Empire: World History - 86. Crushing the Khans: Russia Seizes the Centre of the World

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

As the other European empires were consolidating their holdings in Asia, Russia took 1.5million square miles of territory. Moving south from the Orenburg line, the Russian Empire swallowed up the Khanates of Central Asia with minimal casualties to their own troops. Depicting the citizens of Kokhand, Khiva, and Bokhara as insolent and inferior, this conquest serves as one of classic European colonialism. Listen as William and Anita delve into the story of the conquest of Central Asia. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill + Tabby Syrett Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with Stop Laughing. There's no laughing matter with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Dalrymple. Can I just say you join us? Having quite a warm-up. People sometimes very kindly talk about the chemistry between.

I think it's been combustible. I just want to say that, you know, I really don't mind the fact that you took 20 minutes to get your equipment working. And it's absolutely fine. And I in no way hold you responsible. It's absolutely fine. You are very lucky that you are in a different time zone is all I'm saying. And on a different continent is what I'm adding. Because if there were a bar graph of the number of technical foolishness and the people,

beginning of this. It is true. There were a few power cuts on the farm. Yeah, power cats, cups and coffee, trips to God knows where. Not understanding that nine o'clock is nine o'clock. I mean, that is complete defiance of the laws of the time, space continuum. I don't know what you're talking about. Puntuality is by watchword and all things. Oh, just wait. Where are you, first of all, where are you? You're not where you should be? I am sitting in New York. What are you doing there? I am about to go to a conference at the Metropolitan Museum about early Buddhist art, which I might before to tomorrow. Very exciting.

And have been pitching a show on my new book to a museum here, which still has to keep under wraps. But anyway, you've done a bang up to have. He's in New York and he's discussing a big show. And listen, look, this is very exciting because we are talking about things that are kind of unraveling around us in real time. Now, I mean, we're talking about the conquest of Central Asia, but if we just turn our minds just for a second to the Caucasus at the moment, because they are very much in the news. And this whole series is about Russia and the Russian Empire. And what's been going on? We're recording this on a Thursday, so a week before you're going to be hearing it.

But we've had, William, the fall of, well, can you call it the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh, but you've certainly got reports of Armenians leaving, fleeing. caravans, large numbers of cars back to back up these winding roads to Armenia. Yes. And this is very much a legacy of these disparate places and people that were gathered together as part of the Russian Empire. I mean, and then sort of left and then came back under the Soviet era and now are again re-evaluating what they are, who they are and where they want to be. And what we're finding now more and more, I think, with this podcast is that all the different series are sort of fitting together in a jigsaw. And people may remember.

in our Ottoman series earlier in the year, we talked about the Armenian genocide and the possibly 1.5 million who were killed then during the First World War. And all that was left of Armenia as an area settled by Armenian Christians was the fragment of historic Armenia that was under Russian control. And then there was this mixed area, Nagorno-Karabakh. And that area is now seeing the same sort of mass exodus that we saw, for example, in the Smyrnaer episodes. It's still this story of the unraveling of these places that were once mixed places where minorities can be majorities. We've seen that in our episode on partition. And how things can just turn overnight?

I mean, the speed at which, I mean, these are deep-rooted issues, but it turns on a sixpence when it turns, doesn't it? And suddenly people are just unplugging everything that they own and trying to leave. And our subject today is an extraordinary bit of imperial history that's almost never been told. It's the story of how an area, about half the sides of the United States, which is absorbed by the Russian Empire after the Treaty of Vienna, after the end of Napoleon and Waterloo, at a time when European empires generally in Asia are stabilising. But the Russians keep moving. And they add in the course of, well, about 60 years, this vast 1.5 million square miles of territory in at least 6 million people to their empire. And what is extraordinary about it, looking from our point of view, is A, that this holds, this remains under Russian rule until the breakup of the USSR. It is an area which is a Muslim area, which is ruled by Christians who are looking down on these Central Asians as savages, barbarians, cowardly, backward. These sort of words are being used by Russians and Central Asians. And it's particularly ironic to talk about the people of Central Asia as barbarous because there's

anyone that's ever read Peter Frankapan's wonderful book, The Silk Roads, or I strongly recommend Frederick Starr's book called Lost Enlightenment about all the extraordinary things that emerged from Central Asia. And in an earlier age, when Central Asia was ruled by Persia, it was the eastern half of Persia, the ancient kingdom that was ruled from Persepolis stretched right out. way beyond the Caspian Sea and way beyond the Pamirs. And many of the most famous Persian poets, like Ferdousi and Rumi, were from Khorasan and Kourazim. And also many of the greatest scientists, geographers and thinkers in history, people like Al-Baruni, Al-Farabi, and most importantly,

