2. Amid the horrors of nature: ‘dead’ environments at the margins of the Russian empire*
Jennifer Keating
In exploring the mechanisms of imperialism, innumerable historians have demonstrated that colonial powers and imperial actors deployed the idea of empty landscapes as part of a repertoire of power to create terra nullius: legally and discursively to dispossess indigenous inhabitants of their land and to justify the (often violent) appropriation of territory. At root, such acts were part of the broader global struggle for control and ownership of terrain, transport corridors and natural and human resources.1 The dimensions of settler colonialism, and the obvious fallacy underlying claims of ‘empty’, ‘dead’ or ‘pristine’ land, have been examined in geographies as disparate as the American West, North Africa, Australia and Antarctica.2 Fewer scholars, however, pause to examine critically the idea of emptiness utilized in these contexts.3 While the assertion that tropes of empty terrain supported colonial policies of land seizure is not in dispute, can we accept the construction and deployment of emptiness so unproblematically? What physical and mental actions went into creating and upholding both the myths and realities of vacant spaces? Exploring in detail the imperial construction of empty terrain reveals that emptiness was understood more ambivalently and with a wider range of subtexts than suggested by the simple narrative of ‘unoccupied’ land directly enabling colonial appropriation.
This chapter discusses Russian responses to the environment of Central Asia from the period of conquest in the 1860s until the collapse of the imperial state in 1917 and focuses on the arid deserts and semi-deserts that composed the bulk of this new addition to empire. Although Russia was no stranger to the acquisition of vast areas of grassland and steppe,4 these new landscapes of sand dunes and salt flats were, in the eyes of the incomers, not only almost entirely unpopulated but also lacked a recognizable nature. For the most part they were described as being ‘empty, dead and silent’: melancholy, superheated wildernesses dislocated in time and space.5 The experiences of the travellers, military men, tsarist administrators, botanists, engineers and geographers who witnessed these environments first-hand contributed to the discursive production of landscape as the imperial visitors compared the terrain to a featureless ocean and an alien planet (the premise that deserts were inherently empty was aided by a shared linguistic root between the Russian terms for ‘empty’/‘emptiness’ – pustoi/pustota – and for ‘desert’ – pustynia).6 Yet while such accounts could serve as devices to legitimize conquest and render terrain available for Russian settlement, irrigation and crop cultivation, the (partial) appropriation of these desert lands had more complex dimensions. Emptiness did not automatically behove opportunity and improvement: mirages, climate, erosion and aridity all framed and constrained Russian activities. Even by 1914 desert landscapes continued to threaten and undermine the outsiders’ claims to be transforming Central Asia for the better and were a constant reminder of the difficulties of the imperial mission.
This argument sits squarely within the vast body of recent research into spatial and environmental history. Building on the work of spatial theorists including Lefebvre, Foucault and Soja,7 much scholarship has been devoted to recovering landscape and nature as socially constructed products of both physical terrain and of the geographical imagination.8 Historians of empire have probed the close interconnection between the two, demonstrating the ways in which imperial powers sought to impose their idealized visions onto colonial lands and populations.9 This has had fruitful application in the recent emergence of studies exploring environmental imaginaries: ‘[T]he constellation of ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape, usually local or regional, that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state’.10 Imperial imaginaries came loaded with the presumptions of colonial rule, developing into a form of ‘environmental orientalism’ that very commonly narrated the environment as degraded, ‘strange and defective’ and therefore in need of repair or improvement via irrigation, forestation, sedentarization and so forth.11 Many environmental historians, however, tend to examine either the cultural or the material dimensions of landscape,12 despite the exhortations of those who – quite rightly – suggest that the tangible and the discursive environments exist ‘in superimposition upon one another’.13 This chapter considers the cultural and the material as two inseparable components of what constituted the imperial environment. It follows that just as any landscape is the product of mental as well as physical processes, so too was terrain that, according to imperial narratives, was devoid of owners, inhabitants or features. Indeed, the idea of emptiness was deeply embedded in colonial environmental imaginaries which, while varying in specific context and content, bore broadly similar iterations of the ‘myth of emptiness’ which was crucial to the colonizer’s ‘model of the world’.14 Empty space was at root the foundation of colonial ideologies of improvement, existing hand in hand with legal practices to legitimize the annexation, appropriation and physical settlement of territory.
‘Sunk in a mortal swoon’: geography and anti-landscape
Russia’s military annexation of Central Asia from the 1860s to 1880s provided the empire with a southern borderland four times the size of France. The new province, the Governor Generalship of Turkestan, was to the imperial eye a potent mixture of opportunity and exoticism populated, according to foreign minister A. M. Gorchakov in 1864, shortly before the capture of Tashkent, by ‘semi-savage and itinerant ethnic groups’.15 This mixed sedentary and nomadic population was to become the focus of Russia’s ‘civilizing mission’ in the region – an activity that became increasingly fraught, introspective and uncertain in the years leading to 1917. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s consolidation of its Central Asian possessions took place by and large in urban and suburban population centres, including Tashkent, Samarkand, Andizhan and Namangan, and in the bountiful rural valleys in the east of the region, home to Kazakh and Kirgiz nomads, whose land was progressively expropriated for Russian settlement.
Nevertheless, up to seventy-five per cent of Turkestan’s territory consisted of arid or semi-arid landscape, not naturally conducive to settlement or cultivation. These were sparsely populated, scorched environments, so pervasive in the Russian mind as a (derogatory) symbol of Central Asia that the Russian ministry of finance persistently referred to Turkestan as ‘the Desert’.16 Here, this chapter focuses primarily on three regions of these arid drylands: the Ust Yurt plateau, the Kara Kum (Black Sands) and Kizil Kum (Red Sands) deserts. The first, located in the north-west of Turkestan between the Caspian and Aral Seas, consisted of flat, low-lying land formed of clay and limestone, interspersed with salt marshes; the second, stretching to the south as far as the Persian border and east to the Amu-Dar’ia river, was a more varied mixture of salt flats and loamy soils, but with ninety per cent of its area covered in sand in the form of dunes, knolls or flatter steppe; the third, lying between the Amu-Dar’ia and Syr-Dar’ia rivers, was composed of both sands and firmer steppe terrain.17 While they contained oases favourable for settlement, in general these areas were more sparsely populated than other local regions – apart from perhaps the mountainous Pamirs – and were largely superheated stretches of land prone to huge temperature fluctuations that could sustain only intermittent and transitory human activity.18 Much like ice-sheets, mountains and deserts across the globe, these were extreme and inaccessible landscapes, designated by outsiders as ‘distant, marginal and difficult’.19
Russia’s engagement with these zones underscores the complexity of how seemingly empty space was constructed, deployed and understood. Unlike the settled belt of towns and villages that stretched from east to west across central Turkestan, this arid terrain promised little in the way of immediate potential unless spectacular technological advances were made. To the east, where the fertile rural valleys of Semirech’e appeared to be a natural home for incoming peasant settlers, Russian officials were quick to proclaim the ‘emptiness’ of the land, opening it up to peasant colonization at the expense of local nomads.20 But in the seemingly ‘dead’ desert it was more difficult to see what immediate purpose emptiness could serve. Indeed, for most Russians the desert was a place to pass through, trapped between two more valuable poles: the Caspian, with its important trade significance, and Central Asia’s oasis urban centres.21 This liminality was further confirmed with the opening of the Trans-Caspian railway in 1888, connecting the Caspian shoreline with Samarkand in the first instance and by 1906 to the main Russian railway network to the north. While these lines ran in part through the desert, the convenience of the train hurried the passenger through the arid ‘horrors of nature’, with the sandy vistas unfolding outside the carriage merely a dull precursor to the towns of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara.22 Even for those with a scientific interest in the desert, it was, with few exceptions, a place to visit and to observe, not to stay.23 Russians approached from the vantage point of elsewhere. Nevertheless, there soon existed a wealth of written material on these unwelcoming environments, from travellers’ tales to the reports of geographers, botanists and soil scientists. Consciously or otherwise, these sources were in conversation with each other: through their writings and activities on the ground, these actors contributed to bringing landscape into being.
