The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (13 page)

The last great natural obstacle facing an invader was the mighty River Indus and its network of tributaries. Fourteen hundred miles long, it had to be crossed before an invader could hope to conquer India. That this was not impossible, numerous early invaders had proved. But none of them had had to face a highly disciplined force, led and trained by European officers schooled in the most advanced defensive tactics of the day. The defenders would be fresh, well fed and regularly supplied, while the invaders would be exhausted from months of marching and hardships, short of food and ammunition, and greatly reduced in numbers. If the invader got that far, then there were two obvious points, Kinneir noted, at which he might try to cross the Indus. Were he to approach India via Kabul and the Khyber Pass, as a number of earlier invaders had, then he would most likely choose Attock. Here, he reported, the Indus was ‘of great breadth, black, rapid and interspersed with many islands, all of which may be easily defended.’ However, there were a number of fordable spots in the vicinity.

Were the invader to take the more southerly route through Afghanistan, via Kandahar and that other great gateway to India, the Bolan Pass, then he would probably attempt to cross the Indus near Multan, 300 miles down river from Attock. It was at this point that a Mongol army had once swum the Indus, and Kinneir described it as ‘perhaps our most vulnerable frontier’. A more southerly route still, across Baluchistan, he appears to have ruled out, for he did not so much as mention it, perhaps because Pottinger and Christie had reported it to be impassable to a force of any size, while the coastal route, although once used by Alexander the Great, was deemed too vulnerable from the sea for an invader to consider it.

All roads ultimately led through Afghanistan, whatever route an invader came by. Even the Russians – and now Kinneir switched specifically to them – must approach India through Afghanistan, whether they set out from their new stronghold in the Caucasus or from their forward base at Orenburg, on the edge of the Kazakh Steppe. If they used the former, he warned, they could avoid having to march the length of Persia by making use of the Caspian, which they now controlled, to transport troops eastwards to its far shore. From there they could march to the Oxus, up which they could be ferried as far as Balkh, in northern Afghanistan. After crossing Afghanistan, they could approach India via the Khyber Pass. This, it will be recalled, was the route which Peter the Great had hoped to use to make contact with India’s Mogul rulers – a dream which had ended with the massacre of the Khivan expedition. Kinneir was clearly unaware of the appalling difficulties of this route, for it was not until 1873, long after his death, that a detailed account of the expedition, and the hardships which it had to overcome, was translated from the Russian. In fact, once beyond the confines of the Persian and Turkish empires, Kinneir was as much out of his depth as anyone, having to admit that he had ‘failed in every endeavour to gain such information as can be relied upon’ about the terrain between the eastern shore of the Caspian and the Oxus.

Kinneir recognised, however, that supplying an invasion force attempting to cross Central Asia would present a colossal problem. ‘The great hordes’, he wrote, ‘which formerly issued from the plains of Tartary to invade the more civilised kingdoms of the south, generally carried with their flocks the means of their sustenance.’ Nor were they encumbered with the heavy equipment necessary for modern warfare. They were thus able to perform marches ‘which it would be utterly impossible for European soldiers to achieve.’

The final option for the Russians lay in an advance from Orenburg, the fortress they had built in 1737 as a base from which to bring under their control the warlike Kazakhs who roamed the vast steppe region to the south and east. This would involve a 1,000-mile march southwards to Bokhara – ‘said to be forty days’ journey’ away, according to Kinneir, but in fact several times that – followed by another long march across the desert and over the Oxus to Balkh. The route, Kinneir reported (correctly enough), was infested with murderous tribes, all hostile to the Russians. ‘Before therefore the Russians can invade us from this quarter,’ he wrote, ‘the power of the Tartars must be broken.’ Until that had been achieved, he believed India to be secure from invasion from the north. Curiously, Kinneir seems not to have seen the crossing of Afghanistan as perhaps the most formidable obstacle of all. For an invader would somehow have to get his weary troops, plus artillery, ammunition and other heavy equipment, not only across the Hindu Kush, but also through the lands of the fanatically xenophobic and warlike Afghans themselves. However, there was at that time an almost total ignorance, even among men as well informed as Kinneir, of the vast mountain systems and peoples surrounding northern India. For the era of the great Himalayan explorers still lay far off.

