent 1860 Treaty of Peking border agreement. The Russian consulate in Kulja reported rumors of plans for Qing troops to infiltrate Russian territory. There was no way to guarantee that the

Qing would not launch an attack on Russia while the Siberian Line was engaged elsewhere.301

After the Kyrgyzes drove the Kokandians out of the Trans-Chu region in 1862, it was open for more Russian exploration and surveys of trade routes to the Qing Empire.302

The Kyrgyzes had not only driven the Kokandians out of Merke and Pishpek, but the fort at Kurgan Kurtka further east on a trade route to Kashgar too.303 Russian officials initially decided that they would only try to occupy the Kurgan Kurtka fort themselves if it were occupied by Kokandian sarts but let the Kyrgyzes keep it in the interest of maintaining a good relationship.304 Like Merke, the Kokandians returned to take it again shortly after the Kyrgyz had driven them out, but then later surrendered to Russian

General Staff Captain Protsenko without a shot.305

The Bugus Kyrgyzes had warned the Russian division at its camp at Kegen (just northeast of Issyk-Kul) in 1863 that the Qing were strengthening their forces on the border, up to 10,000 troops, including Kalmyks and Kazakhs. They claimed that these

Qing forces, allegedly intended to attack and destroy the Russian division at Kegen, take

301 Ibid.

302 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 210, (l 2).

303 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (ll 63-64).

304 Ibid.

305 Ibid.

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Issyk-Kul, and build a fortress there, and prompted Russian forces to be on guard.306

Nevertheless, as the year progressed, on top of fears of a Qing attack, Russian officials also feared that the Bugus Kyrgyzes just might leave for the Qing Empire, “Despite the actual proof of our superiority over the Chinese, we do not have influence on the Kyrgyz

Buguses.”307 Governor-General Diugamel’ ordered a small fort to be built at Issyk-

Kul.308

The Buguses’ warnings to the Russians were well founded. At about six in the morning on September 15, 1863, about 26 Cossacks and an unknown number of Kazakhs at Kegen who were herding their livestock woke up to find themselves surrounded by about a 1,000 Qing soldiers with their Kazakhs, who had snuck up on them during the night in the middle of a snow storm. In order to buy time and gather their livestock, the

Russians began to negotiate, but the Qing opened fire on their livestock, killing 82 animals.309 Under intense enemy fire, the Russian and Kazakh forces built a make-shift fortification out bags of clothes and food, quickly digging out trenches with two axes and their bare hands. Well-aimed shots prevented the Qing forces from surrounding them.

The Russians and Russian Kazakhs were under siege for nearly twenty-four hours.

Finally, they managed to send word to sultan Tezek for help nearby when several

Cossacks and Kazakhs made a brake for it under enemy fire.310 Kolpakovskii received a

306 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 167, (ll 68-69).

307 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 228, (ll 1-2).

308 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 228, (l 5).

309 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 228, (ll 30-31); and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 228, (l 5).

310 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 228, (ll34-35).

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desperate letter from a Lieutenant Belykh reporting the Qing attack nearly six days later, and immediately sent reinforcements. The Qing forces and their Kazakhs were finally forced to retreat, leaving behind their weapons and bags.311 Bureaucracy, however, never dies. Once the bullets stopped flying, the Kegen division had to report back to Fort

Vernoe exactly what kinds of animals were shot and how many of each kind, the number of 82 head of livestock not sufficing.312 The following year, in September 1864,

Governor-General Diugamel’ sent more Cossacks to Issyk-Kul to establish a temporary fortress on the Aksu River to protect the Buguses while preventing them from migrating to Qing lands.313

Governor-General Diugamel’ also formed the “Kashgar Division” south of Issyk-

Kul in the spring of 1863 in order to establish direct control over the trade routes to

Kashgar and keep the Kyrgyzes in the region loyal to Russia. Control of this route, it was hoped, would cut out Kokand’s lucrative role as trade intermediary entirely. While the

Siberian Line would have benefited from this direct trade route to Altishahr, the two defensive lines would have to be connected at the Syr Darya in order for the Orenburg

Line to benefit from this direct trade access to Altishahr as well.

While the Orenburg Line lobbied St. Petersburg to conquer a more defensible

(and comfortable) place on the Syr Darya to access trade routes to the Qing Empire and engage with the states of Mawarannahr, the Western Siberia Line was already busy trying to secure these trade routes to Altishahr by fighting Kyrgyzes south of Issyk-Kul who

311 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 228, (l 31ob).

312 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 228, (ll36-37).

313 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis1, Delo 246, (ll 16-17).

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both rebelled against Kokand and rejected Russia. For example, manap Osman Tailak and his men surrounded a small Russian division south of Issyk-Kul. Only the intervention of another Kyrgyz manap, Shabdan Jantai, saved these Russians. Defeated,

Osman Tailak set off with his 3,000 people for Altishahr.314 Another manap Umetali

Ormon of the Sarybagishes attacked a party of some forty Russian soldiers on a trade route to Kashgar as well. After two days, Russian forces and their Kyrgyz allies arrived to save them. Umetali Ormon had hoped to move to Qing lands with his people, but was refused by local Qing officials in Kashgar.315 A direct trade with Kashgar via the Upper

Naryn River remained outside of Russian control until 1867.316

The “New Kokand Line”

With another new khan on the throne in Kokand, the khanate’s officials went to

Suzak, Cholak-Kurgan, and Aulie-Ata collecting taxes from the Kazakhs in the region and further alienating them. Widespread discontent over Kokandian tax collection convinced the Orenburg/Syr Darya Line officials that Turkistan would fall easily.317 Tsar

Alexander II approved plans to unite the lines. Orenburg’s Governor-General Bezak was authorized by Petersburg in 1864 to go to the city of Turkistan and take it if it surrendered, and if there was no doubt that it would fall.318

314 Osmonov, Istoriia Kyrgyzstana, 278. Highlighting the fluidity of Kyrgyz alliances, Osmon Tailak returned in 1868 and entered Russian poddanstvo.

315 Ibid., 279.

316 Ibid., 280.

317 Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Srednei Azii, 164.

318 Ibid., 165.

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Fig. 29. Kokandian Fortress at Aulie-Ata, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00046 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 26, no. 46))

Meanwhile, the Siberian Line, under Colonel Cherniaiev, who formerly served on the Syr Darya Line and was a forceful advocate of uniting the two lines, was ordered to take Aulie-Ata. After re-taking the Kokandian fort of Merke, Cherniaiev moved towards

Aulie-Ata in June 1864 with Cossacks and Kazakhs as his lead forces.319 He sent a letter demanding the surrender of the city, but after no response within the time he had allotted, he opened fire. Unlike the other Kokandian forts, the larger Aulie-Ata fort did not

319 Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question, Appendix VI., x.

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immediately surrender. The next day, a messenger from Aulie-Ata emerged asking for a two-week grace period to think it over. Cherniaiev responded by opening fire again.

Along with the Kazakh militia under Cherniaiev, Captain Ch.Ch. Valikhanov, a Russified

Kazakh great grandson of the Middle Horde’s Ablay Khan, served on Cherniaiev’s staff.

The next day, hoping to avoid digging trenches and laying seige, Cherniaiev, 200

Cossacks and his Kazakh militia crossed the Talas River in the heavy rain and attacked

Aulie-Ata’s fortress from the western side through the town. Within two hours, Aulie-

Ata fell. While there were only three wounded and two injured on the Russian side, 307 were killed, 390 wounded and 341 were taken prisoner on the Kokandian side.320

Colonel Cherniaiev sent 215 Kokandian prisoners back to Fort Vernoe in June, but Russian officials had no idea what to do with them. Most of them were over the age of 60, healthy, but unfit for manual labor, barefoot and poorly clothed. Moreover, they were expensive to feed and maintain. Russian officials decided that they were completely harmless. Russian officials reasoned that it was better to let them return home than to keep them and be forced to provide them winter clothes.321

When the Orenburg Line approached Turkistan in the same month, June 1864, the

Kokandian garrison of 1,500 men at Turkistan did not surrender as hoped, but opened fire.322 This time, Russian forces had to dig trenches to lay seige. The Kokandian commander of Turkistan, Mirza Davlet, fled the fort with 330 of his men and Kazakh ally, Sadyk, and set off in the direction of Chimkent. A flying column of Cossacks and

320 Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question, Appendix VI, xi.

321 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 258, ( ll 80-81, 112-113, 172a).

322 Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question, Appendix VII, xii.

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Russian Kazakhs chased after them. Upon learning this, the town inhabitants surrendered the next morning. While there were a thousand Kazakhs who fought in Russia’s forces against Turkistan, there were roughly 350 Kazakhs who fought to defend Turkistan as well. These Kokandian Kazakhs were sent off to live in their auls once they surrendered.323 Sadyk, one of Mirza Davlet’s Kazakh allies who had fled with him, later approached Russia and asked for poddanstvo and forgiveness, which was granted.324

With Turkistan and Aulie-Ata under Russian control, Tsar Alexander II proclaimed the “New Kokand Line” on July 19, 1864, linking the Chu River to the Syr

Darya as far as the Kokandian fort of Yani-Kurgan, under the command of Major-

General Cherniaiev. With the troops of both the Orenburg and the Siberian Lines on the new Kokand Line under Cherniaiev, they set off for Chimkent on the same day the new line was officially formed. Despite heavy Kokandian fire, the Russians stormed the gates of the Chimkent’s citadel which fell within an hour.325

With all these forts and cities on the Syr Darya falling so easily, it was easy for

Russian officials on the campaign to be persuaded that one needed only to show up with

Russian forces nearby and city gates would voluntarily open. After Chimkent quickly fell, Major-General Cherniaiev soon heard contradictory information about the willingness of Tashkent to surrender to Russia, and set off with his Cossacks and

Kazakhs to find out. This time, however, he quickly retreated after encountering strong resistance and heavy losses.

323 Romanovskii, Notes on the Central Asiatic Question, Appendix VII, xii and Appendix IX, xvii.

324 Ibid., Appendix VII, xvi.

325 Ibid., Appendix IX, xvii.

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Fig. 30. Kokandian Fortress at Chimkent, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09957-00024 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 21, no. 24))

Gorchakov’s Circular Memorandum on Russia’s “most inconvenient neighbors”

Foreign Minister Gorchakov issued a circular memorandum to Russian diplomats shortly thereafter, in November 1864, for them to assure their European interlocutors that

Russia had no intention of expanding into Mawarannahr beyond the “New Kokand Line” along the Kazakh Steppe. He justified Russia’s annexation of the Kazakh Steppe as similar to what any other state would do when confronted by nomads on their border,

“Russia’s position is that of all civilized States which find themselves in contact with

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semi-savage, wandering peoples who have no fixed social organization.”326 In order to secure Russia’s frontiers and trade routes, Russia felt compelled to impose order on its nomadic neighbors to curb the raids and pillaging. Gorchakov further explained that once one group of nomads enters Russian poddanstvo, they are then preyed upon by wilder nomadic neighbors further afield, thus drawing Russia deeper and deeper into the steppe.327 Using a rationale that would appeal to other empires with nomads, like the

United States, France or England, Gorchakov argued, Russia’s expansion into the Kazakh

Steppe was motivated less by ambition and more by “imperative necessity” where “the greatest difficulty consists of knowing when to stop.”328 It is for this reason, Gorchakov argued, that Russia established itself both on a line from the Aral Sea to the Syr Darya and on a line from Issyk-Kul to the Qing Empire, with plans to stabilize what lay between them.329 Gorchakov concluded by saying since nomads could neither be restrained, punished, nor effectively contained, they were, “the most inconvenient neighbors.”330

Therefore, Gorchakov concluded, Russia’s borders would include the nomads of the

Kazakh Steppe and attempt to “civilize” them while stopping at sedentary agricultural civilizations. Russia annexed Chimkent, he explained, because the fertile territory was necessary to maintain the defensive lines and the area was inhabited in part by Kazakhs who are already Russian subjects. Gorchakov concluded by reassuring his European

326 Alfred Erich Senn, ed., "The Advance In Central Asia," in Readings in Russian Political and Diplomatic History, vol 1 (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1966), 139.