According to myriad Russian sources, it was ‘difficult to imagine anything more lifeless’ than the Central Asian desert.24 The enormity of the Kara Kum and Kizil Kum and their austere, bleak environment led observers to decry their ‘sad, dismal and bleak nature’,25 noting in unison how the sandy expanses were ‘uninhabited’, ‘lifeless’, ‘deathly’,26 ‘waterless wastelands’.27 Writers often resorted to lively hyperbole to obviate the wearisome dimensions of the ‘colourless and godforsaken’ landscape.28 One doctor remarked on his journey across the Kara Kum to Khiva during the campaign in 1873 that the monotony of the terrain was such that ‘every place looked exactly like every other, in the way that one egg is the same as another. Being completely cut off from the entire civilised world … was very much like … sailing across an immense ocean’.29 Such impressions were far from uniquely Russian. Curzon offered an evocative picture of a land that inspired an ‘impression of sadness, of desolate and hopeless decay, of a continent and life sunk in a mortal swoon’. The stretch of desert between Merv and the Amu-Dar’ia was ‘the sorriest waste that ever met the human eye … I never saw anything more melancholy than the appearance of this wilderness, and its sickle-shaped dome-like ridges of driven sand with smoky summits’.30 Even when observing from the safety of a train, visitors narrated their experiences in much the same vein. Passage into the ‘menacing, lifeless expanse’ of sands gave rise to an immediate sensation of ‘loneliness and powerlessness’, while only the security of the train carriage could allow one’s ‘instinctive alarm’ to ease.31
These desert landscapes were thus places of morbid fascination and Russian depictions very often referenced the conventions of the sublime – sites that awed or terrified in their grandeur or strangeness.32 Beyond the sublime, Russian constructions of this terrain also leaned towards what David Nye has recently termed ‘anti-landscape’: environments utterly unfit for human habitation due to desertification, pollution or poisoning. While Nye confined his discussions to anti-landscapes of human making, he noted that similar conditions can also arise from natural phenomena, citing the moon as a prime example.33 Over one hundred years earlier on the Ust Yurt plateau, a Russian visitor came to a remarkably similar conclusion. Camping outside and noting the ‘deathly silence’ of the region, he remarked while gazing up at the moon one evening that ‘it was only there, on the moon, where there is neither life nor atmosphere’ that a true comparison to his surroundings could be found.34 The plateau was characterized as a sterile, dead wasteland, with neither life nor sound – to all intents and purposes, an empty landscape. Even the Aral Sea, surrounded to the west by the Ust Yurt plateau, was commonly seen as being ‘silent, gloomy, uninhabited’, ‘the younger brother of the noisy and lively Caspian’.35
Such claims were made on the basis of what appeared visible – or unseen – to the human eye. Emptiness was understood as a condition of absence: a lack of people, animals, natural features, plants, water and, beyond physical attributes, an absence of colour, sound and time. These landscapes were not, however, empty. Nomads, largely Turkmen and Kazakhs, had fashioned a network of routes, wells and burial sites over many centuries across these drylands. Meanwhile, as those who spent time in the region for research purposes attested, while at first sight the terrain was seemingly empty, on closer inspection it yielded a variety of flora and fauna, including saxaul, grasses, spring flowers, snakes, lizards, scorpions, vultures and spiders.36 The following discussion examines why and how Russians conceived of these landscapes as exclusively empty and lifeless, suggesting that despite the largely uniform characterization, emptiness was by no means a static concept. Instead, Russian visits to, accounts of and work in the desert produced what one might term an imperial taxonomy of emptiness: while embedded in the imperial psyche as a foundation of the colonial ‘improvement’ project, understandings of emptiness were also tinged with the imprint of fear, anxiety and confusion.
Improvement and the imperial psyche
With military conquest the Russian state claimed legal ownership of all land in Turkestan other than vaqf property (land belonging to religious or charitable institutions), although in practice property rights in settled regions remained subject to pre-existing Islamic law and custom.37 Desert territory was thus automatically a state asset, open to exploitation and settlement. In concurrence with this legal delineation went a huge amount of physical and discursive work to own and appropriate territory – actions that were less contested than in settled areas of Turkestan, given the relative under-population of the desert drylands. To facilitate this, the Russian state, via the Appanage Department, the Main Administration of Land Improvement and Management (GUZZ) and the Resettlement Administration, deployed a narrative very similar to that used in other parts of the Russian empire and by other colonial powers in north Africa and Australia, which envisaged colonization as a way of ‘banishing emptiness and creating productivity, erasing barbarism and spreading civilization’.38 Labelling land as empty was thus the first step towards imperial reclamation and restitution, whether through watering, planting, building or populating. In turn, territorial ‘improvement’ was seen as a vindication of imperial superiority. The building of the Trans-Caspian railway, for instance, which crossed a vast sweep of dunes east of the Caspian, had ‘opened the way for civilization to reach the most distant part of the populated world’.39 In the main, this was seen as a triumph over distance and nature, given that ‘Russia has built in a country where the soils and climate are considered impossible for the life and activities of cultured man, the last word in civilization – a railway’.40
The railway aside, Russian attempts to inscribe their visions for future development onto these landscapes revolved around the management and redistribution of water resources and ranged from the outlandish – proposals to reroute the Amu-Dar’ia river to flow into the Caspian rather than the Aral – to the more measured irrigation of the Hungry Steppe in the Kizil Kum.41 Many of these schemes have been the subject of detailed scholarly research, but merit a brief synopsis here.42 The work, which began in earnest in the 1870s, was initially sporadic and often unsuccessful, with the most consequential projects undertaken by Grand Prince N. K. Romanov in the Hungry Steppe involving the re-channelling of water from the Syr-Dar’ia river. By 1897–8, he had completed the Emperor Nicholas I canal, which was taken into state ownership shortly thereafter. It was at this point that more significant efforts overseen directly by the Russian state began under the auspices of GUZZ and the Resettlement Administration. This resulted in particular in concerted work to irrigate up to 45,000 hectares of land in the Hungry Steppe, culminating in the opening of the Romanov Canal in 1913. The gradual irrigation of the land watered by the canal and its tributaries allowed for the incremental growth of Russian peasant villages: in 1914 there totalled eleven such villages in the Hungry Steppe, with a population of around 6,000 souls, compared to around 3,500 settled and nomadic locals. By 1917 the figure had risen to twenty-four settlements.43
These projects were part of a wider body of geological and hydrographical surveys carried out across the Kara Kum and Kizil Kum, the vast majority of which proceeded from an explicit recognition that while the deserts were ‘lifeless’ wastelands, this need not be a permanent state and, indeed, had not been so in the past. Engineers and surveyors noted widespread evidence of previous cultivation in the form of long-dried up irrigation canals.44 In Russian eyes, this, coupled with the known fertility of the desert soils,45 meant that although the desert in certain places such as the Hungry Steppe currently resembled ‘a lifeless void, scorched by the sun and yellowish-grey from withered grasses’, it required ‘only water for its revival and transformation into a cultivated oasis’.46 Here, therefore, the condition of emptiness could initiate a transformative narrative of restoration, whereby destitute land could be returned to a more bounteous state. The military engineer M. N. Ermolaev, surveying the eastern Kara Kum in 1906 for a scheme to divert river water from the Amu-Dar’ia to the Merv oasis by means of a canal over 265 miles long, based his project on the claim that ‘the wastelands of the Kara Kum steppe are occupied by nobody’.47 Instead, irrigating over 500,000 hectares of desert land would allow for the cultivation of lucerne and, in particular, cotton, which in turn would reduce Russia’s dependence on American imports. In addition to making a detailed topographical survey and taking numerous soil samples, he included in his report to GUZZ’s hydrology committee a series of photographs of the ‘empty’ desert.48 Images such as these were part of the broader discursive system, which, as Obertreis has noted, played on the idea of emptiness as a means of ‘underlin[ing] the current uselessness of the region and the potential opportunity to turn it into an assimilated and settled place in the future’.49 In turn, this is evidence of a particular imperial vision that produced ‘habitats as empty and unimproved’ and scanned them for prospects and potential.50 In this sense, surveys and reports were powerful forces acting to frame the terrain of the usually sterile desert as an environment open for improvement. Emptiness was thus a state which could be a precursor to land reclamation: within this inhospitable world lay the potential for economic and social growth, if the Russian state could ‘fertilize this vast and hitherto unfertile expanse’ to become a more ‘useful’ and ‘productive’ land.51
