The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (56 page)

At first the tougher line which London was beginning to take appeared to yield gratifying results, momentarily allaying fears of further Russian moves towards India. For an unprecedented climb-down by St Petersburg brought to a conclusion the long-standing disagreement with London over the location of Afghanistan’s northern frontier. This had arisen over the sovereignty of the remote and mountainous regions of Badakhshan and Wakhan, on the upper Oxus, where the Russian outposts lay closest to British India. London had all along insisted that they formed an integral part of eastern Afghanistan, while St Petersburg argued that they did not, maintaining instead that the Emir of Bokhara had a better claim to them. Then, in January 1873, the Russians suddenly and unexpectedly gave way, acknowledging that they lay within the domains of the Emir of Afghanistan. Furthermore, they reaffirmed that Afghanistan itself lay within Britain’s sphere of influence, and outside their own. In return they expected Britain to restrain the Emir from embarking on military adventures beyond his northern frontier or inciting his co-religionists there to make war on them. The British were delighted, believing themselves to have won an important diplomatic victory, although the agreement was not incorporated into a formal treaty, the Russians merely accepting it in principle. Indeed, even now, the frontier was little more than a vague line on an even vaguer map, for almost nothing was known about the wild Pamir region of eastern Afghanistan – a deficiency which George Hayward had intended to put right. But what the British did not then realise was that Russia’s capitulation over Badakhshan and Wakhan was merely a smoke-screen for a further advance, the boldest yet by far, which was being planned at the highest level in St Petersburg.

Only a month before the Afghan frontier agreement, at an extraordinary session of the Council of State, presided over by Tsar Alexander in person, it had finally been decided to launch an all-out expedition against Khiva. Secret preparations had been in hand for this for many months, but the agreement over the Afghan frontier appeared to provide the ideal moment for such a move. By conceding to the British what they wanted, the Tsar and his advisers reasoned, they had made it more difficult for London to object to the seizure of Khiva. The British, however, had already got wind of the fact that something was afoot. Assurances were demanded from St Petersburg that no further conquests were being planned in Central Asia. These were given without so much as a blush, although a 13,000-strong force commanded by Kaufman was by now ready to march towards Khiva. Finally it had to be admitted that an expedition was about to be launched. But even then St Petersburg insisted that it had no intention of occupying the city permanently. Indeed, the British Foreign Secretary was assured, the Tsar had given ‘positive orders’ to this effect.

Following their two earlier disasters, in 1717 and 1839, the Russians were taking no risks this time, advancing across the desert from three directions simultaneously – from Tashkent, Orenburg and Krasnovodsk. Aware of the enormous distances which an attacker had to cover, the Khan had at first felt secure. But as Kaufman’s troops advanced ever further into his domains, he became increasingly alarmed. In an attempt to buy off the invaders he released twenty-one Russian slaves and captives held in Khiva, though to no avail. Finally, when the nearest Russian troops were only thirteen miles from his capital, the Khan sent his cousin to Kaufman offering to surrender unconditionally and submit permanently to the Tsar if the Russian commander agreed to halt the attack. Kaufman replied that he would only negotiate from inside the city. To help the Khan make up his mind, the Russians turned their new, German-made artillery on the mud-built walls. On May 28, 1873, the Khan fled, and the following day Kaufman entered Khiva in triumph.

Although, as at Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara, the Russians had done no more than defeat ill-armed and undisciplined tribesmen, the fall of Khiva represented to St Petersburg a resounding psychological victory. Not only did it help to alleviate the humiliation of the earlier Khivan disasters, as well as that of the Crimean defeat, but it also greatly enhanced the Tsar’s military prestige and growing reputation for invincibility throughout Central Asia. In addition, it won the Russians control over navigation on the lower Oxus, with its attendant commercial and strategic benefits, as well as total domination of the eastern shore of the Caspian. It also closed a large gap in Russia’s southern Asiatic flank, and brought Kaufman’s jubilant troops to within 500 miles of Herat, India’s ancient strategic gateway. After half a century, the forebodings of men like Wilson, Moorcroft, de Lacy Evans and Kinneir were beginning to look ominously justified. By seizing Khiva, the British ambassador in St Petersburg warned the Foreign Office, the Russians had secured a base from which they could ‘menace the independence of Persia and Afghanistan, and thereby become a standing danger to our Indian Empire.’

A terse exchange of notes now followed between London and St Petersburg, with the latter once again assuring the British government that the occupation was only temporary. In November, however,
The Times
published details of a secret treaty, signed by the Russians and Khivans, under which the Khan became a vassal of the Tsar’s and his country a Russian protectorate. The British realised that they had been duped once again, while the Russians insisted that military imperatives and changed circumstances had overridden all earlier undertakings – an excuse the British had heard before. To this Prince Gorchakov, the Russian Foreign Minister, added the following reproof. ‘The Cabinet of London’, he reminded the British, ‘appears to derive, from the fact of our having on several occasions spontaneously and amicably communicated to them our views with respect to Central Asia, and particularly our firm resolve not to pursue a policy of conquest or annexation, a conviction that we have contracted definite engagements toward them in regard to this.’ It fooled nobody, of course, but once again, short of war, there was little or nothing that could be done about it – or about the Russians’ next move.

