Khiva was conquered by the Russians in 1873 who made Sayyid Muhammad Rahim Bahadur Khan II vassal ruler of the region.

[1] From 1905, Pan-Turkist ideologues like Ismail Gasprinski aimed to bridge differences among the peoples who spoke Turkic languages, uniting them into one government.

Early Central Asia Bolshevik leaders, the Kazakh Turar Ryskulov and the Uzbek Fayzullah Khojaev, believed all territories would sooner or later be unified into one state, Soviet Turkestan.

[3] On October 27, 1924 as a result of the national-territorial reorganisation of Central Asia, most of the Syr-Darya region was transferred to the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), and on 1 February 1926 to the Kyrgyz (Kazakh) ASSR (Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic), still being a part of the RSFSR.

Syr-Darya Oblast was originally divided into six uyezds: According to the 1897 census, the total population was 1,478,398 inhabitants (803,411 men and 674,987 women), including the cities of 205,596.