Thus the physical survey and description of emptiness was part of a process that saw an alien landscape pass ‘from menace to management’, much as has been described in the Sahara.52 The designation of land as empty was a forerunner of direct Russian supervision and active stewardship and thus the physical transformation of this land into productive terrain had huge political significance. Beyond the potential economic advantages of reducing Russian dependence on American cotton, environmental improvement was a gauge against which to measure the progress of mankind and the pre-eminence of imperial power. A commonly accepted view in Russia and beyond was that the collapse of irrigation, and of subsequent productivity, was emblematic of the ‘collapse of civilization’, a fate to which it was believed pre-colonial Central Asia had succumbed.53 Facing a land ‘presenting the sorry spectacle of a slow death’, Russia’s role was thus to ‘resurrect the grandiose irrigation systems from bygone ages that will give life to these dead lands’, to ‘re-populate [the region]’ and to ‘regenerate new life’54 – claims by one state land-surveyor that bore clear echoes of French and British proclamations on Egypt, Algeria and India.55
Thus emptiness was closely bound up with vague but potent notions of the demise and rebirth of both land and people, not merely in the sense of general improvement but allied to a specific vision of settler colonialism that was articulated with increasing force in the early 1900s.56 Those surveying and prospecting the land proposed resettlement in explicitly and exclusively imperial terms. Sazonov, leading an expedition to the southern Kara Kum, speculated that once the land had been irrigated it would be critical to attract only those who already had experience of working with crops that required tilling between rows. It followed, he suggested, that the most suitable settlers for Turkestan would be those from the south-western territory, Poltava, Kharkov and other western Russian provinces, along with the northern Caucasus. If 180,000 inhabitants could be resettled in these newly improved desert lands, this population would form a ‘strong core via which Transcaspia, and Turkestan in general, would become more closely merged with Russia’.57 Views of this type were most forcefully articulated by the head of GUZZ, A. V. Krivoshein, who, following a visit to Turkestan in 1912, lobbied energetically for his vision of a vast swathe of three million hectares of freshly irrigated land, farmed by 1.5 million new Russian settlers.58 This view intrinsically linked emptiness to subjective questions of value. Emptiness was in effect a commodity, but one in which the currency of potential enabled those surveying the land to claim that its actual value lay in inverse proportion to its current worthless state. Krivoshein, addressing the Russian state duma in May 1913 on the allocation of land to new Russian settlers in the Hungry Steppe, noted that when calculating the cost to the state of irrigating land there was ‘no need to factor in the value of the land itself before irrigation, as it is lacking almost any vegetation, and because of the complete lack of water, is suitable neither for arable farming nor animal husbandry, and has no value of any kind. Without irrigation, this steppe fully warrants its name, being literally “hungry”’.59 Thus while emptiness was understood as being economically nugatory, it retained political currency as long as it had potential to be converted into productive gain.
Within the rhetoric of imperialism’s mission civilisatrice, emptiness thus served several purposes. Beyond facilitating narratives of improvement, it was a designation of future value and acted as a convenient foil to highlight the reclamation of supposedly degraded land. In the Hungry Steppe, for instance, descriptions of the region sent to prospective new settlers cast the land as a place ‘where formerly human feet rarely trod’, but where ‘there are now cultivated cotton fields, gardens and vegetable patches’.60 Photographs circulated to settlers showed visible evidence of how ‘dead land had been revived’:61 images of the Hungry Steppe before irrigation were directly juxtaposed with ‘after’ shots of villages and fields of crops.62 Furthermore, empty land was a pretext to promote a certain type of racialized settler colonialism. In this sense, land deemed vacant was a cipher for imperial subjectivity: describing the environment as empty, imperialists revealed their own self-conception as all-powerful improvers, managers of human and natural resources as intangible entities to be parcelled, allotted and supervised, in turn revealing the hierarchies of power, presumption and entitlement that underlay the imperial mission.
Maritime metaphors and the legibility of space
Such views presumed the fundamental malleability of nature and landscape. Emptiness was a state conferred by the imperial eye, subject to transformation under colonial rule. Yet as much as emptiness was a category controlled by state actors, deployments of ‘wastelands’ and ‘wilderness’ as a precursor to improvement mask a more complex and ambivalent taxonomy of the empty. The fact remained that vast sections of Central Asia’s deserts continued to be largely untouched by Russian hands: while surveyors concocted plans, there were numerous financial, technical and legal barriers to their implementation.63 In many ways this remote and extreme terrain did not readily fit into the imperial logic of emptiness followed by improvement: beyond the fiscal and legal restrictions faced by the state, nature and climate on the frontier were often excessively challenging. Indeed, examining Russian attitudes to emptiness in greater detail, beyond irrigation mania, reveals a different set of anxieties which counterbalanced the more conventional tropes of imperial agency and superiority. The roots of this disquiet lay, this chapter proposes, in the harsh environment of the desert drylands. Russians expressed traditional concerns about the local climate in much the same way as other imperial actors voiced fears about the climate of the tropics. Pahlen, writing on instances of corruption and dereliction of duty in Transcaspia, suggested that it was ‘the climate, coupled with the heat and the scorching rays of the sun, [that] is primarily responsible for engendering a state of mental unbalance which results in a breakdown of the will and a general slackening of morale’.64 On closer inspection, Pahlen’s suspicions of climate and nature were echoed in the words of other visitors to the region. Heat and disorientation were perceived as a direct danger to survival and to imperial authority itself; and, in turn, Russian formulations of these environments as empty often served to lessen the land’s threat as much as they did to prepare it for improvement.65
