Nevertheless there was a frisson of excitement about the new worlds Russia was coming into contact with, as the Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Valuev, articulated in his diary in 1865. “Tashkent has been taken by General Cherniaev,” he wrote. “Nobody knows why or for what purpose…[but] there is something erotic in all that we are doing on the far frontiers of our empire.” The extension of the borders was marvellous, he wrote. First Russia reached the River Amur, then the Ussuri. And now Tashkent.
