ABSTRACT
After the turn of the century Russia found that her traditional policy of nonintervention in Bukhara’s internal affairs was in danger of being undermined both by the increasingly vociferous group of critics of the situation in the protectorate and by developments in Bukhara demanding limited intervention in order to protect St. Petersburg’s political interests in Central Asia. Significant as were the Bukharan liberals to the history of Bukhara after the collapse of the Romanov Empire, it was the Russian critics of the ancien regimé in the khanate who were of immediate importance in the period before 1917. Since the 1870’s critics had never been wanting, particularly advocates of annexation among the military in Russian Turkestan. Only at the turn of the century, however, after many individual Russians had acquired first-hand experience of conditions in Bukhara and direct economic interests there, did anything like a concerted campaign for reform or annexation develop.
