Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman

Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (Константин Петрович фон-Кауфман in Russian ) ( 1818 - 1882 ) was the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan .

EARLY LIFE

His family was Austria n in origin, but had been in the service of the Tsars for over 100 years, and had long since converted to Orthodoxy . Von Kaufman entered the military engineering field in 1838, served in the campaigns in the Caucasus , rose to be Colonel , and commanded the Sappers at the siege of Kars in 1855 . On the Capitulation of Kars he was deputed to settle the terms with General William Fenwick Williams.

In 1861, he became director-general of engineers at the War Office, assisting General D.A. Miliutin , the Minister of War, in the reorganization of the army. Promoted lieutenant general in 1864, he was nominated adjutant-general and Governor of the military Conscription of Vilna , where at that time the Tsarist state had begun a policy of expropriating the Polish aristocracy in an attempt to break its influence in the countryside.

CONQUEST OF TURKESTAN

In 1867 , he became Governor-General of Turkestan , and held the post until his death, making himself a name in the expansion of the empire in Central Asia . The Khanate Of Kokand north of the Syr Darya had already been annexed to Russia, and the independence of the rest of that country became merely nominal. He accomplished a successful campaign in 1868 against the Emirate Of Bukhara , capturing Samarkand and gradually subjugating the whole country. accompanied Kaufmann in his campaigns.]]

In 1872 - 1873 , he attacked Khanate Of Khiva , took the capital, and forced the Khan to become a vassal of Russia . Then followed in 1875 by the campaign against Kokand, in which Kaufmann defeated the usurping khan, Nasreddin, after an anti-Russian uprising against the previous ruler, Khudoyar. The fiction of Kokand's independence was ended, and the remaining rump of the Khanate in the Ferghana Valley was annexed. This rapid absorption of these Khanates brought Russia into close proximity to Afghanistan, and the reception of Kaufman's emissaries by the Emir was a main cause of the British war with Afghanistan in 1878 .

ADMINISTRATION

The various temporary statutes under which Turkestan was administered from that took two months to cross, it was isolated still more decisively in the minds of Tsarist officials by its dense, ancient and settled Islamic culture. In its early years under Von Kaufman, Turkestan was thus also administratively isolated, with many distinctive institutions within the military Bureaucracy , that was loosely superimposed on a largely unreformed native administration.

Although Kaufmann was unable to induce his government to support all his ambitious schemes of further conquest, he was still in office when General Mikhail Skobelev was despatched from Tiflis in 1880 and 1881 against the Turkomans of the Akhal-Teke Oasis , but died suddenly at Tashkent in May of 1882, shortly before the annexation of Merv . General Cherniaev , the conqueror of Tashkent in 1865, was appointed as his successor.

FURTHER READING

«Кауфман» in the ''Русский Биографический Словарь''. Ибак – Ключарев (С.Пб.) 1897.

Евгений Глущенко "Герои Империи" (Москва) 2001.

REFERENCES

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Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman