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

  By the middle of the nineteenth century Central Asia was rarely out of the headlines, as one by one the ancient caravan towns and khanates of the former Silk Road fell to Russian arms. Every week seemed to bring news that the hard-riding Cossacks, who always spearheaded each advance, were getting closer and closer to India’s ill-guarded frontiers. In 1865 the great walled city of Tashkent submitted to the Tsar. Three years later it was the turn of Samarkand and Bokhara, and five years after that, at the second attempt, the Russians took Khiva. The carnage inflicted by the Russian guns on those brave but unwise enough to resist was horrifying. ‘But in Asia,’ one Russian general explained, ‘the harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.’

  Despite St Petersburg’s repeated assurances that it had no hostile intent towards India, and that each advance was its last, it looked to many as though it was all part of a grand design to bring the whole of Central Asia under Tsarist sway. And once that was accomplished, it was feared, the final advance would begin on India – the greatest of all imperial prizes. For it was no secret that several of the Tsar’s ablest generals had drawn up plans for such an invasion, and that to a man the Russian army was raring to go.

  As the gap between the two front lines gradually narrowed, the Great Game intensified. Despite the dangers, principally from hostile tribes and rulers, there was no shortage of intrepid young officers eager to risk their lives beyond the frontier, filling in the blanks on the map, reporting on Russian movements, and trying to win the allegiance of suspicious khans. Stoddart and Conolly, as will be seen, were by no means the only ones who failed to return from the treacherous north. Most of the players in this shadowy struggle were professionals, Indian Army officers or political agents, sent by their superiors in Calcutta to gather intelligence of every kind. Others, no less capable, were amateurs, often travellers of independent means, who chose to play what one of the Tsar’s ministers called ‘this tournament of shadows’. Some went in disguise, others in full regimentals.

  Certain areas were judged too perilous, or politically sensitive, for Europeans to venture into, even in disguise. And yet these parts had to be explored and mapped, if India was to be defended. An ingenious solution to this was soon found. Indian hillmen of exceptional intelligence and resource, specially trained in clandestine surveying techniques, were dispatched across the frontier disguised as Muslim holy men or Buddhist pilgrims. In this way, often at great risk to their lives, they secretly mapped thousands of square miles of previously unexplored terrain with remarkable accuracy. For their part, the Russians used Mongolian Buddhists to penetrate regions considered too dangerous for Europeans.

  The Russian threat to India seemed real enough at the time, whatever historians may say with hindsight today. The evidence, after all, was there for anyone who chose to look at the map. For four centuries the Russian Empire had been steadily expanding at the rate of some 55 square miles a day, or around 20,000 square miles a year. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 2,000 miles separated the British and Russian empires in Asia. By the end of it this had shrunk to a few hundred, and in parts of the Pamir region to less than twenty. No wonder many feared that the Cossacks would only rein in their horses when India too was theirs.

  Besides those professionally involved in the Great Game, at home a host of amateur strategists followed it from the sidelines, giving freely of their advice in a torrent of books, articles, impassioned pamphlets and letters to the newspapers. For the most part these commentators and critics were Russophobes of strongly hawkish views. They argued that the only way to halt the Russian advance was by ‘forward’ policies. This meant getting there first, either by invasion, or by creating compliant ‘buffer’ states, or satellites, astride the likely invasion routes. Also of the forward school were the ambitious young officers of the Indian Army and political department engaged in this exciting new sport in the deserts and passes of High Asia. It offered adventure and promotion, and perhaps even a place in imperial history. The alternative was the tedium of regimental life on the sweltering plains of India.

  But not everyone was convinced that the Russians intended to try to wrest India from Britain’s grasp, or that they were militarily capable of doing so. These opponents of forward policies argued that India’s best defence lay in its unique geographical setting – bordered by towering mountain systems, mighty rivers, waterless deserts and warlike tribes. A Russian force which reached India after overcoming all these obstacles, they insisted, would be so weakened by then that it would be no match for a waiting British army. It was thus more sensible to force an invader to overextend his lines of communication than for the British to stretch theirs. This policy – the ‘backward’ or ‘masterly inactivity’ school, as it was called – had the additional merit of being considerably cheaper than the rival forward school. Each, however, was to have its day.

  Wherever possible I have tried to tell the story through the individuals, on either side, who took part in the great imperial struggle, rather than through historical forces or geopolitics. This book does not pretend to be a history of Anglo-Russian relations during this period. These have been thoroughly dealt with by academic historians like Anderson, Gleason, Ingram, Marriott and Yapp, whose works are listed in my bibliography. Nor is there room here to go into the complex and continually evolving relationship between London and Calcutta. This is a subject in its own right which has been explored in detail in numerous histories of the British in India, most recently by Sir Penderel Moon in his monumental, 1,235-page study of the Raj, The British Conquest and Domination of India.

  Being primarily about people, this story has a large cast. It includes more than a hundred individuals, and embraces at least three generations. It opens with Henry Pottinger and Charles Christie in 1810, and closes with Francis Young-husband nearly a century later. The Russian players, who were every bit as able as their British counterparts, are here too, beginning with the intrepid Muraviev and the shadowy Vitkevich, and ending with the formidable Gromchevsky and the devious Badmayev. While taking a very different view of these events, modern Soviet scholars have begun to show more interest (and not a little pride) in the exploits of their players. Having no convenient phrase of their own for it, some even refer to the struggle as the Bolshaya Igra (‘Great Game’). I have tried, when describing the deeds of both Britons and Russians, to remain as neutral as possible, allowing men’s actions to speak for themselves, and leaving judgements to the reader.

  If this narrative tells us nothing else, it at least shows that not much has changed in the last hundred years. The storming of embassies by frenzied mobs, the murder of diplomats, and the dispatch of warships to the Persian Gulf – all these were only too familiar to our Victorian forebears. Indeed, the headlines of today are often indistinguishable from those of a century or more ago. However, little appears to have been learned from the painful lessons of the past. Had the Russians in December 1979 remembered Britain’s unhappy experiences in Afghanistan in 1842, in not dissimilar circumstances, then they might not have fallen into the same terrible trap, thereby sparing some 15,000 young Russian lives, not to mention untold numbers of innocent Afghan victims. The Afghans, Moscow found too late, were an unbeatable foe. Not only had they lost none of their formidable fighting ability, especially in terrain of their own choosing, but they were quick to embrace the latest techniques of warfare. Those deadly, long-barrelled jezails, which once wrought such slaughter among the British redcoats, had as their modern counterparts the heat-seeking Stinger, which proved so lethal against Russian helicopter-gunships.

  Some would argue that the Great Game has never really ceased, and that it was merely the forerunner of the Cold War of our own times, fuelled by the same fears, suspicions and misunderstandings. Indeed, men like Conolly and Stoddart, Pottinger and Younghusband, would have little difficulty in recognising the twentieth-century struggle as essentially the same as theirs, albeit played for infinitely higher stakes. Like the Cold War, the Great G
ame had its periods of detente, though these never lasted for very long, giving us cause to wonder about the permanence of today’s improved relations. Thus, more than eighty years after it officially ended with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, the Great Game is still ominously topical.

  But before we set out across the snow-filled passes and treacherous deserts towards Central Asia, where this narrative took place, we must first go back seven centuries in Russian history. For it was then that a cataclysmic event took place which was to leave an indelible mark on the Russian character. Not only did it give the Russians an abiding fear of encirclement, whether by nomadic hordes or by nuclear missile sites, but it also launched them on their relentless drive eastwards and southwards into Asia, and eventually into collision with the British in India.

  THE BEGINNINGS

  ‘Scratch a Russian, and

  you will find a Tartar.’

