The Russian advance into Central Asia was led by two veterans of the Crimean War. One was Mikhail Cherniaev, who had fought against the Turks on the Danube in 1853 and had distinguished himself for his bravery at Inkerman and Sevastopol, before being transferred to defend Russian colonists against the raids of the Central Asian tribes on the steppes of southern Orenburg. From 1858 Cherniaev began launching his own raids deep into the territory of Turkestan, destroying Kirghiz and other hostile tribal settlements and supporting rebellions against the khanates of Khiva and Kokand by other Central Asian tribes who were willing to declare their allegiance to Russia. Cherniaev’s military initiatives, quietly supported but not endorsed officially by the War Ministry, led by stealth to the Russian annexation of Turkestan. In 1864, Cherniaev led a force of a thousand men across the steppes of Turkestan to occupy the fortress of Chimkent. Joined by a second Russian column from Semipalatinsk, they then seized Tashkent, 130 kilometres to the south, effectively imposing Russian rule on this vital power-base of the Central Asian cotton trade. Cherniaev was awarded the St George Cross and appointed military governor of Turkestan in 1865. After angry diplomatic protests by the British, who were afraid that the Russian troops might continue their advance from Tashkent to India, the Russian government disowned responsibility for the invasion carried out by Cherniaev. The general was forced into retirement in 1866. But unofficially he was received as a hero in Russia. The nationalist press proclaimed him the ‘Ermak of the nineteenth century’.bi
Meanwhile, the conquest of the Central Asian steppe was carried on by General Kaufman, a second veteran of the Crimean War, who had led the sappers at the siege of Kars before becoming Miliutin’s chief of engineers at the War Ministry. Kaufman replaced Cherniaev as the military governor of Turkestan. In 1868 he completed the conquest of Samarkand and Bukhara. Five years later Khiva also fell to the Russians, followed by Kokand in 1876. Left in the hands of their respective khans as far as their internal government was concerned, but subject to the control of the Russians in their foreign relations, Bukhara and Khiva became essentially protectorates along the lines of the Princely States of British India.
Cherniaev and Ignat′ev became leading figures in the pan-Slav movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Russia’s turn towards the East, pan-Slavism was the other main reaction by the Russians to their defeat in the Crimean War, as their feelings of resentment against Europe led to an explosion of nationalist sentiment. With censorship relaxed by the liberal reforms of the new Tsar, a new slew of pan-Slav journals forcefully criticized Russia’s foreign policy before the Crimean War. In particular, they attacked the legitimist policies of Nicholas I for having sacrificed the Balkan Christians to Muslim rule in the interests of the Concert of Europe. ‘For the sake of the balance of Europe,’ Pogodin wrote in the first number of the pan-Slav journal
As pan-Slav ideas gained influence in Russian intellectual and government circles, there was a proliferation of philanthropic organizations to promote the pan-Slav cause by sending money to the Balkan Slavs for schools and churches, or by bringing students to Russia. The Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee was established in 1858, with separate branches opening in St Petersburg and Kiev in the 1860s. Funded by private benefactors and the Ministry of Education, it brought together officials and miltary men (many of them veterans of the Crimean War who had fought in the Balkans) with academics and writers (including Dostoevsky and Tiutchev, who both belonged to the St Petersburg Committee).
