Russia in Central Asia in 1889

RUSSIA IN CENTRAL ASIA IN 1889 AND THE ANGLO - RUSSIAN QUESTION by THE HON. GEORGE N. Published in London in 1889 PREFACE: THE nucleus of this book less than one-third of its present dimensions appeared in the shape of a series of articles, entitled Russia in Central Asia which I contributed to the 6 Manchester Courier and other lead ing English provincial newspapers, in the months of November and December 1888, and January 1889. These articles were descriptive of a journey which I had taken in the months of September and October 1888, along the newly-constructed Transcaspian Rail way, through certain of the Central Asian dominions of the Czar of Russia. Exigencies of space, however, and the limitations of journalistic propriety, prevented me from including in my letters a good deal of information which I had obtained and were, of course, fatal to the incorporation with the narrative of illustrations or maps. Written, too, at a distance from works of reference, and depending in some cases upon testimony which I had no opportunity to verify or support, my former articles contained errors which I have since been able to correct. These considerations, and the desire to place before the public in a more coherent and easily accessible shape the latest information about the interesting regions which I traversed, have encouraged me almost entirely to rewrite, and to publish in a more careful and extended form, my somewhat fragmentary original contributions, to which in the interval I have also been enabled to add a mass of entirely new material. If the impress of their early character be in places at all perceptibly retained, it is because I am strongly of opinion that in descriptions of travel first thoughts are apt to be the best, and have consequently sometimes shrunk from depriving my narrative of such vividness or colour as it may have gained from being originally written upon the spot. References, figures, and statistics, I have subjected to verification while such sources of contemporary history as relate to my subject I have diligently explored. In the absence of any Russian publications corresponding to the Blue Books and voluminous reports of the English Govern ment Departments, it is extremely difficult to acquire full or precise information about Russian affairs. But such sources as were open to me in newspapers, articles, I have industriously studied. I trust, therefore, that substantial accuracy may be predicated of these pages for, in a case where the inferences to be drawn are both of high political significance, and are absolutely dependent upon the correct statement of facts. A few words of explanation as to what these chapters do, and what they do not, profess to be. Their pretensions are of no very exalted order. They are, in the main, a record of a journey, taken under circumstances of exceptional advantage and ease, through a country, the interest of which to English readers consists no longer in its physical remoteness and impenetrability, but rather in the fact that those conditions have just been superseded by a new order of tilings, capable at any moment of bringing it under the stern and immediate notice of Englishmen, as the theatre of imperial diplomacy possibly quod di avertant omen as the threshold of international war...