A case in point is the vocabulary employed by disparate Russians to describe the desert landscapes. Common to almost all visitors’ accounts was a maritime metaphor in which terrain was likened to a seascape, a ‘rippling sea of shifting sands’ stretching as far as the eye could see.66 Such depictions were by no means a model unique to Russian prose, as expeditions to the steppe from Qajar Iran made similar comparisons,67 while Curzon observed that Central Asia’s sands had ‘all the appearance of a sea of troubled waves’ and were ‘an insidious and implacable enemy’.68 Indeed, the use of oceanic tropes was a habitual technique employed by explorers of other large, seemingly empty spaces across the world: Livingstone likened parts of Africa to a ‘terrestrial sea’.69 It seems likely that this stylistic device couched the desert in more familiar terms, rendering the scene more imaginable in terms of scale, and alluded to the similarity in how land- and sea-scapes were traversed (navigated using stars, given the lack of fixed points on the horizon). This depiction of land as sea, what Thomas labelled in his discussions of European accounts of Australia as ‘elemental transpositioning’, had obvious imperial undertones, given that the ‘ocean is the one element of the earthly sphere that consistently mimics the expansive neutrality of geometric space’. To European colonizers of the continent, Thomas suggested, ‘this neutrality was embodied not only in the homogeneity and expansive qualities of the ocean but also its legal status. Unlike the land, the ocean is devoid of human occupants. Consequently the transfer of a maritime imaginary to the Australian continent had social consequences of considerable gravity’.70 In other words, casting open and empty spaces as ocean could be a means discursively to erase local inhabitants ‘with any sovereign claims to the land’.71
In the Russian case, the evolution of a common vocabulary linking maritime scenes to empty terrestrial space certainly indirectly played into the imperial appropriation of territory, but equally and more immediately reflected the need to label and classify a threatening landscape. Fear and confusion were embedded in Russian accounts of the desert, as the monotonous terrain and searing heat threatened the very survival of the traveller. In this respect, the majority of those who entered Central Asia were aware of a multitude of abortive attempts to cross the deserts by outsiders, including the unsuccessful attempt of General V. A. Perovskii and a contingent of 5,000 men to reach Khiva in the campaign of 1839–40. Past history and current experience informed the comparison between desert and ocean, with the metaphor conveniently laden with references to the danger of drowning and disorientation posed by the landscape. Just as Curzon noted that the ‘bones of many a victim lie trampled fathoms deep under the pitiless tide’ of dunes inland from the Caspian shoreline,72 so Ukhtomskii invoked a similar threat of being buried or drowned as he reflected on the ‘walls of sand dunes swaying, threatening to bury [us] in the inaccessible steppe, just like hundreds and thousands of other Europeans who previously tried, weapons in their hands, to disturb the steppe’s spellbound repose and calm’.73 Emptiness thus bore the overlay of past history, with plentiful references to the (sometimes futile) bravery of outsiders who had attempted to cross the deserts, including in the campaigns of conquest in the 1870s. Little was as effective in capturing the morbid surroundings as the photograph, which made visually explicit these environmental dangers. Images often framed a landscape strewn with vertebrae and jaw bones74 and were also effective in capturing the land’s stillness, visualizing a place with ‘neither life nor movement’.75
Death was a potential, but extreme, outcome of traversing Russia’s arid limits. Yet even at its most benign, the desert was a formidable companion, with soaring daytime temperatures of over forty degrees and little in the way of shelter or food. A far more prosaic fear was the sense of disorientation inculcated by these environments. Sand, much like ice and snow, offered problems with cognition, vision and perception.76 The flatness of the Ust-Yurt plateau and, conversely, the undulating dunes of the southern Kara Kum and Kizil Kum offered a vista that induced distinct unease among the visitors. With little in the way of landmarks or natural features, and no certain measure to gauge distance or the passing of time, the visitor could feel almost swallowed by the terrain, described memorably by one Englishman on the way to Khiva as ‘a picture of desolation which wearied, by its utter loneliness, and at the same time appalled by its immensity; a circle of which the centre was everywhere, and the circumference nowhere’.77 The never-ending quality of these landscapes with no evident outer limits very easily led to both spatial and temporal dislocation and thus proved profoundly disorienting. Russian sources recorded the ease of becoming hopelessly lost and, consequently, the necessity of a dependable local guide with expert knowledge of the landscape and its fixed (but often hidden) points, such as wells.78
Climate and terrain thus combined to be a dangerous adversary and the threat of nature’s agency coloured almost all Russian accounts of the region. Guidebooks noted the difficulty of traversing ranges of sand dunes, even on still days, as dunes shifted in the slightest wind. This was a particular problem among the tall dunes inland from the Caspian shoreline, which reached up to fifteen metres in height. Even in a matter of hours the dunes could change their form, size and location, covering the traveller’s tracks and dislocating all sense of direction. As one observer remarked, the sands were ‘a sleeping bear which nobody disturbs’.79 When the weather worsened, extreme heat, storms and fog made passage all but impossible, with some visitors recording sandstorms so severe that it was ‘impossible to distinguish the location of the sun in the sky’.80 Accounts of these landscapes were thus encoded with the knowledge of nature’s treacherous dynamism. Numerous visitors noted sightings of mirages, of a ‘miracle on the horizon’ that appeared to be a ‘twinkling lake’ nestling between the sand dunes,81 of a phenomenon that ‘transforms the featureless dismal plain into luscious lakes of water with floating islets of trees’.82 Such events were recorded not only in the sandier desert climes in the south and west of Transcaspia, but also on salt flats, the surface of which could be instantaneously transmogrified into ‘an enormous lake, the mounds of sand towards the edges like ships, and the shrubs like boats, floating on a lake’.83 These mirages were another – and perhaps the ultimate – indication of the landscape’s ability to deceive and disorientate, offering a rather ironic extension to the metaphorical allusion that likened the desert to an ocean: sometimes it did indeed appear that land and sea had become one.84 The mirage was a trickster, suggesting an inversion of the popular conception that desert landscapes were empty and devoid of features: it promised something where there was, in fact, nothing, and thus reinforced notions of emptiness when the hollowness of the vision was revealed.
As Russians who ventured into the deserts noted their reliance on guides for expert knowledge, the dangers of the journey, the lack of discernible landmarks and the landscape’s propensity for optical trickery, they were in many ways describing terrain that defied order and rationalization, unreadable to the imperial outsider. In this sense, deserts were the antithesis of a controlled or understandable environment such as a system of fields, a forest or a managed eco-system, the type of legible landscape that Scott noted is a ‘pre-requisite of appropriation’ and a condition critical to the imperial control of territory across the globe.85 Here, though, there was little regularity, little order, little predictability. It thus follows that to Russians such terrain was profoundly illegible. Fixing terrain as ‘empty’ was hence in part a way of imposing order, a reaction to the illegibility and uncontrollability of the desert world. Emptiness simplified and standardized: the first step to transforming ‘alien’ land into legible, knowable landscape. In this sense, comparisons to an empty ocean did reinforce the declarations on vacant and valueless terrain discussed in the previous section. Yet legibility was important on an individual as well as an imperial scale. Rendering the landscape more knowable and familiar via the trope of emptiness served to lessen the land’s threat, shielding the traveller and observer from the potential hazards of difficult nature.
The triple threat: sand, salt and wind
The size and composition of these desert landscapes preoccupied the tsarist scientific community, itself an important upholder of colonial rule through institutions such as the Imperial Russian Geographic Society and Imperial Russian Technical Society. Engineers, hydrologists, geologists and soil scientists – while important members of the imperial quest to reclaim land through surveying, irrigation, building and planting – also approached the desert with a view to understanding the region’s geography, geology and eco-systems. Analysing soil, water, sand, climate and flora and fauna, these individuals further complicated and destabilized the notion of emptiness as a means of removing threat and rendering land appropriable.
