Uzbekistan's history: a Soviet border around three khanates

What the oases were before the Uzbeks

Settlement in the river valleys is old. In 1938 the archaeologist A. Okladnikov found the skull of a Neanderthal child at Teshik-Tash, dated to about 70,000 years ago. By the middle of the first millennium BC the oases between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya were held by Iranian-speaking peoples: Bactrians in the south, Sogdians along the Zarafshan, Khwarezmians on the lower Amu Darya. UNESCO dates the foundation of Samarkand, as the city of Afrasiab, to the seventh century BC. Alexander the Great took Sogdiana and Bactria in the 320s BC and met fierce resistance there, and the region then passed through Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, Hephthalite and Sasanian rule and the Turkic khaganates.

Trade made the cities rich. Sogdian merchants worked a network of towns that stretched as far as what is now Xinjiang, and UNESCO counts the Zarafshan valley as part of a Silk Roads corridor of 866 kilometres that carried east-west exchange from the second century BC to the sixteenth century AD. Zoroastrianism was the dominant faith until the first centuries AD; Buddhism, Manichaeism and Christianity also had large followings, and the Buddhist sites cluster around Termez on the Amu Darya.

Arab armies under Qutayba ibn Muslim completed the conquest of Transoxiana in the eighth century, and Islam spread through the population under the Abbasids and then the Persian Samanid dynasty, whose capital was Bukhara. The brick tomb of Ismail Samani in Bukhara survives from the tenth century. Al-Bukhari, al-Khwarizmi, al-Biruni and Avicenna came from the region in these centuries. Turkic dynasties followed: the Karakhanids took Bukhara in 999, and Seljuk and Khwarezmian rulers held the region until the Mongols.

How the Mongols and Timur remade Transoxiana

The Mongol conquest of 1219 to 1225 destroyed Afrasiab, sacked Bukhara in 1220 and wrecked the irrigation networks of Khwarezm, and their repair took several generations. The armies of Genghis Khan were led by Mongols but made up mostly of Turkic tribes, and as they settled in Mawarannahr the conquest quickened the turn of the region from Iranian to Turkic speech. After 1227 most of Transoxiana stayed with the descendants of Chagatai, Genghis Khan's second son, while Khwarezm went to the Golden Horde.

Timur, born at Shahrisabz and not a descendant of Genghis, emerged in the 1380s as the dominant chieftain of Mawarannahr. He conquered Iran, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and the steppe north of the Aral Sea, and died in 1405 while invading China. His conquests were accompanied by massacres in the cities he took. He also gathered artisans from those cities into Samarkand, and the craftsmen of Khorezm were deported to build his Ak-Sarai palace at Shahrisabz, begun in 1380, the year after he conquered their country.

Samarkand was the capital of the Timurid state and the place where its architecture was made. Its major monuments include the Registan, the Bibi-Khanum mosque and the Shakhi-Zinda and Gur-Emir ensembles, and UNESCO credits the Bibi-Khanum mosque and Registan Square with a seminal role in Islamic architecture from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent. Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory there in the fifteenth century. Under the Timurids, Chagatai Turkic became a literary language, and its leading writer, Ali-Shir Nava'i, worked in Herat in the second half of that century.

Where the name Uzbek came from

The Uzbeks arrived from the north. Britannica traces them to Turkic-Mongol tribes in north-western Siberia that probably took their name from Öz Beg Khan, a Muslim ruler of the Golden Horde who reigned from 1312 to 1341. Abu'l-Khayr, a descendant of Genghis Khan, became khan of the Uzbek confederation in 1428 at the age of seventeen and led it south-east to the north bank of the Syr Darya. Some tribes broke away in the mid-1450s and took the name Kazakh, and Abu'l-Khayr was killed in 1468 fighting the Dzungars.

His grandson Muhammad Shaybani regrouped the tribes and drove the last Timurids out of Samarkand and Herat; one of them, Babur, went south and founded the Mughal empire in India. The Uzbeks began a wholesale invasion of Transoxiana in 1501 and had completed the conquest by 1510. The Shaybanid dynasty ruled from Bukhara for a century, and UNESCO notes that the old town of Bukhara as it stands is mostly the urbanism of this period, from the Poi-Kalyan group to the domed bazaars at its crossroads.

The Uzbek states weakened after 1600. Ocean routes from Europe to India and China drew trade away from the caravan cities, wars with Safavid Iran set Sunni Uzbeks against a Shia neighbour, and Kazakh and Mongol raids came from the steppe. Nadir Shah of Iran defeated both Bukhara and Khiva in 1740. By the late eighteenth century three states shared the land of modern Uzbekistan:

How Russia took the three khanates

Russian interest grew through the nineteenth century: in trade with Tashkent and Khiva, in the Russians sold as slaves in the markets of Bukhara and Khiva, in the rivalry with British India and above all in cotton, which mattered more once the American Civil War cut off Russia's main supply. After the Caucasus was subdued in the late 1850s, the Ministry of War moved on Central Asia. Tashkent fell in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868. Bukhara became a protectorate in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, and Kokand, after an uprising crushed in 1875, was annexed the following year. The region was governed as Russian Turkestan from Tashkent.

