Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910

Strategic and military goals drove the Russian conquest of Central Asia, leaving Tsarist officers ruling over a Muslim population deemed to be backward and fanatic. Alexander Morrison argues that Russian control of the Samarkand region from 1868 to 1910 produced an ‘inadvertently benevolent neglect’ (p. 291) due to an unwillingness to spend resources or directly challenge a local society that might at any point rebel. Similar to the case of British India, local mediators who served as translators, administrators, and in other intermediary positions, were able to exploit effectively the colonisers’ lack of knowledge and power over the peoples and regions whom they governed. Morrison's book might be better titled ‘Russian Rule in the Zarafshan Valley’, as the city of Samarkand is almost entirely absent in the study. The author focuses on the surrounding villages and emphasises far more the Russian than the comparative British case. The study makes important contributions to our understanding of the relative power and the ultimate goals of Russian officials in this region of Turkestan and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the local intermediaries who provided crucial support for the colonial regime. Unlike British officers and members of the Indian Civil Service, Tsarist personnel in Central Asia were poorly educated and trained. Unable to speak local languages or understand the nuances of Central Asian society and culture, poorly compensated and few in number, they made little imprint on the Zarafshan valley's population. Those officials who had an intellectual background and interacted with local society grew frustrated at Russian inability to bring enlightenment to the Muslim masses. Morrison argues that this frustration was heightened due to the fact that Russian leaders, unlike the British in India, sought the eventual goal of turning the local population away from its culture and religion and affecting a sblizhenie (merger) with western society. V.P. Nalivkin, the first teacher at a mixed Russian-Muslim school, blamed a ‘wall, tightly enclosed and cutting us off from the people, and made up of native administrators, petty bourgeois, and translators’ (p. 195) for the failure to modernise Turkestan. Morrison has harsh words for these intermediaries, whom he characterises as ‘deeply corrupt’ (p. 286). Having risen after initial Tsarist efforts to displace existing local élites, these Central Asians exploited the Tsarist administration's lack of knowledge of issues such as religious law, landholding, and irrigation to enrich themselves through bribes and extortion and to suppress their rivals. The small number of Tsarist officials spent inordinate amounts of time investigating petitions from the local population that accused these native administrators of all kinds of abuses. In the end, Morrison concludes, the system of benevolent neglect emerged from what appears as a ‘complete shambles’ (p. 287) of a colonial system. Neither Tsarist nor local officials had the will or the ability to administer the region effectively, either for the benefit of the bulk of the population or to bring about modernisation

Ancient history · Central asia · Colonialism · CONQUEST · Development economics · Indirect rule · Political economy · Political science · Population · Power (physics · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Demography · History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Soviet and Russian History

• Reflection of acculturation idea in the resettlement policy of the Russian Empire in Turkestan at the turn of the 20th century

  Open Access•N Brezhneva•RUDN Journal of Russian History•2018

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