327 Ibid., 140.

328 Ibid.

329 Ibid., 141.

330 Ibid.

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audience by echoing Governor-General Diugamel’s concerns that the Russian Empire had more pressing tasks ahead and that Russia’s expanding its borders would only “retard and paralyze” its own reforms.331

Gorchakov’s circular openly stated what Russian officials had debated about their relationship with Kazakhs and how to live with them as “European” neighbors for years going back to the eighteenth century (when Russia decided they were European). While

Gorchakov noted how the Russian Empire was pulled further and further into the Kazakh

Steppe due to its alliances with its nomadic neighbors, he neglected to acknowledge that

Russia never could have conquered the Kazakhs Steppe without its Kazakh allies in the first place, and that the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes voluntarily joined Russia and initially benefitted from their alliances. This alliance and mutual dependence, however, would quickly come to an end when Russia solidified its gains later in the nineteenth century.

331 Ibid., 142.

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Chapter 8 -- Finding, Keeping & Making Russians on the Steppe: Solidifying identites as the Middle Ground Closes

The first half of the nineteenth century was a time when Russian officials used the widest possible definition they could find to claim as many “Russians” as possible on the Kazakh Steppe, flexibly shifting that definition of “Russianness” according to circumstances. The Kazakh Steppe was a refuge for Russian runaways, adventurers, slaves and victims of happenstance – none of whom had a “civilizing mission.” Russian criminals who had been exiled to hard labor in Siberia sometimes ran away to

Mawarannahr. Russian serfs, assigned to labor in the mines of the Altai Mountains, sometimes tried to run to Qing lands. Russian Poles exiled to Siberia after one of their uprisings sometimes tried to run to Qing lands or Mawarannahr as well.1 Runaway

Russian soldiers often found themselves fighting against Russia on the losing side as

Russia marched further south, leading to awkward conversations once they were discovered. As Russian forts were established on the Kazakh Steppe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as Russian forces often lived with and depended upon their

Kazakh allies to survive on the Kazakh Steppe, Russian officials often struggled with maintaining the “Russianness” of its soldiers and Cossacks, while Russian Orthodox missionaries tried to form and convert new Russians.

1 TsGARK Fond 3,Opis 1, Delo 250, (ll 1-2); and P.P. Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Liudmila Gilmour, Colin Thomas, and Marcus Wheeler (London: Haklyut Society, 1998), 61-65.

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Freed Slaves & Other Long Lost Orthodox Christians

For as long as Russia has had nomads on its borders, Russia has endured slave raids and the threat of being hauled off to distant markets for sale. As the Russian

Empire became more self-consciously European in the eighteenth century, part of its motive behind attempts to “civilize” the Kazakhs was to stop these slave raids. By the first half of the nineteenth century, as a wave of Romanticist nationalism swept across

Europe, and as speaking French lost its popularity among Russia’s elite after the

Napoleonic Wars, Russian elite society began to define a Russian national identity as well. The concept of the nation, with language as the medium through which the characteristics of the nation were expressed, became more important. Language was seen not just an arbitrary means through which one communicated, but as part of one’s very essence as a human being and as a member of a larger community. Minister of

Education Sergei Uvarov in 1833, in an attempt to bolster Russia’s identity as a European nation and empire, formulated the doctrine of Official Nationality, and declared that

“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” were the pillars of the modernizing Russian state. Thus, as Russian slaves were encountered in the first half of the nineteenth century, these markers of identity – language, customs, clothes, Orthodox faith, and loyalty to the Tsar – were used to determine someone’s “Russianness.”

Nikolai Severtsev, a zoologist for the Russian Academy of Sciences who claimed he was researching wildlife on the frontier between Fort Perovskii and the hostile

Khanate of Kokand in the early 1850s – or at least that was his pretext – found himself captive in Kokand for a month. After being dragged with a lasso by Kazakhs for two miles, and suffering from infected wounds, he eventually ended up in Tashkent under the

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care of Kokandian doctors. While in captivity, a Kokandian attempted to convert

Severtsev to Islam to free him from slavery, by claiming that Severtsev could just nominally convert to Islam, lie to the mullah, and really remain a Christian. All he had to do was repeat the prayer the mullah read. After nominally converting to Islam his faith would be no one’s business and he could consider himself Orthodox if he wanted to, and be a free Kokandian.2 He refused.

This arrangement, however, is exactly what a Russian named Absalom, who

Severtsev met while in captivity, did. Absalom ended up in Kokand in the 1820s when the khan was recruiting Russian soldiers, runaways and prisoners to train his army, and claimed he was taken to Kokand and enslaved against his will. Absalom had rejected

Islam for four years as a slave, but fell in love with a girl who helped take care of him.

When they were caught together, he converted to Islam to save her from being drowned, and entered the Kokandian armed forces as a master blacksmith to make their armaments.

Absalom managed to combine Islam and Orthodoxy in a way that worked for him. He maintained that all Orthodox saints were considered saints in Islam and prayed five times a day to the call of the muezzin, but crossed himself in the Orthodox manner as he did so.

He later claimed to Severtsev that he did not love Kokandians and thought all Muslims should be baptized to be Orthodox as well, but he also had a lot of explaining to do to

Russian officials regarding how he ended up in Kokand. He had an Uzbek and a Kazakh wife, but claimed that he would be willing to abandon both of them to go to Russia and marry a third, if he could take his children with him. After describing Absalom in detail,

Severtsev rhetorically asked the reader, “How is he not a Russian?” Absalom wanted to

2 Nikolai Severtsev, Mesiats plena u Kokantsev, (St. Petersburg, 1860), 59-60.

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return to Russia but feared he would be judged as a traitor. Severtsev concluded that since he was a prisoner and not a runaway, and served the Kokandian military involuntarily to avoid execution, that he would probably be taken back. He was still

Russian.3

While keeping one’s Orthodox religion provided the litmus test for who was really a Russian, authors who encountered these Russians in Central Asia were very flexible about what tenets of Orthodoxy needed to be maintained. Despite the deep schism between state-approved Orthodox believers and Old Believers, as well as the state-sponsored persecution of sects throughout the empire at the time, when it came to finding Russians on the Kazakh Steppe and Mawarannahr, how one practiced one’s

Christian faith did not seem to matter. All one needed to do was cross oneself with as many fingers as one wished in any manner one chose to qualify as a true Russian.

Criminals, Runaways & Traitors

Still, not all “Russians” kept their Orthodox faith. Some converted to Islam more than nominally and established new lives in the principalities of Mawarannahr. Many of these “Russians” missed Russia but were too afraid to return either because they had converted (which was a criminal offense in Russia), intentionally ran away from Russia, served in the military in one of the states of Mawarannahr, or had committed a crime in the past, and now sought amnesty or attempted to hide their true Russian identities.

3 Severtsev, “Mesiats,” 78.

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After the Cossack settlement of Karatal was established south Kopal in the 1840s, permanent settlements sprung up nearby of cholokazaki, “half-Kazakhs,” who farmed.4

Peter Semenov Tian’-Shanskii described these people who claimed to be from Tashkent while exploring the region in the mid-1850s, “I had reason to believe that the majority of

[the cholokazaki] were not Tashkent Uzbeks at all, but fugitive convict settlers from

Siberia, who had lived for a long time in Tashkent, and who finally at the end of the

‘forties and the beginning of the ‘fifties formed an agricultural colony at the very edge of our Asian dominions at the time, on the river Karatal, under the protection of the foremost legal Russian agricultural colony, Kopal.”5 Semenov met with the patriarch of the illegal colony, Chubar-mulla, who had the brand scars of a convict on his face and spoke Russian with a slight Tatar accent. Chubar-mulla revealed that in the 1830s,

Tashkent’s rich Uzbeks had quite a few Russian runaways who had escaped from Siberia working for them. In the 1840s, rumors reached the Russian diaspora community in

Tashkent that a thriving Russian agricultural community had sprung up in newly conquered Semirechye, and Chubar- mulla resolved with his fellow Russians to go to the

“rich outlying districts of Russian land, and if possible to settle there in order, at least, to die on his native soil.”6 In Semenov’s mind by the late nineteenth century when he wrote his memoirs, “native land” was the then newly conquered territory of Semirechye and

Chubar-mulla was returning to his native home, Russia.

4 Cholokazakh means half-Kazakh. The other half was most often from a sedentary culture.

5 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 61.

6 Ibid.

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Chubar-mulla and the other Russian runaway convicts in this village gradually ventured to speak Russian to Semenov. Semenov advocated amnesty and acceptance of these ex-convicts who had “returned to their native land” in Semirechye as positive contributions to Russia’s imperial undertaking:

I spent the night in [their homes], enjoying the most cordial hospitality from the ex-convicts, who long since had changed into the most peaceful and industrious settlers of newly acquired Russian land, to the consolidation of possessions of which they devoted themselves very diligently and quite deliberately. Next morning, after lively conversations, I parted with the ex-convicts (who at some time in their lives had committed very grave crimes), whom I met for the very first time in my life, carrying away the warmest human feelings towards them.7

Semenov seems to recount his time spent with ex-convicts with the same pride he took in his exploits tiger hunting with Cossacks or risking his life travelling among the warring

Kyrgyzes. Regardless of their criminal past or their religion in the present, the cholokazaki were still Russian.

To put the cholokazaki’s move to their “native land” into perspective, the 1840s was also a time of great turmoil within the Khanate of Kokand, making Russia look like a much better place to live even for a Russian runaway. Not only Russians, but also native

Tashkentis and Kazakhs sought to move to Russia at this time. People who might not have otherwise considered themselves Russian in Kokand, suddenly discovered their

Russianness. A message from the Russian émigrés of Tashkent and Bukhara was conveyed to a Russian government official in Aqmola via a Tatar merchant in the 1840s.

It asked for Russian mercy and amnesty for past crimes so that they could all move back to Russia to set up their businesses and farms. Many of these Russians asking to “return” to Russia had one Tashkenti parent and had never lived in Russia, but identified

7 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 65.