While scientists and casual explorers alike noted the capricious qualities of the desert with the evidence of the eye, studies that were more quantitative in nature confirmed many of the perplexing characteristics of arid terrain, particularly with regard to the lack of fixity of natural features. Russians had been aware for many decades that the Aral Sea, in parallel with other lakes across Central Asia and Siberia, was gradually reducing in size.86 Dingel’shtedt, an irrigation and water-law specialist and land assessor for the Ministry of Agriculture, noted that this was an almost indisputable fact, given the combination of extremely high temperatures and a preponderance of dry, northern and north-easterly winds, particularly in the Kizil Kum region, that led to a high rate of evaporation. In this way, formerly watered regions in the Aral basin had now become vast, lifeless wastelands of salt and sand.87 Yet arriving on the Aral shoreline in 1899, the renowned geographer and ichthyologist Lev Berg made a disconcerting discovery. Fully expecting to find further evidence of the continued desiccation of the lake, he compared a series of maps of the lake shore drafted over the course of the past half-century with his own observations in situ.88 This made for an odd revelation. What had, according to maps from the 1840s, once been islands had become part of the desert shoreline in the 1880s as the lake receded, but now appeared to have been restored to their former status. Berg drew the inescapable conclusion that at some recent point the water level had begun to rise at an accelerating pace, a supposition supported by the testimony of local fishermen. He calculated that since the mid 1880s the water level had risen by over four feet; a result, he speculated, of either tectonic fluctuations or, more probably, climate change, given that the volume of water in the Aral Sea’s tributaries had also increased year on year during the 1890s.89 The unexpected findings underscored the unpredictability of a landscape that could not be accurately cartographically fixed. With the desert and salt flats expanding and receding, apparently unaffected by human activity, ‘emptiness’ was a state that defied boundaries.
The slippery nature of the landscape posed a wider social and environmental threat. Migratory dunes were more dangerous than simply moving landforms that were disorienting to the traveller. In fact, those who observed the sands closely over time noted that ‘in many parts of Central Asia, the sands are slowly devouring villages and flourishing oases. No kind of force can hold back their victorious procession. Even cities become their victims’.90 The town of Vardanzi, for instance, had been located some forty kilometres north-east of Bukhara until it had been swallowed by the sand in the mid nineteenth century. Similarly, Nikol’skii lamented the sand’s corrosive effect on natural features, noting that near Karakul there had until recently been numerous salt lakes, which now had either entirely disappeared or had been reduced to ‘tiny puddles’.91 It was clearly difficult to sustain any level of sophisticated measurement across such a large region, with data incomplete and partially anecdotal, but there is considerable supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Finding himself trapped in a sandstorm while surveying part of the Kara Kum, the engineer Kh. V. Gel’man undertook detailed observations of Central Asia’s drifting sands. His measurements and extrapolated calculations revealed that the sands were moving at a rate of a little over two metres a year, or around two kilometres per millennium, in a south-westerly direction, blown by prevailing winds. Anecdotal evidence appeared to support the theory: speaking to his Turkmen guides, Gel’man learnt of a number of abandoned settlements that had been entirely buried in sand in living memory. The problem was not confined to the past: approaching dunes were now noticeable near the Khivan town of Il’ialla and the Russian town of Petro-Aleksandrovsk.92 Meanwhile, the scientist and forestry specialist V. Paletskii observed similar occurrences in the Kizil Kum, recording that the sand dunes around Bukhara were moving at a rate of on average six metres a year to the south,93 while others, including Dingel’shtedt, were of similar opinion.94
Such findings fed into arguments that Central Asia was in a state of rapid desiccation, a condition which meant that ‘from year to year the limits of the deserts are extended’.95 Although debates raged as to whether this was actually a proven case – Berg’s findings were published as a rebuttal to Kropotkin’s claims, citing rising water levels in the region as evidence of quite the contrary phenomenon96 – the idea of an ever encroaching desert that threatened to engulf productive land was one that resonated with wider Russian fears of desertification across their European steppes.97 Drifting sands, very often blown on winds from Central Asia, coupled with problems caused by the over-cultivation of land, threatened to turn parts of the fertile European steppe into desert.98 Similar instances were observed in Central Asia itself: in western parts of Fergana province, near the villages of Makhram, Pamar and Andarzhan, thousands of hectares of fertile land had recently been reclaimed by wind-blown dunes.99 The inhabitants of tens of villages in this area suffered a daily battle with the incoming sand, forcing many to relocate to less precariously placed settlements. Inhospitable conditions were recognized as a combination of the prevailing natural weather conditions and of human activity: grazing cattle and uprooting plant cover for fuel or fodder.
In this sense, desert landscapes posed a very significant threat as well as an opportunity. Observation suggested that the sands were growing in area: emptiness was not contained, but rather threatened to expand into more fertile parts of the region. The evident deterioration of terrain thus offered a significant counterbalance to the narrative of progress and reclamation and was a clear component of the desiccation theory that preoccupied scientists and imperial powers across the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.100 The implications of the situation came gradually to condition Russian actions, but without the scale, commitment or success of other well-known plans to combat desertification, such as the French project to reforest the Landes region or British attempts to stabilize the Thar desert in India.101 At least some Russian scientists, including the geologist V. A. Obruchev, warned of the deleterious effects of increased human activity, advising that serious measures should be taken to increase the cultivation of forested areas across Turkestan, and of scrub coverage in affected localities,102 while small-scale experiments with afforestation and planting to bind together shifting sands had begun as early as the 1870s. The dimensions of the problem, however, demanded effective, governmental-level support.103 Faced with the apparent dangers of desertification, the Russian state heeded such advice in piecemeal fashion. In Fergana province, the administration campaigned for inhabitants to cut back on the uprooting of saxaul for fuel. Fines were imposed on illegal wood cutting, including desert plants, while along either side of the Trans-Caspian line a strip of land five versts in width was created as a protected zone where the removal of foliage was prohibited.104 The railway, being at particular risk of wind-blown sand drifts, was the focus of intense work to stabilize the desert soils – two huge plant nurseries were created at Repetek and Farab stations from which over three million shrubs were planted out along the track.105 In parallel with these natural shelterbelts to prevent erosion, shields and screens similar to those used to guard against snow drifts in Russia proper were also deployed by the Ministry of Transport.106 Yet while efforts to hold back the desert along the length of the Trans-Caspian line were not without success, the wider attempt to regulate cutting and grazing rights was largely ineffective.
Beyond the question of whether migrating sands could be contained, the challenges of reforming these empty landscapes were abundantly clear. Even in areas unthreatened by desertification, Russian efforts to build communities and irrigate land in inhospitable environments had unforeseen consequences. In the Hungry Steppe, the limited irrigation of the land was slow and expensive work, while Russian engineers and peasant farmers lacked the skills and experience in irrigation work efficiently to exploit the terrain. Thus, many villagers also faced an ongoing struggle to tame nature’s elements. Here, the passage of time revealed the paucity of Russian technical knowledge on irrigation. In 1915 a committee of soil experts and agronomists was formed to deal with problems that had arisen in the irrigated areas of the Hungry Steppe. Particular attention was paid to issues of drainage and salinization, even in the village of Veliko-Alekseevskii, which had been founded only two years previously. Despite the newness of this settlement, irrigated land had already become salinized and therefore unusable, while outbreaks of malaria grew as mosquitos flourished in the poorly-drained soil.107 A chief engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture, and a leading light in hydro-technical work undertaken in Central Asia both before and after the revolution, confirmed these findings: G. K. Rizenkampf noted the poorly-built and maintained irrigation structures in the north-east of the Hungry Steppe, drawing attention to the silting of drainage canals, the lack of due reinforcement given to the walls and beds of these structures and in places the compromised integrity of the entire irrigation network. As a result, land that had been reclaimed from an infertile wasteland was once again returning to its previous state, with the soils becoming salinated, swampy and malarial, to such an extent that ‘a significant number of settlers were forced to give up their land and fields and resettle in other parts of Turkestan’.108 Similar findings were also reported at the other main site of desert irrigation, the Murgab estate in the Kara Kum.109
Such difficulties were not uncommon when European imperial powers attempted to co-opt local technical practices with which they were unfamiliar.110 Yet these encounters had a significant impact on the ways in which the arid lands of Central Asia were conceived. Over time Russians uncovered the inherent instability of these spaces and in doing so revealed a paradox that lay at the heart of their conceptions of this terrain as fundamentally empty: the more the rhetoric of imperialism prefixed these landscapes as vacant voids, the greater the level of incursion into them, for the most part by scientific survey but also by settlers and visitors. Yet the more scientific knowledge and first-hand experience was assembled, the unsteadier the nature of this emptiness became. Russian attempts to control, manage and eventually to transform these environments were inherently precarious, shot through with the constant danger that their activities actively prefigured a return to unmanageable emptiness or, at the very least, that they could do little to hold back the forces of nature.
