Fergana Valley - Historical Demography

Historical Demography

The information contained in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is particularly interesting on this point, as it gives the full information from the 1897 census, the only one held in the Russian Empire before 1917, and helps to illuminate a situation rendered obscure by the vagaries of Soviet Nationalities policy in the 1920s and 1930s. The population numbered 1,571,243 in 1897, and of that number 707,132 were women and 286,369 were urban.

In 1906 it was estimated at 1,796,500. Two-thirds of the total were Sarts and Uzbek. They lived mostly in the valley, while the mountain slopes above it were occupied by Kyrgyz, partly nomadic and pastoral, partly agricultural and settled. The other nations were Kashgarians, Kipchaks, Bukharan Jews and Gypsies. The governing classes were of course Russians, who constituted also the merchants and industrial working class, such as it was. But the merchants of West Turkestan were called all over Central Asia Andijanis, from the town of Andijan in Ferghana. The great mass of the population are Muslims (1,039,115 in 1897).

The divisions revealed by the 1897 census, between a largely Tajik-speaking area around Khuhand, hill-regions populated by Kyrgyz and a settled, population in the main body of the valley, roughly reflect the borders as drawn after 1924. One exception is the town of Osh, which has a majority Uzbek population but ended up in Kyrgyzstan.

The one significant element that is missing when looking at modern accounts of the region are the Sarts. This term was abolished by the Soviets as 'derogatory' after 1920, but in fact there was a clear distinction between long-settled, Persianised Turkic peoples, speaking a form of Qarluq Turkic that is very close to Uyghur, and those who called themselves Uzbeks, who were a Kipchak tribe speaking a Turkic dialect much closer to Kazakh, who arrived in the region with Shaibani Khan in the mid-16th century. That this difference existed and was felt in Ferghana is attested to in Timur Beisembiev's recent translation of the Life of Alimqul (London, 2003).

There were very few Kipchak-Uzbeks in Ferghana, although they had at various times held political power in the region. In 1924 however, Soviet policy decreed that all settled Turks in Central Asia would henceforth be known as "Uzbeks", (although the language chosen for the new Republic was not Kipchak but Qarluq) and the Ferghana Valley is now seen as an Uzbek 'heartland'.