Living at the crossroads of East-West and North-South trading routes, Central Asian peoples moved freely within their tribal and ethno-cultural areas for centuries. After the Anglo-Russian delimitation, however, boundaries became barriers to such movements. In the nineteenth century, the area turned into a sphere of rivalry between three empires:
Russia, Britain and, to a much lesser extent, China. This political contest, often referred to as the ‘Great Game’, pitted against each other three powers that, at first glance, had dissimilar interests.
The British, who were primarily concerned with India, arrived in Central Asia indirectly through their control of Afghanistan. Their sphere of influence, however, was limited to the plains north of the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, both because of a political and diplomatic backlash from Russia, and fierce Afghan resistance. The three bloody Anglo-Afghan wars dampened Britain’s colonial zeal.
These circumstances were fateful for the peoples of Movarounnahr (first and foremost for Tajiks and Uzbeks), who were involuntarily absorbed into the Russian orbit.
Russians invaded Central Asia in the nineteenth century. After defeating the Kazakhs, incorporating the steppe and occupying Tashkent, the Russians moved south, where they occupied the right bank of the Amu Darya. The Emir of Bukhara became a Russian vassal
in 1869. Russia also conquered the Central Asian states of Khiva and Kokand (Khuqand) and incorporated them into Turkistan General-Gubernatorial, with the capital at Tashkent.
Strictly-marked borders that divided two states and were drawn along indisputable lines were a constant preoccupation for colonial European powers in the nineteenth century. The major mapmakers were Russia and Great Britain. London sought to restrain the Russian advancement toward Britain’s Indian frontiers. The ‘Afghan buffer’ and its northern edge, the Amu Darya’s1 course from Lake Victoria (Zor Kul) in the Eastern Pamirs, served as a natural line of defense between the empires. At that particular time, the Amu Darya, a clear demarcation, was more useful than mountain ranges to decide who controlled what.
From a ‘scientific’ or historical point of view, mountain ranges were more appropriate boundaries, but the Europeans found these were difficult to map accurately. Many Britons of the ‘scientific frontier’ school saw the Hindu Kush as the natural defensive boundary of India, though British authorities disagreed (see Dacosta 1891). Had the British divided the territories along the Hindu Kush, the region of Eurasia would perhaps look completely different.
Negotiations for the division of the Russian and British spheres of influence concluded with the Russian-British Agreement of January 1873 and the consequent Demarcation of 1895. According to these agreements, Russia could not claim any territories south of the Amu Darya. Clarity of demarcation took precedence over any local concerns.
As a result, the new frontiers were artificial and not grounded in the ethnological realities of the region.
Through this process of drawing borders, Central Asia was alienated from its own cultural, historical, and economic traditions to serve the interests of distant powers playing a ‘Great Game’. Local rulers, emirs of Afghanistan and Bukhara, not to mention the peoples of the region, played only a passive role. The interests of Bukhara were ‘promoted’ by Moscow, while London provided support for Kabul. In search of new territories, the Afghan feudal lords turned their gaze to their northern neighbors — the khanates of Southern Turkestan, parts of which were under the nominal rule of the Bukharan Amir. In the 1850s and 1860s,
1 The Amu Darya, from its upper stream in the Pamir Mountains to its confluence with the Vakhsh River, is called the Panj River.
Afghans, with the active support of the British, conquered the bordering khanates of Balkh, Shibirgan, and Herat. In 1883, the independent Pamir governorates of Rushan, Shughnan and Wakhan, situated along both coasts of the Amu River, became part of Afghanistan with the help of the British. The Russian government strongly objected, pointing out that the transfer violated the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1873.
Following drawn-out diplomatic negotiations, military expeditions and skirmishes, the khanates of Rushan, Shugnan, and Wakhan located on the right bank of the river were definitively transferred to Russia (and then to Bukhara). In other words, Britain and Russia drew up the Afghan-Bukhara borders along the Amu Darya according to the 1873 agreement.
The Amu Darya became the dividing line between Russia proper and Afghanistan and no bridges were built across it. Up until the early twentieth century, the river served as the main artery of the region.
