This paper will explore the nature of Voenno-Narodnoe Upravlenie (Military-Popular administration) across Tsarist Central Asia, from its origins in the Turkestan and Steppe Statutes in the late 1860s to the suppression of the Central Asian Revolt in 1916. It will argue that Voenno-Narodnoe Upravlenie is best understood as a characteristically colonial form of administration, with a clear separation between a lower ‘native’ level and an upper, executive level manned exclusively by Europeans – army officers seconded from military service, who in many cases had participated in the campaigns of conquest that had made Central Asia part of the Russian empire. It will examine the education and world view of the latter (the ‘official mind’) as well as the means by which ‘native’ officials were selected or competed for election. It will do so comparatively, looking at the differing practices and outcomes visible in the nomadic steppe regions of Semirechie and Syr-Darya, the ‘core’ Turkestan provinces of Samarkand and Ferghana with their dense settled populations and irrigated agriculture, and the military frontier province of Transcaspia – as well as looking beyond Central Asia to comparable colonial bureaucracies in French Algeria and British India. It will conclude by examining how this system of governance unraveled under the pressures of war and revolt after 1914.