Quarizmi. His name, Quarism, is the area. We're talking about being conquered. And his name Arabicized to Al-Qurisbi then becomes Latin. to give us the word we have today, algorithm. Right. Do you know the other thing that's very interesting about this is that when you look at the history of this region, it's often couched in terms of the great game, which we described before as being entirely offensive to the people who are affected in these regions, as if there are two great powers who are deciding what happens to a space of land with no people in it

and with no agency at all. Exactly. And that is very much being re-evaluated now with people. going into archives in these places, discovering what has been written by the other side. So it really is a much more complex thing than Britain and Russia are trying to grab some land and the land does nothing to say about it. I grew up reading the wonderful books of Peter Hopkut, The Great Game. His books were very much based on Raj Travelogs and British accounts of that part of the world

with a few Russian voices. They had virtually no voices from the region, which was colonised and conquered. And I think you and I've both been reading this week in preparation for this pod, the extraordinary book by a man called Alexander Morrison, a wonderful fellow of all souls. Hugely impressed by that. Amazing book called the Russian conquest of Central Asia. And very gently, he rolls back a lot of the preconceptions that we've grown up with, those of us that read Peter Hopkirk.

Because he's been in the archives. And one thing that I found really interesting is there's this word that I've learned from Morrison. It's a way in which the Russians describe the people of the step. And it's exactly the same as they're described in sort of dispatches here in Great Britain. And the word is Dieschka. It means insolent. And every time they refer to any of these tribal people, it is with this word as if they are unruly insolent children, Dieske.

It comes up again and again in official documents that he's been looking at. This is a good moment perhaps to read the Russian foreign minister, Prince Gorkachov, justifying the Russian expansion into Central Asia, the subject of. of today's podcast. And he's writing in 1864 and listened to this language, it sounds so like Kersen talking about Indians or any of those Victorian imperialists of the similar sort of age. The position of Russia and Central Asia is that of all civilized states which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations, possessing no fixed social organization. In such cases, it always happens that the more civilized state is forced in the interest of the security of its

frontiers and its commercial relations to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character makes them undesirable neighbours. So let's talk about this region. Let's talk about the people who lived in it because it is a complicated picture. So bear with us. We're going to try and hold your hand and take you through this as best we can. I mean, the first thing to mention is that there are settled people and there are nomadic people historically in this region. We're talking about the area east of the Caspian Sea and north of the Pamirs. So there's a great region between what has been since the time of Catherine, the Great Russia, and northern Afghanistan. And this has areas of great fertility, such as a place we will be talking a lot about today, Fergana, which is where the emperor Babur was originally born. The opening lines of the Babonama have this lovely line saying, it is so fertile. And the pheasants are so fat that a single one. can make soup for 10 people. This is an exile writing in India at the end of his life, remembering the rich lands of his childhood.

I mean, these days, of course, I mean, it's known as that, well, in America, the Stans, but the Starns, and Starn means land of. It's from Persian Urdu, a stem. But we're talking about Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, that kind of region. And what I was saying about the sort of the settled and the nomadic people of this region, You have these wonderful terms to describe some of those who move around in caravan cultures, you know, the Great Horde, the Middle Horde, the Junior Horde, and then you have different types of people, you know, the Kazakhs are a people, the Uzbeks are a people. Turkmen.

And Kazakhs is the same word as Cossacks. Cossack, indeed. You've been around here. Can you just describe the geography to us and a little bit more about the different places, which now we have national boundaries for, but before. was this whole region in Central Asia. So I know quite well. My sister-in-law was the UN rep there.

And it turned out that, in fact, to fly from Delhi to Tashkent is a shorter plane ride than flying from Delhi to Mumbai. Really? It's so close. And of course, Kabul is even closer than that. We always forget how close to the north all these places are to northern India. And I went a lot when my sister-in-law was living there and traveled. I went to places.