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themselves as Russians at least at that particular time when there was something to be gained from doing so. Moreover, according to a Tatar merchant, even Tashkenti merchants asked about the possibility of emigration to avoid Kokand’s voracious tax collectors.8

Semenov’s good will towards Russian runaway convicts was not shared by everyone in administrative circles. While the Russian government willingly accepted the return of the nomadic Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes who had joined Kokand, the Russian government was still somewhat circumspect about accepting Muslim sart merchants to settle in their midst as trading competition, and embracing Russian runaway convicts as their own again. While briefly considering the forcible return of Russian convicts and criminals from Mawarannahr, one Russian government official determined that such an undertaking would involve too much bloodshed. Instead, he slyly concluded that it would be much better to allow the Russian runaways to return to Russia believing that they would be safe, and then seize and prosecute them later.9 Unlike previous examples where Russian authorities in St. Petersburg who supported Russia’s imperial expansion seemed to be willing to accept anyone as “Russian” as long as they wanted to be Russian, or were vaguely Orthodox at one point in their lives and seemed friendly towards

Russians as long as it contributed to the larger imperial project of populating Siberia and expanding into Central Asia and the Qing Empire, Russian officials assigned to remote

Aqmola, with more prosaic duties to consider, still saw Russian runaway criminals as criminals and not potentially useful contributors to the economy on the Russian frontier.

8 TsGARK, Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 679, (l 5).

9 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 679, (ll 1-2).

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The fact that these fugitives wanted to return to Russia gave the government the upper hand in capturing them later.

Russian traitors, although still considered “Russian,” were particularly hard to accept – but not always rejected in frontier society if they were useful. For example,

Russian Poles and Polish sympathizers, who had been exiled to the Kazakh Steppe after the uprising in the 1830s and 1860s, were still considered “Russian,” probably much to their chagrin. Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat who travelled in Russian

Turkistan, Kokand, Bukhara, and Kulja in 1873, noted that he had heard of a Pole or

Polish sympathizer named Gerburt (Herbert) von Fulstein, who had been exiled to Orsk near the western Kazakh Steppe. One day he was surrounded by a party of Kazakhs who somehow claimed that he was really the son of a sultan who had previously been taken by the Russians as a hostage amanat to be educated. The Khan of Kokand was married to a daughter of this sultan and she, too, claimed that Fulstein was somehow her long lost brother. Fulstein was then treated as the Khan’s relative, appointed the Beg of Namangan in the Ferghana valley, and led such a drunken and debauched life that he eventually had to be removed and kept closer to the court for observation. When the Emir of Bukhara took Kokand, he took Fulstein with him and appointed him to a prominent position at court. He was in Samarkand when the Russians took it in 1868, and on account of his acquaintance with the natives and their languages, was given a minor position and made himself useful. In relating his story, he reportedly said that he was himself at times confused to know whether he was really a Pole or a Kazakh.10 Apparently, even though

10 Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, Vol. 1, (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), 263. For a Pole, von Fulstein had a very German-sounding last name.

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he had rejected Russian rule in the past, he was Russian enough in Central Asia to be useful in the Russian Empire.

The very planning and layout of the town of Vernyi was designed by a Polish political dissident named Poklevski-Koziel.11 He had been educated at the General Staff

Military Academy in St. Petersburg, and when the Polish rebellion of 1863 broke out, was a colonel on the General Staff in St. Petersburg. He deserted and joined the insurgents. For a long time he was the commandant of the underground government of

Warsaw. When the rebellion was on its last legs, he escaped to , then France.

During the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871), he fought on the side of the French. After the war, he could not find a job to provide for his wife and child in France and was homesick. He asked the Russian government for a pardon and was told that he might freely return to Russia. He had no sooner arrived there than he was arrested and imprisoned in Vilnius. After several months in prison, he was released on the condition that he would serve in the army as a private, although he was allowed to retain his decorations and rank. He chose to join the newly created Cossacks of Semirechye in the late 1860s. When Eugene Schuyler met him in the 1873, Poklevsky-Koziel wore the uniform of a common soldier, although he had been relieved from actual military duty, and had been given the position of architect of the new town of Verniy. He was received as an equal and comrade by all the officers except one.12 His acceptance by most of

Verniy society is particularly remarkable given that the Governor-General of Semirechye,

Major General Gerasim Kolpakovskii, fought against the Polish uprising in 1830-1831 on

11 When the fortress (ukreplenie) Vernoe became a town (gorod) in 1867, its name slightly changed from Vernoe to Vernyi.

12 Schuyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 148.

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the Russian side, as did many other Russian officers. Nevertheless, the Catholic

Poklevsky-Koziel was educated, useful, and benign, and therefore Russian enough in

Semirechye.

While the Polish nationalists who had deserted Russia were put to work on the

Kazakh Steppe and often used in military engagements against Khiva and Kokand such as Governor-General Perovskii’s ill-fated attack on Khiva in 1839, Russians who deliberately deserted their motherland for an Asian country were judged even more harshly. When the Kokandian fortress of Pishpek (now Bishkek) was taken in 1860, five low-ranking Russian Tatar and Russian defectors were not treated as kindly when they joined a “hostile Asian nation” and fought against Russian forces.13 The first Russian deserter was discovered as Russian forces besieged the Pishpek fortress. Aleksei Starinin ran out of the fortress at night, stumbled across Russian forces and was stopped, whereupon he confessed that he was actually Russian and asked that he be allowed to keep running further away from Russia and Kokand. During the siege, the Russian runaways who escaped the fort pretended to be Kokandian. One of the runaways was recognized as a Russian Tatar and turned out to be an infantryman from the Orenburg

Line. He at first refused to admit he was from Russia, and then confessed that he was

Tatar. He subsequently identified to the Russian commander the remaining Russians in hiding among the Kokandian forces.14 During interrogation, one of them, a certain

Nikita Sukhikh claimed that he had been whisked away from a pine forest by Kazakh nomads on the Russian side of the Chu River in 1856, and handed over as a prisoner to a

13 TsGARK Fond 3, opis 1, delo 64, (ll 45-46).

14 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 64, (ll 57-58).

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Kokand against his will.15 These Russians were considered traitors, imprisoned under strict guard, tried in military courts, and exiled to Siberia. 16

Refugees, Converts, & Adoptions

On the Semirechye frontier, there were also emigrants to Russia who had no claims to Russian ancestry or Orthodoxy, who, fleeing turmoil in their own countries, sought to become Russians by choice. Kalmyk, Mongolian, and Han refugees from the

Qing Empire, fleeing unrest in Kulja, moved to Semirechye in droves in the 1860s. Qing emigrants were considered good workers and farmers by Russian officials in a region that needed more laborers to produce more food and housing, and the Russian government hoped they would not return when peace was restored. When Schuyler passed through

Semirechye in the 1870s, he noted that the Qing emigrants were the main labor supply in

Vernyi. 17 As long as people benefited the empire, they could join Russia, and when hundreds of them converted to Orthodoxy, as discussed later in this chapter, they became

“Russian” and not just Russian subjects.

There was also a good number of adoptions and marriages between Russians and

Kazakhs on the Kazakh Steppe in the nineteenth century. However, it is questionable how voluntary these transactions were. Government records tend to indicate only when problems occurred, and regional governments tried very hard to regulate marriages and adoptions to prevent children and adults from being sold into slavery, disguised as

15 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 64, (l 61).

16 Ibid.

17 Schuyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 146.

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marriage or adoption. As early as 1808, the Orenburg Border Commission decreed that the purchase of Kazakh children of either sex as slaves was permitted and that they should be supported and cared for with all means possible until they were freed at the age of 25. A Kazakh woman who married with the agreement of her master would be considered free upon marriage. A Kazakh man with the approval of the community could join a soslovia (estate) and have the same rights as other Russians in that soslovia if he chose to become Orthodox Christian.18

Russian adoptions of Kazakh children often had contracts which were drawn up by local Russian officials in which a Kazakh adult would declare that he was impoverished and could not care for his child, sibling, niece or nephew. The Kazakh adult, who was dubiously the child’s relative, was usually given a paltry sum of money, between 10 and 25 rubles – about the same price as a horse – rarely more.19 These children, usually around age four or five, were baptized, raised as Orthodox Christians, and given Russian names. This type of transaction in a sparsely populated, labor-scarce environment created a slave market for Russians to purchase abducted children to help around the homestead, and not just to love as children. Regardless of the motives behind their adoption, these Kazakh children became Russian. 20

18 TsGARK Fond 427, Opis 1, Delo 57, (ll 1-4).

19 TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 4619, (l 3); TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 1560, (ll 1-3);TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 4678, (l 1); and TsGARK Fond 4, Opis 1, Delo 4678, (l 110).

20 TsGARK Fond 427, Opis 1, Delo 57, (l 1); TsGARK Fond 338, Opis 1, Delo 864, (l 1).

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Cossacks, Military & Government

The Semirechye Cossack Host embodied the very fluidity of Russian identity on the Russian frontier with the Qing Empire and Kokand. Forced to live off the land and trade in the local economy to function and supply themselves, Cossacks were hardly the

“civilizing” influence Russian enthusiasts of imperialism had in mind. The Cossacks of

Semirechye had a hard time being “Russian.” As Thomas Barrett aptly puts it writing about Cossacks on another frontier, “While Russian power expanded, Russian civilization contracted.” 21 As Semirechye was pulled into the Russian empire, the Semirechye

Cossacks were pulled into the Tatar-Kazakh culture of the Kazakh Steppe.22 Russia’s

“civilizing mission” would not be carried out by Cossacks on the Kazakh Steppe.

Cossacks and Kazakhs both lived on the fringes.

The Semirechye and Siberian Cossacks in the mid-nineteenth were particularly diverse, comprised of people of many different nationalities, languages, and religions.

Unlike the Terek Cossacks in the North Caucasus, which had many Old Believers, the

Semirechye and Siberian Cossacks had Buddhists and Muslims as well as Orthodox members, and many of those Orthodox were likely Ukrainians.23 Many of the emigrants from the Qing Empire who had converted to Orthodoxy became Cossacks too. Still, despite their diverse backgrounds, they were all expected to dress and live like Cossacks.

By 1859, the corps commander of the Cossacks in Vernyi issued an order forbidding

Central Asian robes (khalats) and Kazakh hats under any circumstances – even when off

21 Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: the Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 7.

22 Ibid., 6.

23 Schuyler, Turkistan, Vol. 2, 151.

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duty. Cossacks were to wear if not the tall fur hat (parakha), then the service cap

(furazhka), but not native hats.24 Cossacks who had emigrated from the Qing Empire were not allowed to keep their hair in a long braid either.25

Fig. 31. Kazakh-Cossack Postal Route, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09953-00091 (digital file from Part 2, vol. 2, pl. 115, no. 352))

There were instances when those who had joined the Cossacks changed their minds about serving as a Cossack and practicing the Orthodox faith. A Kalmyk refugee

24 Istoriia goroda Alma-Ata i drugie arkhavnyi dokumenty 1851-1862 (Rukopis), 123.

25 TsGARK Fond, 234, Opis 1, Delo 1, (l 85).

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who had converted to Orthodoxy and joined the Cossacks decided to grow his hair out into a braid as was customary in the Qing Empire, and stopped wearing his cross.26

There were also reports of Kazakh Cossacks just running off.27 In 1842, the brother of a senior Cossack in Semipalatinsk “stupidly left his Russian wife” and ran off to live in a yurt with a Kazakh woman and farm.28 Ethnic Russian Cossacks also sometimes tried to run away to Qing lands, and usually claimed that they were drunk when they were caught by the local Kazakhs and returned.29

According to Schuyler, writing in the 1870s, the Cossack Host of Semirechye was quickly cobbled together from the Ural, Orenburg and Siberian Cossacks, drafting peasants to fill the ranks as well. It therefore lacked the same traditions and military spirit as the Don and Ural Cossacks.30 Moreover, the Cossacks of the Siberian Line along the Irtysh River were considered the worst of all the Cossacks in Central Asia, according to Schuyler.31 In passing through their settlements, Schuyler noted that the

Western Siberian Cossacks seemed far less independent than the ordinary Russian peasant settlers in the region, and that they “led a lazier and more useless life, devoting themselves either to hunting or to the pleasures of the dram shop, while their wives were

26 Ibid.

27 TsGARK Fond 234, Opis 1, Delo 4, (l 1); and Publikatsii po Semirechenskoi. Oblastei, No 33 (Subbota 14 Avgusta, 1871), 132.

