three years of almost incessant civil war, the Russians found themselves compelled to intervene. Kokand was invaded by a strong expeditionary force under General Kauffman, among whose lieutenants was Skobeleff, destined to win imperishable glory in subsequent campaigns. Short work was made of the Kokandis, who had dethroned their Khan and marched under his son's banner. They were routed with prodigious slaughter at Makhram, and the holy city of Marghilan was occupied without resistance. Defeats were afterwards administered to the native levies at Andijān and Nāmangān, and on 20th February the capital was seized by a force under Skobeleff. On the 20th March 1876 the Tsar, Alexander II., formally authorised the annexation of Kokand as a province of Turkestan under its ancient name, Farghāna. Skobeleff, the ardent soldier who had so greatly contributed to the reduction of the Khanate, became its first governor. Farghāna has a temperate climate, and has bred a hardy and warlike population. Owing to its remoteness from the centres served by the Transcaspian Railway, the Russian officials were not till lately subjected to the vigorous surveillance which is exercised over their colleagues in other provinces, and the reins of administration were slackly held. In the spring of 1898 the discontent inspired by alien rule, which had been sedulously fanned by the priesthood, burst into a flame. The ringleader of the movement was a Mohammedan monk named Ishan Mohammad 'Ali Khalifa, who claimed the hereditary dignity of Imām, or descendant of the Prophet. He announced that on himself had devolved the task of fulfilling a prophecy widely received, that during the last decade of our century an Imām would proclaim a Holy War against the infidel. As had been the case on the eve of the Indian Mutiny, a general rising had been planned, and a simultaneous massacre of the Russian troops throughout the province. History repeated itself in the result of their deeply laid conspiracy. India was saved by the premature outbreak at Mirat; and Farghāna by the impatience of the Ishan, who on 29th May attacked a Russian camp near Andijān before his sympathisers were ready for concerted action. The rising was quelled with much bloodshed on either side; 18 of the leaders were executed, and 350 were deported to North-Eastern Siberia. The recent opening of railway lines connecting the cities of Farghāna with Tashkent and Samarkand will render a recrudescence of the spirit of revolt wellnigh impossible. ! CHAPTER IV TURKOMANIA AND THE TURKOMANS THE reduction of Khiva marks a new era in the history of the Russian advance. The last semblance of organised opposition to the movement had disappeared, and the Tsar saw himself the unquestioned suzerain of the great Khānates. Westwards, his base was planted securely on the Caspian, where the port of Krasnovodsk, founded in 1869 by General Stolietoff, was connected with the Russian colonies in the Mangishlāk peninsula by a chain of strong places. The Amu Darya, that ancient boundary of nations, marked the limits of the new empire in the west. But the vast tract between sea and river was still unsubdued, and Russia's boundary marched with that of no organised state. Here lay the habitat of the Turkomans, a race with whom no peace or truce was possible, and the story of their subjection forms the final chapter in the history of the heart of Asia. The haunt of these untamed tribes may be described as a triangle, with Khiva as its apex; its sides the Caspian and the Amū Darya; and its base formed by a line drawn from the city of Balkh in Afghanistan to the south-eastern corner of the Caspian Sea. The area thus enclosed is not far short of 240,000 square miles, more than twice as great as that of the United Kingdom. The north portion is a means a desert of the Moser, A Travers l'Asie Centrale, p. 314. trackless waste; but it is by no 1 |