Lecture 6 turkistan and its division into khanates the Khanate of Bukhara or Khanate of Bukhoro

Russian Empire period[edit]

Khanate of Khiva in 1900 (in grey)

Russians made five attacks on Khiva. Around 1602 some free Ural Cossacks unsuccessfully raided Khwarazm. In 1717 Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky attacked Khiva from the Caspian. After he won the battle, Shir Ghazi Khan (1715–28) made a treaty and suggested that the Russians disperse so that they could be better fed. After they dispersed they were all killed or enslaved, only a few surviving to tell the tale. In 1801 an army was sent toward Khiva but was recalled when Paul I was murdered. In the Khivan campaign of 1839 Perovsky tried an attack from Orenburg. The weather was unusually cold and he was forced to turn back after losing many men and most of his camels. Khiva was finally conquered by the Khivan campaign of 1873.

The conquest of Khiva was part of the Russian conquest of Turkestan. British attempts to deal with this were called the Great Game. One of the reasons for the 1839 attack was the increasing number of Russian slaves held at Khiva. To remove this pretext Britain launched its own effort to free the slaves. Major Todd, the senior British political officer stationed in Herat (in Afghanistan) dispatched Captain James Abbott, disguised as an Afghan, on Christmas Eve, 1839, for Khiva. Abbott arrived in late January 1840 and, although the khan was suspicious of his identity, he succeeded in talking the khan into allowing him to carry a letter for the Tsar regarding the slave issue. He left on 7 March 1840, for Fort Alexandrovsk, and was subsequently betrayed by his guide, robbed, then released when the bandits realized the origin and destination of his letter. His superiors in Herat, not knowing of his fate, sent another officer, Lieutenant Richmond Shakespear, after him. Shakespear had more success than Abbott: he convinced the khan to free all Russian subjects under his control, and also to make the ownership of Russian slaves a crime punishable by death. The freed slaves and Shakespear arrived in Fort Alexandrovsk on 15 August 1840, and Russia lost its primary motive for the conquest of Khiva, for the time being.

A permanent Russian presence on the Aral Sea began in 1848 with the building of Fort Aralsk at the mouth of the Syr Darya. The Empire's military superiority was such that Khiva and the other Central Asian principalities, Bukhara and Kokand, had no chance of repelling the Russian advance, despite years of fighting.^[10] In 1873, after Russia conquered the great cities of Tashkent and Samarkand, General Von Kaufman launched an attack on Khiva consisting of 13,000 infantry and cavalry. The city of Khiva fell on 10 June 1873 and, on 12 August 1873, a peace treaty was signed that established Khiva as a quasi-independent Russian protectorate. See Khivan campaign of 1873. After the conquest of what is now Turkmenistan (1884) the protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara were surrounded by Russian territory.

The first significant settlement of Europeans in the Khanate was a group of Mennonites who migrated to Khiva in 1882. The German-speaking Mennonites had come from the Volga region and the Molotschna colony under the leadership of Claas Epp, Jr. The Mennonites played an important role in modernizing the Khanate in the decades prior to the October Revolution by introducing photography, which resulted with the development of the Uzbek photography and filmmaking, more efficient methods for cotton harvesting, electrical generators, and other technological innovations.^[11]

Civil war and Soviet Republic[edit]

See also: Khivan Revolution

Flag used by the khanate of Khiva during the civil war (1917–1922)^[12]

After the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution, anti-monarchists and Turkmen tribesmen joined forces with the Bolsheviks at the end of 1919 to depose the khan. On 2 February 1920, Khiva's last Kungrad khan, Sayid Abdullah, abdicated and a short-lived Khorezm People's Soviet Republic (later the Khorezm SSR) was created out of the territory of the old Khanate of Khiva, before it was finally incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1924, with the former Khanate divided between the new Turkmen SSR and Uzbek SSR. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, these became Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan respectively. Today, the area that was the Khanate has a mixed population of Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, and Kazakhs.

Khans of Khiva (1511–1920)[edit]

The borders of the Russian imperial territories of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand in the time period of 1902–1903

Data on the Khivan Khans is sparse and sometimes contradictory, especially for the minor khans. Names and dates from Bregel/Muniz^[13] which probably gives the best modern scholarship. Short biographies are from Howarth's 1880 book^[14] which is old but has biographies of most of the khans. RU: is data from the Russian Wikipedia when nothing could be found in English or there was a major contradiction. RU: has sources in local languages.