28 TsGARK Fond 374, Opis 1, Delo 877, (ll 9-10).

29 Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor, 181; TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 250 (l 1); and TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 169, (l 1).

30 Schuyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 151.

31 Ibid.

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left to look after the family property.”32 Moreover, he noted that they were hardly the models of Russian culture, speaking Tatar among themselves “in the same way persons in good society in St. Petersburg or Moscow speak French while in public.”33

Even local government officials had a hard time staying “Russian.” In archival documents from the 1840s to the1860s, Kazakh words pepper Russian official correspondence. General Kolpakovskii, while serving as the acting Governor-General of

Turkestan and a Kazakh-speaker himself, issued a military circular in 1878 urging the use of the Russian language in government documents. He admonished district administrators who used Kazakh words when describing their interactions with Kazakhs, when these words could have been translated into Russian. He asked that they not use

Kazakh words in official letters in the future, and urged his subordinates to attempt to familiarize the Kazakhs with proper Russian speech.34 A Russian report from 1871 lamented that, “The high moral qualities which ought to have carried the civilizing mission of Russia to the natives have been wanting…Our civilizing mission has been limited up to this time only to the propagation among this people of our paper money, and in return we appropriate all their faults.”35

The close interaction and mutual dependence Russian and Kazakhs enjoyed in their alliance in the first half of the nineteenth century intrigued Schuyler. He contrasted

Russia’s “facility in dealing with half-civilized peoples” with Anglo-Saxons, noting that,

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 152.

34 “Circular of the Military Governorship of Semirechye Oblast’,”Turkestanskie Vedemosti, No 4 (21 fevralia, 1878).

35 Schyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 225.

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“[The Russians] have not so much of that contemptuous feeling towards the natives…There is not that feeling of the vast difference which separates, or which in the opinion of some should separate, an inferior from a superior and ruling race, so that

Russian officers and officials are willing not only to receive natives in their houses but do so receive them and meet them upon terms of social equality.”36 To Schuyler, Russian officials in the 1870s undermined their own authority through their close engagement with the natives, but he likely did not understand how recently the Russians depended upon their alliance with Kazakhs just a decade prior to survive in the steppe at all. As the middle ground between Russians and Kazakhs began to close, more attempts were made to create that “vast space” space between Russians and Kazakhs. “Iron Seat”

Kolpakovskii, for example, took umbrage with the Kazakhs calling Russian peasants

“muzhiki.” Even though the Kazakhs surely must have learned the word from Russian speakers, he asked that district administrators make an effort to teach the Kazakhs to

“relate to our colonists in the grammatically polite form” that did not imply social equality, but bemoaned that his requests in the past had had little success. He told the district administrators to insist that the Kazakhs call peasants not “muzhiki,” but the more respectful “krestianin.”37

Lastly, just as the lines between language and clothes blurred for the Russian

Cossacks and government officials on the frontier, so did the way they lived and worshipped. Russian fortresses, as they expanded further into Central Asia, were

36 Schyler, Turkistan, vol. 2, 233.

37 Ibid.

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primarily comprised of yurts before more permanent dwellings could be built. 38 The governor-general of Semirechye spent his summers in several yurts in Vernyi in the

1870s.39 Like the first Russian fortresses on the Kazakh Steppe, the first Russian

Orthodox churches in Bishkek and Karakol were yurts. The Kyrgyz called them

“Russian mosques” and a neighboring mullah even contributed money for a church to be built. Muslim artisans built churches and considered it a holy act.40 Blending cultures even further, three days after Easter, the holiest holiday of the Christian calendar, the

Orthodox Christians of Karakol would go to the mountains for a picnic and prepare the

Central Asian mutton and rice dish of plov.41 Thus, Russian Orthodoxy, the most essential aspect of Russian identity throughout the nineteenth century, had also begun to adopt Central Asian traditions.

Orthodoxy on the Steppe

Even as identities blurred on the Kazakh Steppe between who was Russian and who was not, Russian Orthodox missionaries attempted to draw in lost Russian Orthodox sheep back in to the fold and to make new Russian Orthodox converts out of nomads in

38 Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 60-61, 71; Thomas W. Atkinson, Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor and the Russian Acquisitions on the Confines of India and China. With Adventures Among the Mountain Kirghis; and the Manjours, Toungouz, Touzemtz, Goldi, and Gelyaks: The Hunting and Pastoral Tribes (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1860), 90; and Thomas Witlam Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1858), 247-248.

39 Schuyler, Turkistan, Vol 2, 147.

40Vladimir, Mitropolit Vishekskii I Sreniaziatskii. Zemlia potomkov patriarkha Tiurka: Dukhovnoe naselenie Kirgizii i khristianskie aspekty etogo naslediia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, 2002, 180.

41 Ibid.

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the region. Proselytism among the Kazakhs, however, was highly controversial at the time, and was therefore handled quite gently and often covertly.

Russia’s centuries of experience with Christian proselytism and interaction with

Islam, both as subjects and conquerors of Muslims, might theoretically have prepared it to interact with the Kazakhs, yet still left them remarkably ineffective in their missionary efforts. Both the church and the Russian imperial government were challenged by a yawning gap between theory and practice in proselytism, and in spreading what they believed to be enlightenment. Despite a firm belief that civilization, Russian education, and Orthodox were inseparable, and that Russia was the conduit of modernity and progress Central Asia, pragmatism and the state’s interest in maintaining stability on its frontiers and peaceful relations with its neighbors superseded Orthodox religious fervor.

Russia’s encounter with the Kazakh nomads was further complicated by the persistent belief of Russian administrators, scholars, and missionaries that Kazakhs were not really Muslims, that nomadism was not a valid way to live, that the Kazakhs were shamanists, and that was not a real religion. Russian policy toward Orthodox

Christian proselytizing among the Kazakhs, therefore, was part of an attempt to civilize what it believed to be less developed peoples and protect them as children of nature from what they considered the deleterious influence of Muslim “fanaticism.” In short, spreading Orthodoxy was part of Russia’s general “civilizing mission” in the Kazakh

Steppe.

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Policy towards Islam after Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great attempted to rule her empire based on the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment. In 1764, the Empress closed the Office for New

Converts and eventually stopped all Orthodox missionary activity.42 In 1773, after the start of the Pugachev uprising, in which many Muslims of the Kazan region and baptized non-Russians expressed hostility toward Russian administrators and clergy, Catherine declared general religious toleration.43 While fear of disorder and violence were most likely her priority during the Pugachev rebellion, Catherine was also motivated by the principles of the Enlightenment that espoused that human nature was universal and that laws could govern a diverse population universally. A certain amount of tolerance for difference, in their view, was to be expected and respected.

Catherine did not discourage or prohibit Islam. She herself had converted to

Orthodoxy from Lutheranism in order to marry Peter III, but refused to elevate

Orthodoxy above other religions in her empire. Instead, while she expanded state control over Islam, she attempted to reign in the power and autonomy of the Orthodox Church and put it further under state control as well.44 In her view, all religions ought to be ordered and regulated by the state.

Faced with daunting diversity, Catherine sought to attract the loyalty of her

Muslim subjects along the same lines as her Christian ones under the universalizing

42 Robert Geraci, Windows on the East: National & Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 21.

43 Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II,” Slavic Review 27 (1967), 542.

44 Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 645.

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principles of the Enlightenment. In 1789, she created the Muslim Spiritual Assembly, known as the Muftiate, first in Orenburg and later transferred to Ufa. Much like the Holy

Synod of the Orthodox Church established by Peter the Great in 1721, the state-appointed

Sunni Muslim administration was responsible for registering all Muslim parishes, regulating the appointment of mullahs, publications, and overseeing religious schools.

The Muftiate, like the Holy Synod, was purely a creation of the Russian state and had no prior religious tradition. Catherine also repealed most social and economic restrictions on Muslims. The chief mufti, chairman of the Muslim Spiritual Assembly, and the leading officials were appointed by the imperial government, received noble status, and could own estates with Muslim serfs. Russian, with Tatar translations, was the official language of the Assembly; and foreign Muslim clerics were excluded from Russia.45

Historian Michael Johnson argues that the creation of the Assembly was largely based on the earlier successes of the previously mentioned governor of Orenburg, Baron

O.A. Igelstrom, who believed that imperial support for and regulation of Islam would settle the nomadic peoples of the region, such as the Kazakhs.46 Igelstrom received state support to build numerous mosques and throughout Orenburg province, placed

Islamic schools under state control, and printed textbooks in both Russian and Tatar.47

While the general economic development of the Volga-Urals region contributed to an Islamic renaissance among the Muslims who lived there, Catherine’s toleration of

45 Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine, 510.

46 Michael W. Johnson, "Imperial Commission or Orthodox Mission: Nikolai Il'minskii's Work among the Tatars of Kazan, 1862-1891," (Ph.D. Diss: University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005), 90.

47 Ibid.

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Islam and state support for the construction of mosques and schools also contributed to this cultural revival. Under her reign, Tatar became the virtual official language among the entire Islamic community of Russia. 48 Just as the Kazakhs communicated with the

Qing Empire through Mongolian, they communicated with Russia through Tatar. The

Tatars were the largest Muslim population in the Russian Empire under Catherine and had a strong learned tradition. Most of the Kazakhs were later separated from the

Muftiate in the mid-nineteenth century, to protect them from what Russian officials and

Kazakh elites believed to be Tatar dominance.49

It has been widely asserted that Catherine encouraged of the and commerce through Tatars among the Kazakhs as a tool for bringing progress and civilization to the nomads.50 Kazakh linguist and historian, Allen Frank, argues that

Catherine was not responsible for the converting the Kazakhs to Islam through Tatars; rather, they were already Muslim.51 Even though Catherine likely believed she was helping the Kazakhs become Muslim and thus more civilized, her policy of religious toleration more likely facilitated the Kazakhs’ own desire to learn more about the faith

48 Geraci, Window on the East, 22.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 39.

51 Allen Frank, "Islamic Transformation on the Kazakh Steppe, 1742-1917: Toward an Islamic under Russian Rule," in The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia, ed. Tadayuki Hayashi (Sapporo, JAPAN: Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University, 2003), 261-289.

