Friedrich Engels

The Advance of Russia into Central Asia

Written about 8 October 1858.
From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 5471 of 3 November 1858, leading article]

A few weeks ago we reported on the immense advance which Russia has accomplished in recent years in Eastern Asia, on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean. We now direct the attention of our readers to a similar advance by the same power in another region, in Central Asia.

The probability of a collision between the two great Asiatic powers, Russia and England, somewhere halfway between Siberia and India, of a conflict between Cossacks and Sepoys on the banks of the Oxus, has been frequently discussed ever since 1839, when England and Russia simultaneously dispatched armies to Central Asia. The peculiar defeat of these armies – a defeat caused on both sides by the harshness of the country and its climate – robbed these speculations of interest for a time. England avenged her defeat by a successful but fruitless march on Kabul. Russia appeared to pocket her disgrace; but how little she abandoned her plans, and with what success she attained her aims, we shall soon see. When the war just past broke out, the question arose afresh whether a Russian advance on India was feasible; but at that time the public knew little where the Russian outposts stood and where their advanced patrols were reconnoitring. Indian newspapers occasionally carried notes about reported Russian conquests in Central Asia, but they were ignored. Finally, during the Anglo-Persian War of 1856, the whole question was debated again.

Meanwhile, things have been changing rapidly in Central Asia of late, and continue to change.

When Napoleon, in 1812, sketched Moscow on his map as the base of operations for a campaign against India, he was only following Peter the Great. As early as 1717, this far-sighted prince, who laid down for his successors every possible direction for conquest, sent an expedition against Khiva, which naturally proved fruitless. For a long time the Turanian steppes remained untouched by Russia; but in the interval the land between the Volga and the Ural River was populated with Cossacks, and the Cossack line was established along this river. Yet beyond this river Russia’s suzerainty over the three hordes or peoples of the Kirghiz remained purely nominal, and Russian caravans were plundered by them and by the Khivans until, in 1833, Russia dispatched General Vasily Perovsky as commander-in-chief to Orenburg. He found Russia’s commercial relations with the interior and the south of Asia completely interrupted by the plundering nomads, so that even the military escorts which had been assigned to the caravans for their protection in previous years had not sufficed. To put an end to this, he first organised mobile columns against the Kirghiz, and very soon afterwards began to establish Cossack military stations in their territory. Within a few years he thus brought them under the actual control and dominion of Russia, and then he set about the old plan of Peter the Great against Khiva.

Having received the Emperor’s permission, he organised a force roughly of the strength of an infantry division (8,000 men) with numerous units of semi-regular Cossacks and irregular Bashkir and Kirghiz cavalry. Fifteen thousand camels were assembled for the transport of provisions across the desert steppes. To undertake the expedition in summer was out of the question on account of the lack of water. So Perovsky decided on a winter campaign and set out from Orenburg in November 1839. The result is known.

Snowstorms and unusual cold ruined his army, killed the camels and horses, and forced him to retreat with very heavy losses. And yet, outwardly, the undertaking fulfilled its purpose; for while England has never been able to avenge the murder of its ambassadors Stoddart and Conolly in Bukhara, the Khan of Khiva released all Russian prisoners and sent an embassy to St. Petersburg to sue for peace.

Perovsky then set to work to prepare a line of operations across the Kirghiz steppes. Within eighteen months, expeditions of scientists and engineers were busy, under military protection, surveying the whole country north of the Jaxartes (Syr-Darya) and the Aral Sea. The nature of the soil, the best localities for roads, and the best sites for large wells were explored. At short intervals these wells were bored or dug and surrounded with fortifications of sufficient strength to resist any attack of the nomadic hordes, and of sufficient extent to store considerable supplies. Karabutak and Irgis on the river of the same name served as centres of defence in the north of the Kirghiz steppes; between these and the towns on the Ural River the routes are marked every ten or twelve miles by smaller forts and wells.

The next step was taken in 1847, when a fort was erected on the Syr-Darya, about 45 miles above its mouth. The fort was named Aralsk. It could accommodate the garrison of a battalion and more. It very soon became the centre of an extensive Russian settlement of agriculturalists on the lower part of the river and on the adjacent shores of the Aral Sea; now Russia formally took possession of the whole country north of that sea and the Syr-Darya delta. In 1848 and 1849 the sea was for the first time carefully surveyed, and a new group of islands was discovered and immediately designated as the headquarters of the Aral steam flotilla, the construction of which was begun without delay. Another fort was erected on an island commanding the mouth of the Syr-Darya. At the same time, the line of communication from Orenburg to the Aral Sea was further strengthened and completed.

