Latest / The Story of Uzbekistan: Silk Road Kingdoms and Soviet Legacy — Fexingo History / The Tashkent Oasis: Russia's Forgotten Colony
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've covered the conquests, the cotton, the epidemics, the Jadids, and even the fall of the khanates. But there's one big piece of the puzzle we haven't really touched on yet: the city of Tashkent itself, not as a battlefield, but as a living, breathing colonial experiment. Luna: You mean after the Russians took it in 1865? Lucas: Exactly. After Chernyayev's ruse — pretending to retreat and then storming the walls — Tashkent became the capital of Russian Turkestan. And General Konstantin von Kaufman, the first Governor-General, had a problem. How do you rule a city of maybe 100,000 Muslims with just a few thousand Russian soldiers? His solution was something called 'indirect rule.' He basically left the old Islamic institutions in place — the qazi courts, the waqf endowments, the mahalla neighborhood councils — as long as they didn't challenge Russian authority. No mass conversions, no dismantling of mosques. It was pragmatic, not enlightened. Luna: So he wasn't trying to Russify them right away? Lucas: Not at first. The official policy was non-interference in religion and custom. But over time, Kaufman started building a 'New City' about two miles from the old walled city. Straight boulevards, a governor's palace, a military club, a theater, a park with fountains — all the trappings of a European colonial capital. The old city, with its winding alleys and mud-brick houses, was left largely untouched. But the boundary was real: Russians lived in the New City, Uzbeks and other Central Asians stayed in the old town. There was very little mixing, except in the bazaar. Luna: Kind of like a segregated city? Lucas: In many ways, yes. But what's fascinating is that some Uzbeks found ways to navigate this new order. A class of merchants and landowners, often called 'Sarts' — a term that originally meant 'townsman' in Turkic — began to act as intermediaries. They learned Russian, supplied the army, and even won seats on the Tashkent City Duma, the municipal council that Kaufman set up in 1877. The Duma was mostly Russian, but a handful of Uzbeks were allowed in, and they used their positions to push for irrigation projects, or to protect waqf lands. It was a tiny crack of political participation, but it existed. Luna: So they had some agency? Lucas: Limited, but real. Take a man like Sayyid Karim, a wealthy merchant who served on the Duma. He funded a madrasa in the old city and also invested in a cotton-cleaning factory. Or the poet and historian Muhammad Salih, who wrote a chronicle of the Russian conquest in Persian, not to praise the Russians, but to record how the old elite had failed. Local voices mattered, even if they were often ignored by the colonial administration. And then there were the travelers. An American diplomat, Eugene Schuyler, visited Tashkent in 1873 and wrote a famous account called 'Turkistan.' He described the bazaars, the public baths, and the Russian attempt to introduce streetlamps — which the locals thought were some kind of fire-spirit. Luna: Wait, streetlamps? That's a great detail. Lucas: Schuyler noted that the first lamps were oil-burning, and they were placed at intersections. People would gather around them at night, just to watch the light. It sounds almost quaint, but it was part of a bigger transformation: the Russians were slowly reshaping the city's rhythm. The call to prayer still happened, but now there were also military bands playing in the park, and a new postal service, and a railway — the Trans-Caspian line reached Tashkent in 1898. That railway changed everything. Cotton could now be shipped to Russian mills faster, and Russian goods flooded in. The old artisan economy — silk weavers, coppersmiths, saddle makers — began to collapse. By 1900, Tashkent was already a city of two halves, one modernizing fast, the other clinging to tradition. Luna: And this is where the seeds of later discontent were sown? Lucas: Exactly. The 1916 revolt, which we touched on in the cotton episode, had its roots right here. The Russian decision to exempt themselves from wartime labor conscription and force it on Central Asians was the spark, but the fuel was decades of land confiscation, cotton monoculture, and cultural humiliation. The mahalla councils, which had once been a buffer, now became organizing centers for rebellion. And when the revolt was crushed, the old compromise of indirect rule was over. The stage was set for the Bolsheviks, who promised a different kind of transformation — but that's a story for another episode. Luna: So Tashkent under the Russians was really a laboratory for colonial governance, and its failures paved the way for Soviet rule. Lucas: Exactly right. The Soviets would tear down much of the old city, build factories, and impose a new ideology. But the colonial blueprint — the segregation, the economic exploitation, the creation of a native elite that was both co-opted and distrusted — that was already there, laid by Kaufman and his successors. Tashkent is still a city of two halves today, though the boundaries have blurred. The old city's mud walls are mostly gone, but the memory of that colonial encounter lives on in the street names, the architecture, and the deep ambivalence many Uzbeks feel about their Russian past.