Uzbekistan
 

Overview
officially Republic of Uzbekistan, Uzbek Ŭzbekiston, or Ŭzbekistan Respublikasi
Country, Central Asia.

The autonomous republic of Qoraqalpoghiston (Karakalpakstan) is within its borders. Area: 172,700 sq mi (447,400 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 26,593,000. Capital: Tashkent. The Uzbeks constitute three-fourths of the population; Russians, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Tatars, and Karakalpaks make up the remainder. Languages: Uzbek (official), Russian, Tajik, Kazakh. Religions: Islam (predominantly Sunni); also Eastern Orthodox. Currency: sum. Uzbekistan lies largely between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Although it contains fertile oases and high mountain ranges in the south and east, almost four-fifths of the country consists of flat, sunbaked lowlands. Two-thirds of the Aral Sea extends into Uzbekistan. It is a major producer and exporter of natural gas and has sizable reserves of petroleum, coal, and various metallic ores. It is a leading grower of cotton and also produces fruits and vegetables and Karakul sheep. It is the main manufacturer of machinery and heavy equipment in Central Asia. It is a republic with one legislative body; its head of state is the president, and the head of government is the prime minister. A grandson of Mongol leader Genghis Khan received the territory as his inheritance in the 13th century. The Mongols ruled over a number of Turkic tribes, who would eventually intermarry with the Mongols to form the Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples of Central Asia. In the early 16th century a federation of Mongol-Uzbeks invaded and occupied settled regions, including an area called Transoxania that would become the permanent Uzbek homeland. By the early 19th century the region was dominated by the khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand, all of which eventually succumbed to Russian domination. The Uzbek S.S.R. was created in 1924. In June 1990 Uzbekistan became the first Central Asian republic to declare sovereignty. It achieved full independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Its economy subsequently became the strongest in Central Asia.

Profile
Official name Ŭzbekiston Respublikasi (Republic of Uzbekistan)
Form of government republic with two legislative bodies (Senate [1001]; Legislative Chamber [120])
Chief of state President
Head of government Prime Minister
Capital Tashkent (Toshkent)
Official language Uzbek
Official religion none
Monetary unit sum (UZS)
Population estimate (2008) 27,345,000
Total area (sq mi) 172,700
Total area (sq km) 447,400
1Includes 16 nonelected seats.

Main
officially Republic of Uzbekistan, Uzbek Ŭzbekiston, or Ŭzbekistan Respublikasi

country in Central Asia. It lies mainly between two major rivers, the Syr Darya (ancient Jaxartes River) on the northeast and the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus River) on the southwest, though they only partly form its boundaries. Uzbekistan is bordered by Kazakhstan on the northwest and north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on the east and southeast, Afghanistan on the south, and Turkmenistan on the southwest. The autonomous republic of Qoraqalpoghiston (Karakalpakstan) is located in the western third of the country. The Soviet government established the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as a constituent (union) republic of the U.S.S.R. in 1924; Uzbekistan declared its independence from the Soviet Union on Aug. 31, 1991. The capital is Tashkent (Toshkent).

The land
Relief
Nearly four-fifths of Uzbekistan’s territory, the sun-dried western area, has the appearance of a wasteland. In the northwest the Turan Plain rises 200 to 300 feet (60 to 90 metres) above sea level around the Aral Sea in Qoraqalpoghiston. This terrain merges on the south with the Kyzylkum (Uzbek: Qizilqum) Desert and farther west becomes the Ustyurt Plateau, a region of low ridges, salt marshes, sinkholes, and caverns.

Southeast of the Aral Sea, small hills break the flatness of the low-lying Kyzylkum Desert, and, much farther east, a series of mountain ridges partition Uzbekistan’s territory. The western Tien Shan includes the Karzhantau, Ugam, and Pskem ranges, the latter featuring the 14,104-foot (4,299-metre) Beshtor Peak, the country’s highest point. Also part of the western Tien Shan are the Chatkal and Kurama ranges. The Gissar (Hissar) and Alay ranges stand across the Fergana (Farghona) Valley, which lies south of the western Tien Shan. The Mirzachol desert, southwest of Tashkent, lies between the Tien Shan spurs to the north and the Turkestan, Malguzar, and Nuratau ranges to the south. In south-central Uzbekistan the Zeravshan valley opens westward; the cities of Samarkand (Samarqand) and Bukhara (Bukhoro) grace this ancient cultural centre.

Drainage
Disastrous depletion of the flow of the two historic rivers—the Syr Darya and Amu Darya—has brought rapid change in the Aral Sea and greatly altered the delta of the Amu Darya. Most streams of the delta have dried up, and the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, has lost more than three-fifths of its water (volume) and some two-fifths of its area since 1961. In some places the sea’s shoreline has receded more than 75 miles (120 kilometres). On the north as well as on the east, huge shallow and dead ponds have become separated from the main Aral, cut off by sandbars that emerged as the water level dropped some 45 feet between 1961 and 1992. Overuse of water from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya in both agriculture and industry brought about this dangerous decline. The Syr Darya ceased to deliver any appreciable amount of water to the Aral Sea by about 1978, and the Amu Darya gives the sea a paltry 0.24 to 1.2 cubic miles (1 to 5 cubic kilometres) of water annually, compared with 9.6 cubic miles in 1959. The southern rivers tributary to the Amu Darya—the Surkhan and Sherabad, followed by the Zeravshan and Kashka—contribute little flow, for the last two trickle into nothing in the desert. The Syr Darya, the second largest river in Uzbekistan, forms there by the confluence of the Naryn and Qoradaryo rivers.

The diversion of the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya has resulted in intense salinization of the sea, which also has suffered tremendous pollution from insecticides and chemical fertilizers during the past several decades. This chemical pollution and the decline in water level have killed the once-flourishing fishing industry, grounded most ships that formerly worked within the Aral’s shores, and contaminated wide areas around the sea with salty, lethal dust. This, in turn, has poisoned vegetables and drinking water, most harmfully affecting the health and livelihood of the human population around the Aral Sea littoral.

Climate
Marked aridity and much sunshine characterize the region, with rainfall averaging only 8 inches (200 millimetres) annually. Most rain falls in winter and spring, with higher levels in the mountains and minimal amounts over deserts. The average July temperature is 90° F (32° C), but daytime air temperatures in Tashkent and elsewhere frequently surpass 104° F (40° C). Bukhara’s high summer heat contrasts with the cooler temperatures in the mountains. In order to accommodate to these patterns, Uzbeks favour houses with windows facing away from the sun but open to porches and tree-filled courtyards shut off from the streets.

Although more than 600 streams crisscross Uzbekistan, the climate strongly affects drainage, because river water rapidly escapes through evaporation and filtration or runs off into irrigation systems.

Plant and animal life
Vegetation patterns in Uzbekistan vary largely according to altitude. The lowlands in the west have a thin natural cover of desert sedge and grass. The high foothills in the east support grass, and forests and brushwood appear on the hills. Forests cover less than 12 percent of Uzbekistan’s area. Animal life in the deserts and plains includes rodents, foxes, wolves, and occasional gazelles and antelopes. Boars, roe deer, bears, wolves, Siberian goats, and some lynx live in the high mountains.

Settlement patterns
Most of the population lives in the eastern half of the country. Heavily populated oases and foothill basins are covered with an extensive network of canals intersecting fields, orchards, and vineyards. The fertile Fergana Valley in the extreme east, the most populous area in Central Asia, supports both old and new cities and towns and traditional rural settlements. Much of Qoraqalpoghiston, in the west, is under threat of depopulation caused by the environmental poisoning of the Aral Sea area.

Good public housing continued to be in short supply well into the late 20th century, despite large outlays by the government in this sector. As late as the 1990s, private ownership of urban housing had not become common in Uzbekistan, though suburban plots around Tashkent and other cities became available in large numbers for citizens able to erect their own houses—usually simple, low structures, like those in the past, built around courtyards planted with fruit trees and gardens open to the skies but closed off from the streets.

