He initially announced a rejection of personal gifts and prohibited officials from soliciting bribes or imposing unauthorized taxes.

Some historians suggest that Alim Khan, who initially supported modernization and reforms, may have realized that the reformists' ultimate objectives excluded him and his descendants from future rule.

He toyed with the idea of reform as a tool to keep the clergy in line, but only as long as he saw the possibility of using it to strengthen Manghud rule.

[citation needed] One of the most important Tajik writers, Sadriddin Ayniy, wrote vivid accounts of life under the Emir.

In March 1918, activists of the Young Bukharan Movement (Yosh Buxoroliklar) informed the Bolsheviks that the Bukharians were ready for the revolution and that the people were awaiting liberation.

The majority of Bukharans did not support an invasion and the ill-equipped and ill-disciplined Bolshevik army fled back to the Soviet stronghold at Tashkent.

After four days of fighting, the Ark of Bukhara was destroyed, the red flag was raised from the top of Kalyan Minaret, and the Emir Alim Khan fled, first to his base at Dushanbe (in present-day Tajikistan), and then finally to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he died in 1944.

After the capture of Bukhara, the Bolsheviks discovered them and at first wanted to shoot them together with the remaining several members of the family and close associates of the emir (similar to the execution of Nicholas II with his family and close associates), but left them alive in order to further propaganda in their favor, sending all three to Moscow to be raised in an orphanage for the orphans of dead Bolsheviks and soldiers of the Red Army.

In 1930 (according to other sources, in 1929) he wrote an open letter to his father through the Izvestia newspaper, where he renounced Seyid Alim Khan, accusing him and his government of grave sins and deeds.

He later served in the Red Army, achieving the rank of major general, and participated in World War II, when he lost a leg.

He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and, after the end of the war, again began teaching at the V. V. Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy in Moscow, then married Lidia Mikhailovna.

According to the memoirs of one of Shakhmurad's contemporaries, "when Shahmurad came to visit us with his wife Lidia Mikhailovna, he became drunk, remembered his parents, and cried."

In 1982, she joined the Voice of America, working for many years as a broadcaster for VOA's Dari Service, editor, program host and producer.

Their children (Hasan, Lo'ba, Ali, Narges, Qasem, Reza, Fatemeh, Mohammad, Mahmoud, Mahboubeh) all live in Mashhad.

In 2020, the BBC World Service made a documentary, called Bukhara, which discusses Emir Alim Khan and the fate of his family.