Uzbek collective farmers watching the first waters of Syr-Darya river enter the sluices of the great Fergana canal which they helped to build. This canal irrigates the huge new cotton growing areas of Central Asia in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
Pictured here is the Dzungar Khanate. In 1723, Cevang Rabtan, a Dzungar leader, led a massive invasion into eastern Kazakh (Hambley, n.d.). This lasted for five years. The memory of this national catastrophe, the “Great Disaster,” has never faded among the Kazakhs, as this was only comparable with the Mongol invasion of the 13th century (E-History, 2016).