Unlike Wilson, Kinneir was not fully convinced that Tsar Alexander was planning to seize India: ‘I suspect that the Russians are by no means desirous of extending their empire in this quarter; it is already too unwieldy, and may probably, ere long, crumble into pieces from its own accumulated weight.’ He considered Constantinople a far more likely target for Alexander’s ambitions. On the other hand, if the Tsar did wish to strike a crippling blow against the British in India, at minimal risk or cost to himself, there was another option which Kinneir could foresee. When the ageing Shah of Persia died, it would give the Russians the opportunity to gain control of the throne, ‘if not reduce it entirely to their authority’.

Of the Shah’s forty sons, there was not one, Kinneir wrote, who did not have his eye on the throne. As governors of provinces or towns, nearly half of them had their own troops and arsenals. Were St Petersburg to support one of these rival claimants (despite an undertaking to back the heir apparent, Abbas Mirza), Kinneir believed that during the inevitable turmoil which would ensue, ‘the superior skill and discipline of the Russian troops would . . . enable them to place their own creature on the throne.’ Once they had the Shah in their pocket, it would not be difficult for them to incite the Persians, renowned for their love of plunder, to march on India. After all, had not Nadir Shah, the present Shah’s ancestor, acquired the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-noor diamond that way? The invasion could even be planned by Russian officers, although none of their troops would be involved, thus allowing the Tsar to wash his hands of it.

Kinneir’s careful and detailed study of the invasion routes would be the first of many such assessments, official or otherwise, to see the light of day during the coming years. Despite the gradual filling in of the blanks on the map of the surrounding regions, most of the routes which he considered were to recur again and again, with minor variations, in subsequent studies. However, as the memory of Napoleon faded and fears of the Russian peril grew, the emphasis would gradually move northwards, from Persia to Central Asia, while Afghanistan, the funnel through which an invader must pass, was to loom increasingly large in the minds of those responsible for the defence of British India. But all that lay in the future. Despite the heated debate which Wilson’s alarmist treatise had sparked off, most people were still not convinced that Russia, officially Britain’s ally, bore her any ill-will or had designs on India.

Momentarily anyway, the Russian advance southwards into Persia had been blocked by British diplomacy, giving cause for considerable satisfaction in London. However, even as Kinneir was writing, General Alexis Yermolov, the Russian Military Governor of the Caucasus, had begun to look covetously eastwards, across the Caspian Sea, to Turkestan. It was there, exactly a century earlier, that the Russians had been so treacherously outwitted and defeated by the Khivans. What now followed was the first tentative step in a process which, during the next fifty years, would deliver the great khanates and caravan cities of Central Asia into the hands of the Tsar.

·6·
The First of the Russian Players

In the summer of 1819, in the Georgian capital of Tiflis – then the Russian military headquarters in the Caucasus – a young officer in uniform might have been observed at prayer in a quiet corner of the new Orthodox cathedral. He had good reason to be there that day, for he had much to ask of his Maker. At the age of 24, Captain Nikolai Muraviev was about to embark on a mission which most men would have considered suicidal. Disguised as a Turcoman tribesman, and following the same hazardous route as the ill-fated 1717 expedition, he was to try, on General Yermolov’s orders, to reach Khiva, more than 800 miles to the east.

If he succeeded in crossing the bleak Karakum desert without being murdered or sold into slavery by the hostile and lawless Turcomans, he was to deliver in person to the Khan of Khiva, together with lavish gifts, a message of friendship from Yermolov. After a century without any contact, the Russians hoped thus to open the way for an alliance with the khanate. Yermolov’s bait was commerce – the opportunity for the Khan to acquire luxury goods from Europe and the latest in Russian technology. It was a classic Great Game strategy, which the Russians were to use again and again, for Yermolov’s long-term aim, when the moment was right, was annexation.

