NASRULLAH OF BOKHARA
BY VARIOUS RUSSIAN WRITERS

The Russians in Central Asia: their occupation of the Kirghiz steppe and the line of the Syr-Daria: their political relations with Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokan: also descriptions of Chinese Turkestan and Dzungaria “by Capt. Valikhanof, M. Veniukof, and other Russian travellers”  is a collection of then recent writings on Turkestan in Russian published in St. Petersburg. It was translated from the Russian and apparently also assembled by John and Robert Michell, and published by Edward Stanford in London in 1865.

Presented here is everything of Greek love interest, all of it taken from one chapter, whose author appears to have been one N. G. Zalesov, who was Headquarters Captain and keeper of the official diary for the Russian diplomatic mission to Bokhara led by Colonel Ignatiev in 1858. 

All of it concerns Nasrullah Khan, who was Emir of Bokhara from 1827 to 1860 (and thus personally known to the author). It is clear from this account and others given by J. P. Ferrier in his J. P. Ferrier in his History of the Afghans (1858). Ármin Vámbéry in his History of Bokhara (1873), Fitzroy Maclean in Eastern Approaches (1947) that Nasrullah was sexually voracious and rapacious with both boys and girls, with some apparent preference for boys.

CHAPTER XI. Diplomatic Relations between, Russia and Bokhava. By Zalesoff. 1836—1843.

On the state of Bokhara in 1840, just before the Russian diplomatic mission arrived, and, in particular, on the reigning Emir, Nasrullah Khan:

This is what the Russian traveller, Vitkevitch, who visited Bokhara in 1835, writes of him [Nasrullah]: - "The present Batyr-Khan, who is always simply called the Emir, or ruler, has delegated all sovereign power to the Kush-Begi. The Kush-Begi Hakim-Bai, is an old man of great subtlety, covetous in the extreme, and possessing great wealth; being, in fact, the richest Bokharian, and even richer than the Khan. He will not allow any matter to reach the Khan, and entirely acts as he pleases; . the Khan can no longer oppose him. The Khan, also, is self-willed, cruel, and: given to every description of sensuality; boys and girls being forcibly taken from their parents to gratify his brutal passions.”

General Gentz, another traveller, who passed the greater portion of his life in the collection of information on Central Asia, gives the following account of affairs at Bokhara:—“The Bokharians are dissatisfied with the Emir and his Government, There is no Vizier, and affairs are generally in great confusion. The Custom dues and taxes are collected by two boys; of these, the Emir keeps more than a hundred near him, acquiring new, and sending away the old ones. The Emir does not trouble himself about affairs, and gives himself up entirely to the vilest debauchery. […].”

This sketch was made during the summer of 1840, a short time previous to the starting of the Russian mission, and Mr. Gentz had every opportunity for forming a correct estimate of the Emir’s character.

When Butenef arrived at Bokhara, Ishan-Reis, the head minister and successor of Hakim-Bai, was no longer alive. Although Ishan had merely been chief of the police, yet, from the favour he had received at, Court, and the friendly feelings he entertained to Russia, it was on him that the mission must chiefly have depended for success. The Bokharians themselves lamented the death of Ishan, saying that in him Bokhara had lost the only man who was capable of managing State affairs with profit and success to his country.

Thus, in consequence of the death of Ishan, the mission. was obliged to carry on the negotiations with the new Vizier, Abdul-Halik, a youth of nineteen, and fosterling of the male harem of the Emir.^[1] [pp. 436-8]

^[1] With both his prime minister and his top customs officials (and one may guess many other key appointments), Nasrullah thus illustrates a key feature of Greek love in action through the ages. Whether a great ruler (like Mehmed II and other Ottoman Sultans) or of less exalted status (like the slave-owning Roman poet Martial or the Athenian Kallikratidas in pseudo-Lucian’s Forms of Love), through years of intimacy with a boy, the boysexual was motivated and enabled to give his boy a training for useful employment and build a level of trust with him that meant that as soon as the boy had grown out of being his beloved, he could be given employment he could never otherwise have dreamed of, while his  old lover could enjoy all the benefits of having a truly trustable helper.
     As for whether Nasrullah’s appointment of his old boys to positions of power was a good thing for his emirate, European writers wrote disparagingly of him because of his cruelty, his animosity to their encroachment and their antipathy to sodomy, but in reality Nasrullah was the most successful of the Emirs of Bokhara. He increased Bokhara’s size and power at a time when it was becoming threatened by the Russians and British, reformed it militarily and administratively, and it recovered economically.