AHC: Christian Central Asia, Post-1500

Challenge is to figure out how to get Central Asia to become majority Christian at this late date, which was deliberately chosen so as to prevent cheating by preventing Islam or playing around with Nestorian Mongols. If a series of PoDs is required, that is completely fine but preferentially nothing too extreme, like nuclear war or some such.
 
Same deal as in the Crimea. Russia practices settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing.

Damn, that was fast; not going to lie, I was hoping you'd post as this seems like your area of expertise.

What exactly would be needed to get Russia to do that? Is there any chance of significant, although not necessarily overwhelming, conversions among the native ethnic groups? IIRC, something like 10-15% of the Turks that moved into Anatolia after 1071 converted to Christianity.
 
Damn, that was fast; not going to lie, I was hoping you'd post as this seems like your area of expertise.

What exactly would be needed to get Russia to do that? Is there any chance of significant, although not necessarily overwhelming, conversions among the native ethnic groups? IIRC, something like 10-15% of the Turks that moved into Anatolia after 1071 converted to Christianity.
As far as I know Circassian converted relatively late to Islam, so you could have them become solidly Christiain if post 1500 you have the Ottomans and Safavids decline for various reasons and have Russia expand faster by virtue of being more successful, this way you could get longer time for settlement and have a portion of the population convert to Christianity(especially the non-Muslim one but even the Muslim one can be partially converted).
 
Challenge is to figure out how to get Central Asia to become majority Christian at this late date, which was deliberately chosen so as to prevent cheating by preventing Islam or playing around with Nestorian Mongols. If a series of PoDs is required, that is completely fine but preferentially nothing too extreme, like nuclear war or some such.
Post-1500? Is hard with Mongols turning to Nestorianism by then. In 1200 would be possible but in 1300 not anymore let alone 1500.

I'd say more Russian focus on Central Asia and colonisation by Cossacks. Of all the people, the Kazakhs might even be converted due to that. Maybe. Post 1500 this is the only possibility for a Christian Central Asia.
 
Russia burns down Central Asia's food supply, resulting in mass famine. The resulting rebellions result in massive ethnic cleansing and Russian settlement of Central Asia.
 
To be honest, I like the idea idea of a Circassian Ascendancy timeline - perhaps a PoD is a long-term alliance between a Georgian faction in the Caucauses and the Circassians north of them. I don't know if they can rise to supplant Crimea/the Golden Horde but that could be the beginning of a timeline that leads to a Christian Central Asia - via settling Good Circassians in cities to control trade routes.

In fact, an early PoD could involve both that partnership, and the adoption of gunpowder - and it forming the backbone of a hybrid Urban South and Cossack realm. Even successful the largest threat is Russia - and both are largely constrained by the Urals.

Perhaps we need to go as far back as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zichia ?
 
Ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism on that scale might sadly work somewhere more thinly-populated, like Siberia, but the scale of the Central Asian steppe would make it impossible, particularly given that a lot of the native populations on the steppe are already entrenched. The Karluks of Transoxiana, for instance, converted to Islam six or seven centuries before the POD and hung on to have their language become the main trade language within the Chagatai Khaganate; we still have Karluk-descended people hanging around today in the form of 30 million Uzbeks. We still have several million of the Persianized and Muslim descendants of Oghuz Turks hanging around on the steppe. Even among the Kazakhs, you've got 15 million of them today, plus Islam already taking root there from the 14th century. Add four million Kyrgyz plus Cumans and Mongols and a bunch of other Turco-Mongolic groups, and that grows substantially. Even accounting for 16th-century populations, that is a lot of atrocities for Russia to commit, over an enormous and challenging geographical area. It would probably end up being far and away the single largest deliberate genocide in history.

I'm not sure that level of deliberate atrocity is even possible, and I wouldn't want to write that timeline. It makes me sick just thinking about it.
 
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Ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism on that scale might sadly work somewhere more thinly-populated, like Siberia, but the scale of the Central Asian steppe would make it impossible
There were around 6 million people in soon-to-be Russian Turkestan in 1850, and I don't think it's impossible at all to get a Slavic majority from there given terrible enough state effort.
 
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