Flashman at the Charge

Appendix II

Yakub Beg and Izzat Kutebar

Yakub (Yakoob) Beg, who became the greatest chief in Central Asia and the leading resistance fighter against Russian imperialism, was born in Piskent in 1820. He was one of the Persian-Tajik people, and a descendant of Tamerlaine the Great (Timur)—Flashman's description of him corresponds closely to the reconstruction of features recently made from Timur's skull by the Russian expert, Professor Gerasimov.

In 1845 Yakub became chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, and then Pansad Bashi (commander of 500). He was made Kush Begi (military commander) and Governor of Ak Mechet, an important fortress on the Syr Daria, in 1847, and in the same year married a girl from Julek, a river town; she is described as "a Kipchak lady of the Golden Horde". Yakub was active in raiding the new Russian outposts on the Aral coast, and after the fall of Ak Metchet in 1853 he made strenuous efforts to retake it from the Russians, without success.

After the Russian invasion, Yakub eventually turned his attention to making his own state in Kashgar. In 1865, as commander-in-chief to the decadent Buzurg Khan, he took Kashgar, then dispossessed his own overlord, and assumed the throne himself as Amir and Atalik Ghazi; in this same year he married "the beautiful daughter of Ko Dali, an officer in the Chinese army", by whom he had several children.

As ruler of Kashgar and East Turkestan, Yakub Beg was the most powerful monarch of Central Asia. He remained a bitter enemy of Russia and a close friend of the British, whose envoys were received in Kashgar, where a British-Kashgari commercial treaty was concluded in 1874. It was Russia's fear that he would eventually unite all the Muslims of Central Asia in a holy war against the Tsar, but in 1876 Kashgar was attacked by China, and Yakub was driven out; he was assassinated on May 1, 1877, by Hakim Khan, a son of Buzurg Khan.

His biographer has described Yakub Beg as "a great man born centuries too late". Certainly, as a nationalist leader and resistance fighter he was unique in his time and country, for "alone in Central Asia he remained free", and he fought his campaigns and ruled his independent state without wealth or any large following: his great gifts, according to contemporaries, were a keen intelligence, a winning and handsome appearance, and a refusal to be panicked—he also seems to have had a sense of timing, as witness the neatness with which he betrayed Buzurg Khan.

Anywhere else in the world he would probably be remembered as William Wallace, Hereward, and Crazy Horse are remembered, but not in modern Russia. In Tashkent recently I asked an educated Russian what kind of place Yakub Beg occupied in local history: his name was not even known. (See D. C. Boulger's Yakoob Beg, 1878.)

Izzat Kutebar, brigand, rebel, and guerrilla leader, was a Kirgiz, born probably in 1800. He first robbed the Bokhara caravan in 1822, and was at his height as a raider and scourge of the Russians in the 1840s. They eventually persuaded him to suspend his bandit activities, and rewarded him with a gold medal (see page 268), but he cut loose again in the early fifties, was captured in 1854, escaped or was released, raised a revolt, and lived as a rebel in the Ust-Yurt until 1858, when he finally surrendered to Count Ignatieff and made his peace with Russia.