Steamship lines were only developed in the lower stream between Termez and Chardjui.2 The Afghan conquest of South Turkestan and their enslavement of local populations led to an economic crisis. The cities on the left (Afghan) bank of the Amu Darya gradually became deserted. After Afghans settled in Tashkurgan, which once had twelve thousand inhabitants, only about seven thousand remained. The rest fled to Bukhara.
As far as Chinese border policy in Central Asia is concerned, the Chinese never intended to rule this region directly, unlike the Russians, who regarded Central Asia as Russia’s trophy. The Chinese maintained a clear distinction between tributary areas and China proper. Chinese control over its northwestern frontiers was established by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), which gradually extended Chinese influence westward into the area of what is now the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, also known by its historical name, Eastern (or Chinese) Turkistan. China at the end of the nineteenth century was too weak to compete as an equal rival with Russia and England in Central Asia. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the border between China and the territory of today’s Tajikistan and Afghanistan was not clearly delineated. The Russian and British foreign ministers did not draw the
2 Today in Termez, the Soviet-built Friendship Bridge crosses the river to connect Uzbekistan to Khairatan in Afghanistan.
line eastward to meet the Chinese boundary in mountainous Wakhan, which borders not only China, but also the northwestern outermost tip of British India. The sides finally decided that their frontiers should not converge, providing Afghans with access to China. Wakhan formed a narrow wedge (a panhandle, fifteen kilometers wide in certain areas) separating Russian territories in Pamir from the northwestern borders of India (Hunza, Chitral, and Gilgit). As one of the senior British diplomats noticed, the Afghan Wakhan became ‘the long, attenuated arm of Afghanistan reaching out to touch China with the tips of its fingers’
(Habberton 1937:67). On the outermost eastern tip of the Wakhan corridor lie the Little Pamirs — an uninhabited alpine region — where the Hindu Kush, Pamirs, Karakoram, and Himalayas, as well as three empires, those of Britain, Russia, and China, met. Today the Wakhan corridor is an Afghan territory sparsely inhabited by traditional Tajik and Kyrgyz pastoralists that separates Tajikistan’s southern border from Pakistan’s north.
The borders established in the late nineteenth century are still maintained, although the states themselves have changed. The various Russian-British demarcations in 1895 created a Russian-Afghan frontier with a total length of 2,330 kilometers. With the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1924–1929, this boundary was transformed into the Turkmen (802 km), the Uzbek (140 km) and the Afghan-Tajik (1,334 km) borders. The Peking Treaty of 1860, which demarcated a line between the Russian Pamirs and Chinese Xinjiang, created the Russian-Chinese border. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this line was recognized as the legal boundary between China and Tajikistan (430 km).
By the end of nineteenth century the region was relatively peaceful, at least until the early years of the twentieth century, when the escalation of British-German and Russian-German disagreements led to increasingly tolerant relations between London and Moscow. The British-Russian agreement of 1907 was the second step on the way to completing the separation of spheres of influence. It laid the foundations for the creation of a military-political bloc between Russia, France, and Great Britain — the Entente.
While the compromise among the empires proved to be satisfactory in terms of preserving international security, the outcome for the local
peoples who inhabited the territories was more problematic. First of all, the compromise was designed to maintain the stability of the three colonial empires established by China, Russia, and Britain. Each part of Central Asia was expected to develop peacefully within its own imperial sphere. Naturally, none of the leaders who struck these agreements considered the possibility that changes might bring about the demise of their respective empires, and all were opposed to any developments that would allow independence and the creation of national ethnic states in Central Asia.
Until the ‘Bukharan revolution’ in September 1920, which resulted in the establishment of Soviet power in the region, the Afghans and Bukharans maintained close relationships. Until the arrival of the Bolsheviks in late 1920 Afghan subjects — merchants, laborers, and others — lived in Bukhara and Turkestan. Afghan labour migration to
‘Russian’ Central Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century was linked to the revival there of trade and economic growth as a result of Russian capital flow into Turkestan and Bukhara. However, the Soviet invasion and military strife forced these Afghans to return to Afghanistan.3 The central government of the Soviet Union established a firm monopoly on foreign affairs and no Central Asians were allowed to have contact with their Afghan brethren.