The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (19 page)

Word of this insult to their sovereign by the detested infidel spread quickly through the city’s population. The bazaars were closed on the orders of the mullahs and the people summoned to the mosques. There they were told to march on the Russian legation and seize the three being given asylum there. In no time a mob several thousand strong had gathered, encircling the building and screaming for Russian blood. The crowd was growing by the minute, and Griboyedov realised that the legation’s small Cossack guard could never hold it off. They were all in mortal danger, and reluctantly he decided to offer to return the Armenians. But it was too late. Moments later, urged on by the mullahs, the mob stormed the building.

For more than an hour the Cossacks tried to hold the invaders back but, greatly outnumbered, they themselves were gradually driven back, first from the courtyard, then room by room. Among the crowd’s early victims was the eunuch, who was cornered and torn to pieces. What happened to the two girls is not known. The Russians’ last stand was made in Griboyedov’s study, where he and several Cossacks held out for some time. But the mob had by now got on to the roof where they tore off the tiles, burst through the ceiling and attacked the Russians below. Griboyedov, sword in hand to the last, was finally overwhelmed and brutally slaughtered, his body being tossed from the window into the street. There his head was hacked off by a kebab vendor, who exhibited it, to the delight of the crowd, spectacles and all, on his stall. Even more unspeakable things were done to the rest of his corpse which finally ended up on a refuse heap. It was later identified by a deformity of one of his little fingers, the result of a duel in his youth. All this time there had been no sign of any troops being sent to disperse the mob or rescue Griboyedov and his companions.

The following June the poet Alexander Pushkin, a friend of Griboyedov’s, was travelling through the southern Caucasus when he came upon some men leading an ox-wagon. They were heading towards Tiflis. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked them. ‘Teheran,’ they replied. ‘What have you there?’ he enquired, pointing to the wagon. ‘Griboyedov,’ they told him. Today Griboyedov’s body lies in the little monastery of St David on a hillside above Tiflis, or Tbilisi as it has since been renamed. From Teheran meanwhile, fearing terrible retribution from the Russians, the Shah had hastily dispatched his grandson to St Petersburg to express his horror at what had happened, and to offer his profoundest apologies. On being received by Nicholas, the young prince is said to have held out his naked sword, the point towards himself, offering his own life in exchange for Griboyedov’s. But he was ordered to return the weapon to its scabbard, and told that it would be enough if those responsible for the murders were severely punished.

In fact, being still at war with the Turks, Nicholas was anxious to avoid doing anything which might provoke the unpredictable and hot-tempered Persians into hasty action, least of all into joining forces with the Turks against him. As it was, some in St Petersburg suspected that agents of the hard-pressed Sultan were behind the attack on the legation, their aim being to revive the war between Russia and Persia, and so take some of the pressure off their own troops. For since the ceasefire, General Paskievich’s forces had managed to drive the Turks from their remaining positions in the southern Caucasus and had begun to advance into Turkey proper. Others in St Petersburg, on hearing of Griboyedov’s murder, at once suspected the British, still nominally their allies, of being behind it, a suspicion which still lingers among Soviet historians today.

Just as Russia’s Caucasian adventures had caused concern in London, Paskievich’s westward advance into Turkey now began to give rise to alarm, lest Constantinople and the Turkish straits be Nicholas’s ultimate objective. By the summer of 1829 the great garrison town of Erzerum had fallen to Paskievich, leaving the road from the east all but undefended. At the same time, in the Sultan’s European territories, Russian troops were fighting their way southwards towards Constantinople through what are today Romania and Bulgaria. Two months after Erzerum’s surrender, Edirne, in European Turkey, fell to the advancing Russians. Only a few days later, Russian cavalry units were within forty miles of the capital. With the generals pressing St Petersburg to be allowed to go in for the kill, the end of the ancient Ottoman Empire seemed to be in sight at last. It was very much as Sir Robert Wilson had warned some twelve years earlier.

Now that Constantinople was all but in his grasp, Nicholas must have been sorely tempted to let the advance go on. But wiser counsels, both in St Petersburg and among the other European powers, urged caution. If the Russians attacked the capital, foreign ambassadors there warned, a wholesale massacre might follow of the Christian minorities – the very people whose interests Nicholas professed to represent. The geopolitical consequences too were worrying. If the Ottoman Empire were to break up, with Russia occupying Constantinople and commanding the straits, a scramble would follow among the major European powers, including Britain, France and Austria, for what was left. Not only might a general European war result, but with British and French bases in the eastern Mediterranean, Russia’s southern flank would be permanently threatened. It would be altogether safer to let the Sultan keep his ramshackle empire intact, even if he were to be made to pay for the privilege.

Therefore, to the disappointment of Paskievich and the other Russian commanders, the war was speedily brought to an end. A major confrontation between the powers was thus averted, for the British and French were already preparing to send their fleets to the straits to prevent this crucial waterway from falling into Russian hands. Within a matter of days the outline terms of the Turkish surrender had been settled, and on September 14, 1829, at Edirne, or Adrianople as it was then called, a peace treaty was signed. Under this the Russians were guaranteed free passage for their merchant ships through the straits – the next best thing to having a warm-water port on the Mediterranean – although nothing was said about warships. Russian merchants were also to have the freedom to trade in all parts of the Ottoman Empire. In addition the Sultan was obliged to concede any claims to Georgia and to his former possessions in the southern Caucasus, including two important ports on the Black Sea. The Russians, in return, handed back the garrison towns of Erzerum and Kars, together with most of the territory they had seized in European Turkey.

Although the crisis was over, the British government, led by the Duke of Wellington, had had a fright. Not only had the Russians defeated two major Asiatic powers, Persia and Turkey, in swift succession, thereby greatly strengthening their hand in the Caucasus, but they had come perilously close to occupying Constantinople, the key to the domination of the Near East and the most direct routes to India. The Russian generals, as a result, were bursting with confidence, and the brilliant Paskievich was said to be speaking openly, if vaguely, of the coming war with Britain. The barometer of Anglo-Russian relations now began to plunge. Could it be, people asked, that the story of Peter the Great’s dying exhortation to his heirs to conquer the world might be true after all?

One man who had long been convinced that it was true was Colonel George de Lacy Evans, a distinguished soldier who, like Sir Robert Wilson, had turned polemicist and pamphleteer. Already he had published one controversial book, entitled
On the Designs of Russia,
in which he claimed that St Petersburg was planning, before very long, to attack India and other British possessions. That had appeared, however, in 1828, when there was less cause for such suspicions. But immediately after the Russian victory over the Turks, he followed this up with another, this time called
On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India.
Whereas his first book had attracted many hostile reviews, this one, because of its timing, was assured of a more sympathetic audience, especially in the higher realms of government.

Quoting (often highly selectively) the evidence and opinions of both British and Russian travellers, including Pottinger, Kinneir, Muraviev and Moorcroft, Evans set out to prove the feasibility of a Russian thrust against India. St Petersburg’s immediate aim, he believed, would be not so much the conquest and occupation of India as an attempt to destabilise British rule there. If there was one thing the directors of the East India Company feared more than bankruptcy, it was trouble with the natives, who so vastly outnumbered the British in their midst. Evans next examined the possible approach routes. Although Persia was now all but in the Tsar’s pocket, he thought it unlikely that a Russian army would choose to come that way. Its flanks and lines of communication would be vulnerable to attack by British forces which could be landed at the head of the Gulf. More likely, he believed, it would follow the route envisaged by Kinneir eleven years earlier. Drawing on several Russian sources, he argued that St Petersburg could move a 30,000-strong force from the eastern shore of the Caspian to Khiva, whence it would sail up the Oxus to Balkh. From there it would march via Kabul to the Khyber Pass.

By appending a mass of persuasive detail, Evans managed to make it sound all too easy – especially to those, like himself, who were ignorant of the terrain. Indeed, outside Russia, there was no one with any first-hand experience of it. Nonetheless he saw the crossing of the Karakum desert to Khiva as presenting no insuperable problem, pointing out that bath British and French armies had successfully traversed such waterless tracts in Egypt and Syria. As for transporting the invasion force up the Oxus, there were, he said, ‘numerous large fishing boats employed by the natives’ on the Aral Sea which could be commandeered for this purpose. Evans also recommended that the crucial passes of the Hindu Kush, lying between an invader from the north and the Khyber, be thoroughly explored, while ‘some sort of agent’ should be stationed at Bokhara to give early warning of a Russian advance. Furthermore, he proposed that political agents should be based permanently in Kabul and Peshawar where, he argued, they would be of greater value than in Teheran.

Despite its shortcomings, which were less apparent then than now, his book was to have a profound influence on policymakers in London and Calcutta, and was to become the virtual bible of a generation of Great Game players, until its deficiencies began to show up. Even if it contained nothing that was very new, and which had not already been said by Wilson, Kinneir or Moorcroft, the recent aggressive moves by Russia gave it a force and sense of urgency which their warnings had lacked. These were heightened by a disturbing announcement from St Petersburg (fortuitously coinciding with the publication of the book in the autumn of 1829) that an Afghan chief had come to pay his respects to Tsar Nicholas, as also had an ambassador from Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab, whom the British considered to be their friend.

One influential figure much impressed by Evans’s arguments was Lord Ellenborough, a member of the Duke of Wellington’s Cabinet, who had recently become President of the Board of Control for India. Already anxious about Russian intentions in the Near East, Ellenborough found the book both disturbing and convincing, and at once sent copies of it to Sir John Kinneir (as he had now become), the Company’s envoy at Teheran, and to Sir John Malcolm, Kinneir’s former chief, who was Governor of Bombay. At the same time in his diary he noted: ‘I feel confident that we shall have to fight the Russians on the Indus.’ Eight weeks later he amended this to: ‘What I fear is an occupation of Khiva unknown to us . . . so that in three or four months from leaving Khiva the enemy might be at Cabul. I am sure we can defeat the enterprise. We ought to defeat it before the enemy reaches the Indus. If 20,000 Russians should reach the Indus, it will be a sharp fight.’ The Russians, Britain’s allies against Napoleon, were no longer to be trusted, and this time it was official.

A hawk by nature, Ellenborough strongly favoured presenting St Petersburg with an ultimatum warning that any further incursions into Persia would be regarded as a hostile act. This was rejected by his Cabinet colleagues who argued that short of going to war they had no way of enforcing such an ultimatum. That old India hand the Duke of Wellington was confident that a Russian army approaching India through Afghanistan, whether from Persia or from Khiva, could be destroyed long before it reached the Indus. But what did worry him was the unsettling effect the advance of a ‘liberating’ force might have on the native population. For this reason it was vital that an invader should be dealt with swiftly, and as far from India’s frontiers as possible. However, that would call for detailed maps of the approach routes. Enquiries by Ellen-borough soon disclosed that such maps as did exist were wildly inaccurate and largely based on hearsay. No official efforts had been made to fill in the blanks beyond India’s frontiers since Christie and Pottinger twenty years earlier.

Ellenborough now set about making up for lost time. From every possible source he gathered military, political, topographical and commercial intelligence on the countries surrounding India. He sought information on everything, from the size of the Russian navy on the Caspian Sea to the volume of their trade with the khanates of Muslim Central Asia. He wanted to know about the routes taken by the Russian caravans, as well as their size and frequency. He sifted through all that was known about Khiva, Bokhara, Khokand and Kashgar, and their capacity to withstand a Russian attack. Had Moorcroft been alive still he would have been able to supply many of the answers. As it was, almost the only intelligence from this region was to be obtained in St Petersburg. There the British ambassador, Lord Heytesbury, had obtained the services of a spy who produced for him copies of top-secret documents. These, he told London, showed that Russia was in no position, militarily or economically, to embark on an adventure against India. However, he was written off by Ellenborough as a Russophile because of his known sympathies, and his dispatches were therefore read with scepticism.