Russia annexed Lake Issyk Kul in north east Kyrgyzstan from China in the early 1860s, lands of Turkmens, Khanate of Khiva, Emirate of Bukhara in the second half of 1800s.

In March 1918, activists of the Young Bukharian Movement informed the Bolsheviks that the Bukharans 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.

A nearby anti-Bolshevik stronghold in the Tadjik/Moslem village of Khangir (qingir) declared its independence shortly afterwards, but soon surrendered after a 14-day siege by Russian and Bokhkori Bolsheviks.

It was initially called Kyrgyz ASSR (Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) and was a part of the Russian SFSR.

[1] In 1924, the borders of political units in Central Asia were changed along ethnic lines determined by Lenin's Commissar for Nationalities, Joseph Stalin.

The population also increased with thousands of ethnic Tajiks migrating to Tajikistan following the transfer of Bukhara and Samarkand to the Uzbek SSR.

It has an interesting regional museum and lies near the remains of the ancient city of Merv, which, through its corrupted form, gives its name to the modern town.

This blocked the valley's natural outlet and the routes to Samarkand and Bukhara, but none of these borders was of any great significance so long as Soviet rule lasted.

During the Great Purges of Joseph Stalin, many thousands of Chechens, Koreans and Crimean Tatars were exiled to the Uzbek SSR.

Samarkand is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, prospering from its location on the trade route between China and Europe (Silk Road).

This led to much larger numbers of Slavic settlers flowing into Turkestan than had hitherto been the case, and their settlement was overseen by a specially created Migration Department in St. Petersburg (Переселенческое Управление).

This caused considerable discontent amongst the local population, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs and Sarts, as these settlers took scarce land and water resources away from them.

In 1916 discontent boiled over in the Basmachi Revolt, sparked by a decree conscripting the natives into Labour battalions (they had previously been exempt from military service).

The competition for land and water which ensued between the Kazakhs and the newcomers caused great resentment against colonial rule during the final years of Tsarist Russia, with the most serious uprising, the Central Asian Revolt, occurring in 1916.

This would usher in a still bloodier chapter in Turkestan's history, as the Bolsheviks of the Tashkent Soviet (made up entirely of Russian soldiers and railway workers, with no Muslim members) launched an attack on the autonomous Jadid government in Kokand early in 1918, which left 14,000 dead.

Dissident Islamist and anti-Soviet Central Asians fled to Afghanistan, British India, and to the Hijaz in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamist Uzbek As-Sayyid Qāsim bin Abd al-Jabbaar Al-Andijaani(السيد قاسم بن عبد الجبار الأنديجاني) was born in Fergana valley's Andijan city in Turkestan (Central Asia).

He went to British India was educated at Darul Uloom Deoband,[6] and then returned to Turkestan where he preached against Communist Russian rule.

[7] He then fled to Afghanistan, then to British India and then to Hijaz where he continued his education in Mecca and Medina and wrote several works on Islam and engaged in anti-Soviet activities.

The central part of the geological depression that forms the Ferghana Valley is characterized by block subsidence, originally to depths estimated at 6–7 km, largely filled with sediments that range in age as far back as the Permian-Triassic boundary.

The city of Aktau was built in Kazakhstan's Mangyshlak Peninsula as a small village to house the region's oil workers in 1961.

By the early 1970s, the Soviets had started to build some of their hydroelectric power stations in Eastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as part of an overall development strategy.

The Soviets began to grow cotton in Uzbekistan after the Virgin Lands project and the mass use of the isolated and now shrinking Aral Sea for desert irrigation in the early 1960s.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome was founded in Kazakhstan on 2 June 1955, during the Cold War, as one of many long-range nuclear missile bases in the region, but diverged into space travel.

There remained traces of some settled farming and urban Iranian communities like the Tajiks and Bukhara in the south, and nomadic Mongolic Kyrgiz on the border with China.

(No Citation) In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan women wore veils which covered their entire face and body like the Paranja and faranji.

The descent of the Kyrgyz from the autochthonous Siberian population is confirmed on the other hand by the recent genetic studies (The Eurasian Heartland: A continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity).

Remarkably, 63% of modern Kyrgyz men share Haplogroup R1a1 (Y-DNA) with Tajiks (64%), Ruthenians (54%), Poles and Hungarians (≈60%), and even Icelanders (25%).

1918–24  Turkestan3 1918–41  Volga German4 1919–90  Bashkir 1920–25  Kirghiz2 1920–90  Tatar 1921–91  Adjarian 1921–45  Crimean 1921–91  Dagestan 1921–24  Mountain 1921–90  Nakhichevan 1922–91  Yakut 1923–90  Buryat1 1923–40  Karelian 1924–40  Moldavian 1924–29  Tajik 1925–92  Chuvash5 1925–36  Kazakh2 1926–36  Kirghiz 1931–92  Abkhaz 1932–92  Karakalpak 1934–90  Mordovian 1934–90  Udmurt6 1935–43  Kalmyk 1936–44  Checheno-Ingush 1936–44  Kabardino-Balkarian 1936–90  Komi 1936–90  Mari 1936–90  North Ossetian 1944–57  Kabardin 1956–91  Karelian 1957–92  Checheno-Ingush 1957–91  Kabardino-Balkarian 1958–90  Kalmyk 1961–92  Tuvan 1990–91  Gorno-Altai 1991–92  Crimean