Russia steps up its campaign to wrest…

Russia steps up its campaign to wrest full control over the Central Asian region after the considerable weakening of Persia by its defeat in 1860, and with the increasing occupation of Great Britain in Egypt, during the years of 1873 to 1881.

Turkmen tribes had come into contact in the eighteenth century with the Russian Empire, which began to move into the area in 1869 with the establishment of the Caspian Sea port of Krasnovodsk, current-day Turkmenbashy.

After the suppression of the Bukhara and Khiva emirates, Russia had decided to move into Transcaspian region, allegedly to subdue Turkmen slave trade and banditry.

The service of some Turkmen tribes, especially the Yomud, for the Khivan Khan has also encouraged the Russians to punish them by raids into Khorazm, which kill hundreds.

These wars had culminated in the campaigns of General Mikhail Skobelev, who had returned to Turkestan after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.

After the unsuccessful first siege of Geok Tepe, a desert fortress near Ashkhabad, in 1879, the Russians had sent a second expedition, this time with more men and equipment, including twenty thousand camels for transport.

In December 1880, Geok Tepe had been besieged by seventy-one hundred Russians under General Skobelev against twenty-five thousand defenders, including the civilian Turkmen population of the area.

Learning a lesson from the previous expedition, Skolobev decided to lay siege to the fort instead of mounting a direct assault.

Although the Russian forces encounter heavy resistance, they are eventually able to break in by digging a tunnel underneath a portion of the wall, then detonating a mine underneath the wall on January 12 (24), 1881.

Once the fortress is breached, the Russian troops storm in.

Several hundred defenders had been killed in the initial explosion, and many more are killed in the fighting that ensues.

As the Russians pour into the fort, the defenders, along with the civilians inside the fortress, flee across the desert, pursued by Skobelev's cavalry.

Around wight thousand Turkmen soldiers and civilians, including women and children, are killed in their flight, along with an additional sixty-five hundred that are killed inside the fortress.

The Russians kill all Turkmen males in the fortress who had not escaped, but they spare some five thousand women and children and free six hundred Persian slaves.

The taking of Geok Tepe and the following slaughter break the Turkmen resistance and decide the fate of Trancaspia.

On May 6, 1881, Transcaspia is declared an oblast of the Russian Empire.

During the entire campaign of 1880-1881, Russian casualties are two hundred and ninety killed and eight hundred and eighty-three wounded; sickness accounts for the death of six hundred and forty-five Russian soldiers.

Skobelev is advancing on Ashkhabad and Kalat i-Nadiri when he is disavowed and recalled.

He is given the command at Minsk.