The ‘fierce fight’ at Oshoba: a microhistory of the conquest of the Khoqand Khanate

Abstract

For some time now the theme of the conquest of Central Asia by the Russian Empire has been a subject of historical generalization. In a long-term temporal and broad geographical perspective, researchers have interested themselves in certain general tendencies and patterns, around which it is possible to structure grand narratives of ‘conquest’. One of the consequences of this approach has been a predominant interest in a few ‘key’ events. Another has been a narrowing of the circle of those historical personages garnering attention to a few ‘key’ figures. Finally, the very analysis of events has been reduced in many cases to a study of the thoughts and projects of the colonizers with regard to Central Asia; other interpretations of the ordinary participants in military actions on both sides, their expectations and misgivings, have become immaterial, the disregarded dross of history. In this article, based on written and oral accounts of Russia's military campaign against the Khoqand Khanate in 1875–1876, I will attempt to write a microhistory of the conquest, reconstructing its local episodes, reconstructing and listening to the voices of various actors, and distinguishing different motivations, preferences and means of description.

Keywords:

• microhistory
• colonialism
• local narratives
• Khoqand Khanate
• Ferghana
• conquest of Central Asia

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible thanks to the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am also grateful to Bakhtiyar Babajanov for his assistance in the preparation of the text, and to Alexander Morrison and the anonymous reviewers for Central Asian Survey for their comments on the draft of the article.

Notes

1. Today, Oshoba is located in the Asht region of Sughd Province of the Republic of Tajikistan. In written sources it is often called Ashaba.

2. At the time of the conquest the settlement contained around 400 dwellings, and its inhabitants called themselves Turks. (Now they are recorded as Uzbeks.) Their principal occupations were grazing sheep and goats on the surrounding hillsides and growing wheat, barley and sorghum, and also in external industries, including service in the Khoqandi army.

3. I will here describe these events from the point of view of the Russians (who generated the most detailed accounts), basing it primarily on the materials collected by A.G. Serebrennikov, which are partly published (1897, 1899, 1901a, 1901b, 1901c, 1901d, 1901e, 1901f) and partly held in TsGARUz.

4. The Russians believed that this was largely for religious reasons (because Khudoyar had been collaborating with them), but in fact it seems to have been more closely linked to earlier rivalries between sedentary and nomadic populations in Khoqand, and to Khudoyar's recent attempt to introduce a tax on inheritance, which was denounced by the ‘ulama as contrary to Islamic law (Babadzhanov 2010).

5. The town of Khujand (in Soviet times Leninabad, now the centre of Sughd Province of Tajikistan), which lies at the western extremity of the Ferghana Valley, had been under direct Russian rule within the governor-generalship of Turkestan since 1866.

6. This region nowadays more or less corresponds to Namangan Province of Uzbekistan and the Asht region of Sughd Province in Tajikistan.

7. An analogous practice of creating buffer territories had been used by the Russian military before: von Kaufman created the Zarafshan okrug out of part of the territory of the Bukharan emirate in 1868, and the Amu-Darya otdel from Khivan territory in 1873. The special terms otdel and okrug signified the particular status of these administrative creations with their separate administration (Becker 1968).

8. Pulad Khan (1844 or 1846–1876) proclaimed himself the lawful successor to the ruling Ming dynasty in Khoqand, although his enemies, including Russian officials, accused him of being a usurper (Babadzhanov 2010).

9. I do not intend here to give a complete history of the conquest of the Khoqand Khanate, but would add that on 26 December 1875 a force under Skobelev's command resumed large-scale military campaigns against the Khoqandi forces, seizing Andijan, and beating off the main forces of the enemy. At the beginning of February 1876 the decision was taken in Saint Petersburg to liquidate the Khoqand Khanate entirely and unite its territory with Turkestan.

10. The Russians usually assumed that the forces opposed to them were made up primarily of Qipchaq or Kyrgyz nomads, but resistance amongst the peoples of Ferghana was actually more widespread.

11. In the Khoqand administration a naib was an assistant to the wazir, i.e. the prime minister, and could also sometimes command artillery and infantry (Beisembiev 2009). However, it is entirely possible that von Kaufman took this term from his previous experience fighting in the North Caucasus, where naibs were appointed to govern particular territories.

12. Von Kaufman to the head of the Namangan otdel 19/10/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 d.64 ll.214–5.

13. Eiler to von Kaufman 19/10/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 D.64 ll.218–221.

14. Petr Aristarkhovich Pichugin (dates unknown) was a participant in many military operations in Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s. One interesting detail is that his cousin was married to the well-known anthropologist A.P. Bogdanov, to whom the colonel ‘presented’ skulls for study (S.M.S. 2004).

15. Report of the Commandant of Kurama District to K.P. von Kaufman 25/10/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 D.64 ll.271–272.

16. ‘Zapiska o politicheskikh i inykh delakh na Kokandskoi granitse’ 15/11/1875 TsGARUZ F.I-1 Op.1 D.2551 ll.118-ob.

17. Zulfikar (1839–?) was a high-ranking Khoqandi official, of Qaraqalpaq origin, who had rebelled first against Khudoyar and then against Nasruddin. We have no reliable information about Tanaberdy (Tangriberdy) (see Beisembiev 2009).

18. Report of the commander of the Aq-Djar Force [Pichugin] to the commander of the forces of the Turkestan military okrug [von Kaufman] 20/11/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 d.65 ll.202–7.