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they already practiced.52 Moreover, the Kazakhs’ Islamic identity likely increased through expanding Islamic education, institutions, administration, book-publishing in the

Russian empire as the result of the Kazakhs becoming more integrated into Russia’s economy more than any direct state-led policy toward Kazakhs.53

As Russian national identity took shape in the mid nineteenth century, combined with evolutionary theories of human development, Russians became increasingly intolerant of diversity among those they considered less civilized. It was no longer sufficient to simply be loyal to the tsar and have a different religion, as in the sixteenth century. Living in what they believed to be an age of progress, many statesmen and intellectuals thought that sooner or later the peoples of the eastern part of the Russian empire were naturally destined to become Russian by adopting Orthodoxy, the Russian language and customs, and intermarrying with Russians even without state encouragement. 54 At the same time, the Polish Uprising of 1830-1831 and the war in the

Caucasus against Russian conquest indicated that not all peoples readily sought to become Russian, and that there were other nations who sought to maintain their own identities. Nevertheless, Russian policy-makers seemed convinced that if their peoples were not deleteriously influenced by outside provocateurs, such as Polish revolutionaries inspired by the French Revolution, or others supported by the Ottoman Empire in the

Caucasus, they would readily seek to become Russian. This world view would be

52 Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 275.

53 Allen Frank, "Islamic Transformation on the Kazakh Steppe,” 261.

54 Seymour Becker, “The Muslim East in Nineteenth-Century Russian Popular Historiography,” Central Asian Survey 5 (1986), 30.

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applied to the Kazakh Steppe as well – blaming Kokand, Khiva, Bukhara, Britain, uprisings in the Qing Empire, and Tatars for corrupting the innocent Kazakhs with Islam.

The rise of the importance of the Russian language as part of Russian identity and loyalty would have far-reaching implications for Russia’s polices towards Orthodoxy and education on the Kazakh Steppe.

Kazakhs as “Real” Muslims

By the mid-nineteenth century, Russian administrators and missionaries began to believe that the Kazakhs needed to be protected from Muslim “fanatics” so that they could be liberated by Russian progress and civilization. After decades of fighting either the Ottoman Empire or Muslim peoples in the Caucasus, the Russian government did not want to antagonize the Muslims of the Kazakh Steppe and Mawarannahr, but it also sought to civilize its inhabitants according to Russian norms of progress. How to convert and civilize the Kazakhs while maintaining stability in the region remained highly contentious throughout the century.

At the heart of the struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Tatar Islam was the enduring and misguided belief that the Kazakhs were shamanists, not Muslims, and that shamanism was not a real religion. As Allen Frank and other scholars have demonstrated, however, the Kazakhs believed themselves to be Muslim, even if their religious practices were influenced by arguably shamanistic practices and even if the way they worshipped was arguably considered heretical by other Muslims in the region.55

55 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, xviii; and Allen J. Frank and Mirkasyim A. Usmanov, eds., An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770-1912/ Qurbaan ali Khaalidai (Leiden: Brill, 2004), and Bruce G. Privatsky, Muslim

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Nevertheless, because Russian officials and missionaries believed the Kazakhs to be shamanists, and therefore lacking a real religion, they assumed that the Kazakhs’ would yield to the march of progress. The Kazakhs and other shamanists, they concluded, were either going to become Muslim or Orthodox or Buddhist, but could not possibly remain as they were. Russian competition with Muslim missionaries for the souls of Kazakhs ensued.

While Russian sources identify “Tatars” as missionaries among the Kazakhs on the steppe, in actuality, these Muslim missionaries were comprised of a number of different groups who appear in Muslim sources such as Bashkirs, Teptiars, Mishars, and others as well as Tatars. As Muslims from the Volga-Ural region, however, they shared common Islamic institutional and educational structures.56 As the Russian economy expanded into the Kazakh steppe, Muslims of all kinds from the Russian empire, particularly the Volga-Ural region, expanded onto the Kazakh steppe as well.

While it is nearly impossible to refer to “the Kazakhs” as if they were one people all being influenced by the same factors in an area the size of Western Europe, it is reasonable to assume that the Kazakhs of various hordes had been surrounded by and interacted with Muslim peoples such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, sarts, Iranians, Uighurs, and

Dungans for centuries. This proximity, combined with their own historical ties to the

Mongols, and the Mongols’ conversion to Islam, leads one to expect that the Kazakh

Turkistan: Kazakh Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001).

56 Allen Frank, "Islamic Transformation On The Kazakh Steppe, 1742-1917: Toward An Islamic History Of Kazakhstan Under Russian Rule," in The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia, ed. Tadayuki Hayashi (Sapporo, JAPAN: Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University, 2003), 263.

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peoples had been exposed to, and influenced by, various interpretations of Islam from the east, south, and west for centuries. Through such interactions, despite judgments to the contrary by the sedentary Muslim populations around them, they may have reasonably considered themselves to be Muslim.

Holy Turkistan

The holy city of Turkistan (Yasi), home of the shrine of the twelfth-century Sufi khoja Akhmet Yasawi who converted the nomads of the steppe and burial site of esteemed Kazakh khans, played a central role in Kazakh religious life. As explained earlier, reclaiming this “Second Mecca” on the Syr Darya and harnessing the economic and political power that control over Turkistan conferred upon the khans who possessed it, was the prime motive for Kazakh alliances with Russia in the eighteenth century.

After the Kazakhs lost the cities along the Syr Darya, not only did their social organization under their khans dissipate, but the way Kazakhs practiced their faith changed as well.

Allen Frank’s research on the Kazakh Inner and Middle Hordes shows that while the Kazakhs had long considered themselves Muslim, the way they practiced Islam changed over the nineteenth century. The Kazakhs practiced Islam in a very specific nomadic way until the turn of the nineteenth century when they lost their cities on the Syr

Darya, particularly the holy city of Turkistan, to the Khanate of Kokand. When not paying homage to holy sites, and lacking religious specialists and institutions such as mullahs or mosques, Kazakh nomadic society practiced its religion orally through its

“sacred” tribes, which claimed descent from Muslim saints or even from the Prophet

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Mohammad and the first four caliphs. These elite tribes provided Kazakh society with its religious leaders and mediators, khojas (qozha, khwāja, or khodja) and formed

Fig. 32. Mausoleum of Khoja Akhmet Yasawi,(Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppmsca-09947-00004 (digital file from Part 1, vol. 1, pl. 3, no. 4)) exclusive endogamous communities. They were considered part of the Kazakh elite

“white bone” lineage along with the descendants of Chingis Khan. 57 Among the Kazakh nomads at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islamic knowledge was mainly disseminated orally. Over the course of the century, however, Islamic practice became

57 Irina Erofeeva, "The Evolution of the Traditional Governing Elites of Kazakhstan within the Russian Empire Between the Middle of the 18th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries," in Central Asia on Display: Proceedings of the VIIth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies, vol 1., eds. Gabriele Rasuly-Paleszek and Julia Katschnig (Wien: Lit Verlag Munster, 2004), 66-80; and Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 278.

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increasingly formalized and institutionalized as emphasis on one’s ties to Islam began to compete with one’s lineage from Chingis Khan in terms of legitimacy to rule.58

Islamic institutions and Islamic knowledge in general had only been established in the eastern Kazakh Steppe region in the second half of the eighteenth century.59 The expansion of Islamic institutions among the Kazakhs was part of a larger Islamic revival underway in Russia among the Tatars and Bashkirs that had grown since the second half of the eighteenth century.60 Tatar merchants and other Muslims from the Volga-Ural region in Russia integrated the Kazakhs into the Russian economy, trading Kazakh sheep and livestock for Russian manufactured goods and Chinese luxuries. Russian resentment of these Muslim merchants in commercial matters influenced Russian resentment of the spread of Islam in Russia, and was broadly aimed against the “Tatars” and other commercially successful Muslims from the Volga-Urals region in general, and not just

Muslim missionaries on the steppe.61

Frank counters the stereotype that the Tatars were better Muslims than the

Kazakhs, and that the Kazakhs were converted by “fanatical” Tatar merchants by pointing to instances when Tatar merchants cheated the Kazakhs by appealing to their

Islamic identity. There were times when Tatars refused to donate to build a mosque

58 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 278.

59 Frank and Usmanov, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary, xiii; and James Andrew Millward, "Beyond the Pass: Commerce, Ethnicity and the Qing Empire in Xinjiang 1759-1864," (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 1993), 23.

60 Frank, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary, xiv.

61 Geraci, Windows on the East, 27.

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while Kazakhs would.62 Moreover, he argues that most Tatar merchants, while commercially savvy, were hardly religious proselytizers. Indeed, some were even opium dealers. 63 Nevertheless, a lesser number of Tatar missionaries were also on the steppe disguised as Tatar merchants. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when

Russian administrators became alarmed at the supposedly pervasive presence of Tatar religious figures among the Kazakhs, Tatar mullahs were banned from living among and migrating with the Kazakhs. The Russian government, however, could not ban Tatar participation in trade. Thus, Tatar missionaries used trade as a loophole and disguised themselves as merchants.64

Frank argues that rather than outside Muslim “fanatics” pushing themselves on the Kazaks, as a Russophile Kazakh official in the Russian military, Chokan Valikhanov, had accused Tatars in the nineteenth century, Islamic sources at the time indicated that the Kazakhs themselves were anything but passive, and in fact powered this revitalization.65 The vast majority of the Muslim population on the Kazakh Steppe consisted of Kazakhs. There was great demand among the Kazakhs for Islamic scholarship and education. As the nineteenth century progressed, Kazakh-language publishing became a lucrative activity for Muslim printing houses in Kazan, Ufa,

Orenburg, and St. Petersburg. Moreover, Kazakhs played an increasingly important role

62 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 308.

63 Thomas Witlam Atkinson, Oriental and Western Siberia (London: Hurst And Blackett, 1858), 159.

64 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 311.

65 Frank and Usmanov, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary. xvi; and Frank, Muslim Religious Institution, 280.

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in Islamic education and scholarship, as well as the funding of Islamic institutions.66

According to Frank, Muslim observers across the Kazakh Steppe emphasized the intense piety of the Kazakh nomads in their Islamic practices. This view contradicts the widespread assumption that Kazakh nomads were somehow predisposed to heterodoxy, which had to be suppressed by more “orthodox” Muslims from sedentary societies.67

Indeed, the Kazakhs were no more heterodox in their Islamic practices than any of their neighbors.

In addition to the Tatars, Muslims from Mawarannahr played a significant role in the Islamic revival on the Kazakh Steppe. Muslims, especially from Tashkent and the

Ferghana Valley, were active both in economic and religious matters. However, their role declined after Russia conquered Tashkent in 1865 and the khanate of Kokand fell in

1868. For Kazakhs, their faith, connection to their ancestors, and sense of identity more directly revolved around the holy cities along the Syr Darya, particularly Turkistan.68

Frank suggests that, along with Russian opposition to Tatar missionary influence among the Kazakhs, there was also general Kazakh elite hostility towards the Tatars among the “white bone” khojas and Chingissids who resented their displacement from their dominant social position by “black bone” Kazakhs and Tatar religious authorities.69

66 Frank and Usmanov, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary, xv-xvi, and Allen Frank, “Islamic Transformation on the Kazakh Steppe: toward an Islamic History of Kazakhstan under Russian Rule,” The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia, ed. Hayashi Tadayuki, (Sapporo, 2003), 282-285.

