Syr-Darya Oblast


The Syr-Darya Oblast was one of the oblasts of the Russian Empire, a part of Russian Turkestan. Its center was Tashkent.

History

The Syr-Darya Oblast was founded after annexing the northwestern part of Khanate of Kokand, Chimkent and the northwestern part of Khanate of Khiva in 1867. Khiva was conquered by the Russians in 1873 who made Sayyid Muhammad Rahim Bahadur Khan II vassal ruler of the region.
From 1905, Pan-Turkist ideologues like Ismail Gasprinski aimed to bridge differences among the peoples who spoke Turkic languages, uniting them into one government. This idea was supported by Vladimir Lenin, and on April 30, 1918, with support of the Bolsheviks in Tashkent, the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was established with Tashkent as the capital. During the Russian Empire, the Turkestan ASSR's territory was governed as Turkestan Krai, the Emirate of Bukhara, and the Khanate of Khiva.
Early Central Asia Bolshevik leaders, the Kazakh Turar Ryskulov and the Uzbek Fayzullah Khojaev, believed all territories would sooner or later be unified into one state, Soviet Turkestan.
Without a tradition of national institutions and consciousness prior to the October Revolution of 1917, Central Asia was divided into “national republics” in 1924.
On October 27, 1924 as a result of the national-territorial reorganisation of Central Asia, most of the Syr-Darya region was transferred to the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and on 1 February 1926 to the Kyrgyz (Kazakh) ASSR, still being a part of the RSFSR. The remaining smaller region Tashkent County became a part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. These borders were not drawn along ethnic or linguistic lines.
The Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic later transformed into the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, the Socialist Republic of Kyrgyzstan and the independent Republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Geography

It bordered Turgay Oblast, Akmola Oblast, Semirechye Oblast, Samarkand Oblast, Fergana Oblast, and the semi-independent states of Khanate of Khiva and Emirate of Bukhara.
The area was 504,700 km ². The greatest stretch of longitude - about 1173 kilometers in width is about - 747 km.
Syr-Darya region occupied by about 70% of the total area Turkestan, and about 25% of the Turkestan province.

Administrative division

Syr-Darya Oblast was originally divided into six uyezds:

Demographics

According to the 1897 census, the total population was 1,478,398 inhabitants, including the cities of 205,596. With the exception of the regional city of Tashkent as having 155,673 residents in the Syr-Darya region of large cities do not.

Ethnic groups in 1897

Source:
UyezdKazakhsSartsKarakalpaksUzbeksRussiansTajiksUkrainiansOther Turkic People
Total64.4%9.8%6.3%4.3%2.2%......10.7%
Aiule-Ata90.9%0.5%...3.1%1.9%...1.9%...
Kazalinsk96.7%0.4%...0.03%2.0%.........
Perovsk97.5%1.1%..................
Tashkent36.4%24.3%...0.11%3.9%1.0%0.65%31.8%
Chimkent78.8%11.2%...7.3%......1.5%...
Petroaleksandrovsk24.2%0.03%47.9%17.7%1.6%......7.1%

With the exception of Russian and some Orthodox Old Believers and other Europeans, Christians and Jews, the main bulk of the population consists of Muslims.
Today, the territory of the former Syr-Darya Oblast is in eastern Uzbekistan and southeastern of Kazakhstan.