  Russian proverb

  ·1·

  The Yellow Peril

  You could smell them coming, it was said, even before you heard the thunder of their hooves. But by then it was too late. Within seconds came the first murderous torrent of arrows, blotting out the sun and turning day into night. Then they were upon you – slaughtering, raping, pillaging and burning. Like molten lava, they destroyed everything in their path. Behind them they left a trail of smoking cities and bleached bones, leading all the way back to their homeland in Central Asia. ‘Soldiers of Antichrist come to reap the last dreadful harvest,’ one thirteenth-century scholar called the Mongol hordes.

  The sheer speed of their horse-borne archers, and the brilliance and unfamiliarity of their tactics, caught army after army off balance. Old ruses, long used in tribal warfare, enabled them to rout greatly superior numbers at negligible loss to themselves. Time and again their feigned flight from the battlefield lured seasoned commanders to their doom. Strongholds, considered impregnable, were swiftly overwhelmed by the barbaric practice of herding prisoners – men, women and children – ahead of the storming parties, their corpses then forming a human bridge across ditches and moats. Those who survived were forced to carry the Mongols’ long scaling ladders up to the very walls of the fortress, while others were made to erect their siege engines under heavy fire. Often the defenders recognised their own families and friends among these captives and refused to fire on them.

  Masters at black propaganda, the Mongols saw to it that hair-raising tales of their barbarity were carried ahead of them as they advanced across Asia, devastating kingdom after kingdom, towards a quaking Europe. Cannibalism was said to be among their many vices, and the breasts of captured virgins were reputedly kept for the senior Mongol commanders. Only instant surrender held out the slightest hope of mercy. After one engagement the beaten enemy leaders were slowly crushed to death beneath planks upon which the victorious Mongols were feasting and celebrating. Often, if no more prisoners were required, entire populations of captured cities were put to the sword to prevent them from ever becoming a threat again. At other times they would be sold into slavery en masse.

  The dreadful Mongol whirlwind had been unleashed on the world in 1206 by an illiterate military genius named Teumjin, formerly the unknown chief of a minor tribe, whose fame was destined shortly to eclipse even that of Alexander the Great. It was the dream of Genghis Khan, as he was to become known, to conquer the earth, a task which he believed he had been chosen by God to carry out. During the next thirty years, he and his successors almost achieved this. At the height of their power their empire was to stretch from the Pacific coast to the Polish frontier. It embraced the whole of China, Persia, Afghanistan, present-day Central Asia, and parts of northern India and the Caucasus. But more important still, and particularly to our narrative, it included vast tracts of Russia and Siberia.

  At this time Russia consisted of a dozen or so principalities, which were frequently at war with one another. Between 1219 and 1240 these fell one by one to the ruthless Mongol war-machine, having failed to unite in resisting this common foe. They were to regret it for a very long time to come. Once the Mongols had conquered a region it was their policy to impose their rule through a system of vassal princes. Provided sufficient tribute was forthcoming, they rarely interfered in the details. They were merciless, however, if it fell short of their demands. The inevitable result was a tyrannical rule by the vassal princes – the shadow of which hangs heavily over Russia to this day – together with lasting impoverishment and backwardness which it is still struggling to overcome.

  For well over two centuries the Russians were to stagnate and suffer under the Mongol yoke – or the Golden Horde, as these merchants of death called themselves, after the great tent with golden poles which was the headquarters of their western empire. In addition to the appalling material destruction wrought by the invaders, their predatory rule was to leave the Russian economy in ruins, bring commerce and industry to a halt, and reduce the Russian people to serfdom. The years of Tartar domination, as the Russians term this black chapter in their history, also witnessed the introduction of Asiatic methods of administration and other oriental customs, which were superimposed on the existing Byzantine system. Cut off from the liberalising influence of western Europe, moreover, the people became more and more eastern in outlook and culture. ‘Scratch a Russian,’ it was said, ‘and you will find a Tartar.’

