The decisions which triggered the Russian conquest of Central Asia were taken by the generation of soldiers and statesmen who came of age during the Napoleonic Wars – Nesselrode, Chernyshev, Speranskii and above all Count Vasily Perovskii, Governor of Orenburg during the 1830s. This chapter argues that Russia’s victory against Napoleon transformed the self-perception of the Empire’s ruling elite: Russia was now unquestionably a European Great Power, and as such the constant raiding, rebellion and other forms of ‘insolence’ on her steppe frontier could no longer be tolerated. An account of Russian relations with Persia and Afghanistan is followed by an overview of the empire’s relationship with the Qazaqs from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and the growing Russian frustration with the khanate of Khoqand, and above all with Khiva.

Count V. A. Perovskii’s winter invasion of Khiva was the first significant attempt to project Russian power deep into the settled regions of Central Asia – and it was a dismal failure. This chapter explains how the expedition was proposed by Perovskii and agreed in St Petersburg, the enormous efforts needed to collect sufficient supplies and sufficient camels to carry them, and the hardships suffered by man and beast alike during one of the coldest winters in living memory. The invasion failed because almost all the expedition’s camels died, underlining Russian reliance on these animals and the Qazaqs who bred and drove them. To add to the humiliation, most of the Russian slaves whose liberation was one of the ostensible goals of the expedition were released and brought to Orenburg by a British officer. The lesson the Russians learnt from this humiliation was that long-distance expeditions did not work – instead they turned to fortresses as the best means of conquering and controlling the steppe.

The Khanate of Khiva had a long history of cocking a snook at Russian authority. From the massacre of Bekovich-Cherkassky’s expedition in 1717 to the failure of Perovskii’s winter invasion in 1839–40, Khiva seemed the embodiment of ‘Asiatic insolence’ and intransigence. Turkestan Governor-General von Kaufman was determined to wipe out the memories of these early defeats and secure his own legacy as a great military leader. Easily securing consent from St Petersburg and brushing aside Khivan attempts to find a diplomatic solution, in 1873 he launched the most elaborate of all the Russian campaigns of conquest, with four different columns setting out from Krasnovodsk, Mangishlaq, Orenburg and Turkestan. Of these, the Krasnovodsk column ran out of water in the middle of the Qara-Qum desert and had to turn back. The Turkestan column, led by von Kaufman himself, almost met a similar fate in the Qizil-Qum, and was saved only by the skill of its Qazaq guides. Most of the fighting was done by the Orenburg and Manghishlaq columns, which reached the city of Khiva ahead of von Kaufman, who instructed them to wait until he arrived and could enter in triumph – with farcical consequences. The campaign ended on a grim note with the notorious massacre of the Yomud Turkmen by Russian forces, ostensibly designed to secure the internal authority of the Khivan Khan, Muhammad Rahim II, now a Russian puppet like his counterpart in Bukhara.