The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Read online

  THE GREAT GAME

  On Secret Service in High Asia

  PETER HOPKIRK

  ‘Now I shall go far and far into the North,

  playing the Great Game . . .’

  Rudyard Kipling, Kim, 1901

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1990 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK Company

  © Peter Hopkirk 1990, 2006

  The right of Peter Hopkirk to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-477-2

  Book ISBN 978-0-7195-6447-5

  John Murray (Publishers)

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  For Kath

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Foreword: The New Great Game

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  THE BEGINNINGS

  1. The Yellow Peril

  2. Napoleonic Nightmare

  3. Rehearsal for the Great Game

  4. The Russian Bogy

  5. All Roads Lead to India

  6. The First of the Russian Players

  7. A Strange Tale of Two Dogs

  8. Death on the Oxus

  9. The Barometer Falls

  THE MIDDLE YEARS

  10. ‘The Great Game’

  11. Enter ‘Bokhara’ Burnes

  12. The Greatest Fortress in the World

  13. The Mysterious Vitkevich

  14. Hero of Herat

  15. The Kingmakers

  16. The Race for Khiva

  17. The Freeing of the Slaves

  18. Night of the Long Knives

  19. Catastrophe

  20. Massacre in the Passes

  21. The Last Hours of Conolly and Stoddart

  22. Half-time

  THE CLIMACTIC YEARS

  23. The Great Russian Advance Begins

  24. Lion of Tashkent

  25. Spies Along the Silk Road

  26. The Feel of Cold Steel Across His Throat

  27. ‘A Physician from the North’

  28. Captain Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva

  29. Bloodbath at the Bala Hissar

  30. The Last Stand of the Turcomans

  31. To the Brink of War

  32. The Railway Race to the East

  33. Where Three Empires Meet

  34. Flashpoint in the High Pamirs

  35. The Race for Chitral

  36. The Beginning of the End

  37. End-Game

  Bibliography

  MAPS

  The Battlefield of the New Great Game

  The Caucasus

  Central Asia

  The Far East

  Afghanistan and the N.W. Frontier

  The Pamir Region

  FOREWORD

  THE NEW GREAT GAME

  Since this book was first written, sixteen years ago, momentous events have convulsed Great Game country, adding considerably to the significance of my narrative. Suddenly, after many years of almost total obscurity, Central Asia is once again in the headlines, a position it frequently occupied during the nineteenth century, at the height of the old Great Game between Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain.

  With the sudden and dramatic collapse of Communism in 1991, and the breaking up of the Soviet empire, there sprang up almost overnight five entirely new countries – eight if you include the Caucasus region. At first, even those with long experience of Central Asia had difficulty in familiarizing themselves with this new geographical and political jigsaw puzzle – not to mention getting their tongues around such romanizations as Kyrgyzstan.

  It had all been so much simpler when the entire region was just called Soviet Central Asia. A single visa, if you could get one, took you from Baku to Bokhara, from Tbilisi to Tashkent, with Moscow and Leningrad thrown in. Also, though here I can only speak for myself, travelling there at the height of the Cold War was always an adventure, like sneaking behind enemy lines, particularly if one was engaged in covert research.

  Following Moscow’s abrupt exit, Western embassies began to open up in brand-new capital cities, Soviet names were expunged from the map, and history books hastily rewritten, while foreign companies stepped in eagerly to fill the commercial and economic vacuum. For it was no secret that in Central Asia lay some of the last great prizes of the twentieth century. These included fabulous oil and gas reserves, together with rich hoards of gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead and iron ore, not to mention crucial oil-pipeline routes. So fierce was the competition that political analysts and headline writers in the West quickly began to speak of a ‘new Great Game’, as rival foreign powers and multinational companies fought for influence there. Some too had strategic and political agendas.

  But the sudden lurch from Communism to free-for-all capitalism has not been achieved without a heavy toll. Small but vicious conflicts – in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, not to mention in neighbouring parts of southern Russia, such as Chechnya and North Ossetia – have since convulsed this highly volatile region as rival factions jockeyed for power.

  As I write this, things have gone momentarily quiet there. But not so elsewhere on the old Great Game battlefield. In Afghanistan, so long at the epicentre of the century-long Anglo-Russian confrontation, bloodshed seems almost endemic. In 1979, the Russians moved in 100,000 troops to support their puppet government. But after a barbaric ten-year conflict, they were humiliatingly forced to withdraw. They left behind them their former puppet President, General Mohammed Najibullah, who four years later fell into the hands of the triumphant Taliban when Kabul surrendered to them. Dragged from the UN compound where he had been given sanctuary, he was brutally beaten, castrated, then strung up publicly. Gruesome photographs of him hanging there were splashed on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. It was also reported that he had been translating The Great Game into Pashto, telling friends that every Afghan should be made to read it so that the terrible mistakes of the past would never be repeated.

