PETER HOPKIRK

THE

Other books by the author

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Trespassers on the Roof of the World Setting the East Ablaze

THE GREAT GAME

On Secret Service

in High Asia

PETER HOPKIRK

‘Now I shall go far and far into the North, playing the Great Game...’

Rudyard Kipling, Kzm, 1901

JOHN MURRAY

For Kath

First published in 1990 by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, 50 Albemarle Street, London W1X 4BD

Reprinted 1990 (twice), 1991

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hopkirk, Peter

The great game: on secret service in high Asia.

1. Great Britain. Foreign relations with Asia, history 2. Asia. Foreign relations with Great Britain, history 1. Title 327'.095 ISBN 0-7195-4727-X%

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Prologue

THE BEGINNINGS

. The Yellow Peril . Napoleonic Nightmare . Rehearsal for the Great Game

The Russian Bogy

. All Roads Lead to India

The First of the Russian Players

. A Strange Tale of Two Dogs . Death on the Oxus . The Barometer Falls

THE MIDDLE YEARS

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

‘The Great Game’

Enter ‘Bokhara’ Burnes

The Greatest Fortress in the World The Mysterious Vitkevich

Hero of Herat

The Kingmakers

The Race for Khiva

The Freeing of the Slaves

Night of the Long Knives Catastrophe

109

121 123 135 153 165 175 188 202 213 230 243

20. 21. 22,

CONTENTS

Massacre in the Passes The Last Hours of Conolly and Stoddart Half-time

THE CLIMACTIC YEARS

23: 24. 25) 26. 21. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

The Great Russian Advance Begins Lion of Tashkent

Spies Along the Silk Road

The Feel of Cold Steel Across His Throat ‘A Physician from the North’ Captain Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva Bloodbath at the Bala Hissar

The Last Stand of the Turcomans To the Brink of War

The Railway Race to the East Where Three Empires Meet Flashpoint in the High Pamirs

The Race for Chitral

The Beginning of the End End-game

Bibliography Index

257 270 281

293 295 306 321 339 355 365 384 402 418 430 447 465 483 502 513

525 541

Illustrations

(between pages 114 and 115)

. Henry Pottinger

. Arthur Conolly (India Office Library) . General Yermolov

. General Paskievich

Imam Shamy]

. Russian troops preparing to lay siege to an aul

The Indus at Attock (India Office Library)

. Sir Alexander Burnes

. Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger

. Ranjit Singh

. Shah Shujah (National Army Museum)

. Dost Mohammed

. British troops entering the Bolan Pass in 1839 on their way

to Kabul (National Army Museum)

. Sir William Macnaghten

. Mohan Lal

. The fall of Ghazni, 1839 (National Army Museum) . The last stand at Gandamak (India Office Library)

(between pages 274 and 275)

. Captain Conolly and Colonel Stoddart

Emir Nasrullah of Bokhara The Ark, or citadel, at Bokhara

. Turcoman slavers in action

. General Konstantin Kaufman

. General Mikhail Skobelev

. Lieutenant Alikhanov

. Sir Henry Rawlinson

. George Hayward (Royal Geographical Society) . Scanning the passes

. Map-making in High Asia

vil

ILLUSTRATIONS

(between pages 434 and 435)

