The Khanate of Khiva: Slaves, Turkmens, and the Russian Conquest

This episode turns to the Khanate of Khiva, the last independent Uzbek khanate to fall to the Russian Empire—and the one that provoked the most brutal backlash. We follow the story of Russian slave raids, the disastrous 1717 Bekovich expedition, the rise of the Qungrat dynasty under Muhammad Rahim Khan, and the terrifying Turkmen cavalry that nearly stopped the 1873 Russian campaign under General von Kaufman. We examine why Khiva became a refuge for escaped Russian serfs, how its slave markets enraged St. Petersburg, and how the khanate's fall reshaped the Amu Darya delta and the fate of the Karakalpak people. Along the way, we discuss the Khivan historian Munis and his chronicle Firdaws al-Iqbal, the shifting course of the Oxus River, and the uneasy marriage of Turko-Mongol steppe tradition with Persianate bureaucracy that defined Khiva until the Soviet delimit.

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