  Next to follow the Russians into Afghanistan, in 2001, were US, British, Canadian, Dutch and other NATO troops. This sprang from fears that further 9/11-type attacks on Western targets might be planned from secret al-Qaeda bases there. As well as destroying these, the NATO-led force was tasked with maintaining an uneasy peace, preparing the way for elections, eliminating the drug barons and helping with reconstruction. The UK is currently planning to despatch more troops there to help with this nightmarish – if not impossible – task, which has so far cost the lives of 22 British servicemen – an average of one every eight days. At the time of writing, the outcome of the present brutal struggle in Afghanistan is impossible to foresee.

  The two most powerful players in the ‘new Great Game’, the USA and Russia, are both anxious to keep Central Asia in a peaceful and cooperative state in order to preserve their access to its rich gas and oil supplies. Indeed, Russia’s new power on the world stage is heavily dependent on control of the pipelines. The thought of any of the new Central Asian states following the example of Iran with its heady and alarming mix of oil, fundamentalism and possible nuclear weapons, is viewed as hair-raising in Washington and Moscow – tho
ugh happily at present this seems a remote possibility.

  Besides the Americans and Russians, other regional powers, notably China, India and Pakistan, are looking on with intense self-interest and concern. For the collapse of Russian rule in Central Asia has tossed the area back into the melting pot of history. Almost anything could happen there now and only a brave or foolish man would predict its future. For this reason I have not attempted to update my original narrative beyond adding this brief foreword. Among all the uncertainties, however, one thing seems certain. For good or ill, Central Asia is back in the thick of the news once more, and likely to remain there for a long time to come.

  Peter Hopkirk

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many years ago, when a subaltern of 19, I read Fitzroy Maclean’s classic work of Central Asian travel, Eastern Approaches. This heady tale of high adventure and politics, set in the Caucasus and Turkestan during the darkest years of Stalinist rule, had a powerful effect on me, and no doubt on many others. From that moment onwards I devoured everything I could lay hands on dealing with Central Asia, and as soon as it was opened to foreigners I began to travel there. Thus, if only indirectly, Sir Fitzroy is partly responsible – some might say to blame – for the six books, including this latest one, which I have myself written on Central Asia. I therefore owe him a considerable debt of gratitude for first setting my footsteps in the direction of Tbilisi and Tashkent, Kashgar and Khotan. No finer book than Eastern Approaches has yet been written about Central Asia, and even today I cannot pick it up without a frisson of excitement.

  But in piecing together this narrative, my overriding debt must be to those remarkable individuals who took part in the Great Game and who left accounts of their adventures and misadventures among the deserts and mountains. These provide most of the drama of this tale, and without them it could never have been told in this form. There exist biographies of a number of individual players, and these too have proved valuable. For the political and diplomatic background to the struggle I have made full use of the latest scholarship by specialist historians of the period, to whom I am greatly indebted. I must also thank the staff of the India Office Library and Records for making available to me numerous records and other material from that vast repository of British imperial history.

  The individual to whom I perhaps owe most is my wife Kath, whose thoroughness in all things has contributed so much to the writing and researching of this, and my earlier books, at all stages, and on whom I tried out the narrative as it unfolded. In addition to preparing drafts for the six maps, she also compiled the index. Finally, I was most fortunate in having Gail Pirkis as my editor. Her eagle-eyed professionalism, calm good humour and unfailing tact proved to be an immense support during the long months of seeing this book through to publication. It is worth adding that Gail, when with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, was responsible for rescuing from virtual oblivion a number of important works on Central Asia, at least two of them by Great Game heroes, and having them reprinted in attractive new editions.

  Note on Spellings

  Many of the names of peoples and places occurring in this narrative have been spelt or romanised in a variety of ways over the years. Thus Tartar/Tatar; Erzerum/Erzurum; Turcoman/Turkmen; Kashgar/Kashi; Tiflis/Tbilisi. For the sake of consistency and simplicity I have mostly settled for the spelling which would have been familiar to those who took part in these events.

  Prologue

  On a June morning in 1842, in the Central Asian town of Bokhara, two ragged figures could be seen kneeling in the dust in the great square before the Emir’s palace. Their arms were tied tightly behind their backs, and they were in a pitiful condition. Filthy and half-starved, their bodies were covered with sores, their hair, beards and clothes alive with lice. Not far away were two freshly dug graves. Looking on in silence was a small crowd of Bokharans. Normally executions attracted little attention in this remote, and still medieval, caravan town, for under the Emir’s vicious and despotic rule they were all too frequent. But this one was different. The two men kneeling in the blazing midday sun at the executioner’s feet were British officers.

