History History

From 545 B.C. onwards, the Persian king Cyrus the Great set out on a campaign against the Scythian archers, which he subjected to five years of campaigning. Sogdiana, Bactria and Khorezm became three of the satrapies of the Achaemenid Empire, and were included under the name Touran. Under the Achaemenid dynasty, the Persian Empire was already traversed by a network of royal roads and had a very elaborate mail system, consisting of relays and guard posts, and trade already existed in Eurasia. Lapis lazuli, copper and incense were traded there.

In 330 B.C. the Greek army seized the glorious Susa, Persepolis and Babylon, and Alexander decreed himself heir to the illustrious Cyrus. The Persian Empire, which had just fallen under the blows of the young conqueror, had unified the entire known East. In Central Asia, Alexander passed the legendary Oxus, the Amu Daria in flood, so wide that the Greeks took the river for a sea, then he seized Maracanda (Samarkand) where he met the fiercest resistance. Alexander then seized Tribactra (Bukhara), concluded a peace agreement with the Saka neighbours on the Tashkent side, and founded a new Alexandria at the northern end of his journey, at the site of present-day Khojent in Tajikistan.

As early as 655, the Sassanid Empire disappeared, paving the way for the Arabs to present-day Central Asia. Samarkand first fell in 712. His prince capitulated, converted to Islam and declared himself vassal of the Caliph. During this first Arab campaign in Sogdiana, Muslim troops reached Syr Daria and seized Kesh (Tashkent) and Ferghana. To accelerate conversions, the Arabs decided that converts to Islam would be exempted from taxes. The result was disastrous for the governor's finances, who, after a wave of conversions, suddenly found no more taxpayers. In Sogdiana, the situation became anarchic. Abu Salim, the new governor of Khorassan, resolved the problem with scimitar blows and, at Talas in 751, annihilated the Chinese army which, taking advantage of the general disorder, tried to break through from the north.

The capital of the Samanids, Bukhara, became an important centre of Islamic culture, and the city was nicknamed "the pearl of Islam". But the Samanids remained in power for only a short time, overthrown by one of their vassals, Mahmoud of Ghazni, a Turkish family from Afghanistan, at the end of the 10th century. In the middle of the 11th century, the empire controlled by Mahmud of Gahzni was again invaded by the Seljuks, who in turn were swept away by the Mongolian invasion.

In 1206, Genghis Khan became the supreme khan of all the Mongolian tribes together. It was the beginning of an adventure that would lead a nomadic people, horsemen and archers who knew nothing about writing, cities or agriculture, to the creation of the greatest empire of all time. Mongolia became the base for the conquests of Genghis Khan, who led his first expeditions against China. At the end of this conquest, Genghis Khan turned to the state of Khorezm, at the time the main power of the Muslim East, stretching from the Aral Sea to the margins of India. An army of several hundred thousand men entered the Khorezm in 1221. This first step into the Muslim world was followed by many others. The armies of Genghis Khan seized Khojent, Nurat, Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Herat..

The peace and then the torpor that followed the destruction were conducive to trade and evangelization, and many Westerners set out to discover an unknown world. Many embassies headed eastward. The empire of Genghis Khan was so secure that it was said that a young girl carrying a gold platter on her head could cross it without fear... In 1272, two Venetian merchants, Nicolo and Matteo Polo, accompanied by their son and nephew Marco Polo, left for China, the "land of the Sères". They crossed Central Asia, passing through Balkh, Pamir and Kashgar. " The Devisement of the World " is Marco Polo's account of these twenty-five years of travel: a tale teeming with fantastic characters and an adventure novel. It met with enormous success and made Marco Polo an almost mythical character.

Genghis Khan was long dead when, in the 14th century, a new conqueror appeared: Timour, nicknamed Tīmūr Lang (Timour the Gimp), a nickname that the Europeans would transcribe as "Tamerlan". Claiming a distant kinship with Genghis Khan, Timur was proclaimed Emir of Transoxiana in 1370, and spent the rest of his life annexing neighbouring states. Between two conquests, Tamerlan returned to his beloved city, his jewel, Samarkand, the new capital of his empire. It was a capital with all the attractions: palaces, mosques, mausoleums, but also and above all he had a large bazaar, merchant domes and caravanserais built there. It was a golden age for the Silk Road: everything could be found in the markets of Samarkand. Fabrics and fabrics were of an extraordinary variety: multicoloured silks, damask, taffeta, satin sheets, gold embroidered silks from China, velvet, precious woollen fabrics from Europe, plain or printed cottons from India. There were also furs from Siberia, Tatar leathers, porcelain from China, knives from Damascus, rubies and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, spices, fruits and vegetables. Samarkand, with its gardens and dazzling blue domes, became a city of legend.