  Meanwhile, taking advantage of its reduced circumstances and military weakness, Russia’s European neighbours began to help themselves freely to its territory. The German principalities, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden all joined in. The Mongols, so long as the tribute continued to reach them, were unperturbed by this, being far more concerned about their Asiatic domains. For there lay Samarkand and Bokhara, Herat and Baghdad, cities of incomparable wealth and splendour, which greatly outshone the wooden-built Russian ones. Crushed thus between their European foes to the west and the Mongols to the east, the Russians were to develop a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has bedevilled their foreign relations ever since.

  Rarely has an experience left such deep and long-lasting scars on a nation’s psyche as this did on the Russians. It goes far towards explaining their historic xenophobia (especially towards eastern peoples), their often aggressive foreign policy, and their stoical acceptance of tyranny at home. The invasions of Napoleon and Hitler, though unsuccessful, merely reinforced these fears. Only now do the Russian people show signs of shaking off this unhappy legacy. Those ferocious little horsemen whom Genghis Khan let loose upon the world have much to answer for, more than four centuries after their power was finally broken and they themselves sank back into the obscurity from which they had come.

  The man to whom the Russians owe their freedom from Mongol oppression was Ivan III, known also as Ivan the Great, then Grand Prince of Moscow. At the time of the Mongol conquest Moscow was a small and insignificant provincial town, overshadowed by and subservient to its powerful neighbours. But no vassal princes were more assiduous than those of Moscow in paying tribute and homage to their alien rulers. In return for their allegiance they had gradually been entrusted with more power and freedom by the unsuspecting Mongols. Over the years Moscow, by now the principality of Muscovy, thus grew in strength and size, eventually coming to dominate all its neighbours. Preoccupied with their own internal rifts, the Mongols failed to see, until too late, what a threat Muscovy had become.

  The showdown came in 1480. In a fit of rage, it is said, Ivan trampled on a portrait of Ahmed Khan, leader of the Golden Horde, and at the same time put several of his envoys to death. One escaped, however, and bore the news of this undreamed-of act of defiance to his master. Determined to teach this rebellious underling a lesson he would never forget, Ahmed turned his army against Muscovy. To his astonishment he found a large and well-equipped force awaiting him on the far bank of the River Ugra, 150 miles from Moscow. For weeks the two armies glowered at one another across the river, neither side seeming inclined to make the first move to cross i
t. But soon, with the arrival of winter, it began to freeze. A ferocious battle appeared inevitable.

  It was then that something extraordinary happened. Without any warning, both sides suddenly turned and fled, as though simultaneously seized by panic. Despite their own inglorious behaviour, the Russians knew that their centuries-long ordeal was all but over. Their oppressors had clearly lost their stomach for the fight. The Mongol war-machine, once so dreaded, was no longer invincible. Their centralised authority in the West had finally collapsed, leaving three widely separated khanates – at Kazan, Astrakhan and in the Crimea – as the last remnants of the once mighty empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. Although the overall Mongol grip had been broken, these three remaining strongholds still constituted a threat, and would eventually have to be destroyed if anyone was to feel safe.

  It fell to one of Ivan’s successors, Ivan the Terrible, to seize the first two of these and incorporate them in Muscovy’s rapidly expanding empire. Thirsting for revenge, his troops stormed the fortress of Kazan on the upper Volga in 1553, slaughtering the defenders just as the Mongols had done when they laid waste Russia’s great cities. Two years later the Khanate of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian, met with a similar fate. Only the Crimea, the last remaining Tartar redoubt, still held out, and then merely because it enjoyed the protection of the Ottoman sultans, who regarded it as a valuable bulwark against the Russians. Thus, save for the occasional raid by the Crimean Tartars, the Mongol threat had been eliminated for ever. It would leave the way open for the greatest colonial enterprise in history – Russia’s expansion eastwards into Asia.