We'll be speaking today. these great cities, Bokara, Kiva, Tashkent, Samakand, which are cities of great antiquity. They're cities that were conquered by Alexander the Great and were already old then. They're cities which have been centres of learning, civilisation, Islamic law, poetry, the study of mathematics and geometry, particularly in the early centuries CE, and saw some of the great intellectuals of the Persian world. Traditionally, historically, Persian was the lingua franca across this entire region, And as you said earlier, many of the greatest poets and thinkers of Persian history lived not in what is now Iran within the national boundaries that we see today on the map, but over this area, the Starns, which was historic Persia in ancient times.

But to call them sort of the Starns and to suggest that they are sort of this one amorphous, to use the word de jrothob, if you like, of existence, is to ignore actually how very different some of the peoples were in these places. So, you know, if you go to the Parmere Mountains, and much was made by the Russians at this time in the 1800s, the period of history that we're going to be talking about, those who were in the Parmias, the Tajiks, were much more Aryan. I mean, they used sort of the words similar to Aryan. You know, they are the sons of Alexander. Lots of green eyes, lots of brown hair. Blond and brown hair, and they've got fair skin. And so there is a great deal more empathy towards them than there is to those who have, you know, so that the Arab blood. Well, this was Persia and Persia's Iran is the same word as that. area. So it shouldn't be a surprise. Should we get stuck in then?

We're talking about Central Asia for a while in this podcast. So this is a land of arid plains, deserts, and what is the interest? Why would anybody want to be here? Well, it's fantastically fertile areas. I mean, for example, Fergana, where Babo was from, which is east and south of Tashkent, is as gorgeous as Kashmir. And it's interesting because I'd always, having read Babel, thought of visiting this area, People warned me off in my 20s saying it's now been turned into sort of cottonopolis by the Soviets.

There are smokestacks and belching factories everywhere. But in fact, the cotton industry has completely disappeared now because the Soviets overplanted a monocrop, all the land salinated. They ceased to be able to grow cotton there. And there's a lot of now completely dead soil where the old Soviet factories used to be. But the factories have been dismantled. A lot of the areas returned to sort of pastoral farming with goats and camp. too. And it's a most beautiful place to visit them. And geographically locate Fagana for those who don't know. Where is it exactly? Fagana is between Tashkent and the Chinese border at Kashgar. So it's this last

patch of fertile land before you enter Xinjiang and eastern China. This is all, as I say, to the east of the Caspian Sea and to the north of the Himalayas, the Pamirs and Afghanistan. A vast region. So there are natural borders here, thanks to mountains and rivers. But as far as Russia is concerned, the Orenberg line is very important. Now, remind us what the Orenberg line is. Yes. So the Orenberg line is where the Russian Empire stops really from the period of Catherine the Great for a hundred years. And it is the line which to this day marks southern Russia from the stands. and south of that, by the time we're talking about, which is now the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, you have three major powers dividing this territory between them.

You have the Sultan of Kiva, of Bukhara, and Kokand. And these three are often at war with each other. But what is very important is that they are technologically very backward, particularly in terms of military techniques. Occasionally, sepoys, fleeing. British rule and wanting to make names themselves, make their way through Afghanistan and emerge and do a little training. But these guys are still really fighting with matchlocks and the sort of weaponry that the late moguls were using in the late 18th century, which means, and this is the

important thing, that it's very, very easy for the Russians to make mincemeat of them in any military confrontation. Although, I mean, you say it's easy, but they do have to get around and they can't get around unless they have camels. And camels pose a little bit of a difficulty because, I mean, it's not just that everyone's got camels on tap, do they? Exactly right. And you and I have both been reading Alexander Morrison on this. And he's very good on how it's very difficult to conquer this region, not because there's military resistance or magnificent fortifications to stop you, but because you have to move through thousands of miles of desert. And in order to move one camel, you, through desert. You have to have another camel carrying its food. And so you have these massively

sort of exponentially growing camel caravans following. Two camels per person. Two or three or four camels per person. And then the more camels you have, the more camels you have to have to support the camels. So even a small force of one or two thousand men needs 20, 30, 40,000 camels to carry. And it's not an easy thing to gather, 20,000 camels. No. I mean, there is no place called camels are us where you just turn up. I mean, you have to round these things up. And it takes much. And then you have to get the fodder to feed them, and you have to feed them up. So in all this, if they can get through the desert and through this very inespitable territory, the Russians know that quite a small, highly trained, militarised force with modern weaponry and canister shells