The Chaybanids, who called themselves the Uzbeks, drove out the last Timurids to settle their capital in Bukhara, and the traders followed suit. But the conquest of Chaybani Khan, accompanied by the migration of a whole people, did not prevent Central Asia from entering into the shadows. In addition to the military collapse of the Timurid Empire, the commercial collapse of the great caravan routes was compounded by competition from the sea routes. It was now in the ports of Persia that goods for China transited. As Central Asia was no longer the gateway between East and West, there was a gradual reduction in trade tax revenues. Revenues were weakening, and irrigation systems were deteriorating due to lack of funds to maintain them.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, the cities of Central Asia had lost all their lustre. The Russian propaganda, seeking to justify its future conquest, would report a backward and feudal region. There were three Uzbek khanats: Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand, eternal and mortal rivals. They fought over the entire area halfway between the two capitals, around Khojent and to the south-east of that city. The khanate of Bukhara also regularly disputed the portion of territory south of Amu Darya with the khanate of Khiva, while the latter tried to defend itself against the Turkmen raids in the west by regularly invading their territories. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Russians had no difficulty in subduing the whole of Central Asia.

The Russian Empire laid the foundations for a policy that was continued and even amplified by the Soviets, tending to make Central Asia a zone with high agricultural yields, favouring cotton cultivation. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was felt by the reformist Muslims as an opportunity to get rid of the Russian colonial yoke. In Kokand, an independent government was formed, but it lasted only a few months. The nationalists were massacred by the Red Army without a moment's hesitation. General Frounze seized Khiva and Bukhara in 1920. It was more difficult for him to defeat the basmatchi ("brigands" in Uzbek), the rebellion led by Enver Pasha in 1921, whose home was in the Ferghana Valley. Five Soviet socialist republics had emerged, but the real power was held by the Russians.

With Stalin, new border lines were created, favouring Turkish-speaking countries in general and Uzbekistan in particular, to the detriment of Tajiks, who spoke Iran. The Tajiks effectively lost Bukhara and Samarkand, and a third of their population was attached to Uzbekistan, while the Uzbeks accounted for a quarter of the population of Tajikistan. Uzbekistan was initially formed by the union of the two republics of Bukhara and Khiva, to which the autonomous republic of Karakalpakia was added in 1936. Stalin, a former Commissioner for Nationalities, knew how to subdue these new states: elimination of local elites, especially religious ones, forced sedentarization and imposition of Russian as the official language. The problematic division of the territories systematically imposed Moscow as an arbiter.

Compared to other parts of the Soviet Empire, Central Asia during the Brezhnev period appeared to be particularly calm. But the formidable resources of gold, gas and uranium, combined with the ever-increasing income from cotton exports, encouraged the emergence of local mafias, and corruption took hold at all levels of power and administration, through the typical Central Asian clan organization, which Moscow had never managed to eradicate. This situation came to light with the "cotton scandal" in 1983, in which the entire Brezhnev entourage was implicated. Behind this scandal there was already a Central Asia where every state was prey to clan wars and the ambitions of mafia gangs.

Independence in Central Asia was self-evident when the Soviet Empire collapsed. Uzbekistan celebrated its independence on ¹ September 1991. President Islam Karimov, former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, was the first president and remained in power for 25 years. The new sovereign republics of Central Asia very quickly wished to favour the national path. Russia remained an essential partner in the decision-making process and, for some, in the military field. The arrival of the Americans during the operations against Afghanistan in 2002 was perceived by some as a disruptive element, by others as a means of counterbalancing the still important influence of Moscow, not without displeasing the Russian capital, which has constantly been reclaiming its prerogatives in the region.

With the brutal death of President Islam Karimov after the Games, a new era is beginning for Uzbekistan, which is finally emerging, after 29 years of independence, from the economic model dictated by the Soviets and extended by the first Uzbek president for three decades. The end of the cotton monoculture, the beginning of economic liberalization, and the controlled modernization of political life. The new President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is now basing himself more on the Kazakh or Azerbaijani model to boost the country's economic development, in particular by opening up national wealth to exploitation by large international firms rather than keeping it for the sole use of enriching a clan. It remains to be seen whether its policy will succeed in stemming a difficult economic situation in which inflation makes daily life complicated for many Uzbeks.