The Russian Conquest of Turkestan, 1865 to 1876
How Russia took Tashkent, Samarkand, Khiva and Kokand between 1865 and 1876, why the cotton story doesn't hold up, and where the split cities still show.
For about fifty years, Tashkent was two cities with a canal between them. West of the Ankhor lay the old town: mahallas, mosques, a bazaar, a mud wall with twelve gates. East of it, on the far bank, the Russians built a second town of straight, poplar-lined streets and irrigation ditches, with houses set back in gardens. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica counted 156,414 people in the native city at the 1897 census, and about 25,000 in the Russian one by 1900. One water channel, two worlds, and a population ratio of roughly six to one.
That split is the most visible legacy of the Russian conquest of Turkestan, the eleven years between 1865 and 1876 in which the Russian Empire took Tashkent, annexed Samarkand, turned Bukhara and Khiva into protectorates and abolished the Khanate of Kokand. The argument about why it happened is still running.
The sequence, in one table
Dates below are in the Julian calendar the Russian Empire used, which ran 12 days behind ours in the nineteenth century. That's why you'll see Tashkent's fall given as 17 June in one book and 29 June in another; both are right.
| Year | What happened | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1865 | General Mikhail Chernyaev storms Tashkent, a Kokand-ruled city of at least 100,000 | Annexed outright |
| 1867 | Decree of 11 July creates the Turkestan Governor-Generalship; Konstantin von Kaufman appointed on 14 July | Tashkent becomes the colonial capital |
| 1868 | Kaufman takes Samarkand in May, beats the Bukharan army in June | Samarkand annexed; Bukhara a vassal |
| 1873 | Columns cross the desert to Khiva; treaties with Khiva (12 August) and Bukhara | Both become protectorates |
| 1876 | Decree of 19 February abolishes the Khanate of Kokand after the 1875 revolt | Annexed as Fergana Oblast |
Notice the right-hand column. Russia annexed what it wanted to govern directly and left the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva on their thrones, minus a foreign policy. That two-tier empire is why Bukhara and Khiva kept their old-town fabric in a way Tashkent didn't.
1865: how Tashkent fell
Tashkent in 1865 wasn't independent. It had been ruled from Kokand since 1809, and its defence was led by the khanate's commander Alimqul, who was killed defending it during the siege. That removed the one man with the authority to hold the city together.
Chernyaev had taken the Kokandi forts at Aulie-Ata, Turkestan and Chimkent in 1864 and been beaten back from Tashkent once, that October. In spring 1865 he came again and cut the city's water. According to a 2025 retelling on the Uzbek news site Qalampir.uz, marking 160 years since the capture, a Tashkent official who'd gone over to the Russians helped by damaging the Niyazbek fortress and the Kaykovus canal. The assault came at night, the city surrendered on 17 June after a siege of roughly six weeks, and its notables handed over the ceremonial keys to its twelve gates.
Not all of them. The same account says Muhammad Salih, a scholar who refused to sign the surrender, was exiled to Siberia. His chronicle is one reason we have a local view of these events at all.
The old story says Chernyaev acted alone. The Interior Minister, Pyotr Valuev, wrote in his diary on 20 July 1865 that Tashkent had been taken and that "no-one knows why and for what" (Morrison's translation). His recall in 1866 fed the legend.
Was it about cotton? Mostly not
The guidebook version: the American Civil War cut off cotton to Moscow's mills, so Russia seized Central Asia's cotton oases. It's tidy, and current research says it's backwards.
The historian Alexander Morrison, whose The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is now the standard account in English, calls it the "cotton canard". His 2014 article on the fall of Tashkent in Central Asian Survey, free to read in Oxford's research archive (last checked: September 2026), goes through the customs figures. Raw cotton imported through Orenburg was worth 475,383 roubles in 1861. Bukharan merchants saw the shortage coming and pushed that to 1,829,208 roubles in 1862. In summer 1863 the price peaked at over 18 roubles a pood (about 16 kg), against 7 roubles in 1860.
The market was already delivering. No army was needed.
By the time Russian troops reached the cotton oases, the Civil War was over. Morrison quotes Bekchurin, an interpreter who toured the region with the Orenburg governor in 1865–66, noting that cheaper, better Indian and American cotton had returned and Moscow mills had stopped buying the Central Asian kind, a short-staple variety called ghuza. Stranger still, in the first half of 1865 the Orenburg authorities were detaining Bukharan merchants and impounding their goods. That's hardly how a government desperate for their cotton behaves.
So where did the cotton theory come from? Largely from Soviet historians working in a Leninist framework, where empire had to be explained by capitalists seeking raw materials and captive markets. Morrison argues no document has ever shown Moscow's textile owners steering the advance, and that in the 1860s they had nowhere near the political weight to do it.
What actually drove the advance
Bread and camels, more or less. That's our shorthand for Morrison's answer, and it's duller than cotton or spies.
Through the 1850s Russia had pushed two lines of forts into the Kazakh steppe, one from Orenburg down the Syr Darya, one from Siberia towards Vernoe (now Almaty). In late 1861 the Orenburg governor, Alexander Bezak, wrote to St Petersburg that the steppe forts and garrisons cost up to 700,000 silver roubles a year while the tax on Kazakh households brought in no more than 200,000. Total annual spending was approaching 1.3 million. Supplies still came from inner Russia.