29. Sir Louis Cavagnari

30. The Bala Hissar fortress, Kabul (India Office Library)

31. General Sir Frederick Roberts, VC

32. Newsbill announcing Roberts’s triumph (National Army Museum)

33. Abdur Rahman

34. A contemporary cartoon from Punch (National Army Museum)

35. An anonymous political officer with friendly Afghan trib- esmen (India Office Library)

36. Cossacks manning a machine-gun post in the Pamirs

37. The celebrated meeting of Captains Younghusband and Gromchevsky

38. Francis Younghusband

39. Gurkha troops showing the flag in Tibet (India Office Library)

Maps

The Caucasus x1

Central Asia X11

The Far East X1V

Afghanistan and the N.W. Frontier 194

The Pamir Region 341

Acknowledgements

Forty years ago, when a subaltern of 19, I read Fitzroy Maclean’s classic work of Central Asian travel, Eastern Approaches. This heady tale of high adventure and politics, set in the Caucasus and Turkestan during the darkest years of Stalinist rule, had a powerful effect on me, and no doubt on many others. From that moment onwards I devoured everything I could lay hands on dealing with Central Asia, and as soon as it was opened to foreigners I began to travel there. Thus, if only indirectly, Sir Fitzroy is partly responsible — some might say to blame — for the four books, including this latest one, which I have myself written on Central Asia. I therefore owe him a con- siderable debt of gratitude for first setting my footsteps in the direction of Tbilisi and Tashkent, Kashgar and Khotan. No finer book than Eastern Approaches has yet been written about Central Asia, and even today I cannot pick it up without a frisson of excitement.

But in piecing together this narrative, my overriding debt must be to those remarkable individuals who took part in the Great Game and who left accounts of their adventures and misadventures among the deserts and mountains. These provide most of the drama of this tale, and without them it could never have been told in this form. There exist biographies of a number of individual players, and these too have proved valuable. For the pol- itical and diplomatic background to the struggle I have made full use of the latest scholarship by specialist his- torians of the period, to whom I am greatly indebted. I must also thank the staff of the India Office Library and Records for making available to me numerous records and

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

other material from that vast repository of British imperial history.

The individual to whom I perhaps owe most is my wife Kath, whose thoroughness in all things has contributed so much to the writing and researching of this, and my earlier books, at all stages, and on whom I tried out the narrative as it unfolded. In addition to preparing drafts for the five maps, she also compiled the index. Finally, I was most fortunate in having Gail Pirkis as my editor. Her eagle- eyed professionalism, calm good humour and unfailing tact proved to be an immense support during the long months of seeing this book through to publication. It is worth adding that Gail, when with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong, was responsible for rescuing from virtual oblivion a number of important works on Central Asia, at least two of them by Great Game heroes, and having them reprinted in attractive new editions.

Note on Spellings

Many of the names of peoples and places occurring in this narrative have been spelt or romanised in a variety of ways over the years. Thus Tartar/Tatar; Erzerum/ Erzurum; Turcoman/Turkmen; Kashgar/Kashi; Tiflis/ Tbilisi. For the sake of consistency and simplicity I have mostly settled for the spelling which would have been familiar to those who took part in these events.

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XIV

Prologue

On a June morning in 1842, in the Central Asian town

of Bokhara, two ragged figures could be seen kneeling

in the dust in the great square before the Emir’s palace. Their arms were tied tightly behind their backs, and they were in a pitiful condition. Filthy and half-starved, their bodies were covered with sores, their hair, beards and clothes alive with lice. Not far away were two freshly dug graves. Looking on in silence was a small crowd of Bokharans. Normally executions attracted little attention in this remote, and still medieval, caravan town, for under the Emir’s vicious and despotic rule they were all too frequent. But this one was different. The two men kneeling in the blazing midday sun at the executioner’s feet were British officers.

For months they had been kept by the Emir in a dark, stinking pit beneath the mud-built citadel, with rats and other vermin as their sole companions. The two men — Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly — were about to face death together, 4,000 miles from home, at a spot where today foreign tourists step down from their Russian buses, unaware of what once happened there. Stoddart and Conolly were paying the price of engaging in a highly dangerous game — the Great Game, as it became known to those who risked their necks playing it. Ironically, 1t was Conolly himself who had first coined the phrase, although it was Kipling who was to immortalise it many years later in his novel Kim.

The first of the two men to die on that June morning,

- THE GREAT GAME -

while his friend looked on, was Stoddart. He had been sent to Bokhara by the East India Company to try to forge an alliance with the Emir against the Russians, whose advance into Central Asia was giving rise to fears about their future intentions. But things had gone badly wrong. When Conolly, who had volunteered to try to obtain his brother officer’s freedom, reached Bokhara, he too had ended up in the Emir’s grim dungeon. Moments after Stoddart’s beheading, Conolly was also dispatched, and today the two men’s remains lie, together with the Emir’s many other victims, in a grisly and long- forgotten graveyard somewhere beneath the square.

Stoddart and Conolly were merely two of the many officers and explorers, both British and Russian, who over the best part of a century took part in the Great Game, and whose adventures and misadventures while so engaged form the nar- rative of this book. The vast chessboard on which this shadowy struggle for political ascendancy took place stretched from the snow-capped Caucasus in the west, across the great deserts and mountain ranges of Central Asia, to Chinese Turkestan and Tibet in the east. The ultimate prize, or so it was feared in London and Calcutta, and fervently hoped by ambitious Russian officers serving in Asia, was British India.

It all began in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Russian troops started to fight their way southwards through the Caucasus, then inhabited by fierce Muslim and Christian tribesmen, towards northern Persia. At first, like Russia’s great march eastwards across Siberia two centuries earlier, this did not seem to pose any serious threat to British interests. Catherine the Great, it was true, had toyed with the idea of marching on India, while in 1801 her son Paul had got as far as dispatching an invasion force in that direction, only for it to be hastily recalled on his death shortly afterwards. But somehow no one took the Russians too seriously in those days, and their nearest frontier posts were too far distant to pose any real threat to the East India Company’s possessions.

Then, in 1807, intelligence reached London which was to cause considerable alarm to both the British government and the Company’s directors. Napoleon Bonaparte, emboldened by his run of brilliant victories in Europe, had put it to Paul’s

-2-

- PROLOGUE -

successor, ‘I'sar Alexander I, that they should together invade India and wrest it from British domination. Eventually, he told Alexander, they might with their combined armies conquer the entire world and divide it between them. It was no secret in London and Calcutta that Napoleon had long had his eye on India. He was also thirsting to avenge the humiliating defeats inflicted by the British on his countrymen during their earlier struggle for its possession.

His breathtaking plan was to march 50,000 French troops across Persia and Afghanistan, and there join forces with Alex- ander’s Cossacks for the final thrust across the Indus into India. But this was not Europe, with its ready supplies, roads, bridges and temperate climate, and Napoleon had little idea of the terrible hardships and obstacles which would have to be overcome by an army taking this route. His ignorance of the intervening terrain, with its great waterless deserts and moun- tain barriers, was matched only by that of the British them- selves. Until then, having arrived originally by sea, the latter had given scant attention to the strategic land routes to India, being more concerned with keeping the seaways open.

Overnight this complacency vanished. Whereas the Russians by themselves might not present much of a threat, the com- bined armies of Napoleon and Alexander were a very different matter, especially if led by a soldier of the former’s undoubted genius. Orders were hastily issued for the routes by which an invader might reach India to be thoroughly explored and mapped, so that it could be decided by the Company’s defence chiefs where best he might be halted and destroyed. At the same time diplomatic missions were dispatched to the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, through whose domains the aggressor would have to pass, 1n the hope of discouraging them from entering into any liaisons with the foe.

The threat never materialised, for Napoleon and Alexander soon fell out. As French troops swept into Russia and entered a burning Moscow, India was temporarily forgotten. But no sooner had Napoleon been driven back into Europe with ter- rible losses than a new threat to India arose. This time it was the Russians, brimming with self-confidence and ambition, and this time it was not going to go away. As the battle-

- THE GREAT GAME -

hardened Russian troops began their southwards advance through the Caucasus once again, fears for the safety of India deepened.

Having crushed the Caucasian tribes, though only after a long and bitter resistance in which a handful of Englishmen took part, the Russians then switched their covetous gaze east- wards. There, in a vast arena of desert and mountain to the north of India, lay the ancient Muslim khanates of Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand. As the Russian advance towards them gathered momentum, London and Calcutta became increas- ingly alarmed. Before very long this great political no-man’s- land was to become a vast adventure playground for ambitious young officers and explorers of both sides as they mapped the passes and deserts across which armies would have to march if war came to the region.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Central Asia was rarely out of the headlines, as one by one the ancient caravan towns and khanates of the former Silk Road fell to Russian arms. Every week seemed to bring news that the hard-riding Cossacks, who always spearheaded each advance, were getting closer and closer to India’s ill-guarded frontiers. In 1865 the great walled city of Tashkent submitted to the Tsar. Three years later it was the turn of Samarkand and Bokhara, and five years after that, at the second attempt, the Russians took Khiva. The carnage inflicted by the Russian guns on those brave but unwise enough to resist was horrifying. ‘But in Asia,’ one Russian general explained, ‘the harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.’

