Forgotten Wars in the Sands: Russia’s Campaigns to Khiva and Bukhara

In the mid-19th century, while the Russian Empire was fighting in the Caucasus and Crimea, far to the southeast other, almost forgotten battles were taking place. In those desolate lands where the sands meet the steppe, where fierce winds chase dust across endless plains between the Caspian Sea and the Syr-Darya River, the Empire sought to secure its influence over Khiva and Bukhara. These campaigns became part of a vast geopolitical chess match that historians would later call The Great Game — a silent yet relentless struggle between Russia and Britain for dominance in Central Asia.

One of the first players in that game was General Vasily Perovsky. In 1839 he received orders to march on Khiva — a wealthy khanate that held Russian captives and threatened frontier lands. Perovsky led some five thousand soldiers supported by ten thousand camels and supply wagons. Marching in winter seemed sensible at the time: in summer the steppe turned into a blazing furnace where water evaporated faster than a flask could be filled. But the frost proved far more merciless than the heat.

By December, brutal cold had set in. The steppe froze solid, winds tore through the tents, and camels collapsed lifeless on the march. Snow buried the trails, scurvy spread among the troops, and every day became a test of endurance. In one officer’s report, he wrote: “We marched not against an enemy, but against the earth itself. Sand and ice were our foes.” The Khiva expedition of Perovsky ended in disaster — of 5,200 men, barely half returned. The enemy was rarely seen; they perished instead from cold, hunger, and disease. It was a tragedy soon silenced, for empires have little use for legends of defeat.

Yet lessons were learned. Ten years later, as Russia once again strengthened its hold in the region, Perovsky’s name reappeared in military dispatches. In 1853, he led the assault on the fortress of Ak-Mechet (now Kyzylorda), a stronghold on the Syr-Darya that guarded the road to Bukhara. This time the story was different. Under cannon fire and at heavy cost, the Russian forces advanced, day by day, bastion by bastion. By late summer the fortress fell. For Perovsky it was more than a victory — it was redemption. He had returned to the same lands where half his army once perished and raised the imperial flag over walls steeped in dust, blood, and memory.

Thus began a new era in the history of Central Asia. One by one, cities followed Ak-Mechet’s fate, and soon Bukhara and Khiva came under the protectorate of St. Petersburg. But each step southward cost hundreds of lives and thousands of camels lost in the sands. Behind the dry lines of official reports lay human stories — soldiers frozen in the steppe, officers burying friends in dunes, and the people of Khiva watching foreign armies approach their gates.

Today these events are almost forgotten. Schoolbooks devote only a few lines to them, though it was there, among the sands and storms, that the fate of a whole region was decided. Russia and Britain carefully measured their moves across Afghanistan and Turkestan, like two players preparing for the final move. The Great Game would last for decades — but it began with those frozen caravans that set out into the steppe in the winter of 1839 and almost never returned.

The story of Perovsky is a reminder of the price of ambition — that sometimes the enemy is not another man, but nature itself. And that behind every line drawn on a map lie the lives of those who walked through boundless sands in the name of distant orders and forgotten glory.