Central Asian Uprisings in the Nineteenth Century

Ferghana under the Russians

Bibliographic Data

ID3323210
AuthorsBeatrice Forbes Manz (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume46
Issue3
Pages267
Publication date1987-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Russian Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0036-0341 • E-ISSN: 1467-9434
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/130563
OpenAlexW2314424566
LanguageEN
Citations received10

During the last decades of the nineteenth century Russian colonial rule in Turkestan met little resistance from the native population. Only the small and fertile area of the Ferghana Valley remained a center of unrest. This region, situated northwest of the Pamirs and bounded north and south by the smaller Chotkal and Alai ranges, contained some of the best agricultural land in Central Asia and under Russian rule became an important center of cotton production. It was thus an area crucial to Russian interests; nonetheless the Russians failed to maintain order within it. For the first twenty-five years of their administration Ferghana suffered constant depredations by bands of insurgents often led by members of the Muslim mystical brotherhoods, the Sufi orders. Since most insurgents attacked only the native population, such uprisings caused the Russian colonial administration little concern. This attitude changed with the Andijan rebellion of 1898, during which about two thousand people under a Sufi leader attacked the Russian barracks at Andijan and killed a number of soldiers; simultaneous uprisings planned in other cities failed to materialize. The Andijan rebellion was a major shock to the colonial administration, which had considered the population relatively friendly to its rule. Most writers-tsarist, Soviet, and western-have attributed this and other local uprisings to two main causes. They have cited first the strong conservative religious feeling in the area and especially the power of the local Sufi orders, which could be expected to oppose infidel rule. Their second explanation is the disruption caused by the increase in cotton cultivation, which, with the involvement of outside firms in local agriculture, made the peasants vulnerable to fluctuations in the world market and dependent on credit, often at exorbitant rates. This, scholars explain, created a class of wealthy middlemen, but caused indebtedness and landlessness among the peasants of Ferghana. Russian land reforms and the beginnings of colonization also impoverished the old official class and the nomads of the eastern regions.1

Ancient history · Central asia · Political science · Cuban History and Society · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Soviet and Russian History

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