and so on can destroy an army very easily. Getting there is the main problem. So let's talk about the really important characters during this very pivotal period, the 1850s, 60s and 70s. So we've got now a new Tsar who is in charge. This is Alexander the second, who Orlando Fiji told us in a previous episode, was known as Alexander the Liberator, because of what he would do for the serfs of Russia. And this is a young man who has grown up overpowered by a very dominating father Nicholas I, authoritarian, militarily obsessed. Alexander, though, has a different kind of moral intellectual compass, doesn't he? I mean, he's He's been sort of entrusted to the poet Vasili Zhikovsky, who's a humanitarian, he's a liberal,

who's a romantic, you might say. And I think this is something that Seabag mentions in his writing. He was the best prepared Romanov Tsar. And so even though he was quite emotional and at times absent-minded, he sort of had the best of every world and enough facets to deal with a modernizing world. Exactly that. And one of the things that baffles historians studying this is why do the Russians? end up conquering Central Asia under this man who's not a sort of gung-ho military imperialist. How is it that these tens of thousands of miles are conquered during his rule?

Historians have offered various ideas of why the Russians would want to move these camel caravans. Go to tell us about the cotton cannot. The cotton cannot. Tell us. So the old Marx's view is that everything is driven by the industrial complex and that the Russians wanted to conquer this entire region in order to sell their goods and grow cotton. But it doesn't seem to work historically because in the 1830s and 40s when this conquest is being made, cotton is not yet big business in Russia.

The dates are wrong. It just predates it completely. Yeah. This is a retrospective explanation saying we aren't really imperialists. We just tripped into an empire and it just doesn't hold water. And the second idea that they wanted to expand their markets doesn't really work because there's never been more than about apparently 2.5% of Russian exports go. going to Central Asia. So that idea doesn't work. The great game idea, which generations of historians have loved because it's such a kind of romantic notion, these gung-ho explorers in disguise,

crossing the Pamirs and so on, that also doesn't actually seem to be that realistic, because while the Russians and the British are certainly eyeing each other jealously and not wanting the other to move into their spheres of influence, both of them can't really get to the other because they haven't got the camels, there's mountains in between, and there's Afghanistan, between. So in actual fact, for all the talk about a great game, and while it's certainly something that both sides are aware of, practically, you're not going to get Cossacks riding down the Khyber Pass, much though, you know, people in Simla will sit up at night worrying about it for generations. But what you do have is a period of history where Russia has been humiliated

after the Crimean War. What you have is a period of time where you've got a new boy who's in charge, who wants to put his stamp of authority on his rule. And what you've got is a period of wanting to save face, more than that, not just wanting to save face, but wanting to be glorious again. And that is a, I mean, when you look at some of the documents that certainly Morrison has dug up from his research in the Russian archives, it is all about this that we have to show people we matter. We have to show the world that Russia is important. And there's two different things going on here. One is the orders from on high. And, you know, Russia is obviously very keen to encourage its borders to expand and seeing how easily Britain is doing that in various other theatres. Again, we mustn't forget

this, how easily the United States at this period is expanding right across the whole left-hand side of the United States. Between 1840 and 1880, the United States conquers, colonizes, and settles the entire left-hand half of America. And the Native American tribes are driven into everything. smaller and smaller enclaves and massacred over and over again. So Russia, looking at this, has a desire to be seen to be one of the great powers, and that is what in the 19th century great powers are said to do. But again, this crucial fact is that because the Central Asians are still armed with basically 18th century weaponry, and the Russians, however, to call it, they find it to get around, are armed with the latest mid-19th century rifles that can destroy

irregular armies of the 18th century sort in Central Asia. And Morrison gives a figure, he says that in the entire conquest of Central Asia, six million people in 1.5 million square miles. Only 675 million Russians are killed. Yeah. It's an extraordinary low figure. And so when you have the ability to do that without any cost, they will do it. Well, look, Alexander the Liberator, this news are, He appoints a very young man in the form of 26-year-old Count Nikolai Ignativ, who's going to lead the secret mission in 1858 to Central Asia to discover just how far they might be able to push out and how far the British have already pushed in in the region. And I love this story. I love this story so much. One of the first things he does is he goes to London, does he not?

