Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 230 - The Khivan Campaign of 1839

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Joe is joined by the hosts of Ukraine without Hype to talk about the time the Russian Empire fell for a con artist and invaded a khanate to try to steal gold that didn't exist. Check out Ukraine without Hype: https://twitter.com/HypeUkraine Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Morrison, Alexander, "The Russian Conquest of Central Asia" "A Narrative of the Russian Military Expedition to Khiva under General Perofski", Translated from the Russian for the Foreign Department of the Government of India, Calcutta, 1867 ‘Pray for the Camels’: The Winter Invasion of Khiva, 1839–41

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the lines of my donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is is not Liam. It's Romeo and Anthony from Ukraine without hypepe podcast. And how are you doing, fellas? Hey, not too bad. Not too bad. I'm doing all right. I'm on a bureaucracy voyage right now, halfway across the country. Outstanding. There's always like a special layer of hell when it comes to bureaucracy in some of the places that we live.

I think I've talked before about like dealing with the citizenship office office here and it's something of like a like an engineered nightmare that like it could only exist in like a parody of uh like if you were reading like a fiction novel with like a world building and they're purposely trying to make a bureaucracy that's uh like comically insane like that's the only way it makes sense it's actually the u.s yeah yeah he's doing embassy embassy um oh hell yeah which is just like in normal times it's good it's fun enough um fun meaning the opposite of what that word typically means but during war time it's even more exciting. Yeah.

So the U S embassy fucked off like before the war started. And so they set up shop in Poland, but they told me to do my stuff. They would like send their consulate officers into the country, but wouldn't tell me where, wouldn't tell me when just meet me in this city on Wednesday and like, give you more info. Like I'm like Bridget spies. Like we're going to give you more info. Like, I'm like Bridget Spies.

We're going to pass you a note. Like, it's great. I don't know. It's like, I don't know why it's so precisely. Go to the city. You'll see a mailbox marked with chalk. You'll get your paperwork there. I'm so happy.

I haven't had to deal with the American embassy here since I've moved here. I hope I never do. Well, I will in like three years. My passport expires and I have to go get a new one. I'm really not looking forward to that already. It was actually pretty simple here because like luckily my passport shit happened like a couple of months before the war started. And they just it was during COVID. So they just like gave me the

number of a courier company and they're like call these people give them your passport in like 200 bucks in cash and then in a week the courier company calls me drives over and gives me a fresh passport and i'm like you know what this may not feel official but it damn well feels efficient that feels like you could like uh yeah we we deliver passports and also drugs uh i did my passport did some random dude who pulled up in a fucking town car along with cash like i guess i mean i did it through the embassy, so I guess it's legit. My passport looks real enough. That's all that matters. I actually renewed my Ukraine residency stuff literally weeks before the bomb started dropping.

So I got that in right under the wire. Nice. So I brought you guys here today because it's been a while since... So this show is kind of well known and we've been cited a few times whenever anybody's been talking about uh the war in ukraine um we're like oh you should go listen to this series because the russians just keep doing this forever and i have a hard time arguing with that um we we talk about russia a fair amount on the show because much like the united states the uk UK, France, whoever, any project of armed expansion and imperialism, it's always full of colossal fuck-ups.

And while we can't, as a show or an audience, do anything to really stop these massive powers from churning through human flesh like a thresher through wheat and a never-ending conquest of money, power, and pointless nationalistic pride, we can at least laugh at them when they trip over their own dicks directly into the history books in the dumbest way possible. So we do have that going for us. Now, this brings us back to the Russian imperial era and the hilariously botched Kievan campaign of 1839 uh where russia lost a battle which was not a battle to winter and a group of kazakh camel hustlers who never even fired a shot at them uh so it's kind of unique and how very very stupid this all ends up have you guys ever heard about this before i have not um i don't actually know where kivan is where is kivan um it's so the the conate of kiva was located in what today would be

like considered turkistan um like uh uzbekistan kyrgyzstan tajikistan turkmenistan like the area that turned into those um but it was you know the era of like the great game where russia was trying to expand uh into the step and uh kind of ran into a wall of themselves uh they lost to themselves more than they lost military campaigns during this time which is always solid um yeah i think i'm more of the history dude between the two of us uh i'm pretty familiar with imperial russian fuckery in eastern europe in the 19th century and like less so the caucus but then central Asia is kind of a blank spot for, which is, I feel like it is for a lot of people.

Right. Yeah. I think that's pretty fair to say that it's kind of a blind spot for most people. Like the things that stick out as, you know, like the English invading Afghanistan, most people know about that. Cause that happened around the same time. Most people know about that because that happened around the same time. Most people don't know how Russia exactly conquered Central Asia and also the Caucasus normally. People think of Eastern Europe all the time because it's closer to them, I suppose. But not so much Central Asia. And this military disaster has its roots in the Russian thirst for that sweet, sweet expansion to the steppes. Like I already said, it was an area generally called Turkestan. It's Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan.

It was a fucking massive area, and they wanted to control it all. It was called Turkestan because, when you know it, the inhabitants of the area spoke various dialects of Turkic languages. This also includes Uyghurstan, administered today by China under the name Xinjiang, a place where nothing bad totally ever happened. Those are just Reformation technical schools for real, bro. Now, hence East Turkestan. Yeah, yeah. East Turkestan. At the time, time they called it uyghurstan um i don't know how the name changed exactly um but uh russian expansion into the area is pretty slow um because there wasn't exactly a lot of things to take over like normally uh when in normal and

in normal imperialism they go and they topple the local government, the chief, the Khan, whoever, and they replace it with someone of their own. But there wasn't really a central government to take over, so it made taking it over a little bit slower. They tried to play local tribes and Khans against one another, slowly leveraging their power. For example, in the age of Catherine the Great, she would get Muslims from the area to attend Russian schools, teach them how to read and write in Russian, convert them to Christianity, and then dub them civilizing agents,

release them back into the steppes to influence their tribes to be more pro-Russian, as well as be literal agents of Russian intelligence. In case that doesn't sound familiar at all. Doesn't ring a bell. I mean, just absolutely no idea what you're referring to absolutely no historical uh analogies for for this happening russia doing this kind of thing ever has occurred before in history just like this apparent military loss i've been told on twitter by very um self-proclaimed intelligent independent thinkers that russia has not lost a military confrontation 1 000 years i feel like there's a couple old guys

in afghanistan that have something to say about that it's like um russians moved here uh quite a bit after the war started and they're like why isn't everybody speaking russian like i wonder can't put a fucking finger on it homie you hear that story of a taxi driver in georgia um he picked up two russians from the airport and some ukrainian song was playing on the radio they asked him to um like switcher turn it off he refused uh so then they started complaining so we drove him 50 kilometers out into the countryside and then dumped them yeah he was arrested but they let him go um and like that's vaguely kidnapping sure i mean he got charged with kidnapping but the like the jury completely like vindicated him there's a unanimous not guilty plea

how much of a fucking like asshole do you have to be for a court of law to get together and be like yeah he kidnapped those people but we're fine with it that's the Russian world now much like like the cultural imperialism that the Russian Empire imposed on everywhere, there was pushback to this. It didn't work.

to do and realizing that, hmm, maybe these Kazakhs really don't want to be Russian. Realizing that forcing a different culture onto people at the barrel of a gun is morally corrupt. The Russians decide that no, the only reason why the Kazakhs rejected Christianity and

this sweet fucking stupid alphabet was they just weren't ready for the enlightenment of Russianussian culture yet i mean white man's burden like not a white man's burden literally yeah i don't know the russian slav burden why do you think they squat so low they have to carry all these things on their back i legitimately don't get why anyone is ever surprised by when like we as in people who used to be subjects of the russian empire start telling the west like oh yeah so the russians

didn't imperialist everyone's like what no but they were literally a european power like especially during the tsarist age they would send all their kids to fucking paris they all spoke french they all read enlightenment and renaissance philosophers like it's the exact same fucking intellectual history yeah this is like 20 years after waterloo so it's like you know like it's their big uh invitation to the european theater like this is right then yeah so like all the other european states were saying the exact same shit and doing the exact same thing why in god's name would you think russia would be any different i don't know it's it's like during um when the era when napoleon invaded russia like the operative language of the russian military was fucking french like it wasn't even it wasn't even russian because it was

considered to be a present language they needed translators to literally speak to their subjects. It's funny. Like a thousand years ago, it was actually kind of like that here as well, where Armenian nobility spoke Greek. They barely spoke Armenian. But, you know, it was a little different. Now, kind of like when you're playing a fucked up game of civilization, these tactics, uh, didn't work and they changed their goal. Uh, or they, their goal remained the same, but they changed their tactics.

In 1822, Russian imperialism on the step made the jump from a culture victory to a military victory. Yeah. I'm using a fucking civilization now, like, I'm sorry. Um, following the publication of the regulations of the Siberian Kyrgyz by a Russian imperial reformer and I'm using the term reformer very loosely here, Mikhail

Sparansky, Russian expansion into the region changed from attempting to influence people with culture to just violence if they didn't submit which is something that happens quite frequently. This came into the form of a huge array of military forts, mostly, and these would be outposts of the Russian government.

They would collect taxes on people from the steppe from these forts, as well as if you broke the law. if you broke the law, and the law in this case is basically not doing what they say, they would also enforce Russian justice on the steppe. Now, in order to support this, they would buy out local elites like Kazakh tribal leaders and try to get them into the... Buy into the Russian system. They gave a lot of them nobility them into the buy into the russian system they gave a lot of them nobility um to try to lift them up and uh and and use them as their chosen colonial administrators effectively that's basically how it was in ukraine they took the cossack officer class and said some of you can be actual nobles while the rest of you will have to become serfs yeah like it's pretty common um it's like uh kind of like a through line through most

of imperial history like uh we'll pick uh you you're you're our chosen people uh everyone's gonna hate you in a couple of generations and you're probably gonna die but for now you're gonna collect taxes for us and one of the main things they want to do is regulate movement uh because these are mostly nomadic people for the the purposes of taking over, if you take over this land, right, and you can physically control it, but you can't physically control the population, you don't really control anything. So they wanted to try to force them to settle down. And this ended up being like a weird blurring line of sovereignty between Russian authorities and this Kazakh nobility. The Kazakhs were not loyal to Russia at all, because why would they be? And they were kept in line by favors, bribes, and the occasional threat of violence.

So the reason for this is outside of the nomads, there is also a government on the steps via several different Muslim Khanates, the most important of which was or for this story was the Kiva Khanate or sometimes known as the Kivan Khanate. It lay between the Caspian and the RLC back when the RLC, you know, existed. Whoops. Hit the old control delete on on that motherfucker didn't you way to go guys um now kiva and other conates in the area were largely made up of the same linguistic and cultural groups as the step tribes that were not under these government controls there was effectively like a huge swath of land that Russia couldn't quite control. These Khanates didn't necessarily control. It was kind of just like unceded land. And this is where the majority of these tribes lived for parts of the year, and then they would move south.

All these groups had intermarried and worked with each other for generations upon generations. They had close ties with each other across the board from trade to marriage to politics. And it was super common for tribes in the area that Russia wanted to control to move their flocks of mostly sheep south for the winter because winter in Central Asia, fuck, it sucks. They have to move their farm animals around to see if they can find grass for them. And they would move them south into Kiva. And Kiva was fine with that because it's mutually beneficial to everybody. That isn't Russia.

Because this population that they're trying to tax is leaving for the winter to a place that they don't like. And of course, that becomes a serious problem for the Russian imperial project in the area. They wanted to control the land in the area that they claimed, but that didn't mean anything if they couldn't control the movement of the people. They wanted to break them of their nomadic ways and settle down. And the easiest comparison to this would be what America and Canada did to native people. They forcefully settled them down when they weren't busy murdering them.

they forcefully settled them down, you know, when they weren't busy murdering them. Um, it was one of the things that they tried to, you know, yeah, I think the saying was like, kill the Indian,

save the man. Yeah. And like the residential school system is similar to what we were talking about with Russianization. Like it's, it's a thing that Imperial powers do and it works for their ends. So everyone does it. Yeah,

of course why borders are evil migration is fundamental right yeah these kazakhs were ahead of the curve baby they're like fuck borders i'm taking my sheep south motherfucker just make everything about ukraine again their whole purpose right is to uh enclose a population so you can be counted, taxed, controlled, which is hard to do if you just walk away. Why most countries have really strong border policies is walking away means the government gets weaker and no one wants that if you're in the government. Yeah. And that's kind of how it was with Ukraine and the Caucasus as well. The borders of the Russian empire were not a hard line. It was more of, here's an area that we can control more

of, and the further away you go from it, the more danger you are of being attacked by Chechens or something. In Ukraine, it was the wild fields where the war is happening right now, actually, where it was this weird mix of there are Turks around and there are Cossack Ukrainians around until eventually the the empire decided to like harden up the borders and make it one state controlled thing yeah i mean armenia really didn't have borders until like the 20s like even under the ottoman empire like armenians would just go wherever the fuck they wanted um and then you know they tried to fix that but you

know it wasn't until after the fall of the first republic that like the soviet union put order controls in place um and they're like wait you mean i can't just go over to iran and get married this sucks what do you what do you mean i can't do that my family's been doing that for for literally millennia what what do you what are you talking about? Now, when Russia eventually had to force this restriction in place and when they tried to force it into place,

wouldn't you believe it, there was a string of revolts, the most notable of which is led by a guy named Konasary Kazimov, who was kind of in a long line of Kazakh resistance leaders who had a strong history of really hating Russia. I know this one from Europa Universalis IV, where Russia has the vassal state of that guy, essentially. Yeah, yeah.

You can take a Russophobia trait in EU eu4 you can get all the other ones i mean it's like a crusader kings you can have a kid that's like their jaws on backwards and they're like 18 feet tall and can't have children but why not you know the this caused russia to tilt harder towards the military matters they tossed out their loose relationship with tribal leaders and this uh and kind of allowing them to do what they wanted and made direct Russian control and the maintaining of hard borders the new tactic. And they were reinforced with more forts and more soldiers. However, they didn't really do anything to try to control the rebellion because it would require them to go out and get shot at. And Kazimov kind of became a country unto himself. He was kind of like a gigantic nomadic tribe that was formed on the fly.

And he had his own independent relations with Kiva, with various other tribes, different Khanates. And he also attacked Russians and the Kazakhs who became Russian subjects. And the Russians truly had no answer to this constant raiding, despite the fact that the answer was go home, like just fuck off. Like that's the answer here. Instead, nobles within the Russian government and the military began to get angrier

and angrier as the lucrative trade routes couldn't be open because of constant raiding. And, you know, the more and more Russian soldiers who are patrolling the steps kept getting connected to god's wi-fi via guy and horseback uh a common reframe that the government had through like their nobility was uh you know how can we not defeat these guys uh we just beat napoleon like because waterloo hadn't happened that long ago like how come we can't beat these

guys but we beat napoleon like well you didn't beat Napoleon alone, you fucking morons. So this would be like Alexander I times? It's getting there, yeah. Not to mention, this might surprise you too, but hear me out. Russia, insanely racist. I know, I know. Don't act too shocked. Never heard this proposed before.

Yeah. I mean, they keep calling Ukrainians subhumans and saying that our language is just a debased form of their own despite the thousands-year history, but racism? Now, Joe, that's a bridge too far. Yeah, I've officially stepped out of bounds. Like any imperial project, they have to fundamentally believe that the people you're conquering are below you. They're less than, right?

Because you can't believe you're conquering your equal. That's not how this works. And there's arguments within the Russian government. How are we losing to people they called backwards savages? And we just helped defeat Napoleonoleon how why is this happening um and not to mention like this is you know great game era stuff so like people wondered how the british and imperial power that russia longed to you know eclipse hence the great game could control india when they're like they're so small how do they control this area that's so large? We're fucking huge and we're losing

to this place as a population of like a half a million. How is this happening? Because, you know, whatever. Not to mention, not only is... They're dumb as shit. Dumber than fuck. They're dumb as shit.

Most importantly, this has been going on for over a hundred years at this point the campaign of 1839 is not the first time russia attempted to conquer kiva in fact there's a there's another incident that happened a hundred years before that might actually be dumber um because like you know they're like, how can India or how can the British Empire control India for this long? Obviously, there's rebellions and stuff there too, but they don't care about that. When we have been trying to conquer Kiva for a fucking century. So 100 years before in about 1717, a defeat happened that was so embarrassing that Russia kind of had to leave them alone because

it became politically untenable to try to do it again and we do have to explain what happened in 1717 because it might be an all-timer for this fucking show Prince Alexander Bekovich Cherkassy was a Russian noble who largely conducted military expeditions

because that was back in the era where, you know, the military or gentlemen, science scientists who go and write maps on top of killing the locals. But, uh, he was, he was helping Peter,

the great keep the, uh, sarcastic people in line and happy with the czar. And unfortunately you probably all know where this is leading. Since I said the words are Cassian, um, the czar eventually didn't say sad Sad, sad things is what's happening. Yeah.

I mean, you can't have an episode of this show that me referencing at least one genocide, unfortunately. And eventually, the Tsar decided he actually he didn't want Sarcassian people in Russia anymore. And they did a genocide. Add another one to the column of genocides that Russia refuses to acknowledge to this day. Now, anyway, while living in Astrakhan, which is a town that sounds like if Chinggis Khan had a space program,

he was approached by a Turkmen trader who said that he had found unfathomable riches, and the Russian government, if they threw him a little bit of money, he'd let him in on it. This just immediately sounds suspicious, right? It just totally sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity you cannot pass up.

I mean, what's it going to cost you? A couple of bars of gold? Give the guy his gold. Come on. 1,700s of Bitcoin is what we're talking about. Yeah. If you give me $20 20 now i can triple it it's like it's every guy i don't know if this has happened to you too but it's every weird guy from like your high school who you get a random facebook message he acts like he wants to talk

to you he's like i actually have a business proposition for you because he's in some like pyramid scheme selling uh like dick pills or something oh my god this happens so often after crypto became a thing like so many people are especially in linkedin they're like hey romeo i know you're in ukraine like do you want to do you want in on this crypto option no dude i don't want in on your fucking scams. I don't give a shit. It's totally legitimate internet money. No, you know what's legitimate in my money? The fucking greenbacks, the fucking greenbacks. I have my debit card.

That's legitimate internet money. My PayPal account is this money. It's an IOU from someone I have never seen before. Don't know anything about and maybe f faked and may be stolen at any time yeah i'm gonna stick with with with real money backed by a state that has guns yeah this is the world's first crypto bro um though i have to admit i respect this guy's hustle because this gets wildly out of hand and thousands of people die so he levels of this podcast are steadily rising.

To be fair, there's always a baseline, and we just base everything off of that. Now, of course, Tarkasi was immediately like, sold. Here's your money. Tell me where it is. And he paid, the trader said, on the oxus river

which was he claimed diverted entirely by the con of kiva or the sultan of kiva it had revealed an entire field of gold first of all that never happened like the river was never diverted there was never any gold what i'm picturing is if you've ever played command and conquer tiberium wars and you just like especially in the cut scenes it just pans over the field of like the crystals or whatever this is what i'm picturing it's a gold this is absolutely 100 i can guarantee you this is what the russian officers thought they would find and speaking of the rlc earlier what happens when you divert rivers in kaz in Kazakhstan is that a lot of people die and environments are destroyed, not gold. Yeah, suddenly gold appears.

The Turkmen guy, if like if Tarkasi didn't pay him, he's like, yeah, you're right. This is more of a Shelbyville thing. You're not really ready for a monorail here in Astrakhan. So he he paid him and then he immediately now of course he didn't know where this place was so the turkman trader is like i'll show you it's fine in fact i have gold i'll show you the gold it was a bag of dirt like i i don't know how else to explain it uh it calls it a bag of dirt. Bedazzle it so it shines a bit?

I assume he did something. I don't know. He put some flakes of pyrite into it, at least. He has to sell the grift somehow, right? I think he may have sprinkled some gold on top, but again, it's a sack of fucking dirt. Now, Charkassy is on board immediately he goes to prince gagarin who's the local governor of astrakhan um and uh prince gagarin is like fuck yeah and dispatches several envoys to go look for these claims now to everybody's shock

they return again with dirt and say this must be the gold and uh but nobody tests it like nobody goes through and like yeah there's there's actually no gold under this this fucking trap on top nobody confirms it so then gagarin uh runs to saint petersburg i just want to say it seems like an important step when you're like investigating claims of a new gold field to like check if there's gold but i guess that's the sweet dirt sack homie like i i mean what's one of the problems with having nobility run everything they don't exactly get hired to become prince because they're good at their job most of their family trees just look like spaghetti thrown on the wall like this fucking shit's stupid uh so he runs the saint petersburg talk

to the czar now peter the great's in charge then um and he receives gagarin and the traitor who at this point is shockingly still there like he did not take the bag and fuck off like he's like i can't believe this is still going that is such dedication to the grift he had to be speechless for how good this hustle was going over he's like i'm talking to the fucking czar now god damn these people are stupid isn't he like a sheep trader or something from the mountain he was just some turkman who traded with the russians like just some guy now i'm having an audience with the czar himself. Talk about that Turkman trader grind set, baby. If you wake up early, go down to your local, if you're in Armenia, your local Russian military base and attempt to get them to believe that dirt is gold and see if you can get a tank out of it.

I'm positive you can pull that exact scam, but. Like, I'm positive. I'm positive. You can, you can pull that exact scan, but you have to modernize it. It's gotta be uranium. Hmm. Yeah, that's true.

I can probably do that. Just bring your own or plug a dongle into your phone. That'll make the phone go and be like, you see this bag of dirt, absolutely uranium. Just over, over there in that cave, ignore all the wires around the entrance. And be like, you see this bag of dirt? Absolutely uranium. Just over there in that cave.

Ignore all the wires around the entrance. It's definitely not C4 I've put around here to trap you all in and kill you. That's the sound of Nate rapidly editing that part out. If recent history has proved anything, I could just go up to the front gate of the military base shout loudly and they'll just abandon everything and run um now peter the great is not generally known for being a dumb person in history of a field of dumb people he's generally thought of as being a good uh emperor as much as such a thing exists however you know that thousands of cossacks that were murdered to build saint petersburg is a bit of an exception to that. Well, it's not, though, because to be an emperor, you generally do things like that. Yeah, like in terms of like the inbred, like half sapient status of the grand majority of European nobility, here was more or less sentient and could see out of both eyes at the same time he wasn't dribbling out piss and shit as he walked down the hallways of the imperial palace or anything he wasn't like

charles ii um having someone chew up food and spit into his mouth he was also like seven feet tall or something so people just in a time when everyone was like five foot three so it it goes a while yeah um well at the time russia was locked in the great northern war against sweden and it had been going on for over a decade at this point so russia is poor as fuck so he's not gonna look too hard at the like you know this shifty guy who shows up with a bag of what he claims to be gold it's like yeah sure fuck it go get his gold why why'd you come to St. Petersburg? Just go get gold. Do we know this heroic tradesman's name? We unfortunately do not.

I dubbed him Flim Flam. He will be the originator of the Flim Flam. The con of all Flim Flam. Just like the fucking mega chat of the steps. Now, so he immediately sent Prince Charkassi up. He's like, go fucking get this shit. And they pointed out, well, we're going to have to invade Kiva.

Kiva's not going to just let us waltz into their river and steal what is apparently El Dorado. And he's like, fine, whatever. whatever take care of it i don't care it's like it can't take more than 5 000 men to do you know so he gets 5 000 men and um to secure this um and then there's no good ending to this the prince and his entire army simply vanish like a fart in the wind. Nobody ever hears of them ever again. They die so thoroughly that nobody has ever been able to confirm what happens to them.

Have you considered that they found the gold and decided, why do we want to send it back? We have everything we need right here. Let's just live here in this river of gold. They marched directly off the pages of history. Some people have popped up to claim that they're survivors, but other people have popped up to claim they're survivors as well.

And their stories are completely different. But on the Kazakh side, there is some people that are like, oh, no, we were there. We know what happened. We killed them all. We know what happened. We killed them all. Like, there was a couple. It's like, yeah, we kept a couple of slaves, but, you know, we killed everybody eventually.

Like, all right. Oh, in case this isn't clear from us talking about this for the last 10 minutes, the gold was not real. There was no gold at all. are you telling me that the random turkman trader uh handing out bags of dirt was not being honest about his intentions this whole time this whole time i had my trust i had my king of flim flam man i fucking this is this might be my new favorite podcast guy um i'm i'm absolutely in love i hope he ends up becoming czar somehow. Considering the intellectual level of the rest of the Russian nobility, honestly, it probably wouldn't have been that far. He would just talk them into believing he was the rightful Tsar.

He's like, look at all the dirt that I have. You see this? I didn't fucking think so. This is the Imperial Crown, but it looks like a bunch of pebbles stuck to a twig. Yeah, that's because you're an idiot pavel i am convinced we should probably kneel before this man so you know in the end pier the great has his army defeated by the king of all flim flam men uh and russia was so like fucked up by this not to mention also the great northern War sapping most of their resources. They didn't respond at

all. They didn't try to get revenge. They just were like, huh, I guess the Prince and all of his men fucking waltzed off into nowhere. Now, back in the 1800s, politically, the situation had changed. Russia's borders had eked ever closer to the Kievan Khanate

and spending the previous hundred or so years picking at the edges of the dying Ottoman Empire. We all wish they would have done that sooner. Now, relations between Russia and Kiev were pretty much ruined by this point, by mid 1830s, because Russia had outlawed all trade with them and had every merchant from the Khanate within Russia arrested. So they were getting ready to do it again.

After losing 5,000 men, they just decided to take these radical steps of not talking to the king anymore? This is over 100 years later. They finally decide that they're going to... They've recovered enough to like, okay, we're going to go kick down their door again or try. Now, the main reason for that is the wrinkle of the great game between them and the British Empire. Both of them looked to expand their sphere of influence

directly through Central Asia. And this, of course, led to the British retreat from Kabul in 1842, which we did an episode about. You can go listen to it, which was honestly an all-timer in military fuck-ups. But that hadn't happened quite yet. As the Russians were sitting in 1830, the British had walked into

what they considered their backyard and took over fucking Afghanistan, which isn't super far away from where Russia wants to take over too. So Russia's not very happy. And they're like, well, we have to do something or the British Empire is going to expand in Akiva, which of course it never did um at this point we're under czar nicholas the first um who uh was also slowly building up reasons to make this war inevitable uh this

obviously this might shock you too it's really common for a government to cook up dumb reasons to go to war uh and cover up the fact it's merely it's the soulless attempt to take over large swaths of territory thankfully russia doesn't do this anymore right guys these rationalizations were mostly for internal audiences shocker i know um i know this might sound familiar but again we were talking about the 1800s um and now the reasons were kind of a very dumb again it's the 1800s um and now the reasons were kind of very dumb again it's the 1800s um for starters raiders were accused of coming from the khanate and were routinely attacking russian caravans um there's also the still uncontrolled kazakh rebellion uh who were attempting to uh re-establish the kazakh khanate, which Russia accused them of helping, that being Kiva.

Russia also accused them of Russian-specific slavery, which they completely made up. Partially true. That was kind of true. There was some slave raiding. There was definitely slavery. We'll talk a bit about that. For starters, there was a little bit of this that was all true. Are you saying that they practiced white slavery i heard that they were killing anybody who spoke russian

um now there were raids but nobody is sure who the fuck was doing it uh because like the the sultan of the kane didn't exactly have a tight control of his people and there's little to any uh evidence that he could have stopped raiders if he wanted to. It's a free-flowing nomadic population who don't like you. They're going to steal your shit. Now, as for the slaves, oh, yeah, there's a ton of slavery happening in the region on both sides. But there was no Khanate government policy of enslaving specifically Russians. was no conate government policy of enslaving specifically russians um now the numbers that the russian government gave in its complaint were inflated to a comical degree for example the

russians claimed that there were a hundred thousand russian slaves within the conate which would have been really hard given that the conate's entire population was maybe six hundred thousand um now the conate had every seven people is a russian slave apparently no one noticed all the all the russians that go down to trade never noticed all the all the guys that went into russia never brought the trains of russian slaves that they supposedly had with them yeah uh there was like maybe two to three thousand 3,000 slaves that were Russian. But now all of this was done to press home the idea of how offensive the idea

was that Russians could be pressed into slavery. Kind of like when the US did this to the Barbary states. Because the Kivans didn't give a fuck about who they enslaved. The vast majority of their slaves were not Russian but were fellow Turkic or Persian Muslims. Their slavery was based on having bad luck and who

got caught on raids not your race or religion they didn't give a fuck and the russians should have known about this policy because they literally did have a turkic specific slavery policy not to mention the serfs still were there so like again like it's you're pointing at a mirror here like the the serfs won't even be free for another 20 years in 1861. I think projection is... Glass houses or whatever. It was a lot slower to get to

the further east as well. If you were a surf in what's now Latvia or something, that came pretty quickly, but everyone else, it took a few decades to get fully into effect. Some guy somewhere is like, I just don't want to tell them that they're free but that literally happened in um a number of liberated southern states um but i i just i feel like this the level of projection that all of these like imperial and reactionary powers

constantly use it has to qualify at this point as like a mass psychosis of some kind because all of the bad shit that they always accuse everyone of is always things that they are right now doing like it's never like something invented it's always like we literally have this policy yeah even with like the belgian congo the reason why they said they were doing was to get rid of the arab slave trade so it's always we're going to do our own slavery in order to get rid of their slavery the only thing that can stop uh a bad slavery is good slavery uh signed leopold of belgium um i mean unironically this is what most libertarians do believe right now. Yeah, that's fair.

It's not slavery. You have a contract. It's fine. I mean, it's like Vasily Provsky, who would end up leading or planning a lot of this, fully admitted that the russians were lying like uh he he uh when he was like when the war was like really gonna happen he was like well there's not like you know that many russian slaves there you know uh like and to the point that uh we'll get there but like they try to turn some slaves back as like a good faith measure like hey we didn't actually know you care that much about this because like you do it too So here, you can have the Russians back. And they're like, no, we don't want them.

Like, what the fuck? Again, literally what Russia is doing right now, they gave all of the LDNR assholes Russian passports that they are now not accepting as official documentation. Like, you gave these people citizenship the the panther cannot possibly eat my face as I vote for the panthers who eat faces party

now some of these excuses were also for external audience as well because remember even though everybody in this great game era and every imperial power knows exactly what they're doing they all have bullshit excuses that they'll tell say like the king of whoever and they're like ah yeah that's

a good reason to go to war like that's legitimate like the english had one to invade afghanistan as well there's to replace uh the shah but like you know and like even the british their main uh geopolitical enemy at the time uh was, oh yeah, that seems legit. You can't be enslaved. You're a European power. We enslave people, not the other way around. Somehow in all of these complaints, nobody noted the time that we actually tried to invade them and they butchered

5,000 men, which seems like a pretty important bullet point for starting a war. Nobody brought it up. I think they may have forgotten. I feel like, yeah yeah it was memory hold after peter realized that he'd literally been conned by a guy who who just gave him a bag of dirt so honestly if i was peter i would have probably just told my scribes not to write that particular incident down and this would have been the same time as like the ukrainian uprising at poltava helping the swedes and all that like it was a very busy time for them so like you said a couple thousand soldiers marching off into the steps is

kind of a footnote of all the other nastiness happening he's like telling his imperial scribe like go ahead and tear that page up and throw it in the fucking fireplace let's uh let's go ahead and forget about it let's memory hole about 5 000 people and pretend that this didn't happen um now prince right and the prince and a whole prince yeah yeah i mean i'm sure he actually wasn't like directly related to the czar he's probably like his fourth cousin once removed who also was married to his sister or something. I don't know. Now, Vasily Parovsky, who's actually a veteran

of the war against Napoleon and the pretty much apocalyptic battle of Borden. Now, we did a series on that too. Go listen to it. But he strongly supported the war. As the military governor of Orenburg, he was in charge of the nearest Russian line to that of Kiva. So like this would be the stepping off point for any invasion he was in charge of the nearest Russian line to that of Kiva so like this would be the

stepping off point for any invasion he made all of the normal reasons for war which we already talked about but he also started to blame that the English were like controlling the Sultan the English hadn't actually even gotten there yet

but he did point out like hey if we're going to do anything we should probably do it now because the English are trapped in the first Anglo-Afghan war. So it's a pretty good time to do this. He had a ton of pull with the Tsar. So the Tsar was quickly on board. And because to be fair, it's also because Perovsky is like, this will take a couple thousand people in a month. Like this won't be that hard at all. Quick adventure in and out.

Yeah. Quick adventure in and out. 30 seconds tops. Now, war was the only thing that Russia wanted at this point. And it was pretty clear to everybody. When the Khanate sent emissaries to Russia to negotiate an end to this trade ban. And what they were pretty sure was the obvious signs of a war about to be formed. They brought Russian slaves to turn

them back over and apologize for the whole slavery thing. Government refused to even meet with them. Now, it's because by the time that the emissaries showed up in 1839, they were already beyond the beginning planning stages for an offensive. Now, with Porowski writing out a proposal, quote, beyond its stated aims must have another still more important goal to establish and consolidate the influence of Russia in Central Asia. He goes on to say that another part of it is to combat what they perceive to be British influence, because, you know, I mean, Britain hadn't even managed to secure Afghanistan, a war they'd gone to lose. There isn't exactly any British influence in Kiva. Then he modeled the entire plan, ironically enough, on the

British invasion of Afghanistan. They would invade, pretend they weren't taking over, and simply replace the ruler with a puppet of their choosing. In this case, being the Kivan Sultan's little brother, who had since moved to Russia where he was just doing opium all the time, which is solid, good choice. That's what I'd do if i was a noble like why work have to worry about like

assassins succession when i can lie on the floor and have like slaves feed me grapes and opium uh looking around for a proxy like uh how about the guy who can't stay awake like he's nodding off in the imperial chamber let's let's make him fucking sultan um this entire thing was also supposed to be a secret but it had become obvious to the kevins months ahead of time that the russians are planning something due to you know the logistics of gathering tens of thousands of horses campbells and men like huh that looks weird i'm sorry this is just have they ever used a different playbook like is is there anything in russian history where they do something creative at least once because all of this all of this is not even a parallel

it's literally the exact same sequence of events occurring each and every time like you know how i knew the invasion was gonna happen because they parked a bunch of shit on the belarusian border with ukraine and then like left to the russian bases next to the belarusian border with russia like does it take a genius at that point to say, hmm, looks like the Russians are up to something like Jesus Christ, guys, you like, come on, innovate at least a little bit. What if I told you they also did not supply their soldiers? Next, you're going to be telling me about the rampant ranks, rampant corruption in the ranks of the officer class.

Oh yeah. Now there's the, the, the, how this got found out as kind of great because traders weren't allowed into Russia anymore. Right. So like the main,

and a lot of the traders would tell, you know, they were effectively the, the, the rumor mill that made it back to Kiva, but Kiva had an incredibly effective spiring. They controlled all of the brothels and every hooker was a spy. So they would fuck Russian officers.

They would talk a little bit and then word would get back to the Sultan. But yeah, there's definitely invasion coming. They even knew what day it was coming at. Yeah. Yeah. I want to say that just sounds like the french approach first they get defeated by a guy selling them dirt and then they get defeated by a small army of hookers it's fucking powerful shit man um now uh they also had no idea how to travel across the Kazakh steps. So how do they get around that? They hire Kazakh guides, all of whom hate them.

They have no loyalty to Russia, and at best, they actively fucking hated them and were spies. Oh, so another parallel to American Westward expansion is what you're saying. Let me just ask the natives whose families I've been murdering for centuries. If they want to tell me how to get across that mountain range, I'm sure there'll be more than willing. Oh, yeah, motherfucker.

I'll show you. All right, let's go up the mountain. And then they did not pay them. So like the few people who are like, fuck the russians but hey a money like paychecks a paycheck then it's like wait i don't even give that now all of the guides were either spies or they would become spies now it gets dumber pulling together these resources for would be the largest russian expedition across the steppe took longer than anybody that was prepared for for example they need around 12 000 camels to haul the supplies for 5,000 soldiers, which would need hundreds of local

guides and people to tend to the camels because the Russians had no idea to do that. That shit takes time. And you just can't find that many weird lumpy horses laying around. In order to round up that many fucking camels, the guy that was in charge of the Russian army supply had to requisition literally every camel within the territory. Now, obviously, some guys who need these camels for their entire lives, like that's their livelihood, they're not going to be like, oh, yes, please take my camel. So they simply did not. And the Russians had to go out and get them which took more and more time and then winter approached

local Kazakh merchants and tradesmen quickly learned that the entire Russian mission was wholly and completely dependent on them for success not just for camels but their entire food supply which of course meant they jacked up prices to over 1000% of their normal price.

And they effectively bankrupted Orenburg. Now, it somehow gets worse than... I mean, that's just all around good. Like, if you're a merchant and the military is asking you for things, you should rip them off. Though, somehow, actually, for the first time, they did get winter clothing.

I am surprised by that. They don't have winter clothing now. In the year of our ward, 2022. I mean, they just didn't have the professionalism of the Russian military of 1839. All right. So I plugged it into Rome to Rio to see how long it would take to get from Orenburg to Kiva, Uzbekistan. And it is presently a 42-hour train ride. Now imagine you're all on camels.

Oh, and it's fucking December. It's a long way. Oh, so you know how I did say one nice thing. They brought winter clothing. You want to know what they did not bring? Boots. Take a wild guess. Water for animals? Literally any water at all uh they simply did not pack water there's some desert in there like they know what steps are right there's and there's not a lot of water

in the step it's not a desert but typically all you get are like little shallow tiny rivers and those are far and few in between in the steps which is a giant grassy plain that just goes on forever honestly my favorite part is their camel drivers brought their own water and they're like These guys are dumb. Don't worry. They had a plan for that. There is logistical problems when it comes to hauling water, especially way back then. Hauling water is really hard. Normally, you would simply not do

this military campaign. Perovsky's plan was, well, it's going to snow a lot. We're going to go in the winter. They could simply eat snow. That was his fucking brilliant plan. That's not how snow works. If you're listening right now, as a survival tip, don't do that. You'll dehydrate.

It's very, very bad. You can collect and melt snow, right? It just takes a lot of it. No, because it's distilled or something. There's some stuff in it that you're supposed to have and drink water that you don't get from snow so like it's considered a very very bad idea now there's a lot of problems with this plan most most of which i'm going to go on a limb here you can pretty easily see um the first of which is that uh remember this is a guy who fought napoleon's invading army and now he has an invading army in winter.

He watched Napoleon's grand army freeze to death, and now he's just like, ah, but we're just built different. We'll be fine. But another problem here. Russian plus cold resistance. I'm not a camel guy. I don't know a lot about camels. you know this might blow your mind camels not good at winter they're they're not a winter animal um and to be fair general uh ivan in ivan mean uh the the guy in charge of requisitioning supplies knew that and he's like why don't we use horses quote camels cannot endure cold dampness and wet and thus are kept in the

Southern part of the step. We should not use them. Of course they use them anyway. Like, but what actually, why not use horses? The place you're invading is literally a Connie, right?

It was founded by guys on horseback. Well, the other side of the Eurasian continent. Well, by guys on horseback on the other side of the Eurasian continent. Camels are a bit more durable under normal circumstances where they can do that. They can carry more stuff. Camels aren't a bad idea. Precisely.

There was a US Camel Corps for a while. Yeah, it was pretty much only canceled because of the Civil War. Because they passed all of their field tests and they're like, oh, can't use those for these bye-bye and they was like release them into the desert um now like the the kazakh camel drivers themselves were like yeah you guys shouldn't do this it's like you're gonna kill everybody and also our camels that you stole uh to that uh uh avainen uh said quote they are asiatics unworthy of confidence they have

inclinations of deceit and in no degree can they be relied upon so we're gonna go ahead and kill everybody the basic russian intel is is to like just like make everyone anti-semitic like it just sounds like the exact same things they say about jews oh sounds Like the exact same things they say about Jews Oh yeah literally the exact same things They're deceitful Shifty and cowardly Like come on guys At least assign some different negative Traits the Kazakhs control

All of the media in the Russian Empire I mean they did control all the whorehouses Right that's close That's a hustle we can all support. As preparations wore on, it became clear that this winter was going to be not just bad, but historically bad. And a Kazakh guide wrote a letter to his wife that ended with, quote, pray for the camels. Another problem is the soldiers that they're taking, because they haven't gotten there yet. None of them had ever been on a

campaign before other than a couple officers. These were all super fresh soldiers who had never done any hard training. They weren't seasoned at all. They're all pretty weak. But the war started officially when Ala Khali Khan,

the leader of Kiva, dispatched a force of cavalry to raid a forward garrison of Russian soldiers who had been put out there months before with the idea that the Russians were going to link up with them. But they had simply never shown up. So there's 130 guys just left out in the middle of nowhere. And they got raided. I mean, it wasn't that

bad uh like i believe five russians died uh and oh by the way the five russians that die in this raid are the only five that die from gunfire the entire time um oh that that's an interesting prelude to this story then. Oh, yeah. And after the raid, the entire thing was blamed on the camel drivers and the guides. Because you were spying. You told them that we were coming, which is impossible. It's 1839. It's not like they fucking shot him a text message or something. But when it was time for the main advance, I guess to start off, I should tell you what their plan was.

And we can talk about how it went. Starting at Oranburg, they would go south to Fort Emba, refit, go south again to Fort Akbulak. And from there, they'd gear up for the longest haul and invade Kiva itself, which was effectively an oasis surrounded by hundreds of miles of barren steppe in every direction. to buy hundreds of miles of barren steppe in every direction. For the last several months, Ford garrisons have been sent to these two Ford forts to set up a temporary supply depot, mow grass, feed, and stockpile it all. Because they're mowing the grass for the camels and the horses. Because since they were traveling in winter, there would be no grass growing beyond Akbulak, their second stopping point. So they had to harvest all beforehand. There'd be nothing else.

Everything they would need beyond that would have to be carried by the camels. By the time the main columns of men stepped off, the snow drifts were already so high, it made movement. And just walking forward, a pain in the ass from the mostly infantry uh based army and the temperature had dropped to minus 38 degrees fahrenheit uh so then the camel drivers and guides hearing about uh uh the that raid um that turned into from an isolated raid to what they believed via the rumor mill to be a massive Kievan army that was just raiding its way across the Russian military. So this led to the camel drivers and the guides simply refusing to move. They're like, you guys, there's an enemy army out there.

We're not fucking going anywhere. We're staying right here behind this fort. So the Russian commander, Petrovsky, simply ordered all of the ringleaders of this kind of sort of strike to be shot. And then, of course, after dealing with that, they went back to work. They didn't want to get shot.

But rather than trying to figure out why this happened and like you controlling the rumor mill or whatever they blamed it on islamic fanaticism in order to control that they shot the moa uh which that's not going to make you popular no not at all the russians are just not a creative people how can i solve this problem with this gun um i feel like we've been blaming islam for a lot of things that it doesn't deserve blame for but there's snow on the grass doesn't seem like a particularly islamic trait no yeah like uh Islamic trait. No.

Yeah. Like, uh, I, it's, it's very clearly like everyone was telling them, uh, that this is a very bad idea. Like,

well, you only think that because you're a Muslim. Like, well, no, I think that cause it's 38 degrees below zero. You fucking idiot. Like maybe we shouldn't be outside.

Um, no, we are Russian. Snow is nothing. Uh, now within weeks, uh, it was January and it became abundantly

clear that the camel drivers knew more about camels than the Russian nobility, because who would have thought? The cold air, the wetness, and the all-around horrific winter temperatures had rendered the camels so tired they could barely move. Petrovsky noted that, quote, the camels cannot suddenly perish. We may lose a third

on the way, or half, but we will carry on until the last. They suddenly perish, Joe. Did they all perish suddenly? Oh, they sure do. Now, by this point, they had gotten to Akbolak, which is still just the last staging point.

They have yet to actually set out towards Kiva. Now, there's a couple probably at this point, a couple hundred dead from temperature. Thousands of camels, though, but we'll get there. Now, three days later,

he figured out that, ooh, no, I was really wrong. We should probably turn around. And they turned around and went to Fort Emba, which is the second staging point or the first staging point after Orenburg.

This wasn't supposed to be an all-out retreat instead it was assumed they would go there wait for the weather to break turn around and reinvade and it'd only take a couple weeks uh but at this point thousands of camels were fucking dead which petrovsky blamed on the kazakhs for supplying them with sick animals and not the fact that he was marching through a goddamn blizzard well i'm sure they were sick at some point yeah i wonder i i do wonder how they got sick uh like this is their natural state of being they were already sick um they cannot be helped now as they attempted to retreat to fort emba hundreds more became so weak they couldn't move so they're just left behind uh the ones. The ones that the camel drivers were able to get moving were now super weak.

So at this point, of the original 10,400 camels that they were able to get, which was not enough camels that they needed, only 700 were considered healthy. A lot of them were just dead. And this creates what I call the patented feedback loop of doom. So remember, the camels were carrying all of their supplies, literally all of their supplies. As the camels died, fewer and fewer supplies could be carried along with them. Or what generally happened because Russian soldiers don't know the first fucking thing about camels. Either do I, for that matter.

They would unload supplies from the dead camels and put them on to the healthy ones. This would bog them down with more and more weight, make them weaker, faster, and then they would also die. And they just did this over and over again. Just leaving a trail of dead and dying camels behind them where they go it's the world's most horrific breadcrumbs i don't know if this would be like in your sources but i'm thinking wolves kazakhstan has a lot of wolves and that seems like wolf bait i'm willing to bet that a lot of those uh camels definitely became wolf food especially the ones that fell behind now the book i used for this source, which is The Russian Conquest of Central

Asia, A Study in Imperial Expansion 1814-1914, gives this episode one of the most horrific titles I think I've ever read in my life. It dubs this, the quote, Camel Holocaust. Oh my god!

Poor camels! Never forget jesus fucking christ now misery was not only felt for the camels the men despite their layers of winter coats pretty much everybody had about the russian soldiers but the camels holy shit uh pretty much every soldier had some form of frostbiteite of the original force of 29 camel open and like jump in like as a tauntaun or something we're invading Hoth bitches now of the original force of

2930 infantry 400 were dead probably double that were sick or injured and everybody had some form of frostbite. In the letters that he wrote, Petrovsky insisted that the Kazakhs had duped them, and the winter was still the only time that this mission could be undertaken on the

kind of men needing the snow to drink water. Sticking to his guns. Which is an interesting theory by a man who had messed up such a basic concept as humans need water to live. Oh, also, they didn't pack any fruit. So everybody else had scurvy.

Their teeth were falling out. But they knew scurvy existed by this point, right? Like the age of exploration had come and passed. Like people learned that you need to eat a lemon sometimes. I mean, people also knew if you didn't drink water you'd fucking die so while hunkered down at emba petrovsky sent a supply request back to orenberg for ships to sail into the caspian from astrakhan to nova alex with replacement camels where they found more cables i have no idea hey why didn't they just sail down in the first place? I don't know. Picture this map because they controlled the other side of the Caspian.

There's boats. Kiva's not that far away from the Caspian coast. Why didn't they just sail down and then go further? I have no idea. I was thinking the same thing when I was researching this. I've looked at the map. I'm like, well, that's stupid. Why would you march? But the Russians said it themselves they beat napoleon right and they know that the grand majority of napoleon's

force died because of shitty weapon logistics like what i'm trying to figure the layout of this so akbalak like the city that's currently in kazakhstan or is there probably some other thing called akbalak um it was a fort called akbalak i don't know if the fort turned into the city okay because the city is looks like it's quite a long ways away so i'm really curious to see yeah the like the route of this in map format to because i'm having trouble processing beyond akbalak uh so that's probably why like if you look at their actually gotten to combat with anyone right yeah they're still at the pre-combat phase yeah they've they they got in a brief raid where five russian soldiers were shot that is it

hundreds have died from frostbite since then also camel holocaust i i I cannot in good faith name this episode the Camel Holocaust, but I'm getting close to it. Now, there is going to be medicine. There's going to be soldiers. There's going to be more camels. All this stuff on these supply boats. And I assume fruit at some point. If anybody even has teeth left, I don't know. But the weather didn't get better.

In February, a scouting mission had been sent 100 miles south to plot their route to Kiva. And everybody's like, there's actually... The snow is even deeper down here. We probably shouldn't go. It got so cold that men could no longer wash themselves or change their clothes. Their clothes literally froze to their body. People began burning what supplies they had left for warmth because there was literally nothing else to burn. And, you know, Emba and Akbalak were both meant to be garrisoned temporarily. So when they went back to Emba, there's no supplies there for them.

Like, there's not enough supplies there for this entire fucking army. And it's winter. Men can't forage. However, on the bright spot, you have plenty of camel meat laying around. So I guess you have to fist fight a wolf over a fucking camel cutlet. When word finally got to Petrovsky about the supply ships, it was bad news. Due to the... There's really bad wind in the Caspian, and the ships had to be delayed. And then they were delayed for so long,

they got stuck in ice. They got frozen in place. Now, some ships are actually close enough to the shore that they could be offloaded. And then others were attacked by the cavalry of Kiva and set on fire. They were frozen in place and were attacked by horses. At least it's warm.

Just a Russian sailor saying like, we could be worse as he's on fire. And again, this campaign had to occur in that season. It couldn't be delayed until the warm season. No, there's no summer snow for my soldiers to drink.

Gotta say, the guy's consistent. At this point, the camel drivers got pissed, gave the camels that they did manage to get off the ships to some locals and just walked off. They just walked off the

workplace. Petrovsky, surrounded by dying and sick soldiers, I assume who were all spitting teeths out like chiclets from scurvy and smelling like shit because they haven't had a shower in three months, finally decided that he didn't think that they were going to be able to

invade Kiva and the offensive was called off. However, it's February. You can't just turn around and go home. You have to wait for winter to break. So with their mission over, the men sat around bleeding and stinking like shit, dropping their toes and gumming on mountains of dead camels until fucking June before they were finally able to walk home. And again, they didn't sail home. They walked. Yeah. Yeah.

They had a walk of the original 5000 soldiers on the mission. 1000 died, five of whom were from combat. Thousands more are sick or injured, and nobody's entirely sure of how many were brutally incapacitated from frostbite. Though it's estimated to be at least 600. And unfortunately, nobody kept track of how many Kazakh guides died, but it's thought to be a lot. The animal losses were kind of otherworldly. 10,000 horses had died and close to 15 000 camels this actually created a problem in the critical

camel shortage of the entire territory of orenberg um like now these camels and the horses were the main mechanism for movement of trade caravans and like you know the main economic driver which caused a regional depression because nobody could fucking trade stuff anymore because they had no camels also the thousands of dead soldiers impacted the local economy because their paychecks now obviously this is where i tell you how uh you know petrovsky lost his job or was banished to Siberia until he retired or something. However, showing just how little the Tsar cared about this fuck-up,

he kept his job and was later reappointed to the military governor of Orenburg. Just like last time, feeding the army to the steppe made the Russians take a little bit of pause to subjugate the Kiva Khanate for a few decades. However, the little Khanate that could fell in 1873 and pretty much gave up without a fight,

remaining an imperial protectorate until the Russian Revolution, where in 1924, it was turned into parts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. And that is the Kivan Campaign of 183939 or the great camel hustle of 1839. I'm not really sure what to call it yet. All right. So guys, we do something on the show called Question from the Legion, where if someone wants to, they run into the show and they ask us a question. If you're listening and you want to ask us a question from the Legion, you can donate a whole dollar to the show and ask us on Patreon. And eventually, while working our way down this incredibly long list that we have, we'll

ask the question. And so today's question is, what is the most ridiculous weapon that you believe was ever created? The most ridiculous weapon. It's got to be the, what is it called? Like the Sheikram or Sheikram, the like bladed disc thing that xena warrior princess threw around that was it really used by someone i'm pretty sure chic i want to say the the belt sword like the sword that was flexible enough to like be hidden inside of a belt

yeah the belt sword just didn't seem especially when you it just like be flopping around and like you'd like slap yourself a few times i never quite understood the the practicality of that one or i don't know there's some weird stuff in like the chinese martial arts that doesn't seem like it was actually made to do anything just made to look cool like the meteor hammer or something like that or just i might get i might get shit on this for for shit on for this take but uh i don't think nunchucks are are good weapons i don't think they're actually a weapon like i think they're mostly invented for like hollywood and shit i don't think that's an actual weapon anybody used

uh i personally i really like the uh going off the shakram a related weapon is the shakri dong uh which is a bamboo staff with a really cool name um i think the dumbest or the most ridiculous weapon i think i saw this have you ever heard the puckle gun the puckle no no the puckle gun so i've always wanted to do an episode on it but there's really not a lot to write about it. Cause like they built like two of them. Um, and the idea was it could fire two different kinds of ammunition,

regular musket balls for when you're shooting at white people and square bullets from your shooting at Turks, um, with the idea that the square bullets hurt more. And like, they clearly didn't understand the concepts of like ballistics at all. Yeah. You think we just like started shooting off all in all different directions.

Well, there's a lot of weird ones, like weird 19th century guns, particularly where like they had reached the point where they could shoot things faster, but hadn't quite figured out what that meant yet. So there'd be like machine, like weird, like pistols that were'd be like machine like weird like pistols

that were kind of like gatling gun pistols and yeah just trying to soar out the technology the knife the the knife revolver that was like had like a handle that looked like brass knuckles and like a a twisty knife that you could you stab shoot somewhere. It was a knife that you punch into someone then once it put back a spring would then shoot them. It's like playing Final Fantasy. It's the fucking gun blade. The fucking thing doesn't even shoot. What's the point?

God damn it. Yes, I'm still mad about Final Fantasy 8. Anyway, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. That's what it was. It was a shot shot a bullet into the gun that would cause it to vibrate and by vibrating it would cause more damage that was the final fantasy point of that you made a sword-shaped fucking sex toy that you hit monsters with if you want to think of it cooler think of it as like a chainsword but it only activated by squeezing a revolver trigger.

But the chainsword has an actual chainsaw attached to it. It would be like, no, it's a chainsword, which means it's a sword with a small like two-stroke engine

attached to it that vibrates it around a bit. Exactly. But no blades, no blades at all, no. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on the show today this is the area where you plug your show plug plug away well uh anthony and i are the co hosts of a little podcast called ukraine without hype where we talk about the latest headlines in ukraine and the region like you know the ongoing two ongoing wars now though we haven't

talked about new ongoing war just just the one for now but if you want to know about that war you can listen to us and we talk about it and sometimes we say things that are kind of smart what do you think anthony yeah i like leading up to the war like a year before this version of the war started out, the Russians were doing a mock run of it. And we had an episode where we said, well, they haven't invaded right now, but if they did, this is what they would do. And they

did everything that we said, except for amphibious landings. I thought there'd be more amphibious landings. I think that was the only place where we were wrong. So, yeah yeah listen to ukraine without hype yeah but we got pretty much everything else i got everything else right but yes i accidentally said something similar during our chechen war series when i was kind of comparing them to the current conflict because this is before the the uh the invasion in 2022

and i was like you know this is kind of like what they did in 2014 in ukraine uh but if they like attempted to drive tanks directly into Kiev. But that hasn't happened yet. And that episode came out like three years ago. And I completely forgot that I said that. And then as soon as the fucking war started, I'm just like, Joe, you need to stop fucking talking about this shit on your podcast. I mean, if there's anything I've learned from this particular episode of Lions Led by Donkeys, it's that I can just look at what the Russians have done and just assume that they're going to do that exact same thing every single time. Because I don't see anything countering that theory.

I can just say they're going to do this thing the exact same way they did it before. And it seems I'm going to do this thing the exact same way they did it before. And it seems I'm going to get it right every single time. I strongly disagree with the idea that history repeats itself. However, it often rhymes. And sometimes it rhymes in very, very stupid ways. History doesn't repeat itself, but Russian military doctrine definitely does. It hasn't changed since 1717, apparently. doctrine definitely does it hasn't changed in 1717 apparently so um on top of ukraine without hype we both also do plenty of other journalism stuff in ukraine so uh nova vremia nv english google that

um i also recently produced a podcast for the key of independent which i'm sure if anyone's following the war in ukraine you've probably heard of the key of independent the their podcast series did the war end i thought it was quite well done it was a 11 episode series that is now concluded so we can go listen to that as well good yeah go listen to that and everybody thank you so much for supporting the show if you like what we do here consider supporting us on patreon or don't it's your money do with it what do. However, leaving us a review is free, and it helps us through algorithmic-based ways that I don't completely understand. Gentlemen, again, thank you so much for coming on the show.

And until next time, if you're going to take a long hike, bring water.