The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (82 page)

The negotiations, spread over many wearisome months, confined themselves to just three countries – Tibet, Afghanistan and Persia – all of which were crucial to India’s defence. In August 1907, after repeated disagreements and setbacks, accord was finally reached between Sir Edward Grey and the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Alexander Izvolsky. The Great Game was now rapidly drawing to a close. The agreement was designed not only to resolve permanently the regional differences between the two powers, but also to curb Germany’s eastward march (although it carefully made no mention of this). At the same time St Petersburg was advised that in future Britain would no longer oppose its wish to control the Turkish straits. It was a German presence there which Britain now feared most.

On August 31, amid great secrecy, the historic Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in St Petersburg by Count Izvolsky and Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British ambassador. With regard to Tibet, the two powers agreed to abstain from all interference in its internal affairs, to seek no concessions for railways, roads, mines or telegraphs, to send no representatives there, but to deal with Lhasa only through China, the suzerain power. Afghanistan the Russians formally recognised as lying within Britain’s sphere of influence and outside their own. They pledged themselves to send no agents there, and to conduct all political relations with Kabul through London, though they would be free to trade there. For their part, the British guaranteed not to change the political status of Afghanistan. Acknowledging, moreover, St Petersburg’s fear of Britain and Afghanistan combining against Tsarist rule in Central Asia, the British solemnly undertook never to do so and also to discourage Kabul from ever behaving in a hostile manner.

The agreement over Persia was more complicated. While both powers pledged themselves to respect its independence and allow other countries to trade freely there, they agreed to divide it into two spheres of influence, with a neutral zone between. Russia was assigned the north and centre, including Teheran, Tabriz and Isfahan, while Britain was granted the south, which included the vital entrance to the Gulf. As Sir Edward Grey put it: ‘On paper it was an equal bargain. The part of Persia by which India could be approached was made secure from Russian penetration. The part of Persia by which Russia could be approached was secured from British penetration.’ Nonetheless, he argued, Britain got the better deal. ‘In practice,’ he wrote, ‘we gave up nothing. We did not wish to pursue a forward policy in Persia. Nor could a British advance in Persia have been the same menace to Russia that a Russian advance in Persia might have been to India.’ It was hardly surprising, he added, that Count Izvolsky had difficulty in persuading the Russian generals to surrender so much, ‘while we gave up what was of little or no practical value to us’.

But not everyone in Britain saw the new convention that way. The hawks, like their Russian opposite numbers, denounced it as a sell-out. Foremost among them was the congenital Russophobe Lord Curzon, now back in London after resigning as Viceroy following a row with the Cabinet. Already fuming at the way the government had emasculated Younghusband’s hard-won treaty with the Tibetans, he declared of the convention: ‘It gives up all we have been fighting for for years, and gives it up with a wholesale abandon that is truly cynical in its recklessness . . . the efforts of a century sacrificed, and nothing or next to nothing in return.’ The Russian sphere of Persia, he protested, was unduly large, and contained all the major cities, while that apportioned to Britain was small and economically valueless. As for the agreement over Afghanistan, Britain had gained nothing, while the Tibetan clauses of the convention amounted to ‘absolute surrender’. He was joined in his condemnation of it by another veteran Russophobe, Arminius Vambery, now aged 76. From Budapest he wrote to the British Foreign Office, which paid him a small pension for his services to the Crown: ‘I do not like it at all. You have paid too high a price for temporary peace, for such it is, and the humiliation will not enhance British prestige in Asia. You have shown excessive caution in the face of a sick adversary, although England was not in need of doing so.’

No less angered by the deal were the Persians and Afghans themselves when they learned that they had been shared out between London and St Petersburg in this ignominious fashion without even being consulted. Quite what the Tibetans felt is not known, for, with Younghusband gone, there was no one in Lhasa to take note. But whatever its critics thought of it, the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 finally brought the Great Game to an end. The two rival empires had at last reached the limits of their expansion. There nonetheless remained, in India and at home, lingering suspicions over Russian intentions, especially in Persia, on which St Petersburg continued to tighten its grip. These were not enough, however, to cause the authorities in India to feel seriously threatened. At last the Russian bogy had been laid to rest. It had taken the best part of a century, and cost the lives of many brave men on either side, but in the end it had been resolved by diplomacy.

Or had it? Certainly it seemed so in August 1914, when the British and Russians found themselves fighting as allies in both Asia and Europe. Any remaining suspicions were hastily forgotten as the two ancient rivals joined forces to keep the Germans and Turks out of their Asian territories and spheres of influence. For the first time, instead of glowering at one another across the mountains and deserts of innermost Asia, Sepoy and Cossack fought together. Their common aim was to exclude these new rivals from the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan – the fuse which led to both British India and the Tsar’s Central Asian domains.

But time was running out for Nicholas. The intolerable strain which the war effort placed on his people and on the Russian economy gave his own ‘enemy within’ the chance they had long been waiting for. In October 1917, the Russian Revolution led to the collapse of the entire eastern front, from the Baltic to the Caucasus. At once the Bolsheviks tore up all the treaties made by their predecessors. Overnight the Anglo-Russian Convention, on which such hopes had been staked by Britain, became a worthless piece of paper. Far from being over, the Great Game was destined to begin again in a new guise and with renewed vigour, as Lenin vowed to set the East ablaze with the heady gospel of Marxism. However, that is another story which I have already told elsewhere.

It is now more than eighty years since the imperial struggle between St Petersburg and London ended. Momentous changes have taken place in the vast arena in which it was contested. The political ones continue, as today’s headlines show, but they are too complex and fluid to dwell on here. A change which would have astonished the Great Game players, however, is the opening up of this once forbidden region to foreigners. It is comparatively easy now to reach Chitral, where the grey stone fortress still dominates the river bend, and Hunza, where Manners Smith won his Victoria Cross storming the vertical rockface. Bokhara, where Conolly and Stoddart are buried under the square before the citadel, can be visited thanks to Intourist, as too can Khiva, Samarkand and Tashkent – although the latter has been largely rebuilt following an earthquake. Also at the time of writing, the Chinese allow tourists to visit Kashgar, Yarkand and Lhasa, though for how long is anyone’s guess.

Some regions, once accessible, are now closed, like the skeleton-strewn Karakoram Pass, then the principal route through the mountains from northern India into China, but today superseded by the Karakoram Highway. Somewhere on the ancient pass stands a lonely monument to Andrew Dalgleish, brutally hacked to death there in 1888, although no one has seen it for many years, the last caravan having passed that way in 1949. The young Scotsman’s remains were retrieved at the time of his murder, however, and buried behind the British commissioner’s bungalow at Leh. Although some of the most celebrated players in the Great Game – notably Moorcroft, Burnes, Macnaghten and Cavagnari – have no known resting place, the graves of others can still be visited. General Kaufman, architect of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, is buried near the old Orthodox cathedral in Tashkent, George Hayward in the little-frequented European cemetery at Gilgit, while Francis Younghusband lies in the small Dorset churchyard of Lytchett Minster.

Men such as these, of either side, had few doubts about what they were doing. For those were the days of supreme imperial confidence, unashamed patriotism and an unswerving belief in the superiority of Christian civilisation over all others. With the benefit of hindsight, modern historians may question whether there was ever any real Russian threat to India, so immense were the obstacles that an invasion force would first have had to overcome. But to Burnes and the Pottingers, Burnaby and Rawlinson, it seemed real enough and ever present. Indeed, India’s history appeared to bear out their fears. As one Russian general pointed out with ill-concealed relish, of twenty-one attempted invasions of India over the centuries from the north and west, eighteen had been successful. Was there any reason to think that a powerful Russian force might be any less so? Equally, men like Kaufman and Skobelev, Alikhanov and Gromchevsky, feared that unless they staked Russia’s claim to the Central Asian khanates, the British would eventually absorb these into their Indian empire.

As for the Indians themselves, they were neither consulted nor considered in any of this. Yet, like their Muslim neighbours across the frontier, it was largely their blood which was spilt during the imperial struggle. All they ever wanted was to be left alone, something they achieved in 1947, when the British packed their bags and departed. But the peoples of Central Asia were less fortunate at their conquerors’ hands. For more than a century now the vast Russian empire there has served as a monument to the Tsarist heroes of the Great Game. How much longer it will continue to do so, in view of the violent turmoil threatening the Soviet Union, is impossible to forecast.

The British heroes of the Great Game have no such memorial, precarious or otherwise. There is little or nothing to show on the map for all their efforts and sacrifices. Today they live on only in unread memoirs, the occasional place name, and in the yellowing intelligence reports of that long-forgotten adventure.

London,
January 1990.

Bibliography

The literature of the Great Game, in all its many aspects, is vast. The following list of titles, although far from exhaustive, includes those works which I found most valuable while researching and writing this book. Many of the books are long out of print, and can only be obtained from specialist libraries – or at great expense. The Afghan wars, the Crimean War, the Eastern Question, Anglo-Russian relations and the Russo-Japanese War, although inseparable from the Great Game, are major subjects on their own, with substantial literatures devoted to them. I have therefore listed only those works which I found most useful. Also, for the sake of brevity, I have omitted reports and articles from contemporary newspapers from which I have quoted, although these are usually identified in the text. For the same reason, and because they are unlikely to interest the general reader, I have not listed the file numbers where I have drawn on the Political and Secret files of the day, now in the India Office Library and Records. Except where otherwise indicated, all the works below were published in London.

Abbott, Capt. James,
Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburg, during the late Russian invasion of Khiva.
1843.

Adam, Mme,
Le Général Skobeleff.
Paris, 1886.

Addy, Premen,
Tibet on the Imperial Chessboard.
Calcutta, 1984.

Adye, Gen. Sir John,
Indian Frontier Policy.
1897.

Alder, Dr Garry,
British India’s Northern Frontier, 1865-1895.
1963.

———
Beyond Bokhara. The Life of William Moorcroft.
1985.

Alder, L., and Dalby, R.,
The Dervish of Windsor Castle. The Life of Arminius Vambery.
1979.

Alexander, Michael,
The True Blue. The Life and Adventures of Colonel Fred Burnaby, 1842-85.
1957.

Ali, Mahfuz,
The Truth about Russia and England. From a Native’s Point of View.
Lucknow, 1886.

Allen, W. E. D., and Muratoff, P.,
Caucasian Battlefields. A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828– 1921.
Cambridge, 1953.

Anderson, M. S.,
Britain’s Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815.
1958.

———
The Eastern Question, 1774-1923.
1966.

Andrew, C., and Noakes, J.,
Intelligence and International Relations, 1900-1945.
Exeter, 1987.