Despite St Petersburg’s repeated assurances that it had no hostile intent towards India, and that each advance was its last, it looked to many as though it was all part of a grand design to bring the whole of Central Asia under Tsarist sway. And once that was accomplished, it was feared, the final advance would begin on India — the greatest of all imperial prizes. For it was no secret that several of the Tsar’s ablest generals had drawn up plans for such an invasion, and that to a man the Russian army was raring to go.

As the gap between the two front lines gradually narrowed, the Great Game intensified. Despite the dangers, principally

* PROLOGUE -

from hostile tribes and rulers, there was no shortage of intrepid young officers eager to risk their lives beyond the frontier, filling in the blanks on the map, reporting on Russian move- ments, and trying to win the allegiance of suspicious khans. Stoddart and Conolly, as will be seen, were by no means the only ones who failed to return from the treacherous north. Most of the players in this shadowy struggle were pro- fessionals, Indian Army officers or political agents, sent by their superiors in Calcutta to gather intelligence of every kind. Others, no less capable, were amateurs, often travellers of independent means, who chose to play what one of the Tsar’s ministers called ‘this tournament of shadows’. Some went in disguise, others in full regimentals.

Certain areas were judged too perilous, or politically sensi- tive, for Europeans to venture into, even in disguise. And yet these parts had to be explored and mapped, if India was to be defended. An ingenious solution to this was soon found. Indian hillmen of exceptional intelligence and resource, specially trained in clandestine surveying techniques, were dispatched across the frontier disguised as Muslim holy men or Buddhist pilgrims. In this way, often at great risk to their lives, they secretly mapped thousands of square miles of previously unex- plored terrain with remarkable accuracy. For their part, the Russians used Mongolian Buddhists to penetrate regions con- sidered too dangerous for Europeans.

The Russian threat to India seemed real enough at the time, whatever historians may say with hindsight today. The evidence, after all, was there for anyone who chose to look at the map. For four centuries the Russian Empire had been steadily expanding at the rate of some 55 square miles a day, or around 20,000 square miles a year. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 2,000 miles separated the British and Russian empires in Asia. By the end of it this had shrunk to a few hundred, and in parts of the Pamir region to less than twenty. No wonder many feared that the Cossacks would only rein in their horses when India too was theirs.

Besides those professionally involved in the Great Game, at home a host of amateur strategists followed it from the sidelines, giving freely of their advice in a torrent of books,

-5-

- THE GREAT GAME -

articles, impassioned pamphlets and letters to the newspapers. For the most part these commentators and critics were Russo- phobes of strongly hawkish views. They argued that the only way to halt the Russian advance was by ‘forward’ policies. This meant getting there first, either by invasion, or by creating compliant ‘buffer’ states, or satellites, astride the likely invasion routes. Also of the forward school were the ambitious young officers of the Indian Army and political department engaged in this exciting new sport in the deserts and passes of High Asia. It offered adventure and promotion, and perhaps even a place in imperial history. The alternative was the tedium of regimental life on the sweltering plains of India.

But not everyone was convinced that the Russians intended to try to wrest India from Britain’s grasp, or that they were militarily capable of doing so. These opponents of forward policies argued that India’s best defence lay in its unique geographical setting — bordered by towering mountain systems, mighty rivers, waterless deserts and warlike tribes. A Russian force which reached India after overcoming all these obstacles, they insisted, would be so weakened by then that it would be no match for a waiting British army. It was thus more sensible to force an invader to overextend his lines of communication than for the British to stretch theirs. This policy — the ‘back- ward’ or ‘masterly inactivity’ school, as it was called — had the additional merit of being considerably cheaper than the rival forward school. Each, however, was to have its day.

Wherever possible I have tried to tell the story through the individuals, on either side, who took part in the great imperial struggle, rather than through historical forces or geopolitics. This book does not pretend to be a history of Anglo-Russian relations during this period. These have been thoroughly dealt with by academic historians like Anderson, Gleason, Ingram, Marriott and Yapp, whose works are listed in my bibliography. Nor is there room here to go into the complex and continually evolving relationship between London and Calcutta. This is a subject in its own right which has been explored in detail in numerous histories of the British in India, most recently by Sir Penderel Moon in his monumental, 1,235-page study of the Raj, The British Conquest and Domination of India.

