It introduced the Kazakhs to industrial modernity and tied the distant Governor-Generalship of Turkestan more firmly to the Russian metropole, allowing troops to be rushed to Central Asia and raw cotton to be exported to Moscow's textile mills.

[5] Because of the American Civil War, cotton shot up in price in the 1860s, becoming an increasingly important commodity in the region, although its cultivation was on a much lesser scale than during the Soviet period.

In the long term, the development of a cotton monoculture would render Turkestan dependent on food imports from Western Siberia, and the Turkestan–Siberia Railway was already planned when the First World War broke out.

Cut off from food supplies, and unable to sustain itself due to forced cotton cultivation, Russian Turkestan experienced an intense famine.

The temporary loss of the Trans-Aral also allowed the Tashkent Soviet a degree of autonomy from Moscow during the period immediately following the Bolshevik takeover, which resulted in atrocities like the Kokand Massacre, in which between 5,000 and 14,000 people were killed.