The people
Uzbeks make up about three-fourths of the population, followed by Russians, Tajiks, Tatars, Kyrgyz, Ukrainians, Kazaks, and Karakalpaks. The Uzbeks speak a language belonging to the southeastern, or Chagatai (Turki), branch of the Turkic language group. The Uzbeks are Sunnite Muslims, and they are considered to be among the most devout Muslims in all of Central Asia. They are also the least Russified of the Turkic peoples formerly under Soviet rule, and virtually all of them still claim Uzbek as their primary language. The majority of Uzbeks live in rural areas. Two-fifths of the population of Uzbekistan lives in urban areas; the urban population has a disproportionately high number of non-Uzbeks. Slavic peoples—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—held a large proportion of administrative positions. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, many Russians and smaller numbers of Jews emigrated from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states, changing the ethnic balance and employment patterns in the region.

Uzbekistan’s population is quite youthful in comparison to those of nationalities of the western parts of the former Soviet Union. This age structure results from the high birth rate: of all the former Soviet republics, Uzbekistan has the greatest number of mothers with 10 or more living children under the age of 20.

The cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent have histories that extend back to ancient times. Andijon (Andizhan), Khiva, and Qŭqon (Kokand) also have served the region as cultural, political, and trade centres for centuries. Soviet-era architects purposely laid out some newer towns, including Chirchiq, Angren, Bekobod, and Nawoiy (Navoi), close to rich mineral and energy resources. Soviet planners also sited Yangiyul, Guliston, and Yangiyer in areas that produce and process cotton and fruit.

The economy
Uzbekistan is among the world’s leading cotton producers. The country also produces and exports a large volume of natural gas. Known for its orchards and vineyards, Uzbekistan is also an important region for raising Karakul sheep and silkworms. Uzbekistan’s mineral and oil and gas reserves are substantial.

Resources
The country’s resources include metallic ores; in the Olmaliq (Almalyk) mining belt in the Kurama Range, copper, zinc, lead, tungsten, and molybdenum are extracted. Uzbekistan possesses substantial reserves of natural gas, oil, and coal. The country consumes large amounts of its natural gas, and gas pipelines link its cities and stretch from Bukhara to the Ural region in Russia as well. Surveys show petroleum resources in the Fergana Valley (including major reserves in the Namangan area), in the vicinity of Bukhara, and in Qoraqalpoghiston. The modern extraction of coal began to gain importance, especially in the Angren fields, only during World War II. Hydroelectric dams on the Syr Darya, the Naryn, and the Chirchiq rivers help augment the country’s nuclear-, coal-, and petroleum-powered generation of electricity.

Centuries-old rumours of extensive gold deposits in Uzbekistan evidently arose from a basis in fact. Rich polymetallic ores have been found in the Ohangaron (Akhangaran) field southeast of Tashkent. Miners there extract copper, some gold, lead, molybdenum, tungsten, and zinc. In the Muruntau field in the Kyzylkum Desert of north-central Uzbekistan, the Newmont Mining Corporation in the mid-1990s began construction of a huge plant for heat-leaching gold from low-grade ore; revenue from this project is to be shared with the government.

Uzbekistan requires greater water resources. By the early 1980s the government considered the shortage of water desperate. Officials in Moscow and Tashkent developed a plan to divert substantial amounts of water out of the Irtysh River far to the north into a pumped system that would aid in watering parts of lower Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The project was killed, however, before it began, leaving Uzbekistan with chronic water shortages.

Agriculture
Ample sunlight, mild winters of short duration, fertile irrigated soil, and good pastures make Uzbekistan suitable for cattle raising and the cultivation of cotton. Irrigation has fallen into disfavour owing to the depletion of the great rivers, and the construction of new irrigation systems has been prohibited or curtailed. Already existing grand canals include the Great Fergana, Northern Fergana, Southern Fergana, and Tashkent. Several large artificial lakes and reservoirs have been created on the Zeravshan and other rivers.

In addition to the high and stable cotton yield in this most northerly of the great cotton regions of the world, growers have raised silkworms systematically since the 4th century ad. The silkworms are fed mulberry leaves from the many trees planted along streets and ditches. The Fergana Valley is especially noted for silk production.