67 Frank and Usmanov, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary, xvi.

68 Bruce G. Privatsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazakh Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001), 3.

69 Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 281.

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The elite “white bone” Kazakh authority of the khojas, and Chingissid khans and sultans further attenuated throughout the nineteenth century after the loss of the Syr Darya cities, and even Chingissid Kazakhs attempted to coopt Islamic authority for their own purposes. For example, both Sultans Arun Ghazi and Kenesary Kasymov attempted to bolster and centralize their authority over their people by using Islam in the first half of the nineteenth century.70

As eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries progressed, the ruling

Chingissid aristocracy looked to Russia to bolster their position, not only over other

Kazakhs, but also against Tatar religious competition as well. Chokan Valikhanov, for example, a member of the Chingissid elite from the Middle Horde where Kazakh khojas traditionally held less sway anyway, was a strong advocate of cultural and political, if not religious, Russification of the Kazakhs, and strongly criticized the Tatar religious and cultural influence among the Kazakhs.71 Valikhanov’s vision of Kazakh identity, while popular with Russian officialdom, did not reflect how many Kazakhs saw themselves and their faith at the time. Contrary to Russian and elite Kazakh complaints that the

“Tatarization” of the Kazakhs threatened their very identity, the Kazakhs already saw themselves as Muslims, according to Frank. In an age before national identity among the

70 Baron Georges Von Meyendorf, A Journey From Orenburg to Bokhara in the Year 1820, ed. Pierre Amadee Jaubert, trans. Dr. Carl Hermann Scheidler (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1870). 4; and Yuri Anatolyevich Malikov, "Formation of a Borderland Culture: Myths and Realities of Cossack-Kazakh Relations in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," (PhD Diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006), 67.

71 Frank , Muslim Religious Institutions,280.

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Kazakhs, the desire of a Muslim Kazakh to practice Islam did not make him less Kazakh, but rather made him more of what he thought he already was.72

Kazakh ?

The Siberian Line’s Governor-General Gasfort was one of the first to propose that

Russia reverse its support of Tatar missionaries among the Kazakhs in the mid-1850s.

According to Semenov, Gasfort quickly decided that his predecessors like Baron O.A.

Igelstrom in the neighboring governor-generalship of Orenburg made, “a very big mistake in vigorously and artificially inculcating with Islam the Kazakhs, while they had not wholly lost their ancient shamanistic beliefs and were still little imbued with

Muhammad’s teachings, and by providing their sultans and their auls with Tatar mullahs from Kazan.”73

Gasfort came up with an unusual approach – or as Semenov put it, “a strange and unexpected conclusion,” to bestow on the Kazakh nomads a new “civilizing” religion other than Islam or Christianity. According to Gasfort, Christian proselytism could not succeed among the Kazakhs, since many customs and conditions of nomadic life, like polygamy, were incompatible with Christian teaching as he understood it. He warned that the conversion of the enormous Kazakh population to Islam would be at odds with

Russian state interests. Therefore, he concluded that the Kazakhs had to be given an entirely new religion, adapted to the conditions of their life and conformable to Russian

72 Ibid, 289.

73 Petr Petrovich Semenov, Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857, ed. Colin Thomas, trans. Colin Thomas Liudmila Gilmour, Marcus Wheeler (London: Hakluyt Society, 1998),19-20.

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state interests. In defining the dogmas of this new religion, Gasfort looked to Judaism as a point of departure, stripped of Talmudic interpretations, and injected it with elements of

Christianity along with the commandments and the teachings of Moses. Such a proposal to promote a modified version of Judaism in the Russian Empire was remarkable in society with widespread anti-Semitism. According to Semenov, a full draft of this new religion, which revealed Gasfort’s extensive theological knowledge, was submitted to

Nicholas I, who, it is said, tersely remarked: “Religions are not invented like articles of a law code.”74 After this, Semenov claims that Gasfort was nicknamed “overturned book- case” by his peers for his extensive, yet sadly misapplied, education.75

Russian officials believed that the Kazakhs needed to be molded and educated into more “enlightened” people. While a new state-invented Judeo-Christian religion for the Kazakhs was ruled out, Russian administrators, officers, and clergymen throughout the nineteenth century were convinced that the Kazakhs would benefit greatly if they would become just like Russians in language, culture and faith, and abandoned their shamanistic, pseudo-Islamic, and nomadic way of life. Russian officials were convinced that, with time, the pure logic of the superior nature of Russian culture and civilization would win the day.

Converting the Kazakhs

Kazakh conversions to Orthodoxy from the mid-1850s to mid-1860s were few and far between. The Steppe Commission of 1867 reported that 127 Kazakhs near

74 Ibid., 20.

75 Ibid.,

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Orenburg were baptized from 1855 to 1864, and 109 Kazakhs in Western Siberia were baptized from 1860 to 1864.76 Who proselytized and why these people converted is a mystery, but some of it could have been through marriage or adoption.

Reflecting the ambitions of the Orthodox Church in the metropole, in contrast to the logistical reality of the periphery, the St. Petersburg Missionary Society sought to address the low number of Kazakh conversions by proposing the establishment of a

Kazakh mission to the Tobolsk consistory in 1866 to serve the Kazakhs of southern

Siberia and the northern Kazakh Steppe, just as Siberia was once governed from Tobolsk in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.77 The Tobolsk consistory at the time focused mainly on Ostiak and Samoyed animists to the north rather than Kazakhs.78

Tobolsk declined the proposal, claiming that it was difficult to spread Christianity among

Muslims over vast tracts of sparsely-populated land, and cautioned against the idea.79

76 Tomohiko Uyama, "A Particularist Empire: The Russian Policies of Christianization and Military Conscription in Central Asia," in Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, ed. Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center Hokkaido University, 2007), 26.

77 Ibid., 28. The Holy Synod repeated the proposal in 1870.

78 Aaron Neil Michaelson, "The Russian Orthodox Missionary Society, 1870- 1917: A Study of Religious and Educational Enterprise," (PhD Diss., University of Minnesota, 1999),100.

79 Sebastien Peyrouse, "Les Missions Orthodoxes Entre Pouvoir Tsariste et Allogenes: Un Example des Ambiguites de la Politique Coloniale Russe dans les Steppes Kazakhes," Cahiers du Monde russe 45/1-2, no. Janvier-Juin (2004). 114; and Tomohiko Uyama, “A Particularist Empire,” 28. In 1828, the Bishop of Tobolsk proposed to set up a mission for the Kazakhs, but the governor-general of Western Siberia, Ivan A. Veliaminov, declined it as premature. Peyrouse asserts that Russian administrators refused to allow missionaries among the Kazakhs because they feared proselytizing amongst Muslims and were not interested in combining religion with colonization, however, there did not seem to be any sort of fear of converting the Tatars around the same time. An Orthodox mission was established in the Altai to convert shamans and

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The Bishop of Tobolsk had already been asked three years earlier by religious officials in

Orenburg to establish a church in Petropavlovsk to teach Kazakhs Christianity. While some local officials supported the idea, others wisely noted that Kazakh elites would oppose it. Ultimately, the request was denied by both the Tobolsk consistory and the governor-general of Western Siberia, Alexander Diugamel’. 80

After being repeatedly rejected by Tobolsk, the Orthodox Missionary Society’s

Kazakh Mission started as an offshoot of the Altai Mission.81 That mission was located in the Altai Mountain region where current Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China meet. Makarii Glukharev (1792-1847) founded the Altai Mission in 1830 by building three missionary posts, and began studying the local languages to proselytize and translate religious tracts. Glukharev was less concerned with the number of converts than with the soundness of their faith, converting 675 people in 17 years.82

In 1858, Altai Mission head S.V. Lanishev proposed setting up a mission among the Kazakhs just a few years after the establishment of Fort Vernoe among the Greater

Horde and the Bugus Kyrgyzes entered Russian poddanstvo. The governor-general of

Western Siberia reportedly proposed that the Altai Mission establish a mission on Issyk-

Kul, which was then occupied by warring Kyrgyz tribes who were loyal to Russia, the

Qing, or Kokand or some combination thereof.83 This was a non-starter.

Buddhist Buriats in 1830 as well. The Altai mission would later expand to include the Kazakhs. 80 Tomohiko Uyama, "A Particularist Empire," 26; and TsGARK Fond 369, Opis 1, Delo 120, (l 71ob).

81 Michaelson, “The Russian Orthodox Missionary Society,” Ibid. 90.

82 Ibid. 85.

83 Peyrouse, "Les Missions Orthodoxes," 114.

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Fig. 33. Russian Orthodox Church in Aulie-Ata, 1860s-1870s, (Turkestanskii Al’bom 1871-1872, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppmsca- 09957-00011 (digital file from Part 4, pl. 12, no. 11))

Local missionary work in Semirechye did not even tentatively begin until after the conquest of the Kazakh Steppe and the formation of Semirechye as an oblast within the

Governorship-General of Turkestan after 1867. Major-General Kolpakovskii, who was the Military Governor of Semirechye, met the Bishop of Tomsk during his visit to

Semipalatinsk in 1867. There seems to have been a grave miscommunication.

The Bishop of Tomsk wrote the Governor-General of Western Siberia in Omsk, confusing Major-General Kolpakovskii in Semirechye with the Major-General of

Semipalatinsk and claiming that Kolpakovskii told him that, “the non-Christian nomads

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under [his] jurisdiction in [his] oblast show in significant numbers a readiness to receive the light of Orthodox Christian faith.”84 The Bishop of Tomsk continued that, without weakening the resources of the Altai Mission, the Holy Synod had given him permission to propose a new mission in Semipalatinsk of up to three people to “enlighten the non-

Christians of the holy faith.”

Clearly surprised by this proposal, officials in Omsk wrote to Kolpakovskii in

Semirechye and asked whether he had told the Bishop of Tomsk that “several thousand

Muslims of this oblast expressed a wish to receive Orthodoxy.” Furthermore, if he had, they requested that he clarify which kind of Muslims he was referring to – the Kazakhs, or the recent refugees who had fled unrest in Kulja.85 Kolpakovskii attempted to correct the misunderstanding. Kolpakovskii asserted that when the Bishop of Tomsk visited

Semipalatinsk, the Bishop “expressed an ardent wish for donations to the Church…for the Chinese emigrants …who wish to become Orthodox,” but “Muslim wishes about joining the Orthodox faith were not expressed.”86 Kolpakovskii then wrote the Bishop of

Tomsk to clear up the misunderstanding and to explain his interpretation of the religious practices of the population of the eastern Kazakh Steppe:

[T]he population of natives fall into two categories: the majority of the permanent local population are Muslims, and an insignificant amount by comparison to the former are Buddhists, who just arrived in Semirechye in 1865 accidentally due to the serious disorder that has arisen in western China, which is a Buddhist land. Excluding the aforementioned people, there are people of sufficient means, possessing the possibility to support mullahs who teach them

84 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll 1-2).

85 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (l 3).

86 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, ( ll 5-5ob).