Such reasoning prompted the introduction of a note of moderation in the usually triumphalist accounts of tsarist imperialists. As Dingel’shedt remarked rather perceptively, contrary to the standard rhetoric of a gradual but relentless triumph over nature, what Russia faced in Central Asia was instead a ‘struggle with nature’, a ‘war against drought’.111 While the land assessor placed his faith in the forces of the state, armed with resources, preparation and knowledge, it was abundantly clear that this was not necessarily a war that could be won in all areas. Such modulations of tone offset the usual arrogant confidence of tsarist officials who projected the rapid construction of a large settler colony in Turkestan. By 1914, even Voshchinin, a staunch apologist for colonization in Central Asia, was forced to admit the problems faced by villagers in the region while touring the villages of the Hungry Steppe and beyond. Maintaining a constant and regulated water supply was difficult and unpredictable, while pests, particularly locusts, were a thorny problem that threatened harvests and thus the very survival of peasant enterprises in villages such as Spassk and Dukhovsk.112 Approaching these villages by car across the ‘dead and infertile’ steppe, on seeing the silhouette of these settlements in the distance Voshchinin remarked that the sight was ‘not a mirage, but the work of the Russian people’.113 Yet a clear sense of the precariousness of these ‘outposts of Russian civilization’ ran through his comments: the villages were not a hallucination, but shared some of the mirage’s unstable features.
Even as proponents of settler colonialism expounded the transformation of ‘dead’ and ‘empty’ terrain into productive and bountiful land, other members of the imperial project were demonstrating that the passage from menace to management was by no means an easy task. In the case of scientists working in the field, evidence suggested that the sands of central and western Turkestan were in fact spreading, raising doubts as to the long-term sustainability of the imperial project. What becomes clear from an exploration of the sources discussed above is that to accept that tropes of emptiness were deployed exclusively as a precursor to improvement is to miss the crucial point that understandings of emptiness were the product of interactions between different sets of ideas: ideas produced by science, by imperial rhetoric, by the evidence of the eye, by the traveller and, above all, by the interaction between these different imaginations and the physical geography of the region.
Emptiness in this sense was thus very much a process rather than an inert state. Such was the quality of the environment that Central Asia’s arid terrain was a landscape of hope and opportunity, of science and exploration, but also very much of fear, fantasy, illegibility and confusion. Here the connotations of empty land were far from uniform. On the one hand, political assumptions about the imperial mission facilitated the spread of emptiness as the chief premise upon which actions to appropriate and improve were built. Yet even while tsarist engineers worked to irrigate limited patches of desert, the positive connotations of empty landscape were tempered by a growing awareness of nature’s agency in terms of its threat – deceptive or otherwise – both to the individual visitor or settler and to infrastructure and communities. ‘Emptiness’ had no single fixed value or meaning and overcoming it was not necessarily the one-way, straightforward process of a barren and vacant desert being transformed into a land of opportunity.
Thus if the rhetorical construction and physical survey of empty land were an integral component of the set of assumptions and ideas that constitute Thomas’s ‘dreamwork of imperialism’, whereby landscapes could be rebuilt, modified and managed by the imperial state, emptiness also had the potential to be one of the imperial project’s greatest threats.114 Just as empty land made a convenient foil for Russians to construct future visions for a fertile, blossoming colony, it also acted as a constant reminder of the difficulties of the imperial mission in a landscape that could not be fully tamed. Examining constructions of emptiness in both an imaginative and physical sense thus reveals not only conventional imperial subjectivities, but also the challenges to them: the environment could not always be transformed in the way its interlocutors imagined, and thus emptiness challenged just as much as it enabled the narratives and actions of imperialists. For this reason, imperial constructions of empty space lay somewhere between avarice and anxiety: reflecting the fear of environmental decline that penetrated much of early twentieth-century global thought as much as the arrogant confidence of colonialism that sought its negation.
* My thanks to Charlotte Henze and Alexander Morrison for their comments on a previous draft of this chapter and to my fellow editors Allegra Giovine and Courtney J. Campbell for their perceptive reading of my work. All translations from Russian to English are my own.
1 A. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Oxford, 2002), p. 9.
2 For a selection, see Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, ed. T. Banivanua Mar and P. Edmonds (Basingstoke, 2010); High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science, ed. D. Cosgrove and V. della Dora (London, 2009); Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. W. Cronon (New York, 1996); D. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, Oh., 2007); R. H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); D. Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, Mass., 2013).
3 Noteworthy analyses include Banivanua Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space; and Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces.
4 See, e.g., D. Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford, 2013); and W. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), pp. 70–1.
5 A. Nikol’skii, ‘Ust’-Urt”, in Aziatskaia Rossiia. Illiustrirovannyi geograficheskii sbornik, ed. A. A. Kruber (Moscow, 1905), pp. 307–15, at p. 310.
6 See also ‘pushcha’, an impenetrable, dense forest; ‘pustyn’, a hermitage; and ‘pustyr’, wasteland.
7 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991); E. W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, 1989); E. W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford, 1996). For more on this immense field, see M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1984); M. Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, xvi (1986), 22–7; Y-F. Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience (London, 1977); B. Warf and S. Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York, 2009).
8 This includes D. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London, 2008); The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (Cambridge, 1988); D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford, 1994); D. Harvey, ‘Between time and space: reflections on the geographical imagination’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxxx (1990), 418–34; D. Weiner, ‘A death-defying attempt to articulate a coherent definition of environmental history’, Ab Imperio, iv (2008), 30–50.
9 See, e.g., W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007); A. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986); Grove, Green Imperialism.
10 Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. D. Davis and E. Burke III (Athens, Oh., 2011), p. 3.
11 Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries, p. 4. For a particularly instructive example, see Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome.
12 See J. Beattie, E. Melillo and E. O’Gorman, ‘Introduction: eco-cultural networks and the British empire, 1837–1945’, in Eco-cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History, ed. J. Beattie, E. Melillo and E. O’Gorman (London, 2015), pp. 3–20, at p. 8.
13 T. Mitchell, ‘Afterword’, in Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries, pp. 265–73, at p. 268 (citing Trumball).
14 Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, p. 190.
15 ‘Gorchakov circular’, cited in A. Kappeler, The Russian Empire: a Multi-Ethnic History (Harlow, 2001), p. 194.
16 K. K. Pahlen, Mission to Turkestan: Being the Memoirs of Count K. K. Pahlen, 1908–1909, trans. N. Couriss (London, 1964), p. 16.
