Central Asian Uprising and the Last Days of the Tsar's Empire

In the summer of 1916, with Russia bleeding on the Eastern Front, Tsar Nicholas II signed a decree that broke half a century of colonial peace: the Muslim men of Central Asia, long exempt from service, were to be requisitioned for labour behind the lines. Within weeks the oases of Fergana and Tashkent were in uproar, Jizzakh lay in ruins under artillery fire, and the mountains of Semirechye had erupted into open war between Kyrgyz herdsmen and the Slavic settlers who had taken their land.Drawing on imperial archives, Duma investigations and the oral testimony of survivors, Ernesto Kavanagh traces the revolt from its roots in land seizure and corrupt intermediaries through the sieges of Przhevalsk and Turgai, the settler militias, General Kuropatkin's plan to clear Lake Issyk-Kul of its people, and the Urkun, the catastrophic flight of more than a hundred thousand refugees across the frozen passes of the Tian Shan into China.It is a story of empire and its blind spots, of a people driven to the edge of destruction, and of a memory suppressed for seventy-five years. Here is the gripping narrative history of the forgotten catastrophe that helped bring down the Russian Empire.