The protectorates kept their internal affairs while Russia took their foreign relations and trade. Railways reached Samarkand and Tashkent by 1905, Russian settlers followed, and 210,306 Russians lived in the territory in 1912. A reform movement among Muslim intellectuals, the Jadids, centred in Samarkand and helped by Crimean Tatar reformers, set up new-method schools and began to argue for self-rule. In the summer of 1916 a decree ending Central Asians' exemption from conscription set off violent protests in the east of the territory.

Who drew the Uzbek republic in the nineteen twenties

How Kokand autonomy ended in the Basmachi war

After the 1917 revolutions, Muslim leaders met in Kokand and set up an autonomous government under Mustafa Chokayev. Red Army forces sent from Tashkent destroyed it in February 1918, and the armed resistance that followed, called Basmachi by its enemies, lasted more than a decade in parts of the region. Forces controlling Tashkent deposed the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva in 1920. A Bukharan People's Soviet Republic and a Khorezm People's Republic took their place, led at first by Jadids such as Fayzulla Khojayev, and by the end of 1921 communist-dominated politicians held power in both old capitals.

What the delimitation and the purges made

In 1924 and 1925 the Communist Party redrew the map of Central Asia so that each major nationality had its own territory. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was created on 27 October 1924. It included Tajikistan until 1929, and Karakalpakstan was transferred to it in 1936 with an autonomous status it still holds. Britannica notes that Uzbeks remained a minority in Tashkent and that the core of the republic's Communist Party was for decades made up of Slavs and others from outside Central Asia.

Collectivisation in the late 1920s and early 1930s brought famine to Central Asia, and the purges of the late 1930s executed Khojayev and the leadership around him and took heavy casualties among the small Uzbek intelligentsia. During the Second World War factories were evacuated from European Russia to the republic with their workers, and Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Koreans and other deported peoples were sent to the republic. The Wikipedia country article counts 1,433,230 people from Uzbekistan who fought in the Red Army in 1941 to 1945 and 263,005 who died. Economic policy put the supply of cotton ahead of diversified farming, and according to the FAO Uzbekistan grew 61% of all Soviet cotton.

How the cotton scandal ended Soviet trust

Sharaf Rashidov led the Communist Party of Uzbekistan from 1959 to 1982, filled posts with relatives and associates from his home region and, as became apparent after his death, bribed officials in Moscow so that the republic could feign compliance with ever higher cotton quotas. In 1986 Moscow announced that almost the whole leadership had falsified cotton figures, and prosecutors brought from Moscow purged and tried it. The purge fed Uzbek resentment of the cotton monoculture, of the drying Aral Sea and of the campaigns against Islam. In June 1989 Uzbeks attacked Meskhetian Turks in the Fergana Valley, and Moscow appointed Islam Karimov, an outsider to the local party elite, as first secretary. An opposition movement, Birlik, formed around the status of the Uzbek language, the diversification of farming and a programme to save the Aral Sea.

How independence came without a campaign for it

Uzbekistan declared its sovereignty on 20 June 1990. In August 1991 its party leadership, led by Karimov, backed the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and when the coup failed the Supreme Soviet declared independence on 31 August. A referendum in December 1991 approved it with 98.2% of the vote, and Karimov was elected president on 29 December. A constitution was adopted on 8 December 1992, the same year Birlik was banned.

Karimov governed for twenty-five years. A referendum in 1995 extended his first term to 2000, and he was re-elected in 2000, 2007 and 2015, each time with more than 90%; most international observers dismissed the results as failing democratic standards. The government blamed car bombs in Tashkent in February 1999 on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and thousands of people suspected of complicity were arrested. After September 2001 the government let American forces use the Karshi-Khanabad air base for operations in Afghanistan.

In May 2005 troops fired on a crowd of protesters in Andijan. The government said the army had been responding to a jailbreak and that the 187 dead were terrorists; rights groups cited by Britannica estimated that 700 to 1,500 civilians had been killed. When the United States joined calls for an international investigation, Uzbekistan gave it 180 days to leave the base, and the last American troops left in November 2005. The cotton harvest relied on forced labour throughout these years: the United Nations University estimates that about a fifth of the adult population was made to pick cotton each year between 1992 and 2017.

What changed after the death of Karimov

Karimov died on 2 September 2016. His prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, became interim president and was elected in December 2016 with 88.6% of the vote. The som became fully convertible in September 2017, exit visas were scheduled for abolition in 2019, and an Uzbek delegation attended the inauguration of Tajikistan's Rogun dam in 2018, a project Karimov had once threatened war over. State-imposed forced labour in the cotton harvest ended by 2021, and the Cotton Campaign lifted its global boycott of Uzbek cotton on 10 March 2022 after Uzbek Forum for Human Rights found none in that year's harvest. Freedom House, in its 2025 report, still described the state as authoritarian, with no opposition party operating legally.

A constitutional reform drafted in 2022 first proposed removing the sovereign status of Karakalpakstan and its right to secede. Protests broke out in Nukus on 1 July 2022, and the Prosecutor General reported 21 people killed and 274 injured; the proposals on Karakalpakstan were then withdrawn. The new constitution, which lengthened the presidential term from five to seven years and reset the count of terms for the incumbent, was approved by referendum on 30 April 2023 with 90.21% in favour. Early presidential elections followed on 9 July 2023. On 15 January 2026 the country held its first population census since independence, which counted 39,047,321 people.