From 1875-1876, Kuropatkin was employed in a diplomatic mission to Yaqub Beg (ruler of Kashgaria) to resolve the issues of Russian border claims in the Fergana Valley.

In December 1880, he and 5 companies made an 18-day march across 500 miles of desert to join General Mikhail Skobelev’s invasion of Turkmenistan.

He established a local judicial and school system, and encouraged the settlement of colonists from the interior provinces of the Russian Empire.

Although the rationale of his military approach was to wage a war of attrition and to avoid an offensive until the Trans-Siberian Railway brought sufficient troops and materiel, his cautiousness and hesitancy markedly influenced the repeated Russian defeats.

Nevertheless, once Tsar Nicholas II assumed the post of Supreme Commander, he put Kuropatkin in charge of the Grenadier Corps in October, 1915.

Tsar Nicholas II did not accept Kuropatkin's excuses of a lack of artillery support, poor roads and bad weather.

He planned a night attack which included setting up batteries of searchlights to blind the German defenders, a tactic which had worked in 1904 against Japanese troops.

[7] Kuropatkin was relieved of command on July 22, 1916, and reassigned to Turkestan, where the Russian involvement in World War I, especially against the Ottoman Empire was extremely unpopular among the indigenous peoples and which had led to the Central Asian revolt of 1916.

Kuropatkin served as Governor-General of the Turkestan Military District as well as ataman of the Semirechye Cossacks and led the brutal suppression of the revolt.

[8] In the February Revolution of 1917 Kuropatkin was in Petrograd, and quickly pledged his allegiance to the Russian Provisional Government, cutting the royal insignia off his epaulettes.

He was confirmed in his post as commander of the Turkestan Military District by Provisional Government War Minister Alexander Guchkov.