19. However, the significant number of casualties at Oshoba is confirmed by circumstantial evidence: a census of the number of houses in the qishlaq carried out by officials in 1877–1883.

20. Report of Pichugin on the award to the former bek of Babadarkhan, Mirza ‘Abdullah, of a robe of honour, 11/09/1876 TsGARUz F.I-1 Op.20 D.9808 l.1

21. After von Kaufman's departure, Skobelev united the Aq-Djar and Chust forces and appointed as their commander Baron A.N. Meller-Zakomel'skii, who at the beginning of December carried out a punitive expedition along the left bank of the Syr-Darya, after which opposition in the Kurama foothills finally ceased.

22. Pichugin to Skobelev 21/11/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 D.65 ll.230-1. Attached to the copy of this letter, another participant in the Ferghana campaigns, Major-General V.N. Trotskii (1836–1901), remarked on the strangely familiar tone with which Pichugin addressed Skobelev.

23. I do not have any information as to whether Pichugin took part in the military campaigns in the Caucasus, which lasted for the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century, but certainly in his text one notices numerous clichés about ‘mountaineer – Muslim – fanatics’, which were already well established in Russian military discourse from the very beginning of the conquest of Central Asia (Bobrovnikov 2005).

24. Proclamation of Aq Buta Bek, son of ‘Abd al-Ghafar, and Mullah Nur Muhammad (trans. 31/10/1875) bearing their seals, from Gudas. TsGARUz F.I-715 op.1 d.64 l.377. The original is not present in the file (for a similar letter see Terent'ev 1903, II, 418).

25. He composed this work over 25 years, 1863–1887/8.

26. Pansad/pansadbashi: commander of 500. Ghazi: warrior for the faith.

27. Muhammad Salih Khwaja Tashkandi, Ta'rikh-i Jadidah-yi Tashkand IVANRUz Inv. No.7791, ff.804b, 805a. I gratefully acknowledge my profound debt to Bakhtiyar Babajanov for translating this passage from the original Persian and for his commentary on it. I am also indebted to Timur Beisembiev's Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles (Tokyo 2008) for having found the reference to Oshoba.

28. On the characteristics of Muhammad Salih Khwaja Tashkandi's world-view see Babadzhanov (2010).

29. Although to become national it would have needed other elements – the imagining of a single name, a single language and a single culture, a secular view of historical development, a strong anti-imperial ethos, etc. In its full form a national narrative from a traumatic perspective of the tragic events at Oshoba emerged only in 1992, when Uzbekistan was proclaimed an independent state. An article by O. Abdullaev entitled ‘The Tragedy of Oshoba’ appeared in the newspaper Uzbekiston adabiёti va san'ati that year. The author was familiar with the articles in Voennyi Sbornik, where Pichugin's report was reprinted, which became for him a means to reassess the tragedy of colonial subjugation. The imperial account was recalled and, paradoxically, became a seamless part of the national text.

30. We should not forget that Muhammad Salih Khwaja was a Russian subject by this date, although he did not identify as Russian.

31. In all, I noted down around 10 interviews about these events with people of different ages and social backgrounds. My impression was that fragments of this narrative were known to all inhabitants of the village, but the fullest version was remembered only by a few older people.

32. In this instance pansad is either a sobriquet for the woman or else her husband's military rank.

33. There are two qishlaqs with this name in the Asht region – one in the direction of Pangaz, the other towards Asht.

34. Skobelev to von Kaufman 28–29/10/1875 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 D.64 ll.324–325. It is possible that the letter refers to Mir-Salih Bekchurin (1819/20–after 1887), a Bashkir who served on the statistical committee in Tashkent, participated in military operations and was Skobelev's translator during the campaign of 1875–1876.

35. Report of the Commander of the Aq-Djar force to Lt-Col Komarov 12/01/1876 TsGARUz F.I-715 Op.1 D.66 l.124.

36. ‘File on the arrest of four inhabitants of the qishlaq of Oshoba, accused of rebellion’, 12/02/1876 TsGARUz F.I-19 Op.1 d.10458 l.1.

37. It is possible that earlier this account had a written form. It is striking that N. Veselovskii, who at the end of the nineteenth century sought out local accounts of the Russian conquest, refers to an old man from Asht who ‘kept such notes’ (Veselovskii 1894, vi n.1).

38. On the significance of oral history in Central Asia, including the description of events connected with the Russian conquest, see Prior (2013). Researching a heroic poem about the Kyrgyz leader Shabdan Batyr, which was compiled on the basis of oral sources at the beginning of the twentieth century, Prior draws attention to the description of the successful career of this figure, who concluded peace with the Russians and was raised by them to high status.

39. This had also occurred during the Russian siege of the Khoqandi fortress of Aq Masjid in 1853, the first open clash between the two powers. Mullah Niyaz Khoqandi, in his Ta'rikh-i Shahrukhi (composed 1871), writes that ‘The besieged, men and women, throwing aside guns and bullets, took up knives and swords [Zan va mard hama yakbara alat tir tuhfang ra par tafta dasteha-ra bar qabza tegh buda]’ (Pantusov 1885, 199).

40. For an earlier example of this see Mackenzie (1969), although the influence of ‘military atamans’ on Russian imperial expansion should not be exaggerated.