17 A comprehensive topographical overview can be found in Turkestanskii krai, ed. V. I. Masal’skii, in Rossiia. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva, nastol’naia i dorozhnaia kniga dlia russkikh liudei vol. 19, ed. V. P. Semenov-Tian’-Shanskii (hereafter RPGONO) (St. Petersburg, 1913), pp. 10–35. See also P. M. Lessar, ‘Peski Kara-Kumy’, in Izvestiia Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva (hereafter IIRGO), xx (1884), 113–46; L. S. Berg, ‘Formy russkikh pustyn’’, in I. Val’ter, Zakony obrazovaniia pustyn’ v nastoiashchee i proshloe vremia (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 164–78. In terms of area, the Kara Kum measured some 250,000 square versts (one verst is 0.6629 miles); the Kizil Kum 300,000 and the Ust Yurt plateau over 150,000. The total area of Turkestan was 1,731,090 square versts (including Bukhara and Khiva) (RPGONO, p. 343).
18 Accurate population figures for these outlying regions are difficult to ascertain. Transcaspia – containing the Kara Kum and Ust Yurt – had a far smaller population than any other province of Turkestan and a much smaller population density (only 0.8 people per square verst) (RPGONO, p. 345).
19 Cosgrove and della Dora, High Places, p. 14. See D. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), for an excellent overview of changing attitudes to these difficult arid regions.
20 D. Brower, ‘Kyrgyz nomads and Russian pioneers: colonisation and ethnic conflict in the Turkestan revolt of 1916’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, xliv (1996), 41–53, at p. 45.
21 E. E. Ukhtomskii, Ot Kalmytskoi stepi do Bukhary (St. Petersburg, 1891), p. 62.
22 I. Il’enko, Zakaspiiskaia oblast’. Ocherk (Moscow, 1902), p. 5.
23 For an excellent overview of Russian exploration of Central Asia’s deserts, see E. Murzaev, V dalekoi Azii. Ocherki po istorii izucheniia Srednei i Tsentral’noi Azii v XIX-XX vekakh (Moscow, 1956).
24 RPGONO, p. 13.
25 Zakaspiiskii krai. Biblioteka dlia shkoli i naroda (Moscow, 1916), p. 37.
26 V. N. Skopin, Sredniaia Aziia i Indiia (Moscow, 1904), pp. 21, 44.
27 Illiustrirovannyi putevoditel’ po Sredne-Aziatskoi zheleznoi doroge (Askhabad, 1912), p. 17.
28 Ukhtomskii, Ot Kalmytskoi stepi, p. 38.
29 Niva, xxiii (1873), 358–9.
30 G. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 (London, 1967), pp. 140–1.
31 Ukhtomskii, Ot Kalmytskoi stepi, pp. 61–2.
32 On the picturesque and sublime, see The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. S. Copley and P. Garside (Cambridge, 1994); The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. P. Hulme and T. Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 42–7; B. Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 139–62.
33 D. E. Nye, ‘The anti-landscape’, in The Anti-Landscape, ed. D. E. Nye and S. Elkind (Amsterdam, 2014), pp. 11–28, at p. 15.
34 Nikol’skii, ‘Ust’-Urt’’’, p. 314.
35 L. Cherskii, ‘Ne sudil Bog’, Vokrug sveta, xxx (1896), 474–5.
36 V. Dubianskii, ‘Rastitel’nost’ russkikh peschanykh pustyn’, in Val’ter, Zakony obrazovaniia pustyn’, pp. 179–91; Lessar, ‘Peski Kara-Kumy’; A. Nikol’skii, ‘Priroda Kizil-Kumov’, in Kruber, Aziatskaia Rossiia, particularly pp. 219–24.
37 A. Morrison, ‘Amlakdars, khwajas and mulk land in the Zarafshan valley after the Russian conquest’, in Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th–early 20th Century), ed. P. Sartori (Leiden, 2013), pp. 23–64, at p. 57; ‘Turkestan Statute’, Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 3rd ser., vi, no. 3814, 12 June 1886. On land management in Central Asia more broadly, see the 2010 special issue (vol. xxix) of Central Asian Survey; and B. Penati, ‘Managing rural landscapes in colonial Turkestan: a view from the margins’, in Sartori, Explorations, pp. 65–109.
38 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, p. 94.
39 I. Ia. Vatslik, Zakaspiiskaia zheleznaia doroga, ee znachenie i budushchnost’ (St. Petersburg, 1888), p. II.
40 A. I. Rodzevich, Ocherk postroiki Zakaspiiskoi voennoi zheleznoi dorogi i ee znachenie dlia russko-sredneaziatskoi promyshlennosti i torgovli (St. Petersburg, 1891), p. 9.
41 For a sample of such projects, see A. I. Glukhovskoi, Amu-Dar’insko-kaspiiskii vodnyi put’ i ego znachenie dlia Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1889); Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter RGIA), f. 183, op. 1, d. 68; N. Petrov, Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k proektu orosheniia I-go uchastka Golodnoi stepi (St. Petersburg, 1898).
42 See M. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge, 2019); and J. Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991 (Göttingen, 2017).
43 ‘Khronologicheskie vypiski’, in Golodnaia step’ 1867–1917. Istoriia kraia v dokumentakh, ed. A. V. Stanishevskii (Moscow, 1981), pp. 214–6.
44 Glukhovskoi, Amu-Dar’insko-kaspiiskii vodnyi put’, p. 2; V. F. Karavaev, Materialy i issledovaniia k proektu orosheniia Golodnoi i Dal’verzinskoi stepei: Golodnaia step’ v ee proshlom i nastoiashchem (Petrograd, 1914), p. 8; N. Malakhovskii, ‘Istoriia orositel’nykh rabot v Turkestane’, Turkestanskie vedomosti, xxii (1912), 3.
45 V. M. Sazonov, K proektu orosheniia Zakaspiiskoi oblasti (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 43.
46 Karavaev, Materialy i issledovaniia, p. 5. Karavaev led the surveying party for Rizenkampf’s proposed project to irrigate 500,000 hectares of land in the Hungry Steppe. For details of the plan, see RGIA, f. 432, op. 1, d. 926 and f. 432, op. 1, d. 659.
47 M. N. Ermolaev, Propusk vod r. Amu-Dar’i v Mervskii i Tedzhenskii oazisy s tsel’iu orosheniia 516,000 desiatin zemli v vostochnoi chasti Zakaspiiskoi oblasti (St. Petersburg, 1908), p. 65; and RGIA, f. 427, op. 1, d. 26.
48 Ermolaev, Propusk vod r. Amu-Dar’i, plates on pp. 36–7, 38–9, 40–1, 42–3.
49 J. Obertreis, ‘“Mertvye” i “kul’turnye” zemli: Diskursy uchenykh i imperskaia politika v Srednei Azii, 1880–e–1991 gg.’, Ab Imperio, iv (2008), 191–231, at p. 200.
50 M. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), p. 61. See also Obertreis, ‘“Mertvye” i “kul’turnye” zemli’, pp. 200–4.
51 [Annenkov] Sredniaia Aziia i ee prigodnost’ dlia vodvoreniia russkio zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1889), p. 49.
52 G. R. Trumbull IV, ‘Body of work: water and reimagining the Sahara in the era of decolonization’, in Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries, pp. 87–102, at p. 97.
53 N. A. Dingel’shtedt, Opyt izucheniia irrigatsii Turkestanskogo kraia (St. Petersburg, 1893), p. 293.
54 Dingel’shtedt, Opyt izucheniia irrigatsii, p. 43.
55 An elegant overview of imperial ‘improvement’ is provided in Davis, Arid lands, chs. 4 and 5.
56 A. Morrison, ‘Peasant settlers and the “civilising mission” in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’, Jour. Imperial and Commonwealth History, xliii (2015), 387–417.
57 Sazonov, K proektu, pp. 68–71.
58 A. V. Krivoshein, Zapiska Glavnoupravliaiushchego zemleustroistvom i zemledeliem o poezdke v Turkestanskii krai v 1912 godu (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 67. This view was championed by Krivoshein’s staff – see also V. P. Voshchinin, Ocherki novogo Turkestana. Svet i teni russkoi kolonizatsii (St. Petersburg, 1914), p. 19.
59 A. V. Krivoshein, ‘Ob otvode russkim pereselentsam uchastkov oroshaemoi kazennoi zemli v Golodnoi stepi’, in Stanishevskii, Golodnaia step’ 1867–1917, pp. 142–53, at p. 147.
60 Spravochnaia knizhka dlia khodokov i pereselentsev. Opisanie Syr-Dar’inskogo pereselencheskogo raiona (Tashkent, 1914), p. 30.
61 Turkestanskie vedomosti (1913), No. 220, 2.
62 Spravochnaia knizhka, plates, pp. 30–1.
63 These obstacles included the failure to legislate fully for water rights and difficulties in facilitating foreign investment (Peterson, ‘Technologies of rule’, ch. 3).
64 Pahlen, Mission to Turkestan, p. 156.
65 For similar British anxieties about the unfathomable nature of Iraq post-1900, see P. Satia, ‘“A rebellion of technology”: development, policing and the British Arabian imaginary’, in Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries, pp. 23–59. Grove also suggests that sublime wildernesses were ultimately constructed as ways of dealing with anxieties about the survival and integrity of the individual and society (Grove, Green Imperialism, p.483).
66 Turkestankie vedomosti (1909), No. 198, 862. See similar comparisons in Il’enko, Zakaspiiskaia oblast’, p. 7; and Karavaev, Materialy i issledovaniia, p. 5.
67 A. Khazeni, ‘Across the Black Sands and the Red: travel writing, nature and the reclamation of the Eurasian steppe circa 1850’, International Jour. Middle East Studies, xlii (2010), 591–614, at p. 598.
68 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, p. 56.
69 Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, pp. 19–20.
70 M. Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (Carlton, 2014), p.117.
71 Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, p. 10.
72 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, p. 68.
73 Ukhtomskii, Ot Kalmytskoi stepi, p. 61.
74 RPGONO, p. 29.
75 Karavaev, Materialy i issledovaniia, pp. 5–6.
76 See Fox on the indecipherable landscapes of Antarctica in ‘Walking in circles: cognition and science in high places’, in Cosgrove and della Dora, High Places, pp. 19–29.
77 F. Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (London, 1882), p.135.
78 A. Nikol’skii, ‘Priroda Kizil-Kumov’, pp. 216–27, at p. 225, and Sorokin, ‘Cherez Kara-Kum’, pp. 282–93, at pp. 290–1, both in Kruber, Aziatskaia Rossiia.
79 A. Kaufman and Shevchenko-Krasnogorskii, ‘Po Sredne-aziatskoi zheleznoi doroge’, in Kruber, Aziatskaia Rossiia, pp. 160–73, at p. 171.
80 Kh. V. Gel’man, ‘Nabliudeniia nad dvizheniem letuchikh peskov v Khivinskom khanstve’, IIRGO, xxvii (1891), 384–415.
81 Sorokin, ‘Cherez Kara-Kum’, p. 290.
82 Curzon, Russia in Central Asia, p. 75. For a more scientific take, see Val’ter, Zakony obrazovaniia pustyn’, p. 130.
83 RPGONO, p. 22.
84 On mirages and the breakdown of perception, see K. Yusoff, ‘Climates of sight: mistaken visibilities, mirages and “seeing beyond” in Antarctica’, in Cosgrove and della Dora, High Places, pp. 48–63.
85 J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1999), p. 219. See also Banivanua Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space on the colonial reorganization of space (p. 3); and Mitchell’s analysis of British attempts to make Egypt readable in T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, Calif., 1988).
86 E.g., N. Iadrintsev, ‘Umen’shenie vod v aralo-kaspiiskoi nizmennosti v predelakh zapadnoi Sibiri’, IIRGO, xxii (1886), 53–62.
87 Dingel’shtedt, Opyt izucheniia irrigatsii, pp. 8–12.
88 L. Berg and P. Ignatov, ‘O kolebaniiakh urovnia ozer Srednei Azii i zapadnoi Sibiri’, IIRGO, xxxvi (1900), 111–25. See also L. S. Berg, Aral’skoe more. Opyt fiziko-geograficheskoi monografii (St. Petersburg, 1908).
89 Berg and Ignatov, ‘O kolebaniiakh urovnia ozer’, p. 118.
90 Nikol’skii, ‘Priroda Kizil-Kumov’, p. 217.
91 Nikol’skii, ‘Priroda Kizil-Kumov’, p. 217.
92 Gel’man, ‘Nabliudeniia’, pp. 413–5.
93 Val’ter, Zakony obrazovaniia pustyn’, pp. 120–4.
94 Dingel’shtedt, Opyt izucheniia irrigatsii, pp. 14–5.
95 P. A. Kropotkin, ‘The desiccation of Eur-Asia’, Geographical Jour., xxiii (1904), 722–41, at p. 722.
96 L. Berg, ‘Vysykhaet li Sredniaia Aziia?’, IIRGO, xli (1905), 507–21.
97 V. S. Solov’ev, ‘Vrag s vostoka’, in Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, ed. S. M. Solov’ev and E. L. Radlov (St. Petersburg, 1914), v. 452–65 (originally published 1892).
98 See Moon, Plough that Broke the Steppes, ch. 5; and D. Moon, ‘The debate over climate change in the steppe region in nineteenth-century Russia’, Russian Review, lxix (2010), 251– 75.
99 RPGONO, p. 31.
100 See, e.g., E. Huntington, Civilisation and Climate (New Haven, Conn., 1915); and W. Macdonald, The Conquest of the Desert (London, 1914). For more on the zenith of desiccation theory, see Davis, Arid Lands, chs. 4 and 5.
101 Davis, Arid Lands, p. 78, pp. 106–10.
102 V. A. Obruchev, Peski i stepi Zakaspiiskoi oblasti (St. Petersburg, 1888), p. 11. See also RPGONO, p. 212.
103 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 664, op. 1, d. 6. See similar activities on Russia’s European grasslands in Moon, Plough that Broke the Steppes, pp. 173–206.
104 N. Kharin, Vegetation Degradation in Central Asia under the Impact of Human Activities (Dordrecht, 2002), pp. 47–8.
105 RGIA, f. 350, op. 1, d. 277, ll. 26–26 ob.
106 See RGIA, f. 350, op. 1, d. 277, ll. 8–26 ob for measures including earthworks and shields.
107 Turkestanskie vedomosti, 1915, no. 252, p. 3.
108 G. K. Rizenkampf, Problemy orosheniia Turkestana (Moscow, 1921), p. 42. See also discussions in local agricultural journals about poor soil quality in the Hungry Steppe, e.g. Turkestanskii zemledelets, no. 4 (1915), 52–8.
109 V. A. Vasil’ev, Ocherk gidrotekhnicheskikh rabot v Murgabskom Gosudarevom imenii (Petrograd, 1915).
110 The British in India and Egypt experienced very similar difficulties: see D. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1988), ch. 6, pp. 171–208.
111 Dingel’shtedt, Opyt izucheniia irrigatsii, p. 64.
112 Voshchinin, Ocherki novogo Turkestana, pp. 23–6. Advice on how to recognize and combat such difficulties was often featured in the local agricultural press, e.g., Turkestanskoe sel’skoe khoziaistvo nos. 3 and 6 (1914).
113 Voshchinin, Ocherki novogo Turkestana, p. 22.
114 Thomas, Artificial Horizon, pp. 42 and 149.