This chapter dwells further on the collective solidarity and imagined digital community that the Kazakh Spring was able to bring about. In this chapter, I discuss the use of language, colonial heritage, and the rethinking of its legacy in the context of the nationalizing regime of Nazarbayev. I argue that the constructed divide between the Kazakh- and Russian-speaking political audiences no longer works as a divide for the Kazakh Spring activists, who are actively embracing bilingualism not as an unattainable aspiration but as a living reality of post-independence. Kazakh Spring activists can also be dubbed the Generation Q as they strive to return to the Latinization of the Kazakh/Qazaq language. This chapter also discusses how activists read the decolonial theory and use it in their activism. I dwell on why the main slogans, names, and titles of their projects come from the oeuvre of the Kazakh pre-Soviet movement of Alash and its writers and how these well-known discourses are changed and adapted to the contemporary Qazaq realities. I also discuss how the Kazakh Spring as a field allows the rethinking the nationalistic stigma that remained a Soviet legacy.

In the 1840s and 1850s the Russians notionally extended their control much deeper into the steppe, where, after the capture of the Khoqandi fortress of Aq Masjid in 1853, they attempted to consolidate a new frontier along the line of the Syr-Darya, to the east of the Aral Sea. The new fortresses at Raim, Kazalinsk, Karmakchi and Perovsk were islands of Russian sovereignty in an inhospitable landscape of salt-flats, marshland and desert, subject to extremes of cold and heat. Supplying their garrisons was difficult and expensive, and threw the Russians into dependence on Bukharan grain-traders and Qazaq pastoralists. Soldiers were bored out of their minds, and deliberately wounded themselves or deserted to the Khoqandi outposts to the south. While the Syr-Darya frontier was reasonably effective as a listening-post for Russian intelligence and resisted attacks from Khoqand, neither Cossacks nor peasants could be persuaded to settle there, and the costs of occupation far outweighed any revenue. By the late 1850s some voices were calling for a retreat to the Orenburg line, but a familiar argument – that of prestige – won the day, and instead an advance to Tashkent began to seem like the best way of escaping this ‘particularly painful place’.

The decisions which triggered the Russian conquest of Central Asia were taken by the generation of soldiers and statesmen who came of age during the Napoleonic Wars – Nesselrode, Chernyshev, Speranskii and above all Count Vasily Perovskii, Governor of Orenburg during the 1830s. This chapter argues that Russia’s victory against Napoleon transformed the self-perception of the Empire’s ruling elite: Russia was now unquestionably a European Great Power, and as such the constant raiding, rebellion and other forms of ‘insolence’ on her steppe frontier could no longer be tolerated. An account of Russian relations with Persia and Afghanistan is followed by an overview of the empire’s relationship with the Qazaqs from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and the growing Russian frustration with the khanate of Khoqand, and above all with Khiva.

By the end of the nineteenth century Semirechie would be known as the ‘granary of Central Asia’, and the only significant Russian settler colony in Turkestan, but in the 1840s it was still largely populated by Kyrgyz and Qazaq nomadic pastoralists under the contested rule of the Khoqand Khanate. Russian contacts with Qazaq Chinggissids of the Great Horde dated back to the early 1800s, but a Russian military presence came only in the 1840s, with the construction of fortresses at Kopal and Lepsinsk, before they crossed the Ili river to found Fort Vernoe in 1854. In 1860 Khoqandi forces suffered a shattering defeat at the Battle of Uzun-Agach, paving the way for extensive Cossack and peasant settlement in Semirechie’s gentle climate. In 1871 the Russians seized the Upper Ili Valley, which had seen a rebellion against Chinese rule in 1866. In 1881, however, following the reconquest of the region by the Qing, they returned the territory to them – the only instance of this happening throughout the whole history of the conquest.

Count V. A. Perovskii’s winter invasion of Khiva was the first significant attempt to project Russian power deep into the settled regions of Central Asia – and it was a dismal failure. This chapter explains how the expedition was proposed by Perovskii and agreed in St Petersburg, the enormous efforts needed to collect sufficient supplies and sufficient camels to carry them, and the hardships suffered by man and beast alike during one of the coldest winters in living memory. The invasion failed because almost all the expedition’s camels died, underlining Russian reliance on these animals and the Qazaqs who bred and drove them. To add to the humiliation, most of the Russian slaves whose liberation was one of the ostensible goals of the expedition were released and brought to Orenburg by a British officer. The lesson the Russians learnt from this humiliation was that long-distance expeditions did not work – instead they turned to fortresses as the best means of conquering and controlling the steppe.