Just the year before he's about to go to Central Asia and he's buying up all the maps. And buying up Burns' travelogue. He reads Alexander Burns. He runs is Travelog, Alexander Burns again, and he's buying up these maps. And then somehow the foreign officer's tipped off that there's this weird Russian guy. A clever Wiley Fellow, according to the intelligence report. Yeah, exactly. That's what they write. A clever Wiley Fellow who's buying up all these maps you might want to know about it. He's just sitting in secondhand bookshops and St. James is.

I don't think it's that sort of tricky this intelligence work. It's not that cloak and dagger, but they do notice. So they follow him around and he's very much described as this sort of Machiavellian figure, who is, you know, gathering Intel and needs to be watched. But in 1858, as I say, armed with these maps that he's bought in the streets of London and other things, he goes off, doesn't he, Central Asia? What does he find there, William? Just tell us what do his adventures teach him?

Well, because he's read Alexander Burns account, and should be said, Alexander Burns is self-glorifying account of him moving up the Indus with those famous Suffolk-Drey horses and the Lord Mayor of London's coach. He tries to do the same thing on the Oxus. and unfortunately for him he comes up against emir Nazrullah, who is this famously wily emir of Bukhara. And Nazrullah gets a very rough character assessment from a lot of the Raj travelogs. He's killed two famous British explorers called Stodot and Connolly who get to Bukhara, and they are beheaded in 1842 when the emir hears about the retreat from Kabul

and how the British could no longer exercise any power. And he just cuts the head off these two people after keeping them for a long time in this famous pit in Pekhara. And Ignatyev decides to court this guy. I have to put in here the famous thing that the Uzbek slavers do. We had that whole series on slavery without actually doing the slavers of Central Asia, which is an entire series.

And it's one we could have actually spent an episode on very profitably because it's an extraordinary story. But the particularly nasty thing that the slavers have Bekazer, up affected and the Uzbek slavers were famous for was they used to do slave raids on northern Afghanistan on areas like Mazo Sharif and Balt. And if you were captured by these guys, they were carpet makers and they had these long carpet needles, which they used to weave their carpets with. I'm feeling worried now. Yes. And they used to sew a rope, a thin rope with a carpet needle under your clavicle to connect you to the next man in the slave trade. So you couldn't

run away without ripping yourself apart. So you couldn't run away. And if you tried to run away, or if you didn't keep up, if you were weak and stumbling and slowing down the caravan of slaves heading back across the desert to Bacara, the pain of your cubicle being dislocated was so terrific that it would force you however sore and however exhausted you were. And if you were tied, for example, to the back of a saddle and stumbling with your hands tied in front of you. So they were a particularly nasty bunch of slaves. Can I just say, people can be so rubbish, can't they? I mean,

but this is the sort of thing, and it's true and Emir Nasrullah is actually enslaving as well as a lot of Afghans and selling them in the slave markets of Central Asia. He's also enslaving lots of Russians. And this obviously pisses off the Russians. Yeah, understandably so. But also gives an excuse to Ignatiev and so on.

So Ignativ is wooing him nonetheless, even though this man is really a very unpleasant character. Yeah. But he isn't wooed. He doesn't buy it, does he? I mean, he's not somebody to be flattered into giving away either Intel or land. So what does he do? He just stops Ignatiov. He gives him a nice welcome, gives him his presence and sends him back again, doesn't allow him to float his raft any further down the oxus than he's already got. So then when is the next push? Who tries again? And how do they try again?

It's Ignatiev again, isn't it? Who tries? So Ignatiev has brought this area very much into the focus of Imperial Russia. He is lorded in St. Petersburg. He's given medals. He's very much the Alexander Burns of his day. And he goes off on a mission to China. He goes on horseback to Beijing in the spring of 1859. He writes more books. And by the stage, he's become a major celebrity. So in 1860, he is back in Russia. He's got the order of St. Van der Meer. Because he's brought big chunks of China. So now they've got the taste for imperialism, haven't they? Exactly that. And he's shown in a sense how easy it is and how much prestige and honour you can get back home if you do this. So all the next generation of Russians on the Orenberg line dream now of being like Ignatyev and making their name in the

