1804 Russian Sources - TATAR UZBEKISTAN - Tashkent

Khiva (historical names include Khorasam, Khoresm, Khwarezm, Khwarizm, Khwarazm, Chiwa, and Chorezm), is the former capital of Khwarezmia and the Khanate of Khiva and lies in the present-day Khorezm Province of Uzbekistan. In the early part of its history, the inhabitants of the area were from Iranian stock and spoke an Eastern Iranian language called Khwarezmian. Subsequently the Iranic ruling class was replaced by Turks in the 4th century A.D, and has had a Turkic speaking majority ever since. The city of Khiva was first recorded by Muslim travellers in the 10th century, although archaeologists assert that the city has existed since the 6th century. By the early 17th century, Khiva had become the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, ruled over by a branch of the Astrakhans, a Genghisid dynasty. In 1873, Russian General Von Kaufman launched an attack on the city, which fell on 28 May 1873. Although the Russian Empire now controlled the Khanate, it nominally allowed Khiva to remain as a quasi-independent protectorate.

The Crimean Tatars of Uzbekistan are part of a large Tatar population that lives primarily in Russia, but also in Turkey, Romania, and the Ukraine. They are descendants of the Mongols who swept through eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, and their history has been both complex and turbulent. For many years they have endured hardship, oppression, and injustice.

The territory of modern-day Uzbekistan and its close neighbors have seen many empires rise and fall. The Sogdians, the Macedonians, the Huns, the Mongolians, the Seljuks, the Timurids and the Khanates of Samarkand, Bukhara Khiva and Khorezm all held sway here at one time or another. The Russians had had their eyes on the lands over their southern border since Peter the Great sent his first military mission to Khiva in 1717. It was to be another 150 years before they started to make any considerable headway.

In 1865, General Kaufmann took Tashkent and signed agreements with the Khans. There were Russian client Khans in Khiva until 1920. The Bolsheviks were resisted in Central Asia by bands known as Basmachi until the 1930s; they were finally suppressed and Moscow took control. The history of Central Asia under Soviet rule is one of exploitation. Uzbekistan was used, as it had been under the tsars, as a place of internal exile. Stalin, fearing the power of the minorities in the Soviet Union, transported thousands of people in cattle cars into Uzbekistan and the surrounding republics. These included Germans, Koreans, Meshketi Turks, Chechens and Tatars. Uzbekistan has been governed since 1989 by Islam Karimov when he took over as head of the Uzbek Communist party (now the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, PDPU). Uzbekistan assumed independence in 1991 upon the break up of the Soviet Union.