Transcaspian Region

Transcaspian Region ( _ru. Закаспийская Область), or Transcaspia. The name given before 1924 to a Russian territory to the east of the Caspian Sea, bounded on the south by Iranian Khorasan and Afghanistan, north by the former Russian province of Uralsk, northeast by the former Russian protectorates of Khiva and the Bukhara and to the southeast by Afghanistan. Area, 212,545 sq. miles [ In 1897 (when the first, and only complete Russian Empire Census took place) the population numbered 377,416, of whom only 42,431 lived in towns; but, besides those of whom the census took account, there were about 25,000 strangers and troops ] . It corresponds roughly to the territory of present-day Turkmenistan.

History

Transcaspia was conquered by Russia in 1879-1885, in a series of campaigns led by Generals Lomakin, Skobelev and Mikhail Annenkov. The Transcaspian Railway was begun from the shores of the Caspian in 1879 in order to secure Russian control over the region and provide a rapid military route to the Afghan border. In 1885 a crisis was precipated by the Russian annexation of the Pendjeh oasis, to the south of Merv, which nearly led to war with Britain, as it was thought that the Russians were planning to march on to Herat in Afghanistan [ See G.N. Curzon "Russia in Central Asia" (London: Longmans) 1889 pp1-15] . Until 1898 Transcaspia was part of the Governor-Generalship of the Caucasus and administered from Tiflis, but in that year it was made an Oblast of Russian Turkestan and governed from Tashkent. The best known Military Governor to have ruled the region from Ashkhabad was probably General Kuropatkin, whose authoritarian methods and personal style of governance made the province very difficult for his successors to control. Consequently the administration of Transcaspia became a byword for corruption and brutality within Russian Turkestan, as Russian administrators turned their districts into petty fiefdoms and extorted money from the local population [ Richard A. Pierce "Russian Central Asia 1867-1917" (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1960 pp88-9 ] . These abuses were fully exposed by the Pahlen Report of 1908-10. During the revolutionary period of 1917-19 parts of Transcaspia were briefly occupied by British Indian forces from Meshed. The region was one of the last centres of Basmachi resistance to Bolshevik rule, with the last of the rebellious Turkoman fleeing across the border to Afghanistan and Iran in 1922-3.

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