Varieties of melons, apricots, pomegranates, berries, apples, pears, cherries, and figs grow abundantly, as do vegetables such as carrots, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, and greens. Uzbekistan’s grapes are made into wine or raisins or are eaten fresh. Fruits and vegetables are sold both in the bazaars of Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana, and other localities and in trade with neighbouring states. Korean agriculturalists cultivate rice along the middle Syr Darya. Sheep are the principal livestock.

Industry
Uzbekistan is the main producer of machinery and heavy equipment in Central Asia. The republic manufactures machines and equipment for cotton cultivation, harvesting, and processing and for use in the textile industry, irrigation, and road construction. This emphasis on making machinery also makes ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy important. The first metallurgical plant began operation at Bekobod in 1946.

Light industry includes tea-packing plants and factories for garment making.

Trade
The leading exports from Uzbekistan consist largely of extracted natural resources or raw materials—cotton, natural gas, oil, coal, silk, fruit, and Karakul pelts. Some fresh produce reaches Moscow and other northern markets. Manufactured goods such as machines, cement, textiles, and fertilizer are also exported.

Transportation
The great obstacle to further development of markets for Uzbekistan’s copious truck gardening and fruit growing remains the antiquated means of distribution. Neither the surface nor air transport now available can efficiently or with adequate refrigeration handle the volume produced in Uzbekistan and needed by the Baltic states, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Old railways connect the republic’s major urban centres with other Central Asian republics and extend to Moscow and Siberia. Uzbekistan never had a domestic airline of its own, but, after independence in 1991, former Soviet Aeroflot airplanes and their pilots were chartered to fly rather infrequently from such cities as Samarkand and Tashkent to nearby cities. Air service now connects Tashkent with London, New York, and other international cities.

Trucks transport most of the freight carried, and the roadways, like other facilities, require much repair—virtual reconstruction—and widening before they can support the modernizing economies that their builders once hoped to link with each other. The Great Uzbek Tashkent-Termiz Highway runs south almost to the border with Afghanistan. Termiz remains virtually a dead end in terms of trade, however, especially since the Soviet intervention (1979–89) in the Afghan War. A second road, the Zeravshan Highway, connects Samarkand with Chärjew, Turkmenistan, in the west. The Fergana Ring links the main settlements within the populous Fergana Valley.

Administration and social conditions
Government
In 1992 Uzbekistan adopted a new constitution to replace the Soviet-era constitution that had been in effect since 1978. The new constitution provides for legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, dominated by a strong executive. Personal liberties generally are protected, but the government is given the right to restrict some of these liberties in certain circumstances. Nationalist or religious political parties are prohibited.

A 150-member legislature (the Oliy Majlis, or Supreme Assembly) consists of members elected by territorial constituencies to five-year terms. The legislature has the authority to amend the constitution, enact legislation, approve the budget, and confirm presidential appointees.

The president is the head of state and is elected for a maximum of two consecutive five-year terms, though the term can be extended by referendum. The president appoints the cabinet and the high court justices, subject to parliamentary approval, and has the authority to issue binding decrees and repeal legislation passed by local administrative bodies.

The highest courts are the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Higher Economic Court (for commercial cases), in addition to two high courts for the autonomous republic of Qoraqalpoghiston. Judges are appointed by the president, subject to approval by the legislature.

Health and welfare
Hospital care for Uzbeks improved after 1924. Death rates at first fell markedly, but new problems later arose in public health because of environmental contamination, especially around the Aral Sea (see above Drainage), and maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates now rank among the highest in the former Soviet states. The longevity of adult males also continues to lag behind rates elsewhere in the former Soviet republics. The poor quality of health care in Uzbekistan is attributable to discriminatory allocations for health care during the Soviet period and to a lack of sufficient attention to environmental problems by public health officials.

Education
The famed medieval seminaries (madrasahs) of Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and the Fergana Valley, long in decline, underwent a revival in the late 18th and again in the late 19th century that prepared new generations for carrying on Muslim education throughout Central Asia. Thousands of seminarians had flocked to those great institutions from inside and outside the region. Owing to both the renewed concern for education in the 1890s and the models offered by sudden activism among modernizers in Egypt, India, Turkey, and Tatarstan, Central Asia instituted its own educational reform movement known as the New Method (usul-i jadid) during the first two decades of the 20th century. The leaders of the Jadids, as they called themselves, included Munawwar Qari in Tashkent, Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy in Samarkand, Sadriddin Ayniy in Bukhara, and ʿAshur ʿAli Zahiriy in Kokand (Qŭqon). They exerted a strong influence on education during the initial decades of the Soviet period, and their methods and aims have reemerged since independence.