* PROLOGUE -

Being primarily about people, this story has a large cast. It includes more than a hundred individuals, and embraces at least three generations. It opens with Henry Pottinger and Charles Christie in 1810, and closes with Francis Young- husband nearly a century later. The Russian players, who were every bit as able as their British counterparts, are here too, beginning with the intrepid Muraviev and the shadowy Vit- kevich, and ending with the formidable Gromchevsky and the devious Badmayev. While taking a very different view of these events, modern Soviet scholars have begun to show more inter- est (and not a little pride) in the exploits of their players. Having no convenient phrase of their own for it, some even refer to the struggle as the Bolshaya Igra (‘Great Game’). I have tried, when describing the deeds of both Britons and Russians, to remain as neutral as possible, allowing men’s actions to speak for themselves, and leaving judgements to the reader.

If this narrative tells us nothing else, it at least shows that not much has changed in the last hundred years. The storming of embassies by frenzied mobs, the murder of diplomats, and the dispatch of warships to the Persian Gulf — all these were only too familiar to our Victorian forebears. Indeed, the head- lines of today are often indistinguishable from those of a century or more ago. However, little appears to have been learned from the painful lessons of the past. Had the Russians in December 1979 remembered Britain’s unhappy experiences in Afghanistan in 1842, in not dissimilar circumstances, then they might not have fallen into the same terrible trap, thereby sparing some 15,000 young Russian lives, not to mention untold numbers of innocent Afghan victims. The Afghans, Moscow found too late, were an unbeatable foe. Not only had they lost none of their formidable fighting ability, especially in terrain of their own choosing, but they were quick to embrace the latest techniques of warfare. Those deadly, long-barrelled jezails, which once wrought such slaughter among the British redcoats, had as their modern counterparts the heat-seeking Stinger, which proved so lethal against Russian helicopter- gunships. |

Some would argue that the Great Game has never really

- THE GREAT GAME -

ceased, and that it was merely the forerunner of the Cold War of our own times, fuelled by the same fears, suspicions and misunderstandings. Indeed, men like Conolly and Stoddart, Pottinger and Younghusband, would have little difficulty in recognising the twentieth-century struggle as essentially the same as theirs, albeit played for infinitely higher stakes. Like the Cold War, the Great Game had its periods of détente, though these never lasted for very long, giving us cause to wonder about the permanence of today’s improved relations. Thus, more than eighty years after it officially ended with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, the Great Game is still ominously topical.

But before we set out across the snow-filled passes and treacherous deserts towards Central Asia, where this narrative took place, we must first go back seven centuries in Russian history. For it was then that a cataclysmic event took place which was to leave an indelible mark on the Russian character. Not only did it give the Russians an abiding fear of encircle- ment, whether by nomadic hordes or by nuclear missile sites, but it also launched them on their relentless drive eastwards and southwards into Asia, and eventually into collision with the British in India.

THE BEGINNINGS

‘Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tartar.’

Russian proverb

-1- The Yellow Peril

You could smell them coming, it was said, even before

you heard the thunder of their hooves. But by then it

was too late. Within seconds came the first murderous torrent of arrows, blotting out the sun and turning day into night. Then they were upon you -— slaughtering, raping, pil- laging and burning. Like molten lava, they destroyed every- thing in their path. Behind them they left a trail of smoking cities and bleached bones, leading all the way back to their homeland in Central Asia. ‘Soldiers of Antichrist come to reap the last dreadful harvest,’ one thirteenth-century scholar called the Mongol hordes.

The sheer speed of their horse-borne archers, and the bril- liance and unfamiliarity of their tactics, caught army after army off balance. Old ruses, long used in tribal warfare, enabled them to rout greatly superior numbers at negligible loss to themselves. Time and again their feigned flight from the battle- field lured seasoned commanders to their doom. Strongholds, considered impregnable, were swiftly overwhelmed by the bar- baric practice of herding prisoners — men, women and children ~ ahead of the storming parties, their corpses then forming a human bridge across ditches and moats. Those who survived were forced to carry the Mongols’ long scaling ladders up to the very walls of the fortress, while others were made to erect their siege engines under heavy fire. Often the defenders recog- nised their own families and friends among these captives and refused to fire on them.