  For months they had been kept by the Emir in a dark, stinking pit beneath the mud-built citadel, with rats and other vermin as their sole companions. The two men – Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly – were about to face death together, 4,000 miles from home, at a spot where today foreign tourists step down from their Russian buses, unaware of what once happened there. Stoddart and Conolly were paying the price of engaging in a highly dangerous game – the Great Game, as it became known to those who risked their necks playing it. Ironically, it was Conolly himself who had first coined the phrase, although it was Kipling who was to immortalise it many years later in his novel Kim.

  The first of the two men to die on that June morning, while his friend looked on, was Stoddart. He had been sent to Bokhara by the East India Company to try to forge an alliance with the Emir against the Russians, whose advance into Central Asia was giving rise to fears about their future intentions. But things had gone badly wrong. When Conolly, who had volunteered to try to obtain his brother officer’s freedom, reached Bokhara, he too had ended up in the Emir’s grim dungeon. Moments after Stoddart’s beheading, Conolly was also dispatched, and today the two men’s remains lie, together with the Emir’s many other victims, in a grisly and long-forgotten graveyard somewhere beneath the square.

  Stoddart and Conolly were merely two of the many officers and explorers, both British and Russian, who over the best part of a century took part in the Great Game, and whose adventures and misadventures while so engaged form the narrative of this book. The vast chessboard on which this shadowy struggle for political ascendancy took place stretched from the snow-capped Caucasus in the west, across the great deserts and mountain ranges of Central Asia, to Chinese Turkestan and Tibet in the east. The ultimate prize, or so it was feared in London and Calcutta, and fervently hoped by ambitious Russian officers serving in Asia, was British India.

  It all began in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Russian troops started to fight their way southwards through the Caucasus, then inhabited by fierce Muslim and Christian tribesmen, towards northern Persia. At first, like Russia’s great march eastwards across Siberia two centuries earlier, this did not seem to pose any serious threat to British interests. Catherine the Great, it was true, had toyed with the idea of marching on India, while in 1801 her son Paul had got as far as dispatching an invasion force in that direction, only for it to be hastily recalled on his death shortly afterwards. But somehow no one took the Russians too seriously in those days, and their nearest frontier posts were too far distant to pose any real threat to the East India Company’s possessions.

  Then, in 1807, intelligence reached London which was to cause considerable alarm to both the British government and the Company’s directors. Napoleon Bonaparte, emboldened by his run of brilliant victories in Europe, had put it to Paul’s successor, Tsar Alexander I, that they should together invade India and wrest it from British domination. Eventually, he told Alexander, they might with their combined armies conquer the entire world and divide it between them. It was no secret in London and Calcutta that Napoleon had long had his eye on India. He was also thirsting to avenge the humiliating defeats inflicted by the British on his countrymen during their earlier struggle for its possession.

  His breathtaking plan was to march 50,000 French troops across Persia and Afghanistan, and there join forces with Alexander’s Cossacks for the final thrust across the Indus into India. But this was not Europe, with its ready supplies, roads, bridges and temperate climate, and Napoleon had little idea of the terrible hardships and obstacles which would have to be overcome by an army taking this route. His ignorance of the intervening terrain, with its great waterless deserts and mountain barriers, was matched only by that of the British themselves. Until then, having arrived originally by sea, the latter had given scant attention to the strategic lan
d routes to India, being more concerned with keeping the seaways open.

  Overnight this complacency vanished. Whereas the Russians by themselves might not present much of a threat, the combined armies of Napoleon and Alexander were a very different matter, especially if led by a soldier of the former’s undoubted genius. Orders were hastily issued for the routes by which an invader might reach India to be thoroughly explored and mapped, so that it could be decided by the Company’s defence chiefs where best he might be halted and destroyed. At the same time diplomatic missions were dispatched to the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, through whose domains the aggressor would have to pass, in the hope of discouraging them from entering into any liaisons with the foe.

  The threat never materialised, for Napoleon and Alexander soon fell out. As French troops swept into Russia and entered a burning Moscow, India was temporarily forgotten. But no sooner had Napoleon been driven back into Europe with terrible losses than a new threat to India arose. This time it was the Russians, brimming with self-confidence and ambition, and this time it was not going to go away. As the battle-hardened Russian troops began their southwards advance through the Caucasus once again, fears for the safety of India deepened.

  Having crushed the Caucasian tribes, though only after a long and bitter resistance in which a handful of Englishmen took part, the Russians then switched their covetous gaze eastwards. There, in a vast arena of desert and mountain to the north of India, lay the ancient Muslim khanates of Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand. As the Russian advance towards them gathered momentum, London and Calcutta became increasingly alarmed. Before very long this great political no-man’s-land was to become a vast adventure playground for ambitious young officers and explorers of both sides as they mapped the passes and deserts across which armies would have to march if war came to the region.