Perovsky, who had retired from his post as commander of Orenburg in 1842, now resumed it and in the spring of 1853 advanced with considerable forces to Aralsk. The desert was crossed without great difficulty, and now the army marched up the Syr-Darya, while a steam vessel of shallow draught accompanied the troop movement on the river. Arriving at Akmetchet, a fortress about 450 miles upstream belonging to the Khan of Kokand, the Russians took it by storm and immediately transformed it with such success into their own stronghold that an army from Kokand suffered a complete defeat when it attacked Akmetchet in the following December.

While in 1854 the attention of Europe was directed to the battles fought on the Danube and in the Crimea, Perovsky advanced from his newly won base of operations on the Syr-Darya with 17,000 soldiers against Khiva; but the Khan did not await his arrival on the Oxus. He sent envoys to the Russian camp, who concluded a treaty by which the Khan of Khiva recognised the suzerainty of Russia. He ceded to him the right to decide peace and war, furthermore the supreme power over life and death, as well as the right to fix the caravan routes, taxes and customs duties, and to make regulations for trade in general throughout Khiva for all time. A Russian consul established his seat in Khiva and at the same time assumed the function of a supreme arbiter in all political affairs of Khiva, an arbiter responsible to the Russian government.

With the submission of Khiva, the conquest of Turan is essentially decided; perhaps it has by now been actually decided as well. The Khans of Kokand and Bukhara have likewise sent envoys to St. Petersburg. The treaties concluded with them have not been published, but they may be guessed at quite easily. Whatever independence Russia may be inclined to leave to these tiny states, whose sole strength lay in their inaccessibility, which now, at least for Russia, no longer exists, that independence has only a nominal character, for a force of about 20,000 men, dispatched from Khiva or Akmetchet against the fertile valleys of Upper Turan, would amply suffice to suppress any attempt at opposition and to march from one end of the country to the other. That Russia has not been idle in these regions since 1854, we may take for granted – however much she keeps her doings secret – and after her rapid, silent and persistent advance into Turan over the last twenty-five years, one may expect with certainty that her flag will soon wave over the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush and the Bolor Tagh.

The immense value of these conquests, from the military standpoint, lies in their significance as the nucleus of an offensive base of operations against India. And indeed, in the face of such an advance of the Russians into the centre of Asia, the plan of attacking India from the north leaves the realm of vague speculation and assumes something like a definite form. The tropical regions of Asia are separated from those parts belonging to the temperate zone by a broad desert belt that runs from the coasts of the Persian Gulf right across the continent to the sources of the Amur. Leaving the Amur country out of consideration, this belt was, until quite recently, almost impassable for armies; the only conceivable route through it is that from Astrabad on the Caspian Sea via Herat to Kabul and the Indus. But since the Russians are stationed on the lower Jaxartes (Syr-Darya) and on the Oxus (Amu-Darya), and military roads and forts supply water and provisions to a marching army, the Central Asian desert no longer constitutes a military obstacle. Instead of the one incomplete route from Astrabad via Herat to the Indus, Russia now commands three different routes which, at no distant date, may be fully prepared for the march of an army. In the first place, the old route via Herat remains, which, as things now stand, can no longer be closed to Russia; secondly, the Oxus valley from Khiva to Balkh; thirdly, the Jaxartes valley from Akmetchet to Kokand, from where the force could push across a well-watered and populated country to Samarkand and Balkh. Herat, Samarkand and Balkh would form a main base of operations against India. Balkh is only 500 miles from Peshawar, the north-western outpost of the Anglo-Indian empire. Samarkand and Balkh belong to the Khan of Bukhara, who is just now in the power of Russia, and with Astrabad (which is either now occupied by the Russians or may be occupied by them any day) and Balkh in the hands of Russia, Herat cannot be withheld from her grasp whenever she chooses to seize it. Once this base of operations is really in Russian possession, England will have to fight for her Indian empire. From Balkh to Kabul is scarcely farther than from Kabul to Peshawar, and this one fact shows how narrow the neutral space between Siberia and India has now become.

The fact is that if the Russian advance continues at the same pace and with the same energy and persistence as during the last twenty-five years, we shall within ten or fifteen years hear the Muscovites knocking at the gates of India. Once they have crossed the Kirghiz steppes, they will reach the relatively well-cultivated and fertile regions of South-East Turan, the conquest of which cannot be disputed with them and which is easily capable of supporting an army of fifty or sixty thousand men for years on end

, an army strong enough, should the occasion arise, to march as far as the Indus. In ten years such an army can completely subjugate the country, protect the building of roads and the colonisation of a huge territory by Russian crown peasants (as is now happening on the Aral Sea), strike terror into all the surrounding states, and prepare the base and line of operations for an Indian campaign. Whether such a campaign will ever be undertaken depends on political eventualities which are now only the subject of remote speculation.