-11-

- THE BEGINNINGS -

Masters at black propaganda, the Mongols saw to it that hair-raising tales of their barbarity were carried ahead of them as they advanced across Asia, devastating kingdom after kingdom, towards a quaking Europe. Cannibalism was said to be among their many vices, and the breasts of captured virgins were reputedly kept for the senior Mongol commanders. Only instant surrender held out the slightest hope of mercy. After one engagement the beaten enemy leaders were slowly crushed to death beneath planks upon which the victorious Mongols were feasting and celebrating. Often, if no more prisoners were required, entire populations of captured cities were put to the sword to prevent them from ever becoming a threat again. At other times they would be sold into slavery en masse.

The dreadful Mongol whirlwind had been unleashed on the world in 1206 by an illiterate military genius named Teumjin, formerly the unknown chief of a minor tribe, whose fame was destined shortly to eclipse even that of Alexander the Great. It was the dream of Genghis Khan, as he was to become known, to conquer the earth, a task which he believed he had been chosen by God to carry out. During the next thirty years, he and his successors almost achieved this. At the height of their power their empire was to stretch from the Pacific coast to the Polish frontier. It embraced the whole of China, Persia, Afghanistan, present-day Central Asia, and parts of northern India and the Caucasus. But more important still, and par- ticularly to our narrative, it included vast tracts of Russia and Siberia.

At this time Russia consisted of a dozen or so principalities, which were frequently at war with one another. Between 1219 and 1240 these fell one by one to the ruthless Mongol war- machine, having failed to unite in resisting this common foe. They were to regret it for a very long time to come. Once the Mongols had conquered a region it was their policy to impose their rule through a system of vassal princes. Provided sufficient tribute was forthcoming, they rarely interfered in the details. They were merciless, however, if it fell short of their demands. The inevitable result was a tyrannical rule by the vassal princes — the shadow of which hangs heavily over Russia to this day — together with lasting impoverishment and back-

-12-

- THE YELLOW PERIL -

wardness which it is still struggling to overcome.

For well over two centuries the Russians were to stagnate and suffer under the Mongol yoke — or the Golden Horde, as these merchants of death called themselves, after the great tent with golden poles which was the headquarters of their western empire. In addition to the appalling material destruction wrought by the invaders, their predatory rule was to leave the Russian economy in ruins, bring commerce and industry to a halt, and reduce the Russian people to serfdom. The years of Tartar domination, as the Russians term this black chapter in their history, also witnessed the introduction of Asiatic methods of administration and other oriental customs, which were superimposed on the existing Byzantine system. Cut off from the liberalising influence of western Europe, moreover, the people became more and more eastern in outlook and culture. ‘Scratch a Russian,’ it was said, ‘and you will find a Tartar.’

Meanwhile, taking advantage of its reduced circumstances and military weakness, Russia’s European neighbours began to help themselves freely to its territory. The German prin- cipalities, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden all joined in. The Mongols, so long as the tribute continued to reach them, were unperturbed by this, being far more concerned about their Asiatic domains. For there lay Samarkand and Bokhara, Herat and Baghdad, cities of incomparable wealth and splendour, which greatly outshone the wooden-built Russian ones. Crushed thus between their European foes to the west and the Mongols to the east, the Russians were to develop a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has bedevilled their foreign relations ever since.

Rarely has an experience left such deep and long-lasting scars on a nation’s psyche as this did on the Russians. It goes far towards explaining their historic xenophobia (especially towards eastern peoples), their often aggressive foreign policy, and their stoical acceptance of tyranny at home. The invasions of Napoleon and Hitler, though unsuccessful, merely reinforced these fears. Only now do the Russian people show signs of shaking off this unhappy legacy. Those ferocious little horsemen whom Genghis Khan let loose upon the world have

- THE BEGINNINGS :-

much to answer for, more than four centuries after their power was finally broken and they themselves sank back into the obscurity from which they had come.

