A political history of Central Asia from ancient times to the present. It is readable and accurate, and implies the point that what destroyed the tolerance (due to indifference) of the Tsarist authorities to practical day-to-day freedom of ordinary people in remote parts of the Empire was STALIN and, through him (this is the general civilisational point) BUREAUCRACY. You cannot manage a multi-cultural national community by bureaucracy as bureaucracy always has to standardise, while the essence of multi-culturalism is diversity (i.e. no standardisation).
I make the connected point that it was the Christian evangelists who brought a bureaucratic outlook (i.e. self-righteousness and centralisation - very like the Scottish administration today) into the British Empire and destroyed it as surely as Stalin's approach destroyed the Russian one (and Sturgeon's "authentic Scot" fascism will destroy Scotland) .57 - Central Asia - Shoshana Keller (2020) - YouTube
