ABSTRACT
Coming by the thousands, Russian settlers inundated the streets of Tashkent’s “Russian section” in 1906. Unemployment, rural poverty, and repression in the central provinces drove these new arrivals to seek opportunities elsewhere. A recently completed rail line allowed settlers to escape harrowing treks across steppe and desert land that separated the tsarist province of Turkestan from European Russia. Administrators and other privileged Russians in Tashkent, despite their minority status in the city and region as well as their initial enthusiasm over the railway, greeted their new compatriots with scorn. Poor, dirty, and, in some cases, disease-ridden, recent migrants occupied all available housing in the Russian section, and squatted in old, dilapidated soldiers’ barracks. They crowded the central city market, Voskresenskii bazaar, pleading with Russian or Central Asian passers-by for employment. Peasants refused official pleas to move to the surrounding countryside. Tsarist officials working with new settlers complained of “moral torment” from their shock at having to deal with so many members of Russia’s lower classes.2 By June, the city duma opened debate on enforcement of a ban on any movement to the capital city of Turkestan.3