The man to whom the Russians owe their freedom from Mongol oppression was Ivan III, known also as Ivan the Great, then Grand Prince of Moscow. At the time of the Mongol conquest Moscow was a small and insignificant provincial town, overshadowed by and subservient to its powerful neigh- bours. But no vassal princes were more assiduous than those of Moscow in paying tribute and homage to their alien rulers. In return for their allegiance they had gradually been entrusted with more power and freedom by the unsuspecting Mongols. Over the years Moscow, by now the principality of Muscovy, thus grew in strength and size, eventually coming to dominate all its neighbours. Preoccupied with their own internal rifts, the Mongols failed to see, until too late, what a threat Muscovy had become.

The showdown came in 1480. In a fit of rage, it is said, Ivan trampled on a portrait of Ahmed Khan, leader of the Golden Horde, and at the same time put several of his envoys to death. One escaped, however, and bore the news of this undreamed- of act of defiance to his master. Determined to teach this rebellious underling a lesson he would never forget, Ahmed turned his army against Muscovy. To his astonishment he found a large and well-equipped force awaiting him on the far bank of the River Ugra, 150 miles from Moscow. For weeks the two armies glowered at one another across the river, neither side seeming inclined to make the first move to cross it. But soon, with the arrival of winter, it began to freeze. A ferocious battle appeared inevitable.

It was then that something extraordinary happened. Without any warning, both sides suddenly turned and fled, as though simultaneously seized by panic. Despite their own inglorious behaviour, the Russians knew that their centuries-long ordeal was all but over. Their oppressors had clearly lost their stomach for the fight. The Mongol war-machine, once so dreaded, was no longer invincible. Their centralised authority in the West had finally collapsed, leaving three widely separated khanates — at Kazan, Astrakhan and in the Crimea — as the last remnants

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* THE YELLOW PERIL -

of the once mighty empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. Although the overall Mongol grip had been broken, these three remaining strongholds still constituted a threat, and would eventually have to be destroyed if anyone was to feel safe.

It fell to one of Ivan’s successors, Ivan the Terrible, to seize the first two of these and incorporate them in Muscovy’s rapidly expanding empire. Thirsting for revenge, his troops stormed the fortress of Kazan on the upper Volga in 1553, slaughtering the defenders just as the Mongols had done when they laid waste Russia’s great cities. Two years later the Khanate of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian, met with a similar fate. Only the Crimea, the last remaining Tartar redoubt, still held out, and then merely because it enjoyed the protection of the Ottoman sultans, who regarded it as a valuable bulwark against the Russians. Thus, save for the occasional raid by the Crimean Tartars, the Mongol threat had been eliminated for ever. It would leave the way open for the greatest colonial enterprise in history — Russia’s expansion eastwards into Asia.

The first phase of this was to carry Muscovy’s explorers, soldiers and traders 4,000 miles across the immensity of Siberia, with its mighty rivers, frozen wastes and impenetrable forests. Comparable in many ways to the early American set- tlers’ conquest of the West, it was to take more than a century and only end when the Russians had reached the Pacific sea- board and established themselves there permanently. But the conquest of Siberia, which is one of the great epics of human history, lies outside the scope of this narrative. This vast inhos- pitable region was too far away from anywhere for any other power, least of all the British in India, to feel threatened by it. Its colonisation, however, was only the first stage of a process of expansion which would not cease until Russia had become the largest country on earth, and, in British eyes at least, an ever-increasing threat to India.

* * *

The first of the Tsars to turn his gaze towards India was Peter the Great. Painfully conscious of his country’s extreme

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- THE BEGINNINGS -

backwardness, and of its vulnerability to attack — largely the result of the ‘lost’ Mongol centuries — he determined not only to catch up, economically and socially, with the rest of Europe, but also to make his armed forces a match for those of any other power. But to do this he desperately needed vast sums of money, having emptied the treasury by going to war with Sweden and Turkey simultaneously. By a happy coincidence, at around this time, reports began to reach him from Central Asia that rich deposits of gold were to be found there on the banks of the River Oxus, a remote and hostile region where few Russians or other Europeans had ever set foot. Peter was also aware, from the accounts of Russian travellers, that beyond the deserts and mountains of Central Asia lay India, a land of legendary riches. These, he knew, were already being carried away by sea on a massive scale by his European rivals, and by the British in particular. His fertile brain now conceived a plan for getting his hands on both the gold of Central Asia and his share of India’s treasures.

