Russian conquest of Turkestan

The Russian conquest of Turkestan took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. The land that became Russian Turkestan and later Soviet Central Asia is now divided between Kazakhstan in the north, Uzbekistan across the center, Kyrgyzstan in the east, Tajikistan in the southeast and Turkmenistan in the southwest. Before the Russians came the north was held by the Kazakh steppe nomads and their ancestors while the south was approximately part of Greater Iran. The area was called Turkestan because most of its inhabitants spoke Turkic languages.

Outline: In the eighteenth century Russia gained increasing control over the Kazakh steppe. In 1839 they failed to conquer the Khanate of Khiva south of the Aral Sea. In 1847-53 they built a line of forts from the north side of the Aral Sea eastward up the Syr Darya river. In 1847-1864 they crossed the eastern Kazakh steppe and built a line of forts along the northern border of Kyrgyzstan. 1864-1868 they moved south from Kyrgyzstan, captured Tashkent and Samarkand and dominated the Khanates of Kokand and Bokhara. They now held a triangle whose southern point was 1000 miles south of Siberia and 1200 miles southeast of their supply bases on the Volga. The next step was to turn this triangle into a rectangle by crossing the Caspian Sea. In 1873 they conquered Khiva. In 1881 they took western Turkmenistan. In 1884 the Merv oasis and eastern Turkmenistan were taken. In 1885 expansion south toward Afghanistan was blocked by the British. In 1893-95 they occupied the high Pamirs in the southeast.

Geography: The area was bounded on the west by the Caspian Sea, on the north by the Siberian forests and on the east by the mountains along the former Sino-Soviet border. The southern border was political rather than natural. It was about 1300 miles from north to south, 1500 miles wide in the north and 900 miles wide in the south. Because the southeast corner (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) is mountainous the flat desert-steppe country is only about 700 miles wide in the south. Using modern borders, the area was 1,545,730 square miles, about half the size of the United States without Alaska. On the east side two mountain ranges project into the desert. Between them is the well-populated Ferghana Valley which is approximately the 'notch' on the west side of Kyrgyzstan. North of this projection the mountain-steppe boundary extends along the north border of Kyrgyzstan about 400 miles before the mountains turn north again.

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Wikipedia