Editing History of Turkmenistan (section)

=== Russian colonization and Great Game ===
In the 18th century [[Turkmen tribes|Turkoman tribes]] came into contact with [[Russian Empire|Tsarist Empire]]. The Russian Empire began to move into the area in 1869 with the establishment of the [[Caspian Sea]] port of Krasnovodsk, present-day [[Türkmenbaşy, Turkmenistan|Turkmenbashy]].<ref name=lcweb /> After the suppression of the [[Emirate of Bukhara]] (1868) and the [[Khanate of Khiva]] (1873), the Turkmen area remained independent. Russians decided to move into [[Transcaspian Oblast|Transcaspian]] region, allegedly to subdue Turkmen slave trade and banditry. Turkmen tribal groups were the providers of the [[Khivan slave trade]] and the [[Bukhara slave trade]], performing regular slave raids called ''alaman'' toward Russian and German settlers along the Ural, and Persian pilgrims to Mashad, two categories who as Christians and Shia-Muslims respectively were seen as religiously legitimate to target for enslavement in the Sunni Muslim Khiva and Bukhara.<ref> Barisitz, S. (2017). Central Asia and the Silk Road: Economic Rise and Decline Over Several Millennia. Tyskland: Springer International Publishing., p. 223</ref> The service of some Turkmen tribes, especially the [[Yomut]], for the Khivan Khan also encouraged the Russia to punish them by raids into [[Khwarazm]], which killed hundreds.<ref name=lcweb /> These wars culminated in the [[Battle of Geok Tepe]] in 1881, where General [[Mikhail Skobelev|Skobelev]] massacred 7,000 Turkmens at the desert fortress of [[Gökdepe|Geok Depe]], near modern [[Ashgabat]]; another 8,000 were killed trying to flee across the desert. In September of that year, [[Qajar Iran]] signed the [[treaty of Akhal]] with [[Russian Empire|Imperial Russia]] which officially recognized the territory that today incorporates modern [[Turkmenistan]] as part of the Russian Empire.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XPfcfF8LRWQC&pg=PA469|last=Adle|first=Chahryar|title=History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Towards the contemporary period: from the mid-nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century|year=2005|publisher=UNESCO|page=1008|isbn=9789231039850|access-date=July 13, 2021|archive-date=February 3, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230203125547/https://books.google.com/books?id=XPfcfF8LRWQC&pg=PA469|url-status=live}}</ref>

By 1894, Imperial Russia had taken control of almost all of Turkmenistan except around part of [[Konye-Urgench]] was in [[Khiva]] and around part of [[Türkmenabat |Charju]] was in the [[Emirate of Bukhara]].

The [[Transcaspian Oblast|Transcaspian]] Railway was started from the shores of the Caspian in 1879 in order to secure Russian control over the region and provide a rapid military route to the Afghan border. In 1885 [[Panjdeh incident|a crisis]] was precipitated by the Russian annexation of the [[Serhetabat|Pandjeh]] oasis, to the south of Merv, on a territory of modern [[Afghanistan]], which nearly led to war with [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|Britain]].<ref>Peter Hopkirk, "Great Game", pp 332</ref> as it was thought that the Russians were planning to march on to Herat in [[Afghanistan]]. Until 1898 Transcaspia was part of the Governor-Generalship of the Caucasus and administered from Tiflis, but in that year it was made an Oblast of Russian [[Turkestan]] and governed from [[Tashkent]]. Nevertheless, Turkestan remained an isolated colonial outpost, with an administration that preserved many distinctive features from the previous Islamic regimes, including Qadis' courts and a 'native' administration that devolved much power to local 'Aksakals' (Elders). In 1897 the Transcaspian Railway reached Tashkent, and finally in 1906 a direct rail link with European Russia was opened across the steppe from Orenburg to Tashkent. This led to much larger numbers of Slavic settlers flowing into Turkestan than had hitherto been the case, and their settlement was overseen by a specially created Migration Department in St. Petersburg (Переселенческое Управление). This caused considerable discontent amongst the local Turkmen population, as mainly Russian-populated cities such as [[Ashgabat]] appeared.

The best-known Military Governor to have ruled the region from Ashkhabad was probably [[Aleksey Kuropatkin|General Kuropatkin]], whose authoritarian methods and personal style of governance made the province very difficult for his successors to control and led to a revolt in 1916. Consequently, the administration of Transcaspia became a byword for corruption and brutality within Russian Turkestan, as Russian administrators turned their districts into petty fiefdoms and extorted money from the local population. In 1908 Count Konstantin Konstantinovich Pahlen led a reforming commission to Turkestan which produced a monumental report detailing these abuses of power, administrative corruption and inefficiency.