conquest of Central Asia. So the next character who wants to emulate the success of Ignatyev and make his name in the conquest of Central Asia is a character called Chernaev. And we're going to stop here. So join us after the break when we find out what Chenayev manages to do that his hero, Ignatif, does not manage to do. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the birth pangs of what will become a huge imperial drive in Russia with Ignativ, who has had his eye on Central Asia, but failed

to capture it. So it goes off to China and takes chunks of that instead. But it has started off this appetite within Imperial Russia that, you know, actually maybe we can get Central Asia as well. Maybe that could be ours as well. And 1865 becomes a very important year. And I think we should just focus on this place, Tashkent. Now, first of all, just tell us where Tashkent is and why it's important. So at the beginning of 1865, the southern border of the Russian Empire is still at Orenburg. And Tashkent is no less than 1,000 miles south of that. But it's very difficult territory. It's desert. It's difficult to get troops through it.

Now this character, Chenayef, General Mikhail Chenayev, who's an ambitious, impulsive veteran of the Crimean War, who's used to using the new rifles, canister shot, horse artillery, all that weaponry that Orlando Fijis was talking about being developed in the Crimean War, he's willing and able to take this new technology south a thousand miles to Tashkend. So Chennaev is a really interesting character because he has failure and success woven into his DNA, His father was one of those who was successful against Napoleon. He has those great victories in the clanking of medals in his family. And yet he was active during the Crimean War where Russia felt humiliated.

So here is a man who wants to prove himself, who wants to restore the honour that his father had brought to the family in many ways. And he hasn't got a very large force, which is really interesting, to adventure into this region. It's only 1,300 strong. again is very much powerful the course, because while they've got the modern weaponry, they haven't got the railway, they haven't got the modern transport. So they've got mid-19th century weaponry with all its ore and shells and artillery and all that kind of thing, but they're still

moving on camels through the desert. And so there's two different centres of power that Chennaev is eyeing up. Emir Nasrullah is in Bukhara, but he decides to go for Nasrullah's great rival, who is the Khan of Kokand. And I've been to Kokand. It's in Fagand. There's this wonderful palace with successive courthards, full of all knit-knacks imported both from Russia and from British India. And the Khan of Kokan has captured Tashkent.

Now, Tashkent is one of these ancient caravan cities. Tamerlane took it. Barbo's uncle is buried there. Lots of wonderful architecture looking very like Mogul Delhi. And it's this that Chennai aims for. He's going now for the Khan of Kukkand. I mean, on paper it doesn't look like a sensible idea, does it? There are 30,000 troops defending Tashkent.

And he's only got 1,300. But he knows that they've only got matchlocks. Yeah, exactly. There's just a superior firepower that he has at his disposal. What is also interesting is that those numbers do not look good to the Tsar. Who says, what are you doing? And he sends a telegram saying, just come back. This is not a good idea.

Do not, do not. I repeat, do not go. and attack Tashkent with those kind of numbers. But Cheneyev knows this telegram probably contains this order, so he doesn't open it. He just leaves it sealed and doesn't tell his staff that he's had a direct order from the Tsar, which he suspects it don't do it. And he just leaves it unopened, thinking that actually, you know what, if I can just do this, I can be glorious like my father.

And Cheneyev sets off from Orenberg with an amazingly small force of 1,0003. hundred troops, knowing this he's going to face people of about ten times that number in Tashkent. And his first engagement is a place called Auli Atta. And that falls almost without a single casualty, because as he casually remarks in a letter to his father, it was raining, and the Kokundi garrison's matchlocks were left unusable. That's it. Just soggy weather. Same thing at Plassy. At Plassy, the British had tarpaulins, which they covered their, their artillery, and the Mughals didn't.

And that's what won the British Bengal is what gets Chernaev all the way to the walls of Tashkent. But once he gets to Tashkent, he finds this is one of the great ancient fortresses of Central Asia. There are huge numbers of defenders. And he starts to siege. He cuts off the water. He does all the things that he's supposed to do. And he's still only got now, you know, just over a thousand troops. What does he do?

So he decides just to go for it. He has scaling ladders. and there's an incredible piece of luck when they make their assault. They first of all organize a distraction, a small force pretends to be attacking the back. So all the defenders go around to the back of the city. And as they're moving forward in the moonlight with their scaling ladders in the ready, they see a single century standing outside the walls. And this raises Chennau's suspicions.