After the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) in the mid-1980s, Uzbekistan’s school administrators and teachers acknowledged openly the inadequacies of public education and began intensive efforts to modernize primary and secondary education; among other measures, Uzbek replaced Russian as the primary language of instruction. These efforts rendered most schoolbooks, which were written in Russian, unusable. The new language emphasis and the change in ideology created a need for hundreds of thousands of copies of entirely new instructional materials in Uzbekistan’s elementary and secondary school system. In response to that need, several histories of Uzbekistan—somewhat liberated from communist ideological strictures but still showing Marxist influence—appeared soon after independence, written by scholars experienced in Soviet historiography. Higher education, too, began the massive switch from Russian-language instruction and teaching materials to a curriculum and classroom procedure based entirely on Uzbek.

After the destruction of the informal Jadid system by communist authorities in the early 1920s, higher research shifted to such newer educational institutions as Tashkent State University and, after 1942, to the Uzbek S.S.R. branch of Moscow’s Academy of Sciences. At its zenith, the latter academic complex supported some 200 scholarly institutes and centres. After independence, and to some extent starting even earlier, the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan declined in prestige and suffered large losses in subsidies. By 1992 many institutes had closed or combined with others, and competing institutions with funding from various state agencies arose to operate in the same field.

Most educational institutions, except for the emerging Islāmic centres with their maktabs (primary schools) and madrasahs organized and supported by Muslim religious educators and their followers, continued to depend on the state for their budgets and therefore must follow the dictates of Uzbekistan’s authoritarian leaders. In contrast, the network of Islāmic institutions—centred in the Fergana Valley—has attracted to religious instruction thousands of young people, of whom about half remain outside the public schools.

Cultural life
During the 1980s religious practice surged, transforming many aspects of Uzbek life, especially in the towns of the Fergana Valley and other concentrations of Muslim believers. This resurgence affected the republic’s cultural life through the increased activities of religious schools, neighbourhood mosques, religious orders, and religious publishing ventures and through the Islāmic Renaissance Party.

Over the centuries, the territory of what is now Uzbekistan has produced great scholars, poets, and writers whose heritage has enriched the general culture of humanity. The scholar and encyclopaedist al-Bīrūnī, who lived in the 11th century, produced a series of geographic works about India and a wide range of writings in the natural sciences and humanities. In the 15th century the astronomer and mathematician Ulūgh Beg founded a famous observatory in Samarkand. The late 15th-century scholar, poet, and writer ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī greatly advanced Turkic-language literature and was also a talented artist and composer.

The major writers of the early 20th century broke from the Navāʾī tradition in their style but continued to revere it in their literary history. In the Jadid era (1900–20) the foremost modern poets and prose writers included Abdalrauf Fitrat, Sadriddin Ayni, and Abdullah Qadiri, each of whom was bilingual in Uzbek and Tajik. These writers all began as poets and subsequently branched out to produce many of the first modern indigenous plays, stories, and novels of Central Asia. The younger poets Batu, Cholpán (Abdulhamid Sulayman Yunús), and Elbek (Mashriq Yunus Oghli) offered metres and rhyme schemes quite different from the verse composed in the traditions long employed by the poets of the region. Fitrat gained fame and popularity for such prose and poetic dialogues as Munazara (1909; The Dispute), and Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy became known for a stage tragedy, Padarkush (1913; The Patricide). Abdullah Qadiri became known for a first Uzbek historical novel, Otgän kunlär (1922–26; Days Gone By), and Cholpan introduced a new lyricism in his short poems. Hamza Hakim-Zada Niyaziy was also an early 20th-century playwright and poet later much favoured by Soviet authorities for his simplified, class-oriented plots and subjects.

Most of these writers died violently either during the Russian Civil War or, more commonly, in Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. As a result, Uzbekistan’s intellectual and cultural life suffered trauma for decades to come. Only since independence have its finest modern authors regained posthumous recognition.

