Introduction: Killing the Cotton Canard and getting rid of the Great Game: rewriting the Russian conquest of Central Asia, 1814–1895

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Acknowledgements

This special issue of Central Asian Survey is based on the papers delivered at an international workshop on the Russian conquest of Central Asia held in the Department of History of the University of Liverpool, 23 November 2012. The workshop was made possible by a research grant from the British Academy, and I thank that body for continuing to provide funding of a type and scale appropriate to research in the humanities. I also thank Ulfatbek Abdurasulov, Paolo Sartori and Thomas Welsford for the valuable contributions they made at the original workshop. I thank Ian Campbell for translating Svetlana Gorshenina's paper, Gabriel McGuire for the reference to Dulat Babataiuli's poetry, the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, and Deniz Kandiyoti and Raphael Jacquet for agreeing to a special issue on the Russian conquest.

Notes

1. These are Carrère d'Encausse (1967), a short essay which ignores the period before the fall of Tashkent; MacKenzie (1969, 1974), which concentrate on the campaigns in which M.G. Cherniaev was involved; and Bauman (1993), which has a rather narrow focus on military tactics. By far the best accounts and interpretations currently available are in Becker (1968, 1–45; 1988), although he writes little about the period before 1865, and Palat (1988), which offers a sweeping, striking and often very perceptive interpretation of Russian expansion in the region, albeit without very substantial evidence to back it up. See also the brief overview by Abashin and Gorshenina (2009, 7–14).

2. Strangely, the new collectively authored official history of Kazakhstan (Kozybaev 2010, III, 362–90) showcases both these tendencies. The account of the establishment of the Syr-Darya line by M.U. Shalekenov (362–68) is highly polemical, but the description of the conquest of Semirechie and the uniting of the two lines by I.V. Erofeeva (368–90) is a model of balanced, careful research.

3. The classic popular account is by Hopkirk (1990), but the most important scholarly study of the foreign policy of British India in Central Asia is by Yapp (1980), whose level of detail and analysis has never been matched in the historiography of the Russian Empire.

4. A recent attempt to apply international relations theory to Central Asia in this period (Mackay 2013) compounds these prejudices with a total absence of primary research. For an excellent critique of the whole concept of the Great Game see Hopkins (2008, 34–47).

5. Something acknowledged by Yapp (2001).

6. Mackay (2013, 2) opens his article with the jaw-dropping statement that ‘primary historical sources on Central Asia are limited’ – something true of neither Russian nor Central Asian material for those who are actually prepared to do some research.

7. For a discussion of Sami and his text, see Gross (1997).

8. There are some interesting examples in the Kazakhstan state archives in Almaty, notably an appeal by Allah Quli Khan of Khiva to Turkmen and Kazakh bahadurs and biis to resist Perovskii's expedition in 1839 (TsGARKaz F.4 Op.1 D.2182 l.16ob), and a letter from the Khoqandi leader ’Alimqul to a Kyrgyz bii called Janata Atai Batur Dadkhwah in 1864 calling on him to resist the Russians (TsGARKaz F.3 Op.1 D.167 l.140).

9. I have expanded on this argument more fully elsewhere (Morrison 2008); Alex Marshall (2006, 176–193) suggests that fears for the security of the Empire's Asiatic frontiers in the last years of the tsarist regime distracted the ‘myopic guard’ of the Russian General Staff from the much more serious German threat.

10. For instance, it was used by war minister D.A. Miliutin in 1863 to convince the more cautious foreign minister, A.M. Gorchakov, that the uniting of the Siberian and Syr-Darya lines of fortresses was absolutely necessary (Miliutin to A.M. Gorchakov 01/?/1863 RGVIA F.483 Op.1 D.62 ll.198ob-199ob).

11. ‘Min. Voen. Doklad po Glavnomu Shtabu. Kantseliariia Voenno-Uchenogo Komiteta’ 09/11/1901 RGVIA F.483 Op.1 D.150 l.2. The remaining volumes of Serebrennikov's Sbornik (covering the period 1853–63 and 1866–76) remained unpublished, despite pleas by V.V. Barthold, although the drafts are held in a special fond (I-715) in the Uzbek archives and have been used by Sergei Abashin for his paper in this volume.

12. On the enforcement of this orthodoxy, which still finds many adherents in Russia today, see Tillett (1969, 32–4, 174–190); those historians who deviated from this line, notably Erumkhan Bekmakhanov (1947), were forced to recant.

13. LeDonne, indeed, writes that the conquest of Central Asia began in 1864 (2004, 235).

14. On the annexation and subsequent return of Kulja to China between 1871 and 1881, see Hsü (1965) and Gorshenina (2012, 95–132).