Russo-Turkoman War - 1878-1881
Russia resumed her southward march, setting to work with the doggedness that she usually displays in the task of avenging slights and overbearing opposition. The penury of the exchequer, the plots of the Nihilists, and the discontent of the whole people after the inglorious struggle with Turkey, would have imposed on any other Government a policy of rest. But there were many motives for adopting a forward policy in Asia. Conquests of Turkoman territory would bring wealth, at least to the bureaucrats and generals; and military triumphs might be counted on to raise the spirit of the troops, and to silence the talk about official peculations during the Turkish campaign.
In the autumn of 1878 General Lomakin had waged an unsuccessful campaign against the Tekke Turkomans, and finally fell back with heavy losses on Krasnovodsk, his base of operations on the Caspian Sea. In the summer of 1879 another expedition set out from that port to avenge the defeat. Owing to the death of the chief, Lomakin again rose to the command. His bad dispositions at the climax of the campaign led him to a more serious disaster. On coming up to the fortress of Denghil Tepe, near the town of Geok Tepe, he led only fourteen hundred men, or less than half of his force, to bombard and storm a stronghold held by some fifteen thousand Turkomans, and fortified on the plan suggested.by a British officer, Lieutenant Butler. Preluding his attack by a murderous cannonade, he sent round his cavalry to check the flight of the faint-hearted among the garrison; and before his guns had fully done their work he ordered the whole line to advance and carry the walls by storm. At once the Turkoman fire redoubled in strength, tore away the front of every attacking party, and finally drove back the assailants everywhere with heavy loss (September 9, 1879). On the morrow the invaders fell back on the river Atrek and thence made their way back to the Caspian in sore straits.
The next year witnessed the advent of a great soldier on the scene. Skobeleff, the stormy petrel of Russian life, the man whose giant frame was animated by a hero's soul, who, when pitched from his horse in the rush on one of the death-dealing redoubts at Plevna, rose undaunted to his feet, brandished his broken sword in the air, and yelled at the enemy a defiance which thrilled his broken lines to a final mad charge over the rampart—Skobeleff was at hand. He had culled his first laurels at Khiva and Khokand, and now came to the shores of the Caspian to carry forward the standards which he hoped one day to plant on the walls of Delhi.
At once the operations felt the influence of his active, cheery, and commanding personality. The materials for a railway, which had been lying unused at Bender, were now brought up; and Russia found the money to set about the construction of a railway from Michaelovsk to the Tekke Turkoman country—an undertaking which was destined wholly to change the conditions of warfare in South Turkestan and on the Afghan border. By the close of the year more than forty miles were roughly laid down, and Skobeleff was ready for his final advance from Kizil Arvat towards Denghil Tepe.
Meanwhile the Tekkes had gained reinforcements from their kinsmen in the Merv oasis, and had massed nearly forty thousand men—so rumor ran—at their stronghold. Nevertheless, they offered no serious resistance to the Russian advance, doubtless because they hoped to increase the difficulties of his retreat after the repulse which they determined to inflict at their hill fortress. But Skobeleff excelled Lomakin in skill no less than in prowess and magnetic influence.
For two years Skobelef made his preparations, and on January 1, 1881, he delivered his first attack upon the Turkoman stronghold at Geok Tepe with 8,000 troops and more than fifty guns. Inside was the flower of the Turkoman people, with 7,000 women and children. Their felt tents were set on fire by petroleum bombs, artillery rained shell and shrapnel on them, gradually the trenches drew nearer; but they fought with a desperation which kept the Russians at bay for three weeks, and on more than one occasion they routed the invaders in a hand-to-hand struggle and slashed them to death in their own trenches, leaving Russian heads and limbs scattered about. Here raged for three whole weeks an almost uninterrupted battle, fought by both sides with a ferocious courage never surpassed in history; here Skobelef, and Kuropatkin under him, won their greatest laurels; here Russia became mistress of Trans-Caspia.
Skobelef proceeded to push his trenches towards the stronghold, so that on January 23, 1881, his men succeeded in placing twenty-six hundred pounds of gunpowder under the south-eastern corner of the rampart. Early on the following day the Russians began the assault; and while cannon and rockets wrought death and dismay among the ill-armed defenders, the mighty shock of the explosion tore away fifty yards of their rampart. At once the Russian lines moved forward to end the work begun by gunpowder.
But the inevitable end came, and the slaughter of every male left in the fortress, and, after it, that terrible Cossack pursuit of flying men and women for ten miles. Opinions differ as to this part of the struggle. If you would strike only once, and thus be more merciful in the end, you must strike hard, was Skobelef's motto in dealing with Orientals. Skobeleff gave to his foes a sharp lesson, which, he claimed, was the most merciful in the end. He ordered his men, horse and foot alike, to pursue the fugitives and spare no one. Ruthlessly the order was obeyed. First, the discharge of grape-shot from the light guns, then the bayonet, and lastly the Cossack lance, strewed the plain with corpses of men, women, and children; darkness alone put an end to the butchery, and then the desert for eleven miles eastward of Denghil Tepe bore witness to the thoroughness of Muscovite methods of warfare. All the men within the fortress were put to the sword. Skobeleff himself estimated the number of the slain at twenty thousand. Booty to the value of six hundred thousand pounds fell to the lot of the victors.
This victory proved to be the last of Skobeleff s career. 'The Government, having used their knight-errant, now put him on one side as too insubordinate and ambitious for his post. To his great disgust, he was recalled. He did not long survive. Owing to causes that are little known, among which a round of fast living is said to have played its part, he died suddenly from failure of the heart at his residence near Moscow (July 7, 1882). Some there were who whispered dark things as to his militant notions being out of favor with the new Czar, Alexander III.; others pointed significantly to Bismarck. Others, again, prattled of Destiny; but the best comment on the death of Skobeleff would seem to be that illuminating saying of Novalis— "Character is Destiny." Love of fame prompted in him the desire one day to measure swords with Lord Roberts in the Punjab; but the coarser strain in his nature dragged him to earth at the age of thirty-nine.
The accession of Alexander III, after the murder of his father on March 13, 1881, promised for a short time to usher in a more peaceful policy; but, in truth, the last important diplomatic assurance of the reign of Alexander II. was that given by the minister, M. de Giers, to Lord Dufferin, as to Russia's resolve not to occupy Merv: "Not only do we not want to go there, but, happily, there is nothing which can require us to go there."
In spite of a similar assurance given on April 5th to the Russian Ambassador in London, both the need and the desire soon sprang into existence. Muscovite agents made their way to the fruitful oasis of Merv; and a daring soldier, Alikhanoff, in the guise of a merchant's clerk, proceeded thither early in 1882, skillfully distributed money to work up a Russian party, and secretly sketched a plan of the fortress. Many chiefs and traders opposed Russia bitterly, for O'Donovan, a brilliant and adventurous Englishman, while captive there, sought to open their eyes to the coming danger. But England's influence had fallen to zero since Skobeleff's victory and her own withdrawal from Kandahar.
Finally, in 1884, the Czar's Government sought to revenge itself for Britain's continued occupation of Egypt by fomenting trouble near the Afghan border. Alikhanoff then reappeared, not in disguise, browbeat the hostile chieftains at Merv by threats of a Russian invasion, and finally induced them to take an oath of allegiance to Alexander III. (February 12, 1884).
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