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 land 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.
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-barrelledjezails, 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 Game 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.