nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47as Russian Turkistan and Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1818–1882),
a general of Austrian extraction, became the territories’ first Governor
General. Kaufman continued the push to the Amu Darya and in 1865
took Jizakh, the gateway to Samarkand and Bukhara. Three years later, in
the spring of 1868, Russian forces pushed deeper into Bukharan territory.
Muzaffar Khan, who had succeeded his father Nasr Allah Khan in 1860,
appealed to ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan for military assistance but the sardar
had his hands full with the siege of Maimana and turned down the request.
Samarkand fell in May 1868 and Russian troops pursued the remnants of
the Khan’s army to the gates of Bukhara. A revolt in Samarkand, which
was put down with great brutality, gave Muzaffar Khan a short stay of
execution, but in mid-June Muzaffar Khan surrendered in order to spare
Bukhara suffering the same fate as Samarkand. Muzaffar Khan remained
as Khan, but Bukhara became a Russian Protectorate. The conquest of
Bukhara meant that by the summer of 1868 Russia’s Central Asia frontier
had reached the Amu Darya and the northern border of Afghanistan.
The fall of Bukhara led to calls by British officials for a more interven-
tionist policy in Afghanistan, Kalat and other frontier states, regurgitating
many of the arguments used to formulate Ellenborough’s Indus policy
of the 1830s. By 1868, however, the Rubicon was not the Indus but the
Amu Darya, or rather the Oxus, as Britain’s classically educated officials
ana chron istically referred to it. The civil war in Afghanistan, it was argued,
Samarkand, the tomb of Amir Timur Lang, or Tamurlaine. The Russian occupation of the
city in 1868, which was followed shortly by the surrender of the Khan of Bukhara, marked
the end of over half a millennium of Turco-Mongolian rule in the region.