Eugene Schuyler - Travels in Central Asia

Travels in Central Asia

Schuyler was able to combine his diplomatic duties with scholarship and travel. He began writing a major biography of Peter the Great, and frequented the meetings of the Russian Geographic Society in St. Petersburg. In 1873, he was one of the first foreigners invited to visit Russia's new conquests in Central Asia.

Schuyler left St. Petersburg by train on March 23, 1873 and traveled first to Saratov. He was accompanied by an American journalist, Januarius MacGahan, who was working for the New York Herald. Schuyler and MacGahan traveled from Saratov by sledge to Orenburg, then to Kazala (now Kazalinsk), then to Fort Perovskii (now Kzyl-Orda). MacGahan went from there to find the Russian Army at Khiva, while Schuyler travelled on to Tashkent, in present-day Uzbekistan, Samarkand, Bukhara and Kokand. He returned to St. Petersburg via Siberia and the Urals. His trip had taken eight months (he had told the State Department he would be gone only three months), but he brought back a wealth of geographical information.

Schuyler wrote extensively about his trip for the National Geographic Society in the United States, and he also wrote a long confidential report for the State Department. He was embarrassed when his confidential report was published in December 1876 in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States - 1874, and translated into Russian by the St. Petersburg press. His report had been critical of the treatment of the Tatars by the Russian General Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman. A Russian journalist responded, "it did not lie in the mouth of an American statesman to say evil things of the Russian treatment of Tatars - he ought to look at home, and criticize the policy of his own countrymen toward the North American Indians." (1)

With the exception of the treatment of the Tatars, Schuyler was favorable toward the Russian presence in Central Asia. "On the whole, the Russian influence is beneficial in Central Asia," he wrote, "not only for the inhabitants, but to the world, and it certainly is greatly to our interest that a counterpoise should exist there against the extension of English domination in Asia. Having once taken possession of the country, it will be almost impossible for the Russians, with any fairness to the natives, to withdraw from it.." (2)

Schuyler wrote a two-volume book about his travels in Central Asia. The book, Turkestan, was published in October 1876, in both the United States and England. Like his report to the State Department, it was favorable to Russia's role in Central Asia: "Notwithstanding the many faults which may be found in the administration of the country, the Russian rule is on the whole beneficial to the natives, and it would be manifestly injust to them to withdraw her protection and leave them to anarchy and to the unbridled rule of fanatical despots." (3)