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Muslim rituals, but the majority of Kazakhs almost do not have any kind of understanding about religion.87

Kolpakovskii noted, however, that the Buddhist Kalmyk refugees from the Qing Empire exhibited an inclination to become Christian, “[T]he Kalmyks (Buddhists) very often expressed outward respect to our churches and holy places, for this they gathered with large crowds, surrounded the church and walking on their knees, kneeled to it.”88 Other than that, there was little expression among the Muslim population in the mid-nineteenth century to become Christian except for a few examples. He claimed that one priest in

1866 converted six Kazakh families in the Cossack encampment of Urdzharskoi, and another priest baptized five Kazakhs in the Cossack encampment of Verkho-Lepsinsk in

1867-1868. In contrast, he explained to the Bishop, 1,037 Kalmyk emigrants from the

Qing Empire were baptized in 1867.89

Kolpakovskii bemoaned the fact that the Russian Orthodox clergy in the region were too concerned with their pastoral duties to the wider Christian population and did not have enough time or language skills to reach out to non-Christians and “fulfill this important task.” On top of insufficiencies in the clergy, the Qing government had taken measures to entice the refugees to return and had sent them money. Thus, the number of refugees expressing a wish to be baptized was significantly declining, and had fallen to

328 by the time Kolpakovskii wrote to the bishop in 1867.90

87 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29129, (ll 6-6ob).

88 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll 6-6ob).

89 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll 6-6ob).

90 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll. 7).

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Kolpakovskii seemed to view the Islamic practice of the Kazakhs in the mid- nineteenth century in terms of economic means and social stratification. Wealthier

Kazakhs could afford to pay for an Islamic education, whereas he determined that poorer

Kazakhs had little or no understanding of religion at all. His interpretation of the practice of Islam among the Kazakhs raises the possibility that he was judging their practice of religion only in terms of their understanding of Islamic text, law and dogma, but ignored the Islamic rituals of everyday life, and rites of passage. Indeed, ordinary Russian

Orthodox peasants could arguably be accused of the same theological ignorance of their own faith. Kolpakovskii’s letter to the Bishop of Tomsk went on to note that the natives were loyal to him and that the majority of them were “not penetrated with fanaticism.”

He advised the Bishop that, “missionaries with meekness and patience fulfilling their calling, “cannot carry out their expected role,” and would not be successful without knowing the language of the native population and popular medicine in order to attract the poorer inhabitants who could not afford to study Islam.91 His perspective supports

Frank’s assertion that Islam was undergoing a renaissance on the eastern Kazakh Steppe

(for those who could afford it), and also the nineteenth-century tendency to only recognize religions that had texts and buildings, while ignoring folk practices in religion.92

Finally, Kolpakovskii noted that missionaries should operate covertly among the

Kazakhs and look more like laymen rather than Orthodox clergy.93 He warned, “I am

91 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll 7-7ob).

92 Bruce G. Privatsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazakh Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, SURREY: Curzon, 2001), 46-47.

93 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (ll 7-7ob).

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making this remark because among the Kazakhs I have more than once noticed an inhospitable mood to Russian clergy, arousing danger, when it seemed as if their singular goal was to baptize them.”94 Therefore, missionaries ought to be subtle.

The church and state had different priorities in the region. Aware of social divisions within Kazakh society and of potential resistance to Russian governance by the elite, Kolpakovskii stressed that the presence of Russian Orthodox missionaries could be exploited by the Kazakh elite to undermine current Russian reforms to help the poor should poor Kazakhs turn to Christianity, “It is necessary to avoid such feelings in the people, which could have a harmful effect on the success of the administration from a political point of view, if . . . the aristocratic estate [of the Kazakhs] could use the appearance of missionaries in the steppe, and in turn, oppose government directives and paralyze those good reforms which simple Kazakh people everywhere meet with full trust and with such hope for a better system for the future of their well-being.”95 In

Kolpakovskii’s judgment, the civilizing mission of Russian state to help the poor

Kazakhs through administrative means took precedence over saving their souls.

Kolpakovskii cautioned the Bishop of Tomsk that Russian Orthodox missionaries should be very careful among the Kazakhs and work very slowly and imperceptibly through schools, “All this prompts me to propose the most cautious missionary activity.

At first I would think to attract [missionaries] by twos or threes, as much as Your

Excellency can find as possible in quality the better, for schools (narodnii uchilishche)

94 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (l 8).

95 Ibid.

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here, for them to teach Russian and native children.”96 Kolpakovskii’s advice on how to proselytize to the Kazakhs is deeply ironic coming from the same man who only six years earlier had written letters to his Kyrgyz and Kazakh allies claiming that the Russian

Empire was the true defender of Islam, “[The sarts] are deceiving you by assuring you that they fight with us for the faith…but what have they done for faith! We, in contrast, protect your faith, and build mosques.”97

Nevertheless, while warning the bishop of potential dangers of missionary activity on the Kazakh Steppe, Kolpakovskii did not discourage missionaries among the

Kazakhs, but rather tried to influence where and how they operated, perhaps for his own purposes. With proselytism as the clear objective, Kolpakovskii advised the bishop to install a missionary in the Cossack settlement of Lepinsk, another in the Kyrgyz lands around the former Kokandian fortress of Tokmak, and a third in the Aksu fortress near

Issyk-Kul, where Cossacks had settled. Speaking from experiences as an effective interlocutor with the Kazakhs and Kyrgyzes himself, Kolpakovskii assured the bishop that missionaries would find their responsibility as teachers an easy means to “acquire a moral influence on native children, and through their relatives can more easily interact even with other Kazakhs.” Moreover, the missionaries,“would become acquainted with the spirit of the people, and with sufficient study of them learn to act with fewer mistakes than if they would have attempted to fulfill their calling without advance preparation.”98

96 Ibid.

97 TsGARK Fond 3, Opis 1, Delo 401, (ll 13-14).

98 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (l 8).

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Kolpakovskii went on to advise the bishop that each missionary teacher should have one assistant to help lead these schools that would teach both Russian and native children.

Kolpakovskii ambitiously sought to have the missionaries teach Russian children as well as natives in the same schools. In contrast to the teaching methodologies advocated by famed Orthodox missionary to the empire’s non-Russian natives, Nikolai

Il’minskii, that reinforced the separate identity of newly-baptized natives with separate schools, churches and priests who taught and preached in their own respective languages,

Kolpakovskii sought Russian priests who spoke native languages to teach Russians and natives together in Russian.99 It is therefore possible that Kolpakovskii sought to co-opt the resources of the Church to meet the ends of the poorly-financed state to provide an educational infrastructure for a newly settled frontier. Teachers were needed for Russian children as well as Kazakhs and refugees, and government resources were stretched. He likely suggested regions where both Kazakhs and Russians lived in order to ensure that the missionaries would at least have some donations to sustain themselves.100

Kolpakovskii warned the bishop to pay careful attention in selecting missionaries since they would have to work respectfully with the local population and behave properly. Kolpakovskii advised that in order to become popular with the Kazakhs and attract children and donations to their schools, every missionary sent to the Kazakh

Steppe ought to treat the natives respectfully and listen to them.101 Ultimately, the

99 Geraci, Windows on the East.

100 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120,( l 9).

101 Ibid.

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success of a Russian Orthodox priest would depend upon the donations of his congregants and a 1000 ruble stipend from the Church. 102

Despite what Kolpakovskii wrote to officials in Semipalatinsk claiming that he had told the bishop of Tomsk that only refugees from the Qing Empire, not Kazakhs, were interested in Christianity, he assured the bishop that there was a “tendency of the

Kazakhs” to become Christian that had already been demonstrated in the conversion of a few Kazakhs, albeit less than the Qing refugees.103 This leads one to suspect that perhaps his conversation with the bishop in 1867 could have been more enthusiastic about the potential conversion of the Kazakhs than he had reported to Omsk and Semipalatinsk.

Still, in the conclusion of his letter to the bishop, he hedged and passed the decision on to his superior in Tashkent, “for the final decision of this question, I would propose it would be more proper to await the answer from the Turkestan Governor-General [General

Konstantin von Kaufman] on relations with His Excellency in the Holy Synod.”104 While von Kaufman had an established policy against proselytism, Kolpakovskii’s correspondence with the bishop indicates that he was more supportive of introducing

Russian Orthodox missionaries to the region. Until 1881, however, Kaufman’s policy of indifference to religion prevailed.

The second half of the nineteenth century on the Kazakh Steppe and

Mawarannahr was a time of transition where Russian officials were still defining who they were in contrast to the peoples they had recently conquered, what their roles were to

102 Ibid.

103 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29120, (l 3).

104 TsGARK Fond 44, Opis 1, Delo 29129, (l 9).

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be, and how they were to relate to each other. No longer were Russians and Kazakhs mutually dependent upon each other to fight a common enemy. Instead, Russian officials sought to change the Kazakhs by introducing the benefits of Russian civilization to them, and reinforce the Russianness of the Russians and Cossacks who lived with them. The struggle to define Russianness on the Kazakh Steppe was also a struggle against the cultural and commercial success of the Tatars in the region, and part of Russian frustration with the Tatars’ refusal to assimilate after several centuries of being part of the

Russian Empire.105 This struggle also included a fight for the souls and minds of the

Kazakhs, who were erroneously considered to not be true Muslims and therefore had the potential to more easily become Russian. Kazakh Chingissid elites, who were also losing their power to Islamic leaders, allied with Russian officials in their fight against

Tatarization and Islam if they had not co-opted Islamic authority themselves. There was significant confusion in the mid-nineteenth century regarding how to define Russianness either in terms of language or religion and the proper sequence of which aspect of

Russian identity to pursue first.106 While much was unclear, after the Orenburg and

Siberian Lines were united along the Syr Darya, Russian officials were convinced more than ever that they had a duty and a right to change and “civilize” the Kazakhs rather than ally with them as equals, thus closing the middle ground.

105 Geraci, Windows on the East, 35.

106 Ibid., 156-157.

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Conclusion

The Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe was as much the result of a Kazakh alliance to reassert their control over their pasturelands, reclaim livestock, and avoid punitive levies from the nomadic allies of other states neighboring the steppe, as it was a

Russian alliance to secure trade routes from Siberia to Mawarannahr and the Qing

Empire, and curb slave raids. While the nature of this alliance would significantly change in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian-Kazakh alliance in the first half of the century to control the Kazakh Steppe had very little to do with fears of

Great Britain as a threat in the “Great Game,” Russian shame over losing the Crimean

War and having its imperial ambitions repulsed elsewhere, Russian capitalist demands for more raw materials like cotton for their industries, or a preternatural desire to expand because the Russian autocracy and imperial elite needed military glory to sustain itself.1

The Russian Empire’s relationship with the Kazakhs of the Junior, Middle and Greater hordes was fluid, highly contested and frequently re-negotiated until the mid-nineteenth century, and there was very little that Russian officials could control on the steppe

1 Michael Rywkin, Russia in Central Asia (New York: Collier Books, 1963); Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle or Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994); Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, Imperialsm: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Press, [1916] 1939); J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: Gordon Press, [1902] 1975); Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism (New York: Meridian Books, [1918] 1961); Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961).

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without their Kazakh allies getting their needs met as well. Indeed, while it is open to debate whether Russia was similar to other European empires in other parts of its realm at the time, the Russian Empire on the Kazakh Steppe up to the mid-nineteenth century was still participating in a transitional Inner-Asian context that clearly did not conform to many theories of nineteenth-century Western imperialism.