Worried perhaps lest this time he might have overtaxed British forbearance, Gorchakov volunteered yet another assurance. ‘His Imperial Majesty’, he declared, ‘has no intention of extending the frontiers of Russia such as they exist at present in Central Asia, either on the side of Bokhara, or on the side of Krasnovodsk.’ He omitted to mention Khokand, however, whose ruler had been closely tied to Russia by treaty since the fall of Tashkent. In the summer of 1875, an uprising there directed against both the Russians and their puppet khan gave Kaufman the opportunity he needed to impose a tighter grip on this unstable territory, then still nominally independent. On August 22 his troops routed the main rebel army, and four days later he entered Khokand, over which he raised the imperial Russian flag. After further fighting, in which the rebels suffered heavy losses, the towns of Andijan and Osh also fell to him. Not long afterwards the khanate was formally proclaimed to be part of the Tsar’s Central Asian empire, and renamed the province of Ferghana. Alexander, the official announcement declared, had ‘yielded to the wishes of the Khokandi people to become Russian subjects’. So it was that the Russians, in a period of just ten years, had annexed a territory half the size of the United States, and erected a defensive barrier across Central Asia stretching from the Caucasus in the west to Khokand and Kuldja in the east.

For India’s defence chiefs this was highly disturbing. The incorporation of the Khanate of Khokand into the Russian Empire had brought Kaufman’s battle-hardened troops to within 200 miles of Kashgar. It could only be a matter of time before the Russians seized that too, together with Yarkand, which would give them control of the passes leading into Ladakh and Kashmir. Then the ring around India’s northern frontiers would be complete, allowing the Russians to strike southwards from almost any point or points of their choosing. Only the great mountain ranges of the north – the High Pamirs and the Karakorams – stood in their way. Until recently these had been regarded as impenetrable to a modern army with its artillery and other heavy equipment. Shaw and Hayward had been the first to challenge this, only to have their warnings rebutted by the experts. Now others, whose opinions could not be so lightly dismissed, were expressing similar fears about the vulnerability of the northern passes.

By now the mission headed by Sir Douglas Forsyth which the Viceroy had dispatched to the court of Yakub Beg at Kashgar had returned to India. Their reception this time had been splendid, and the many promises which the Muslim ruler had made to them greatly exceeded anything he had offered his earlier Russian visitors. However, despite the vows of undying friendship between Kashgaria and Britain, and visions of a great new trading partnership, in the end nothing was to come of it. The vast markets for European goods which both the British and the Russians had believed to exist in the region were to prove illusory. It soon became clear, moreover, that Yakub Beg was merely stringing his two powerful neighbours along, exploiting their mutual jealousies to safeguard his own position. After all, an oriental could play the Great Game too. But if Forsyth’s mission failed to extract from the wily ruler anything other than what would prove to be worthless promises, it did succeed in one thing. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gordon and two other officers had been allowed by Yakub Beg to return home across the Pamirs with a small escort of the Indian Corps of Guides. The route they took was much the same, though in reverse, as that which Hayward had hoped to follow. Their aim, like Hayward’s, was to explore and map the passes leading from the Russian frontier southwards into Kashmir, and gauge whether a modern army could enter India by them.

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‘A Physician from the North’

Struggling at times through snow which came up to the bellies of their ponies, and frequently forced to halt by violent storms, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon and his party nonetheless rode 400 miles across the Pamirs in three weeks. Unlike the other great mountain systems which converge there – the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Tien Shan –the Pamirs consist of a vast plateau broken by mountains and broad valleys. Known to the tribes living in the surrounding regions as the Bam-i-Dunya, or Roof of the World, they are almost destitute of human habitations, trees and other vegetation. It was the objective of Gordon’s party to fill in as many of the blanks on the British staff maps of this little-known region as possible, and to answer certain other crucial strategic questions. The intelligence they returned with in the spring of 1874 was profoundly disturbing.

Provided the right season was chosen, the Pamirs were far from impenetrable to a modern army, even one encumbered with artillery. Indeed, there was little to prevent a Russian force from the Tsar’s new garrisons in the Khokand region, just across the Oxus, from crossing the river and swarming down through the passes into Dardistan and Kashmir, and from there into northern India. The most vulnerable of the passes, they learned, were the Baroghil and the Ishkaman, a hundred miles or so north-west of Gilgit. Although they lay roughly equidistant from the nearest British and Russian outposts, the approaches to them from the north were far easier than from the south. In the event of a race between the two powers for their possession, Gordon reported, the Russians would almost certainly win. For much of the year, both these passes could be crossed without any great difficulty. Not many years earlier, one of the native rulers to the north had even managed to get cannons over them, or so it was said.

In his report to his chiefs, Gordon concluded that by means of the Baroghil Pass the Russians could reach the Indian frontier in thirteen marches via Chitral, while the Ishkaman would bring them there in much the same time via Gilgit. These two passes, he and his fellow officers agreed, were far more vulnerable than the Chang Lung, which Hayward and Shaw had envisaged as a back-door route into India for a Russian force occupying Kashgaria, not to mention the formidable Karakoram Pass, whose difficulties the mission had experienced. Possession of Kashgar by the Russians, Gordon believed, was less worrying than their present occupation of Khokand, although in the event of a war the former might serve either as a supply centre for an invasion force crossing the Pamir passes, or as a base from which the British could attack its lines of communication. To preserve the friendship of Yakub Beg was therefore vital for India’s interests.