During the second half of the 20th century there was a great increase in the number of writers but not in the quality of the writing. Until the 1980s most Soviet Uzbek authors produced tendentious novels, plays, and verse in line with official Communist Party themes. Among the older generation of contemporary authors is Asqad Mukhtar (b. 1921), whose Socialist Realist novel Apä singillär (Sisters; original and translation published during the 1950s), has been translated into English and other languages. Mukhtar, along with others of his generation, effectively encouraged the creative efforts of younger Uzbek poets and authors, a group far less burdened than their elders by the sloganeering characteristic of Soviet “Socialist Realism.” Among these newer voices, Razzaq Abdurashid, Abduqahhar Ibrahim, Jamal Kamal, and Erkin Wahid, all born in the 1930s, and Rauf Parfi, Halima Khudayberdiy, Muhammad Ali, Sharaf Bashbek, Mamadali Mahmud, all born in the 1940s or later, stand out. Several of these new writers have contributed striking dramas and comedies to the theatre of Uzbekistan. Privately organized drama and theatre were very active in Samarkand, Margilan, Tashkent, and other cities before 1917. In the difficult economic situation of the 1990s, however, the loss of government subsidies led to a drastic decline in theatrical activity, and the cinema and television have further emptied the seats in legitimate theatres.

Musical tradition throughout southern Central Asia provides a distinctive classical form of composition in the great cycles of maqoms handed down from master performers to apprentices. Television and radio as well as concert halls offer maqom cycles in live performances.

Uzbekistan’s cultural heritage includes magnificent monuments in the national architectural tradition: the mausoleum of the Sāmānid ruler Ismāʿīl I (9th and 10th centuries) in Bukhara, the great mosques and mausoleums of Samarkand, constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries, and many other fine tombs, mosques, palaces, and madrasahs. An interesting recent development is the reclamation, renovation, and reconsecration of many smaller old mosques, some very elegant though badly damaged; these had been relegated by communist authorities to serve as garages, storehouses, shops, slaughterhouses, or museums. Muslim rebuilders now accurately reconstruct these damaged buildings as part of a comprehensive drive to re-create the Islāmic life suppressed by the communists between 1920 and 1990.

Edward Allworth


 

History

Humans lived in what is now Uzbekistan as early as the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age), some 55,000 to 70,000 years ago. The great states of Bactria, Khwārezm, and Sogdiana emerged during the 1st millennium bc in the fertile region around the Amu Darya, which served as a centre of trade and cultural exchange on the Silk Road between East and West.

After the 8th-century introduction of Islam into Central Asia, several streams of population flowed into the territory now forming the land of Uzbekistan. Some migrations contributed to the demographic diversity that characterizes Uzbekistan. Before the lasting conquest by the Russians in the late 19th century, however, military invaders generally withdrew soon from the area. Arabs after ad 711, Mongols under Genghis Khan from the 13th century, Dzungars in the 15th–17th centuries, and Persians in the 18th century exerted less impact upon the makeup of the population than upon the social and political systems, because they left behind relatively small, assimilable numbers of their people.

The early Uzbeks
One great incoming human wave that did substantially change the demography of the region brought the ethnonym Uzbek to the heart of that territory. These Turkic-Mongol tribes came from northwestern Siberia, where they probably adopted the name Uzbek from the admired Muslim ruler of the Golden Horde, Öz Beg (Uzbek) Khan (reigned 1312–41). A descendant of Genghis Khan, Abūʾl-Khayr (Abū al-Khayr) at age 17 rose to the khanship of the Uzbek confederation in Siberia in 1428. During his 40-year reign, Abūʾl-Khayr Khan intervened either against or in support of several Central Asian Timurid princes and led the Uzbek tribes southeastward to the north bank of the Syr Darya. (See Timur; Timurid dynasty.) However, a number of Uzbek tribes broke away, adopting the name Kazak, and fled east in the mid-1450s; their departure weakened the Uzbeks. Abūʾl-Khayr continued to lead the main Uzbek body until 1468, when he was killed as the Uzbek confederation was shattered in combat with invading Dzungars.