And they capture the man and they ask him what he's doing there. and they prod him with their bernets. And he reveals that there's a secret passage hidden on the outside of the walls covered by felt. So no one can hear anybody. How interesting. Which leads into the city. And it leads up to a platform on the walls. So just at the moment that the guns start going off on the rear of the city and all the defenders are drawn off in that direction.

The Russians slip into the city, like the Greeks into Troy. They capture the walls. And there's this terrific fight. There's this figure in all the accounts, the priest. Oh, Father Malov. Tell us about Father Malov. Yeah, he's amazing. He's armed only with the large crucifix that he balks people on the head with.

And apparently stays after the conquest of Tashkent for the rest of his life, trying to make conversions to Orthodox Christianity in the city. But this again is one of these classic colonial conquests of a basically unarmed people or people armed with weaponry so antiquated that it just can't stand up. And this tiny force captures this great city in a single night. I have a question. Now, the Tsar said, don't do it. And he went and done it.

So is the Tsar happy or a bit annoyed that he's not being listened to? The Tsar's delighted and calls him the Lion of Tashkent and gives him all the medals. And this is very much the nature of the Russian expansion into Central Asia, exactly the same as the British in India. There is a major technological difference between the weapons used by the attackers and that used by the defenders. So officers on the spot can just take decisions and take risks and defeat armies ten times bigger than them.

And this is read in 19th century rhetoric as the superiority of Europeans, as the bravery of these fine Aryan stock and all this racist nonsense. In actual fact, it's just that one lot have got 18th century weapons, the other lot have got mid-nineteenth century rifles that can fire at double the length. And when you have these set-piece battles that follow for the capture of the next group of cities, Bokhara and Samakand, you have exactly the same thing happening, that these guys simply cannot defend themselves. And particularly this matter of range, if the army lines up, the matchlocks fire about 200 yards, but the modern Russian rifles can fire half a mile. And they just stay.

out of range of the defenders and shoot their way into them. Yeah, and they don't mind if it's not a sunny, lovely day. It's a duck shoot. They can do it in any weather. So, I mean, you said the Tsar was delighted, and yes, he was, and he did call him the lion of Tashkent, but they called him back to St. Petersburg because he's proven himself to not listen. He's been a slightly disobedient, naughty boy.

So he does get called back. That said, in the entire conquest, he lost only 25 Russian dead. Sure. Captured 10,000 miles of territory. It looks good on paper, but if you are, there's a Tsar, and you know that this is a guy who's just not listening, you know, I think it's true to say that Chenayev, although he's celebrated, his stock falls, plummets when he comes back to St.P. Because he's not allowed to go out, and they can't trust him to follow orders. He's deemed to be too impulsive, too proud and too ambitious, so they rein him in.

So what happens next? Who's they turn to you next and where are they turning to you next? Because now they've got a taste for it, they're making in raids into Central Asia. And as you say, there's these tiny casualties. They've just lost 25 troops to capture 10,000 miles of desert. And Cheneuve creates a great appetite for a sort of new, renewed imperial thrust into Central Asia. And the man who takes that forward is General Constantine von Kaufman. He amasses his troops and marches on Samakan, this ancient center of Central Asian culture. And the cost for this again is this really.

these ridiculous figures. There's only two Russian lives lost and 31 wounded in the taking of Samarkand. And tell us about Samarkand. Samakund being the great capital of Tamerlane, who had conquered Muscovy. So this for the Russians is a great sort of reversal of the tables of history. First, the golden hoard comes and attacks. Muscovy. Now Musco has come back and taken Samarkand. And as important as it is to the restoration of Muscovy, pride to take it, it is also crushing for the people of Central Asia, because Tamerlane is a hero to them. So to have his tomb suddenly seized by the enemy, I mean, that has got to have a

terrible effect on morale and also, you know, inspires fear of who are these people who are coming in with small forces and just wiping us out. And when you go to Samakhan today, you know, you go there and there is the tomb of Timelaan sitting in the middle of the amazing astronomy me that Ulubeg, his descendant built, all these extraordinary vast buildings built with the plunder of India, of Turkey. They defeat the Ottoman Turks to the taking of Moscow. So all this wealth and loot has been brought back to Samakhan, but now Samakhand has been taken with literally two Russian dead in the entire conquest. So all that's left is Eminazerla of Bukhara. They're not very nice man running Bukhara. I mean, how does that go? Does that go any differently to

the sort of the routes at Samarkand? No, exactly the same. It's a cakewalk. And then there's one final one to go, which is Kiva. And when you visit Central Asia today, Kiva is many people's favorite. It's in the middle of this vast desert, these ancient, ancient walls that look as if they're, you know, going back to the time of Alexander the Great, they slope and have these wonderful wooden struts coming out of it. It's pure Tolkien.

