Russian forces took Tashkent in 1865 and it became the seat of a Governorate-General in 1867 under Konstantin von Kaufman. Bukhara was defeated in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, both surviving as protectorates; Kokand was abolished and absorbed in 1876. The conquest of the Turkmen lands was the bloodiest phase: the Hamilton College survey records the storming of the Teke fortress of Geok Tepe in January 1881, in which approximately 14,000 Teke Turkmen were killed including those cut down in the pursuit, after which the Transcaspian province was organised with its centre at Ashkhabad. Kaufman's administration adopted a policy of non-interference in Muslim religious and customary life, on the assumption that exposure to Russian culture would produce assimilation on its own. The lasting demographic effect came later, through peasant settlement of the steppe after the Trans-Siberian Railway, which took pasture from nomadic communities and set the conditions for the revolt of 1916 and the famine of the early Soviet period.
The Russian Empire conquered the Kazakh steppe, the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva and the Turkmen lands, and settled Slavic colonists on nomadic pasture
The first all-Russian census of 1897 counted about 5.3 million in the Turkestan Governorate-General and roughly 2.5 million in the Steppe krai, with the protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva holding perhaps 2-2.5 million more, giving an order of magnitude of 9-10 million for the conquered lands. Slavic settlement followed: by 1911 over 1.5 million settlers had taken up land on the Kazakh steppe, and the resulting pressure on nomadic pasture led to the 1916 revolt and the flight of several hundred thousand Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to China.
No aggregate exists for thirty years of intermittent campaigning. The one large documented figure is the storming of Geok Tepe in January 1881, where the Hamilton College survey records approximately 14,000 Teke Turkmen killed, most of them in the pursuit after the fortress fell; the count comes from Russian military reporting, which had reason both to exaggerate the victory and to understate the killing of non-combatants. Deaths in the sieges of Tashkent, Samarkand, Khiva and Kokand, and among pastoral communities dispossessed of pasture, were not recorded.
The Hamilton College survey of Russian Turkestan records the killing of roughly 14,000 Teke Turkmen at Geok Tepe in 1881, including in the pursuit of those who fled, and the destruction of the fortress and its settlement.
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia