The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (79 page)

This settlement naturally had a close bearing on the question of Chitral. The forward school argued that because the new frontiers brought the Russians even closer to the passes leading to Chitral and northern India, the need to hold on to the territory was greater than ever. The Indian government also subscribed to this view, informing London that it proposed to establish a permanent garrison in Chitral, and build a strategic road to it across the Malakand Pass from Peshawar. For the only other way of getting troops from India to Chitral in the event of a crisis was via Gilgit, and even in late spring, as Kelly had found, this route was still blocked by snow (as indeed was the road leading up to Gilgit from India). However, despite these arguments in support of retention, the Liberal Cabinet of Lord Rosebery had made up its mind not to become entangled again with Chitral. It therefore overruled Calcutta’s decision, decreeing that neither troops nor political officers were to be stationed there. Among the reasons given for this was the enormous expense of maintaining such a garrison, and also of building and protecting a road which would run for nearly 200 miles through hostile, Pathan-controlled territory. Furthermore, London argued, such a road might prove to be a two-edged weapon, serving invader as well as defender.

Then, less than two months later, the ruling was abruptly reversed as the Liberals fell from power and Lord Salisbury was back once more in Downing Street. More important perhaps for India, Curzon was appointed Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Strongly urging the Prime Minister to retain Chitral, he warned of the likelihood of the Russians seizing it if Britain withdrew. Even if they did not, a British withdrawal would be viewed by the frontier tribes as a sign of weakness, especially following Russia’s gains in the Pamirs. Already serious trouble was brewing among the tribes in parts of the north, and such a move would only encourage them into believing that the British could be driven out. Curzon’s arguments prevailed, and it was decided to retain Chitral. A permanent garrison was to be maintained there, consisting of two battalions of Indian infantry, mountain batteries and sappers, while two further battalions would guard the Malakand Pass and other points on the route northwards.

The hawks had won the day, and subsequently it emerged that very likely they were right in urging the retention of Chitral. In the spring of 1898, while on a ‘shooting expedition’ in the Pamirs, an officer of the 60th Rifles – Captain Ralph Cobbold – learned from a Russian frontier officer he met there that they had orders to take immediate possession of Chitral if the British evacuated it. ‘Very complete plans’ had been drawn up for this eventuality, and a Russian officer had visited Chitral in disguise in order to examine its defences and approach routes. Cobbold’s informant added that plans for the invasion of Chitral ‘are a matter of common discussion at the dinner table of the Governor of Ferghana’, while other Russian officers told him that they looked upon the present frontier with Afghanistan as a ‘purely temporary arrangement’ and ‘by no means permanent’. Cobbold was much impressed by how well informed they were about the British and Afghan side of the frontier. This he put down to ‘the extensive system of espionage which is encouraged by the Russian Government along the Indian frontier’. He added: ‘Trusty men in disguise are constantly coming and going between the Russian frontier, Kabul and Chitral, and these are encouraged to gain all the information possible compatible with their own safety.’ The Russian officers he met ‘all look forward to war with the greatest eagerness’, he reported.

Russian officers serving on the frontier had long been given to such bellicose talk, as we have noted before. Its encouragement was one way of keeping up morale, while the preparation of invasion plans, and the gathering of intelligence, was merely part of a staff officer’s routine in most armies. Allowing word of it to reach British ears, moreover, was an effective way of encouraging them to keep more troops in India than they would otherwise have needed. That was all part of the Great Game. Whatever the truth of this Pamir gossip, in the event St Petersburg was to stick firmly to the agreement, making no further moves towards Afghanistan or India. The Russians had got pretty well what they wanted. Not only had they secured their long southern frontier, but they had also placed themselves advantageously if ever it came to a war with Britain. After the best part of a century, the Tsar’s empire in Central Asia had finally reached its limits. But the British, so often hoodwinked in the past, were still far from convinced. The last round of the Great Game was about to begin. Once again the play moved eastwards – this time to Tibet, a secretive land long closed to foreigners, and protected from the inquisitive by some of the highest mountains on earth.

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The Beginning of the End

Although the British had not yet grasped the fact, far grander visions now occupied the mind of the new Tsar Nicholas than the annexation of Chitral, or even the conquest of India. Under the persuasive influence of his Finance Minister, Count Witte, he dreamed of opening up to Russia the whole of the Far East, with its vast resources and markets, before these fell to other predators. It would thus become his India. Russia would be a great economic power, as well as a great military one. Witte knew just how to feed his sovereign’s dreams with visions of a golden future for Russia. ‘From the shores of the Pacific, and the heights of the Himalayas,’ he declared, ‘Russia will not only dominate the affairs of Asia, but those of Europe also.’ And while his grand design would extend Russia’s resources to the full, it involved no risk of war – or so he believed. To wrest India from the British was one thing, but to capture its trade was another.

Witte’s plan involved the construction of the greatest railway the world had ever seen. It would run for 4,500 miles across Russia, from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok and Port Arthur in the east. Indeed, work had already begun on it, starting simultaneously at either end, although it was not expected to be completed for at least twelve years. When finished, Witte calculated, it would be capable of carrying merchandise and raw materials from Europe to the Pacific and vice versa in less than half the time it took by sea. It would thus attract not merely Russian commercial traffic, he reasoned, but also that of other nations, thereby seriously threatening the sea routes which served as Britain’s economic arteries. But there was much more to it than that. The railway would enable Russia to exploit its own enormous but still untapped resources in the inhospitable Siberian wastes through which it would run. Entire communities from overcrowded parts of European Russia could be moved eastwards by railway, to work both on its construction and also in the new towns along its length. And in time of war its role could be crucial, for it could be used to rush – at 15 miles an hour – troops and munitions eastwards to a Far Eastern war zone, without risk of interference by the navies of Britain or any other power.

Even that, however, was not all that Witte dangled before the impressionable Nicholas in his vision of the future. In 1893, the year before Nicholas’s accession, an astute Buryat Mongol named Peter Badmayev, a lecturer in Mongolian at St Petersburg, had submitted to Alexander III an ambitious plan for bringing parts of the Chinese Empire, including Tibet and Mongolia, under Russian sway. This could be done, he assured Alexander, without any risk of war and at comparatively little cost by fomenting large-scale insurrections against the already enfeebled and universally disliked Manchus. To accomplish it he proposed the setting up of a trading company, to be run by himself, whose real purpose would be to incite the population against their alien rulers. Alexander, however, turned the scheme down, calling it: ‘so fantastic . . . that it is hard to believe in the possibility of success’. But that did not deter Count Witte from reviving it after Alexander’s death, and using it to excite Nicholas’s expansionist dreams. And in this he appears to have had some success. Badmayev’s company, with an initial capital of two million roubles, was set up, and Nicholas expressed to his Minister of War, General Kuropatkin, a wish to add Tibet to his domains. It is perhaps more than a coincidence, therefore, that around this time a growing number of reports began to reach Calcutta of shadowy Russian agents, usually Buryat Mongol subjects of Tsar Nicholas’s, travelling between St Petersburg and Lhasa. All appeared to be somehow connected with the mysterious Badmayev.

Whatever the truth about Badmayev’s machinations in Tibet and Mongolia, elsewhere in the Far East the major European powers were at that moment engaged in a frantic scramble for their share of the dying Manchu empire, and anything else that was going. The Germans, late starters in the colonial game, began the immediate rush, fearing lest the other powers gain a monopoly of the world’s markets and resources. Their first requirement was a naval base and coaling station for their new Far Eastern fleet somewhere on China’s northern coastline. The murder of two German missionaries by Chinese bandits in November 1897 gave them their chance. By way of reprisal, Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops seized nearby Kiaochow, known subsequently as Tsingtao, on which the Russians already had their eye. Peking was given little choice but to grant Germany a ninety-nine-year lease on it, together with mining and railway concessions. In the ensuing scrimmage, Britain and France gained further concessions, while Russia, ever posing as China’s protector, obtained the warm-water naval base of Port Arthur and its immediate hinterland. The Russians further gained a crucial strategic concession – agreement to link the base by rail to the now half-completed Trans-Siberian line. The United States, too, joined the Far Eastern scramble, acquiring in 1898 Hawaii, Wake, Guam and the Philippines, which Russia, Germany and Japan were known to covet.

