On the southern side of the mountains society evolved in response to Russian rule and the social changes that it brought. The great reforms brought an end to serfdom in Georgia, creating a crisis for much of the Georgian nobility. At the same time the slow spread of education led to the formation of a Georgian intelligentsia, liberal in politics and determined to preserve and continue the national culture. A few of the younger generation were already attracted to Russian populism, and in the 1890s the first Georgian Marxist groups appeared in Tiblisi and Baku. Similarly the Armenians formed a local business class and intelligentsia, both with centers in Tiblisi and Baku rather than Erevan, still a sleepy provincial town. For Russian Armenians the great issues were the condition of the Armenians across the border in the Ottoman territories and increasing Russian pressure on the Armenian Church. The increasing nationalist radicalism of the Armenian intelligentsia led to the formation of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) party in Tbilisi in 1890, a nationalist party with a mildly socialist program. Though its main opponent was the Ottomans, the Dashnaks quickly attracted the enmity of the Russian authorities.
In spite of slow economic growth, development in Trancaucasia remained on the level of peasant agriculture, artisan production and trade with one major exception: Baku. The great irony of Russian Transcaucasia was that it did eventually provide a great economic benefit to the empire in the form of the Baku oil fields. Local producers, mostly Armenians, already exploited the oil in a small way for lighting and other purposes, but by mid century more modern drilling technology appeared, some in local or Russian hands, but the Russian branch of the Swedish Nobel family became the main producer, selling kerosene as fuel for lamps all over Russia. The American Rockefellers joined them, but Nobel remained dominant until the revolution. The result was to produce a modern, European type city on the shores of the Caspian, populated mainly by Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Azeris. Until 1905, the Azeris themselves showed little interest in secular politics or new ideas, but beneath the surface they too were influenced by the changes emanating from Baku.
CENTRAL ASIA
Russia had started to move south into Kazakhstan in the eighteenth century, but until the Crimean War its main activity was the building of border stations and trying to maintain influence among the various tribal rulers of Kazakhstan. Attempts to make a more permanent penetration were failures. Only in 1853 did the Russians manage to seize the small fort of Ak Mechet on the Syr Darya near the Aral Sea, on the south side of the Kazakh steppe. Nothing further happened until 1860. The driving force behind the expansion of Russia into Central Asia was the army and Ministry of War, operating partly out of the need to control the frontier in Kazakhstan and partly out of fear of British expansion into and beyond Afghanistan. The immediate context was the decision to maintain a fortress line south of the Kazakh steppe, on the northern borders of Central Asia proper. This meant seizure of the forts built by the khans of Kokand to control the southern Kazakhs, and put Russia into conflict with both Kokand and Bukhara. In 1860–1864 the Russians took control of the Kokand forts on the southern fringe of the Kazakh steppe, and then moved south to the Central Asia cities. Acting on his own initiative but with the general approval of the Ministry of War, General Mikhail Cherniaev took Tashkent in 1865, giving Russia a stronghold in the rich and well-watered Ferghana valley, Kokand’s base. The largely Uzbek Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand were old-fashioned and weak even by the standards of the Near East in the nineteenth century and soon fell to Russian arms. The khanates’ attempts to fend off the Russians only led to more defeats for them and in 1876 the whole of Kokand fell under Russian rule. Bukhara and Khiva were reduced to Russian protectorates on the model of the native states of British India, and in 1881 general Mikhail Skobelev eliminated the last resistance among the Turkmens. The Russian Empire now stretched to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. The conquest was achieved at a low cost to Russia, only a few hundred soldiers died over the years of fighting. The soldiers of the Khanates were not used to European warfare and though numerous and brave, could not stand up to disciplined troops. Thus the largest problems for the Russians were logistic: learning to transport men and equipment over arid steppes and actual deserts, coping with intense heat in the summer and cold in unsheltered steppe in the winter. Fortunately, for all the British concern about Russian expansion, Central Asia was just too far away for the authorities in Delhi and London to try to counter the Russian moves. Iran and Afghanistan separated the Russian possessions from the British and the Ottomans as well. That is not to say that Britain was not concerned by Russian policy, obsessed as it was by the specter of losing India. The result was the continuation of the long “cold war” between the two empires – a situation that caused immense problems for Prince Gorchakov at the Russian foreign ministry, for his focus was stability in Europe. Thus the army often acted without informing him of its moves until it was too late for him to object.
The Russian colonial administrators, with general Konstantin von Kaufman at their head, were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Caucasus, which they saw as a narrowly military approach to empire. Instead they were going to imitate the master imperialists, their English rivals, and build a modern empire. Central Asia was to be slowly modernized by building European infrastructure, giving modern education to the natives, and encouraging or directly setting up investments that would benefit the empire. The great idea was the development of cotton growing, already a major crop, to supply the Russian textile industry. This project enjoyed modest success, but only by the early twentieth century. All these plans brought a small measure of modern society to Central Asia, one of the poorest and most backward parts of the Muslim world. Those modern elements, however, had other effects, for they called into being a small local intelligentsia with some modern ideas.
Figure 15. Nomadic Kirghiz (Kazakhs) around 1900.
The development of the local intelligentsia was a response not just to Russian rule and its consequences but also to developments among other Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire and beyond. One current was pan-Turkism, the idea that all Turkic speaking people were really one nation, propounded by the Crimean Tatar aristocrat Ismail Bey Gasprinskii. Gasprinskii advocated a modernized state and modernized Islam, but his views on the unity of the Turkic peoples raised the suspicion in St. Petersburg that he was essentially furthering Ottoman foreign policy aims against Russia. Another trend, influential also in Central Asia was jadidism, from the Arabic work jadid (“new”). Jadidism began in the late nineteenth century among the Muslims of British India, who believed that a modernized Islam would be closer to the original inspiration of Mohammed, stripped of the accretions of centuries in between. Like Gasprinskii, the jadidists wanted a modern education system that went beyond rote memorization of the Koran in Arabic and the study of classic Islamic texts. They also wanted many of the features of modern society, which they did not see as contradictory to the Islamic spirit, if not to the Islamic practice of their time. These ideas soon spread among the Volga Tatars, living as they did among Russians who had already achieved a more modern society than that of the Tatars. The Volga Tatar merchants had been for centuries the intermediaries in trade between Bukhara, Khiva, and Russia, and now many came to settle in Central Asia under the aegis of the Russian Empire. They found an audience among the local intelligentsia, which began to try to put their ideas into practice. In the Central Asian cities the only result was the creation of a few small cultural circles, but it was the beginning of modern nation building.