History of Turkmenistan - Russian Colonization and Great Game

Russian Colonization and Great Game

In the 18th century Turkoman tribes came into contact with Tsarist Empire. The Russian Empire began to move into the area in 1869 with the establishment of the Caspian Sea port of Krasnovodsk, current-day Turkmenbashy. After the suppression of Bukhara and Khiva emirate, Russians decided to move into Transcaspian region, allegedly to subdue Turkmen slave trade and banditry. The service of some Turkmen tribes, especially the Yomud, for the Khivan Khan also encouraged the Russia to punish them by raids into Khorazm, which killed hundreds. These wars culminated in the campaigns of General Mikhail Skobelev, and in 1881 fighting climaxed with the massacre of 7,000 Turkmen at the desert fortress of Geok Depe, near modern Ashgabat; another 8,000 were killed trying to flee across the desert. By 1894 imperial Russia had taken control of all of Turkmenistan.

The Transcaspian Railway was started from the shores of the Caspian in 1879 in order to secure Russian control over the region and provide a rapid military route to the Afghan border. In 1885 a crisis was precipitated by the Russian annexation of the Pandjeh oasis, to the south of Merv, on a territory of modern Afghanistan, which nearly led to war with Britain. as it was thought that the Russians were planning to march on to Herat in Afghanistan. Until 1898 Transcaspia was part of the Governor-Generalship of the Caucasus and administered from Tiflis, but in that year it was made an Oblast of Russian Turkestan and governed from Tashkent. Nevertheless Turkestan remained an isolated colonial outpost, with an administration that preserved many distinctive features from the previous Islamic regimes, including Qadis' courts and a 'native' administration that devolved much power to local 'Aksakals' (Elders). In 1897 the Transcaspian Railway reached Tashkent, and finally in 1906 a direct rail link with European Russia was opened across the steppe from Orenburg to Tashkent. This led to much larger numbers of Slavic settlers flowing into Turkestan than had hitherto been the case, and their settlement was overseen by a specially created Migration Department in St. Petersburg (Переселенческое Управление). This caused considerable discontent amongst the local Turkmen population, as mainly Russian-populated cities such as Ashgabat appeared.

The best-known Military Governor to have ruled the region from Ashkhabad was probably General Kuropatkin, whose authoritarian methods and personal style of governance made the province very difficult for his successors to control and led to a revolt in 1916. Consequently the administration of Transcaspia became a byword for corruption and brutality within Russian Turkestan, as Russian administrators turned their districts into petty fiefdoms and extorted money from the local population. In 1908 Count Konstantin Konstantinovich Pahlen led a reforming commission to Turkestan which produced a monumental report detailing these abuses of power, administrative corruption and inefficiency.