While this was taking place on the periphery of Great Game territory, something occurred in India which was to have a profound effect on the game itself. George Curzon, that arch-Russophobe, had been appointed Viceroy of India. At the age of only 39, and newly raised to the peerage, he had thus achieved his boyhood dream. Needless to say, the hawks were delighted, for Curzon’s views on the Russian threat to India were well known. St Petersburg’s ultimate ambition, he was convinced, was the domination of the whole of Asia, a goal it sought to achieve step by step. It was a remorseless process which must be resisted at every stage. ‘If Russia is entitled to these ambitions,’ Curzon wrote, still more is Britain entitled, nay compelled, to defend that which she has won, and to resist the minor encroachments which are only part of a larger plan.’ He was confident, moreover, that with firm action the Russian steamroller could be halted. ‘I will no more admit’, he declared, ‘that an irresistible destiny is going to plant Russia in the Persian Gulf than at Kabul or Constantinople. South of a certain line in Asia her future is much more what we choose to make it than what she can make it herself.’ It need hardly be said that his appointment as Viceroy was to cause alarm in St Petersburg.

Persia, particularly the Gulf, was seen by Curzon as an area especially vulnerable to further Russian penetration. Already St Petersburg was beginning to show an interest in acquiring a port there, and even in building a railway for the Shah from Isfahan to the coast. It was worrying enough, he wrote to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, in April 1899, having to defend India from a Russian overland attack, without the added menace of a seaborne one. He urged the Cabinet to make it quite clear to both St Petersburg and Teheran that Britain would never allow southern Persia to fall under any foreign influence other than her own. Nor were the Russians alone in showing an interest in the Gulf, for both Germany and France were beginning to challenge British supremacy there. The Cabinet, however, did not appear unduly perturbed, causing Curzon to write to Hamilton: ‘I do not suppose that Lord Salisbury will be persuaded to lift a little finger to save Persia . . . We are slowly – no, I think I may say swiftly – paving the way for the total extinction of our influence in that country.’ Afghanistan, too, was a worry to Curzon, despite Britain’s long-standing treaty with Abdur Rahman and the settlement of the northern frontier with Russia. For intelligence began to reach Calcutta that Russian officials in Transcaspia, including the governors of Ashkhabad and Merv, were endeavouring to communicate with the Emir directly, and not, as St Petersburg had agreed, through the Foreign Office in London. In the event, the Russians were rebuffed by Abdur Rahman, and a crisis was averted. It was to Tibet, however, that the focus of the Great Game now shifted, as word was received in India that twice within twelve months an emissary from the Dalai Lama had visited St Petersburg, where he had been warmly welcomed by the Tsar.

The Russians have always insisted that the comings and goings of this emissary – a Buryat Mongol named Aguan Dorjief – were purely religious, and without any political significance. Indeed, it could not be denied that the Tsar had many Buddhists of the Tibetan school among his Buryat subjects in southern Siberia. What was more natural, therefore, than for spiritual contacts to be made between a Christian head of state and a Buddhist one? But Curzon, for one, was unconvinced. He felt fairly certain that Dorjief, far from being a simple Buddhist monk, was working on behalf of Tsar Nicholas against Britain’s interests in Asia. The discovery that Dorjief was a close friend of Peter Badmayev’s, who was now the Tsar’s adviser on Tibetan affairs, served only to confirm Curzon’s suspicions. The final truth will almost certainly never be known, although most scholars today believe that British fears were largely groundless, Nicholas being beset by too many problems of his own to be thinking about Tibet. However, writing in 1924, a respected German traveller and Central Asian scholar, Wilhelm Filchner, claimed that between 1900 and 1902 there was an all-out drive by St Petersburg to secure Tibet for Russia. In
Storm Over Asia: Experiences of a Secret Diplomatic Agent,
Filchner described in detail the activities of a Buryat Mongol named Zerempil, a man even more shadowy than Badmayev or Dorjief, with whom he was closely associated. Among other things, Filchner claims, Zerempil was used by the ‘Indian Section’ of the Russian General Staff to smuggle arms into Tibet. If Zerempil, who was said to go under a variety of names and guises, did in fact exist, then he managed to go undetected by the British intelligence services, for there are no references to him in the archives at that time.