The Arrest of Khivan Subjects in the Russian Empire in 1836 and Russian Struggle Against Slave Trade in Middle Asia. Part II

The article is dedicated to a well-known yet not specifically studied event, the arrest of Khivan subjects in the Russian Empire in 1836.Different authors offer diametrically opposed interpretations of this event: thus, the Russian researcher R.Yu.Pochekaev views it as an act of self-defense caused by the Khiva-inspired attacks on the Russian subjects, but the British researcher A. Morrison considers it the first step towards the escalation of a conflict which ended with the Khivan campaign.We will consider this event from the point of view of microhistory rather than the history of states and regions, concentrating the attention on the individual strategies and fates of different people connected with the arrest of Kvivans, and in doing so we will rely on archive materials, predominantly the documentation of the Orenburg Border Commission.In the second part of the article, the author comes to four main conclusions.First, the attitude of the Orenburg authorities towards the arrested Khivans was extremely negative, and the Orenburg Military Governor V.A. Perovsky was demonstrating blatant xenophobia, as a result of which even the mistakenly arrested Bukharians and "Kirgiztsy" (an erroneous term used by Russian officials of the time to call various native ethnicities of the region) were not released from Russian captivity.The Khivans were kept in a specially designated building and on extremely small funds, their visits with families were limited, and as a result, 43 of the arrested in Orenburg did not survive Russian captivity.Second, such an attitude towards the arrested Khivans was not universal for the Russian Empire: much better conditions were created for them in Astrakhan, first of all, by allowing them to live in appartements and by allocating them times more funds for daily expanses.Third, the arrest of Khivans didn't give the results in terms of fighting the slave trade which G.F. Gens had hoped for: for the first two years, before Khiva learned about the impending military expedition against her, only 30 Russian subjects were released from Khivan captivity.And, finally, fourth, the Russian authorities were able to achieve success fighting Khivan slave trade in Middle Asia in 1820-1830s only by extremely brutal methods, the number of victims of which is comparable to the number of victims of said slave trade: in the case of the arrest of Khivans they, to free 30 Russian subjects, had to take no less than 400 hostages, of whom more than 40 died in captivity, and the military campaign to Khiva that allowed to free almost 500 slaves from there had cost, by various estimations, 1 000-3 000 dead Russian soldiers.