His fix was to push south into settled, irrigated country where the forts could buy food locally. Between Turkestan and Tashkent, he'd heard from merchants, grain was flourishing. The War Minister, Dmitry Milyutin, agreed. Joining the two fort lines through the Karatau range was approved by Alexander II on 1 August 1864, and Tashkent, the big market city just beyond, was always on the table. Chernyaev's attack may have been impetuous, but Morrison shows it was at least tacitly authorised.
What about the Great Game with Britain? It's there, but in a supporting role. Milyutin did write that ruling Kokand would let Russia threaten British India. Morrison points out he only reached for that argument after the dull logistical case had failed to win over the Foreign Ministry, and that when the final plan went to the Tsar, the anti-British reasoning was left out. After reading how two British officers died in Bukhara's zindan in 1842, it's tempting to see rivalry everywhere; the paperwork says supply lines.
Our view: Morrison's case on the 1860s is convincing. It doesn't mean cotton was irrelevant to Russian Turkestan. It means cotton was the consequence, not the cause.
1867 to 1876: Kaufman's decade
The decree of 11 July 1867 turned the conquered land into the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, with Tashkent as its capital and General Konstantin von Kaufman in charge from 14 July. He ran it until a stroke in 1881 and died in Tashkent in 1882. His 1913 statue stood in what's now Amir Timur Square.
Samarkand and Bukhara, 1868
Kaufman's first war was with the emir of Bukhara. His troops took Samarkand on 2 May 1868 after a fight on the Chupan-Ata heights just outside the city, which opened its gates without a siege. When the army marched west after the emir, the small garrison left in the citadel was besieged in early June; the painter Vasily Vereshchagin was among its defenders. Kaufman defeated the Bukharan army at Zirabulak that month, and the emir accepted terms that made him a Russian vassal. The emirate's protectorate years ran on from there to 1920.
Samarkand itself was annexed. That hurt Bukhara twice over, because the city sits upstream on the Zarafshan, the river that also waters Bukhara.
Khiva, 1873
A Russian winter expedition in 1839–40 never reached Khiva. In 1873 Kaufman's columns crossed the desert from several directions, the khan fled, and the Gandumyan treaty of 12 August 1873 made the khanate a protectorate and abolished slavery. The Khivan side of the story includes the twist that the khanate's best buildings went up after it lost its independence.
Kokand, 1876
Kokand was the one state Russia swallowed whole. A revolt against Khudoyar Khan in July 1875, partly over his taxes and his dependence on Russia, gave Kaufman the pretext; Mikhail Skobelev's winter campaign of 1875–76 did the rest. A decree of 19 February 1876 abolished the khanate and turned it into Fergana Oblast. Our history of the Kokand khanate covers the last khan's three reigns.
How cotton arrived after the soldiers
Once the Fergana Valley was Russian, officials handed out American upland cotton seed, which gave a longer fibre than local ghuza, and trials began in 1884. One agronomic history of Uzbek cotton puts the area under cotton at 327 hectares in 1884 and 272,000 by 1900. We couldn't cross-check them, so treat them as an order of magnitude. The Trans-Caspian railway reached Samarkand in 1888 and the Orenburg–Tashkent line was finished in 1906. By 1914 the valley that had fed itself grew cotton and bought grain from Russia.
That dependence turned lethal between 1917 and 1920, when the railway to European Russia was cut and famine followed. It's the starting point for our piece on cotton, famine and the law in Uzbekistan, which runs from there to the end of forced labour in the 2020s.
Two cities side by side
Building a European town next to, rather than inside, an existing Asian one was policy across Russian Turkestan, with British and French colonial cities as the model. Jeff Sahadeo's Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 describes the result: Petersburg-style boulevards, official buildings, parks and a library on one side of the Ankhor, winding lanes on the other, as a Harvard Belfer Center review of the book summarises it.
The canal wasn't sealed: Russians crossed it to see Central Asian healers, and relied on local irrigation men for their water. Politically, though, the line held. In 1892 a cholera outbreak led to quarantine rules that broke local burial customs, crowds protested in the old city, and the Russian response left dozens dead.
Samarkand got the same treatment from 1871: a new town went up west of the citadel, its wide avenues fanning out from the fortress on a plan chosen as much for defence as for looks. The street that separated it from the old city was named after the first Russian governor, Alexander Abramov; today it's University Boulevard. The 1897 census counted 40,000 people in Samarkand's native city and 15,000 in the Russian town, military included.
Fergana took the logic further. After 1876 the Russians skipped Kokand and Margilan and built a new administrative town on open ground, Novy Margelan, later renamed Skobelev and now simply Fergana. Near Bukhara, which was never annexed, the railway town of New Bukhara (today's Kagan) did the job at 12 km.
Seeing the join today
In Tashkent, the 1966 earthquake and Soviet rebuilding erased much of both towns, so the split is easier to read on a map than on the ground. Independence Square, where Kaufman's residence stood, and Amir Timur Square are on the old Russian side. Chorsu and Hazrati Imam are on the old-city side, and our walking route through what's left of old Tashkent covers them. Walk between the two along the Ankhor embankment and you're crossing the colonial boundary on foot.
Samarkand makes it easier. Walk University Boulevard, with shady nineteenth-century avenues on one side and the lanes towards the Registan on the other. Stay in the new-town hotels near the station and you're sleeping in Kaufman's Samarkand.
One suggestion before you go: read the Morrison article. It's free, it's about 20 pages, and it'll change how you read every "Russian quarter" sign in the country.