Recovering rapidly, the mounted Uzbek tribesmen regrouped, and in 1494–95 they conquered key portions of Transoxania (the region between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, roughly corresponding to modern Uzbekistan). The leader of those tribes, Abūʾl-Khayr’s grandson Muḥammad Shaybānī Khan (reigned 1500–10), ejected the last Timurid sultans, Bābur and Ḥusayn Bayqara, from Samarkand and Herat, respectively. The Uzbeks occupied major cities, including Bukhara, Khiva, Samarkand, and Khujand, and moved their numerous tribes permanently into Mawaraunnahr, Khorāsān, and adjacent lands. Muḥammad Shaybānī established and gave his adopted name to the potent Shaybānid dynasty, which ruled from its capital, Bukhara, for a century.

While renowned as military commanders, several Shaybānid khans also gained wide recognition for their Sunni religious orthodoxy and as cultured patrons of the arts. Muḥammad Shaybānī, for example, was an accomplished poet and wrote pious tracts in the ornate Chagatai literary language. Monuments of architecture erected by the Uzbeks during the Shaybānid period further testify to the aesthetics of the dynasty’s rulers. In Bukhara, great well-endowed seminaries and mosques arose under royal patronage, as did many major buildings and bridges.

During the reign of the greatest Shaybānid ruler, ʿAbd Allāh Khan II (reigned 1557–98), Shaybānid authority was expanded in Balkh, Samarkand, Tashkent, and Fergana. Uzbek hegemony extended eastward as far as Badakhstān and East Turkistan and westward to Khorāsān and Khwārezm.

The Shaybānids’ successor, the Ashtarkhanid (Astrakhanid, or Janid) dynasty, ruled Transoxania after 1599. From the elevated political and cultural accomplishments of the Shaybānids, the level and extent of Uzbek influence slid into decline under Ashtarkhanid rule, reaching a low point by the mid-1700s. The severe jolt that Iran’s Afshārid ruler, Nādir Shāh, administered in his quick defeat of Bukhara and Khiva in 1740 decapitated the Ashtarkhanid dynasty, which was finally extinguished in 1785. By then, power in southern Central Asia had already shifted to three energetic tribal formations: the khanates of Bukhara (which included the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand), Khiva (northwest of Bukhara on the Amu Darya), and Kokand (centred in the Fergana Valley in the east).

In Bukhara, which became the dominant Central Asian power, Manghīt tribal chieftains during the late 18th century energized the khanate and revived its fortunes under the leadership of Emir Maʿsum (also known as Shah Murād; reigned 1785–1800), a remarkable dervish emir who forwent wealth, comfort, and pomp. In the khanate of Khiva, the Qonghirat tribe succeeded the Ashtarkhanid dynasty and prevailed until 1920, leaving Khiva a museum capital of architectural, cultural, and literary monuments. The Uzbek Ming tribe, imperial in ambition, founded a new dynasty in Kokand about 1710 as the Ashtarkhanids faltered. Known for the elegant civilization at their courts, the rulers ʿUmar Khan (reigned 1809–22) and Muḥammad ʿAlī Khan (also known as Madali Khan; reigned 1822–42) gave the Uzbek Ming dynasty and the Kokand khanate a reputation for high culture that joined with an expansionist foreign policy. At its height the khanate dominated many nearby Kazak and Kyrgyz tribes and resisted Russian aggression. Subsequent rulers in the dynasty, however, failed to sustain either the cultural or the political standards of their predecessors.

Russian and Soviet rule
Though the geographic isolation of Central Asia slowed the southward advance of Russian forces, Bukhara was invaded in 1868 and Khiva in 1873; both khanates became Russian protectorates. An uprising in Kokand was crushed in 1875 and the khanate formally annexed the following year, completing the Russian conquest of Uzbek territory; the region became part of the Russian province of Turkistan.

