Povorot and the Khanate of Khiva: a new canal and the birth of ethnic conflict in the Khorazm oasis, 1870s–1890s

Abstract

Previous research has emphasized that after the creation of a Russian protectorate over the Khanate of Khiva in 1873, Russian colonial authority in Turkestan followed a non-intervention policy up to the 1910s. However, Russian administrators and irrigation planners continued to interfere in irrigation matters in the khanate in order to realize the diversion (povorot) of the Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea, which was a goal Imperial Russia had been pursuing from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The typical example of such efforts towards diversion is the unsuccessful construction of the New Lawzan Canal, starting in 1894. Construction began without sufficient investigation, under the assumption that it would be easily realized by mobilizing the native population. As a result, it directly provoked a Yomut Turkmen uprising in 1899. Later, it represented a starting-point for the prolonged conflicts between the Khivan government and the Turkmens, which, in the 1920s, came to be interpreted as an ethnic conflict over water issues between the Uzbeks and the Turkmens.