Befriending the Khan, therefore, was only part of Captain Muraviev’s task. That was dangerous enough, for the Khivan ruler was widely known to be a tyrant who terrorised not just his own subjects but also the surrounding Turcoman tribes. But Muraviev had been entrusted with a further role, which was even more perilous. He was to observe carefully, and note down secretly, everything he could discover about Khiva’s defences – from the locations and depths of the wells along the route, to the numerical strength and military capacity of the Khan’s armed forces. He was also to collect as much economic intelligence as he could about the khanate, so that the truth about its legendary wealth could be properly judged.

The Russians had one further interest in this remote medieval kingdom. Over the years large numbers of Russian citizens – men, women and children – had been sold into lifelong bondage in the flourishing slave-markets of Khiva and Bokhara. Originally they had included survivors from the 1717 expedition, but they were now mostly soldiers and settlers kidnapped or captured by the Kirghiz tribes around Orenburg, or fishermen and their families seized by the Turcomans on the shores of the Caspian. Very little was known about their plight, for escape was virtually impossible. It was Muraviev’s final task to try to discover all he could about them.

Yermolov had chosen his man with care. Muraviev, the son of a general, and one of five brothers all of whom were serving officers, had already shown himself to be exceptionally able and resourceful. As an ensign of only 17, he had been five times mentioned in dispatches in the war against Napoleon. But he had other qualifications which fitted him exactly for this mission. In addition to being a trained military surveyor, he had carried out a number of clandestine journeys, including one behind Persian lines when he had travelled with false papers and disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. Thus not only did he have a soldier’s eye for the terrain, but he was also fully aware of the dangers to which he was exposing himself.

Even so, Yermolov had reminded him that were he to fail, and the Khivans to imprison, enslave or execute him, he would have to be disowned by the Russian government. There would be no possible way of rescuing him, and the Tsar could not afford to lose face at the hands of a petty Central Asian ruler. Muraviev had one other quality which Yermolov told him to exercise without shame on the Khan, and that was his exceptional charm. To this was added a fluency in the local tongues. ‘Your capacity for making yourself liked,’ the general told him, ‘together with your acquaintance with the Tartar language, can be turned to great advantage. Do not regard the arts of flattery from a European point of view. They are constantly used by Asiatics and you need never fear of being too lavish in this respect.’

As he prayed in the cathedral on the eve of his departure, the prospects of his returning alive to tell the tale must have seemed slender. For in the Khan’s last communication, received some years earlier, he had warned that an unpleasant fate lay in store for any Russian envoy who approached Khiva. And yet, if anyone could pull it off, Yermolov was convinced that it was the brilliant young Muraviev.

A month after leaving Tiflis, Muraviev sailed from Baku in a Russian warship, calling in briefly at the coastal fortress of Lenkoran before crossing to the wild and desolate eastern shore of the Caspian. Here he was to remain for several weeks, making contact with the scattered Turcoman settlements while still enjoying the protection of Russian sailors and guns. At first the people were frightened and suspicious, but with the help of gifts to their chieftains he gradually won their confidence. Finally it was agreed that for a payment of forty gold ducats he could accompany a caravan which was shortly due to leave for Khiva across the treacherous Karakum desert. Half that sum would be paid on departure, and the rest on his safe return to the Russian warship. It was decided that it would be wise for him to travel disguised as a Turcoman of the Jafir Bey tribe, one Murad Beg, although the caravan men knew that he was really a Russian carrying gifts and important messages for the Khan of Khiva. The disguise was intended to protect him, not to mention the gifts, from the raiders and slavers who lurked in the desert. Even so, Muraviev carried a pair of loaded pistols and a dagger hidden beneath his robe.