Babur’s favorite, but absolutely unverifiable, claim was that he was a lineal descendant of King Zahiruddin Babur (1483–1530). Official histories describe Babur as a great poet and prose-writer, but he didn’t get to be head of the most powerful Moghul state in the world by penning rhyming couplets; he did a lot of fighting along the way. Babur (the name means “lion”) had both the lineage and role models to become a warrior king; he was a direct descendant of Tamerlane (Timur) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother. In 1497, as the newly crowned king of Fergana, he built a shelter and private mosque on the eastern promontory of Suleiman’s Mountain, the rocky outcrop that rises above the city of Osh. In 1504, his small army entered what today is Afghanistan and captured Kabul, where he established himself as ruler. In 1525, he set out to conquer India, using heavy guns to defeat the numerically superior forces of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi and capture Delhi. He went on to defeat other armies and by his death in 1530 had established the Moghul dynasty in India.
It’s a steep thirty-minute climb to Dom Babura, the rebuilt version of the small house on Suleiman’s Mountain where Babur came to pray. The formation, with its five peaks, is the result of glacial movement, but it is easy to see why travelers believed the mountain, rising majestically from the middle of the wide, flat valley, was the work of God. For centuries, it has been a place of pilgrimage for Muslims. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad once prayed there and that a shrine marks the grave of Suleiman (Solomon), a prophet in the Qur’an. Women who ascend to the shrine and crawl through an opening will, according to legend, give birth to healthy children. As in other parts of Central Asia, Islam is casually mixed with older belief systems, particularly animism—the belief that natural physical entities including animals and plants, and often inanimate objects such as rocks, possess a spiritual essence. The trees and bushes on the mountain are draped with prayer flags. UNESCO, which added Suleiman’s Mountain to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2009, has recorded more than 100 sites with petroglyphs representing humans and animals, and 17 sites of worship, linked by a network of ancient paths. Each is reputed to have a medical specialty—to cure barrenness, headaches, or back pain, and even to give the blessing of longevity. According to UNESCO, the mountain is “the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millennia.”5
The Russians Are Coming
The Russian push into Central Asia began in the early 1700s with the first of several costly missions to subdue Khiva, the most western of the khanates. In 1735, having defeated the three major Kazakh tribal groups (the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes), the Russians built a forward base at Orenburg in the southern Urals. From the 1850s, in a close parallel to the advance of the American frontier (although in the opposite direction), Russia’s armies and railroad builders, followed by settlers seeking farmland, relentlessly pushed east from the industrial cities of the Urals into Siberia and southeast into Central Asia.
What motivated Russian expansion or, as Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac eloquently put it, “the prodigious projection of power over an interminable solitude”? Was it the fear of a revived Mongol empire that could threaten Europe or an impulse for historical revenge? Or a strategic calculation, almost two centuries before Sir Halford Mackinder advanced his theory that the Eurasian heartland was the geographical pivot of history? Meyer and Brysac suggest there were several reasons.
For an empire lacking natural boundaries, space itself formed a wall. The Yale scholar Firuz Kazemzadeh has pointed to Russia’s abiding horror vacui, the fear that a hostile power might populate the empty steppe. Nor can one ignore the Russian ambition to secure an overland passage to India, for purposes of commerce and possible conquest—the abiding British nightmare. Other analysts, judging these explanations inadequate, claimed the key lay in the recesses of the Slavic soul. “Russia was as much compelled to go forward,” Lord Curzon [the Viceroy of India] maintained, “as the earth is to go around the sun.”6
The more prosaic explanation is economic. In 1861, the Civil War in the United States cut off exports of American cotton, forcing Russia to turn to other regions to supply its growing textile industry. The climate and soil of the Fergana Valley were considered ideal for cotton growing. Russia also looked to the region for other raw materials and mineral resources, and as a new market for its manufactured goods.
As Russia pushed southward, the British in India were pushing—or rather probing—northward. For half a century, the two colonial empires competed for influence and trade in a vast region stretching from Afghanistan to Tibet in what became known to historians as the “Great Game.” The term came from a letter by a British army officer, Captain Arthur Conolly, serving in Afghanistan. Conolly was an extreme example of the Victorian Christian soldier, melding imperialism with humanitarian and missionary zeal. He believed his destiny was to unite the khanates of Central Asia under British protection to stem Russian expansionism and promote commerce with India, persuade their rulers to abandon slavery, and spread Christianity. In 1841, he set off for Bukhara where the emir had imprisoned and tortured another British officer, Colonel Charles Stoddart. The mission failed, with the emir having both officers executed, so Conolly’s main legacy was to name the contest between the two great powers. He wrote that he wanted to play a leading role in “a great game, a noble game” in Central Asia. The military historian Sir John Kaye, quoting from Conolly’s letters, was the first to use the term. It was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim about Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned, street-smart vagabond who foils a Russian plot in British India.
The pawns in the Great Game were the khanates. Conolly’s nemesis, the emir of Bukhara, and the khans of Khiva and Khokand were throwbacks to medieval despots, with lavish palaces and courts, harems and slave markets. More important, the khanates controlled trade routes, agricultural lands, and natural resources, and could send large armies into the field. Fortunately for the Russians, they were almost always fighting each other. One by one, they were conquered, annexed, or co-opted by the tsar’s generals. Between 1839 and 1895, Russia annexed approximately 1.5 million square miles of territory in Central Asia. It was, writes the historian Alexander Morrison, “an example of European expansion that in speed and scale is matched only by the ‘Scramble for Africa’ or the British annexation of India.”7 By World War I, the Russian Empire encompassed all of what today are the five republics of Central Asia.
By 1850, the Kazakhs, who had reluctantly agreed to Russian “protection” in the mid-eighteenth century, were subdued after a short-lived revolt to prevent Tatar and Cossack farmers from taking over their pasture lands. The khans of the three Kazakh hordes became puppet rulers in a Russian colony. To the south, Kyrgyz tribes, descendants of herders from the Upper Yenisey basin of what today is southern Siberia, were scattered throughout the mountains. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, successive waves of Mongol invaders had pushed them south, first into the Tian Shan and then to the Fergana and Pamir Alay. Although the khanate of Khokand was still the dominant regional power, the more serious threat came from the Russian armies advancing from the north. To protect their tribes, chiefs such as Kurmanjan Dakta decided to back the Russians. In 1862, a Russian army with support from Kyrgyz irregulars captured the Khokand fortress of Pishpek (now Bishkek); the fortresses of Turkistan, Zhambyl, and Shymkent fell in 1864, Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, and finally Khokand in 1876. With the conquest of the khanates, the northern mountains became part of the Russian imperial province of Semireche (Seven Rivers) while the south, including Osh, was absorbed into the province of Fergana.
MAP 2.2 Russian conquest of Central Asia (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
For almost a century, Russia’s southern frontier attracted a gallery of heroes and villains—rogue army commanders who willfully ignored orders from St. Petersburg and whose adventures ended in famous victories or utter disasters, intrepid explorers, railroad builders, entrepreneurs, missionaries, exiled writers, spies, and adventure-seekers on the run from the law, their families, or society in general. The frontier was the place where fame and fortune was won or