Until the mid-nineteenth century the Russians and Kazakhs needed each other to pursue their respective goals of peaceful border settlements and trade routes for Russian subjects and to reinforce social order and access to pasturage for the Kazakhs, each with differing concepts of loyalty and obligation in their poddanstvo or ejen-albatu relationship. Far from fleeing the “Jungar Threat” Junior Horde Khan Abu’l-Khayr sought Russian assistance in reinforcing his authority over his Kazakhs by taking the city of Turkistan away from the Kazakh allies of the Jungars in the eighteenth century.

Kazakh khans and their rivals spent much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seeking alliances from the surrounding states of the Kazakh Steppe, to regain the authority and title of khan through acquiring cities around the steppe to maintain their social system. The Jungar defeat by Qing forces in the mid-eighteenth century opened up contact between the Kazakhs and the Qing, contributing to further competition between neighboring states of the steppe for Kazakh loyalty and more opportunities for Kazakhs to seek alliances to become khans. With the Kazakhs’ permanent loss of the Syr Darya cities in the early nineteenth century to Kokand – and the religious and socio-economic role these cities played to reinforce the authority of Kazakh khans – the Kazakhs’ already weak social structure as an Inner-Asian nomadic state further attenuated.

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For all intents and purposes the Kazakhs viewed their shifting alliances with all of their neighbors on the steppe in terms of the Inner-Asian nomadic ejen-albatu (master- servant) framework of duty obligations and deference of an albatu to the ejen, regardless of what the Russian or Qing governments might have thought they had agreed upon and expected through their respective imperial lenses. These divergent Russian and Kazakh expectations of their relationship led to confusion, frustration, as well as accommodation on all sides.

Kazakh requests for alliances with Russia, and other states surrounding the steppe, continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Kazakhs were free agents on the steppe, often allying with several neighboring states simultaneously and breaking those alliances at will to pursue their own interests. Much of the first half of the nineteenth century was spent by Russian officials trying to attract Kazakhs to

Russia’s side to curb further attacks and to protect Russia’s Kazakhs against the predations of other Kazakhs. The state that had the most Kazakh allies on the steppe would ultimately secure the trade routes that traversed the steppe.

The establishment of the Syr Darya Line was not initially conceived as part of a

“pincer maneuver” by Russia to take the entire Kazakh Steppe. Russia’s main threat on the Kazakh Steppe initially was the Khanate of Khiva – particularly Khivan Kazakhs – who raided Russian Kazakhs and caravans, abducted Russians and sold them as slaves as a central part of their own economy, as well as blocked commercial trade both on the steppe and via the Amu Darya to the largest markets of Mawarannahr in Bukhara. As

Kazakh society continued to fracture in the mid-nineteenth century and after Russia’s failed attack on Khiva in 1839, Russia established a fort at the mouth of the Syr Darya at

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the nexus of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand in 1847 in the location that the Junior Horde’s

Abu’l-Khayr Khan had requested over a century earlier. If the Kazakh Steppe were a sea, then this toe-hold on the Syr Darya was intended by Russia to facilitate commercial trade like an island “coaling-station” for onward trade with larger markets. Russia’s attack on the Kokandian stronghold of Aq Masjid on the Syr Darya was initially intended to stop further attacks on Russia’s Kazakhs in the region by Kokand’s Kazakhs so that

Russia could return to its primary focus, Khiva.

Russia’s alliances with Kazakhs drove them further into the steppe to protect them against the Kazakh allies of neighboring states. In order to compete for Middle Horde loyalty, resolve inter-Kazakh disputes, and secure trade routes to the Qing Empire at a time when the Kazakhs no longer had a khan, Russia established forts on the eastern

Kazakh Steppe throughout the 1820s and 1830s. As disturbances and brigandage increased on the steppe, more Kazakhs of the Middle and Greater Horde allied with

Russia. These alliances were used by sultans to reinforce their power over their own tribes and against other tribes. Russia established forts in the 1840s and 1850s at the nexus of the Middle and Greater Hordes and the Qing Empire, and at the nexus of the

Greater Horde, the Kokandian Kyrgyzes and the Qing Empire to maintain these alliances and mediate disputes. Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, Russia had a defensive line on the Syr Darya to manage Khiva and check Kokandian attacks, and forts along the eastern edge of the Kazakh Steppe to manage inter-Kazakh disputes and the Qing, and no serious plans to unite the two. Meanwhile, the Khanate of Kokand, between these two defensive lines, had fallen into internal strife and started demanding more taxes, which prompted more Kokandian raids and instability.

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Russia’s alliance with the Kazakhs of the Greater Horde in the first half of the nineteenth century helped the Kazakhs maintain their independence from the Qing

Empire and Kokand, and conquer the Syr Darya. The Greater Horde Kazakhs played a very active role in driving Kokand out of Semirechye and the Chu River Valley in the

1850s as allies of Russia. While there were times when they allied with Kokand against

Russia and forced Russians forces to retreat, they ultimately chose to ally with Russia and used this alliance to reinforce their own authority over other Kazakhs in the area. As highlighted by Russia’s campaigns in the Chu River valley, a Kazakh division fought alongside Russian forces and drove off the Kokandian Kyrgyzes so that the Russians could besiege the Kokandian fort of Pishpek. They ultimately marched with Russian forces to Aulie-Ata and Chimkent to connect the two defensive lines as the “New Kokand

Line.” Indeed, Russia could not have even survived on the Kazakh Steppe --let alone conquer it--without the reconnaissance, supplies, food, shelter, and cavalry that their

Kazakh allies willingly supplied.

The alliance and mutual dependence of Russians and Kazakhs on the steppe in the mid-nineteenth century formed a kind of “middle ground” that had long since closed in other European empires at that time. While Russian officers were becoming more self- consciously “European” imperialists and entertained Enlightenment-inspired pretensions of Russia’s “civilizing mission” at an official level regarding the Kazakhs, the Kazakh

Steppe in the first half of the nineteenth century was still an environment where neither side really had the power to dictate terms in their relationship. Through their interactions, Kazakhs not only adopted Russian cultural traits, but Russians and Cossacks adopted Kazakh ones as well. In an age of romantic nationalism when the Russian

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Empire was trying to define what it meant to be Russian, that definition became even more flexible on the Kazakh Steppe. Because the Kazakhs were nomads, Russian officials believed them to be culturally more malleable, and therefore more easily formed into Russians if given the proper guidance, but Russian officials also struggled in vain to stop Cossacks from resembling Kazakhs by wearing Kazakh clothes. Moreover, local government officials continued to use Kazakh words in official correspondence, much to the chagrin of their superior officers. After Russia no longer needed Kazakhs as allies, officials turned to their attention to solidifying the definition of what being “Russian” on the Kazakh Steppe meant – both to themselves and to Kazakhs – thus closing the middle ground.

The transition of both the Russians and the Kazakhs in the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century in their Inner-Asian relationship seems to confound many historians when trying to place the Russian Empire in a larger global context with contemporaneous empires that also included nomads. Just as some of the Philosophes differentiated the “noble savages” of the New World from the “Tatars” who had once threatened Europe from the east, Russia’s eighteenth-century relationship with the

Kazakhs as Inner-Asian nomads was inherently different from England’s or France’s or later America’s relationships with other kinds of nomads. The Kazakhs’ initial alliance with Russia was to re-establish the Kazakh khanate and sought assistance from Russia just as the Jungars had of Muscovy. The Russian Empire would continue to differ from other European empires into the nineteenth century as long as the Kazakhs continued their attempt to unite under khans and reclaim the cities of the Syr Darya from which to govern as an Inner-Asian nomadic state.

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Closer to home, this dissertation sheds light on the confusion over whether

Russia’s conquest of the Kazakh Steppe between the 1730s and 1860s was similar to the

United States’ conquest of the in the late nineteenth century.2 While attempts have been made to compare Russia’s relationship with Kazakhs to the United

States’ relationship with the Sioux Nation of the Great Plains, the Sioux did not even have horses when Russia first engaged with and allied with the Kazakhs, who were expert horsemen, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.3 Moreover, when the Sioux acquired horses in the late eighteenth century, they had only recently moved into the Great Plains, and were never intent upon reclaiming ancient trading cities, holy sites, and trade routes as a source of prestige and revenue by which to reinforce and expand their authority over others and form a nomadic state.4 There are, however, many other ways one could compare Russia’s experience with the Kazakhs with European and

American relations with Native Americans, if sufficiently qualified and contextualized.

The Russian Empire really only began promoting colonist settlements on the Kazakh

Steppe in the 1890s – well after Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the American frontier had closed.5 Understanding how the relationship between the Kazakhs and

Russians evolved in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could shed light onto

2 Sabol, Steven. "Comparing American And Russian Internal Colonization: The "Touch of Civilisation" on the Sioux and Kazakhs." The Western Historical Quarterly. 43, no. 1 (2012, Spring), 29-51.

3 Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 3rd ed (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008), 291.

4 Ibid., 295.

5 Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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how their relationship developed and rapidly changed later in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, while the Russian Empire’s relationship with the Kazakhs on the steppe is most certainly not like that of the United States with the Sioux on the Great

Plains in the late-nineteenth century, if one focuses solely on Kazakhs in the Russian

Empire after the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, Kazakhstan might reasonably be compared to Montana without going so far as to claim that they are “nearly the same place.”6

The Inner-Asian nomadic nature of Kazakh culture and our fixation on their equine mode of transportation perhaps distracts us from other kinds of comparisons with other empires. For example, Russia’s relationship with the Kazakhs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could potentially be compared to that of the English with another fractious and tribal nation in their realm in the sixteenth century, the Irish. Both the Russians and the English occupied the respective areas to prevent other states from using it as a staging ground to attack, and allied with the tribal Kazakh and Irish elites.

Both countries introduced their own form of “civilization” that destroyed native languages and cultures, despised the native religions and saw them as a threat, responded inadequately to the subject peoples’ suffering and famines, yet depended upon these new subjects for manpower and supplies to expand their respective empires. Both Kazakhstan and Ireland today have difficulty reconciling their past suffering and humiliation under their respective empires with their own often voluntary participation in them. A more nuanced exploration of the Russian-Kazakh relationship in the past, and the voluntary

6 Kate Brown, "Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place," The American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001, February 1), 17-48; and Sabol, "Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization,” 29-51.

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nature of much of it, could possibly help us better understand Russia’s and Kazakhstan’s complicated relationship and current alliance today.

While Russia’s alliance with the Kazakhs would soon change after Russia solidified its control over the region and the middle ground closed, the Kazakh-Russian contested and frequently re-negotiated relationship in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century was often one of dependence and alliance against common threats for mutual benefit. By reinserting the active role of the Kazakhs in this narrative of Russian imperial expansion, acknowledging the changing nature of Muscovite-Russian imperial expansion itself and the changing social structure of Kazakh social organization as an Inner-Asian nomadic state, and recognizing the choices Kazakh khans and sultans willingly made to serve their respective goals of maintaining their power over other Kazakhs, one can only hope that Kazakhs today will see their past not only as victims of Russian imperialism but also as participants in it.

397

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