and 1869 to 73 is the period when the Russians wipe out this last remaining outpost of free Central Asia ruled by its own people. I mean, I've read somewhere that it's two and a half thousand years old, Kiva. All these cities are, you know, were old at the time of Alexander and are major centres of ancient learning. But the Russians just wiped the whole thing through in a matter of 10 or 15 years. and it seems like a very casual conquest because it's done with such ease and with such speed. But this really matters because this remains in Russian hands for 130 years and they've added to the Tsar's territory, 1.5 million square miles. I mean, we should say that when you have conquest on this level, although we're saying that

there are hardly any Russian casualties, that's not to say there aren't casualties because there are some dreadful massacres that take place. I mean, there's the massacre of Yomut, which takes place where, I mean, it is as banal as this, because they've had such an easy time walking into these places and taking these places, and the rain has fallen and matchlocks have got damp and all of that kind of thing. There is this one moment where they decide that, you know, the men need to have a little trot out, otherwise they're going to explode because they've been expecting to fire. And that is why you have this dreadful massacre that takes place in your mood, where men, women and children, in their hundreds, if not thousands, are taken,

gathered and shot. So again, you know, this is not an empire that is built upon only a few bodies. There is an awful lot of blood that sinks into the sand. And where does this leave Russia now after, you know, we're talking now, we're sort of in the 1880s now. So what shape is Russia in? So in this newly conquered Central Asian territory is finally deep. demarcated between Russia and Britain. The borders are drawn. The northwest Afghan border is established. The Russians take one Afghan fort at a place called Pungier, and Britain comes close to threatening war, so they both then sort of back down, and the borders delineated in 1885 and 1886. And the point that Alexander Morris makes, which I think is right, is that far from this being a sort of eternal

conquest of two rivals who fear each other, in actual fact, it's like, a club dividing up Asia between these two European powers. And the Russians are given their sphere of influence. The British are given their sphere of influence. Afghanistan has agreed to be a buffer zone between them. And it's all organised to the great profit and enrichment of the European powers at the expense of the people that live there. And also, I mean, it puts pay to this argument that often comes from modern day Moscow and Putin, which is, you know, the British have blood on their hands. You know, the Americans are modern-day imperialists. They have blood on their hands, but, you know, Russia's not been an imperialist country before. I mean, it has. These hands are not

clean. When you go to Tashkent today, there's still quite a large Russian population. There are these two parallel worlds that survive. There are Russian enclaves where there are ethnic Russians, there are Russian restaurants, Russian clubs. And relations are not bad at all. It's surprisingly easy. But the influence of this long, 100. 130 years of conquest is still, you know, very much evident in human form. In 1989, when the Soviet Empire fell apart, you had many of the Russians going back to what became the new borders of Russia, but many remained and they're still there. So there's been, in a sense, a permanent genetic fallout of this in a way that, you know, you don't find many Brits still

living in India, myself excluded. Apart from you. Apart from me. And you don't find many French at all in Al. Algeria, but there's still significant Russian minority in Tashkent and all over Uzbekistan. So we have one more episode to see us through to the peak of the Russian Empire, and no one better to take us there than Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy fought as we saw as a young man in the Crimea. He's in the Caucasus, fighting Imam Shemail, and his early works like the Cossacks are set

in these regions. So we're going to have Rosamund Barth. but on next week, talking about the literature of Russian imperialism. And it's not just Tolstoy, there's Pushkin, Lermontov, and a whole range of extraordinary Russian writers who have immortalized this, in a sense, far more than was done by British writers in India. I'm always amazed how thin the literary pickings are of English literature in India. There's Forster, Paul Scott, a little bit of thackeray and Kipling, but there's pretty thin stuff. While the literature Russian imperialism is Pushkin Nervant-Tof and Tolstoy, which is a much more formidable team. Anyway, we'll be returning next week with Rosamund Bartlett on Tolstoy.

So do join us then. Till then, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Durunpo.