Subdued by tsarist Russian weaponry and colonial administrators, Central Asians at the turn of the 20th century diverged along two cultural and social orientations. The old intelligentsia and clergy of Bukhara and Khiva generally persisted on their antiquated course, resisting the modernization of educational, religious, economic, and governmental institutions. Simultaneously, a small but vigorous expression of dissent emerged in the form of an active reform movement. Reformers were centred in Samarkand but were also present in Bukhara, Tashkent, and Fergana. Jadids, as the reformers called themselves, were inspired and assisted by Crimean Tatar reformers such as Ismail Gasprinski (Ismail Bey Gaspirali). (See BTW: Activities of the Jadid reformers.) The Jadids enjoyed sporadic protection by tsarist governors in Turkistan, and they were able to prepare numbers of young urban intellectuals for moderate change in their society and culture. Modernization also came to Turkistan with the advent of the telegraph, telephone, and press; railroads reached Samarkand and Tashkent by 1905.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought instability and conflict to Turkistan. Muslims convoked a National Congress in Kokand and established an autonomous government under Mustafa Chokayev, which was liquidated in February 1918 by Red Army forces sent from Tashkent. This action provoked a prolonged resistance movement known as the Basmachi (Qorbashi) Revolt. Slavic and European troops and colonists controlling Tashkent successfully moved to depose the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva in 1920. New leaders initially came from the ranks of the Jadids, but, by the end of 1921, communist-dominated politicians held power in both old capitals.

In 1924–25, politicians directed by the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) redrew the Central Asian map according to a monoethnic principle for each major entity and its people. Karakalpakstan and Uzbekistan arose overnight as ethnically designated territories within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), which had been established in December 1922. The authorities soon granted Uzbekistan the formal status of constituent republic of the U.S.S.R. Karakalpakstan was transferred to the Uzbek S.S.R. in 1936, though it retained autonomous status. Uzbeks remained a minority in the capital city of Tashkent and were underrepresented in the Soviet bureaucracy and administration. Uzbeks quickly learned that real political authority was held by the Communist Party of Uzbekistan (CPUz), the republic’s branch of the central Communist Party. The core membership of the CPUz, and for decades its majority, consisted of Slavs and others from outside Central Asia who made all important local decisions except those reserved to the Soviet centre.

The trauma introduced in Uzbekistan by the communist political purges of the 1930s exacted heavy casualties, especially among Uzbekistan’s relatively small class of intelligentsia and leaders. World War II (1939–45) brought further emphatic cultural changes as the Soviet authorities moved thousands of Russian, Polish, and Jewish managers, intellectuals, and cultural figures to the towns and villages of Uzbekistan. The death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 helped free Uzbek institutions from some of the negative pressures of his era. In 1954–55 Tashkent was again opened to noncommunist visitors from the West after decades of isolation, and Uzbekistan slowly regained direct contact with the outside world. Uzbeks rose to high levels in Soviet politics; Nuritdin A. Muhitdinov, Sharaf R. Rashidov, and Yadgar S. Nasriddinova made Uzbeks visible in the U.S.S.R., serving actively in Soviet diplomacy and foreign affairs.

Despite the easing of some controls on the press and on assembly initiated during the 1980s by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the communist leadership of Uzbekistan continued its firm control over the republic. In August 1991, CPUz chiefs led by Islam Karimov supported the Russian coup attempt against Gorbachev; after the coup failed, Uzbekistan moved quickly to declare independence from the U.S.S.R. The communists—the only experienced politicians in the republic—retained mastery over the new country, and Karimov easily won the 1991 presidential election.

Like much of Central Asia, Uzbekistan persistently ignored democracy in its practical politics if not in its statements of principle. Opposition parties were prohibited from participating in elections, and democratic activists were kidnapped or attacked. Karimov was reelected in 2000 in a ballot that was generally viewed as fraudulent. The government’s human rights record drew international criticism.

Edward Allworth

In the early years of independence, Uzbekistan adopted symbols of sovereignty such as a new constitution, currency, national anthem, and flag. However, the degree of diversity in Uzbekistan’s population diminished as many people, including Jews, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Meskhetian Turks, and Slavs, became apprehensive of Uzbek ethnocentrism and began emigrating. Islamic militants attempted to gain a foothold in the country, leading to an outbreak of violence and persecution of many practicing Muslims. Uzbekistan supported the U.S. government’s campaign in Afghanistan, allowing U.S. forces to use an Uzbek air base beginning in 2001.

Ed.