Some years before, Peter had been approached by the Khan of Khiva, a Muslim potentate whose desert kingdom lay astride the River Oxus, seeking his assistance in suppressing the unruly tribes of the region. In exchange for Russian protection, the Khan had offered to become his vassal. Having little or no interest in Central Asia at that time, and more than enough on his hands at home and in Europe, Peter had forgotten all about the offer. It now occurred to him that possession of Khiva, which lay midway between his own frontiers and those of India, would provide him with the staging point he needed in the region. From here his geologists could search for gold, while it would also serve as a half-way house for the Russian caravans which he soon hoped to see returning from India laden with exotic luxuries for both the domestic and European markets. By exploiting the direct overland route, he could seriously damage the existing sea trade which took anything up to a year to travel between India and home. A friendly Khan, moreover, might even provide armed escorts for the caravans, thus saving him the enormous expense of employing Russian troops.

Peter decided to send a heavily armed expedition to Khiva

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- THE YELLOW PERIL -

to take up, somewhat belatedly, the Khan’s offer. In return, the ruler would be provided with a permanent Russian guard for his own protection, while his family would be guaranteed hereditary possession of the throne. Should he prove to have changed his mind, or be short-sighted enough to resist the expedition, then the accompanying artillery could knock sense into him by reducing the medieval mud architecture of Khiva to dust. Once in possession of Khiva, preferably on an amicable basis, then the search for the Oxus gold, and for a caravan route to India, would begin. Chosen to lead this important expedition was a Muslim prince from the Caucasus, a convert to Christianity and now a regular officer in the élite Life Guards regiment, Prince Alexander Bekovich. Because of his background Bekovich was judged by Peter to be the ideal man to deal with a fellow oriental. His party consisted of 4,000 men, including infantry, cavalry, artillery and a number of Russian merchants, and was accompanied by 500 horses and camels.

Apart from hostile Tturcoman tribesmen who roamed this desolate region, the principal obstacle facing Bekovich was a dangerous stretch of desert, more than 500 miles wide, lying between the eastern shore of the Caspian and Khiva. Not only would the expedition have to negotiate this, but eventually the heavily laden Russian caravans returning from India would also have to cross it. But here a friendly ‘Turcoman chieftain came to their assistance. He told Peter that many years before, instead of flowing into the Aral Sea, the River Oxus used to discharge into the Caspian, and that it had been diverted by the local tribes to its present course by means of dams. If this was true, Peter reasoned, it would not be difficult for his engineers to destroy the dams and restore the river to its original course. Goods travelling between India and Russia, and vice versa, could then be conveyed for much of the way by boat, thus avoiding the hazardous desert crossing. The prospects for this began to look promising when a Russian reconnaissance party reported finding what appeared to be the old Oxus river bed in the desert not far from the Caspian shore.

After celebrating the Russian Easter, Bekovich and his party set sail from Astrakhan, at the northern end of the Caspian, in

- THE BEGINNINGS -

April 1717. Conveyed across the great inland sea by a flotilla of nearly a hundred small vessels, they carried with them enough provisions to last a year. But everything took much longer than had been expected, and it was not until mid-June that they entered the desert and headed eastward towards Khiva. Already they were beginning to suffer from the extreme heat and from thirst, and soon they were losing men through heat-stroke and other sickness. At the same time they had to fight off the attacks of marauding tribesmen determined to prevent their advance. But there could be no question of turning back now and risking the fury of the Tsar, and the party struggled stoically on towards distant Khiva. Finally, in the middle of August, after more than two months in the desert, they found themselves within a few days’ march of the capital.

Far from certain how they would be received, Bekovich sent couriers ahead bearing lavish gifts for the Khan, together with assurances that their mission was strictly a friendly one. Hopes of successfully accomplishing it looked promising when the Khan himself came out to welcome the T'sar’s emissary. After exchanging courtesies, and listening to the mission’s band together, Bekovich and the Khan rode on towards the town, the former’s somewhat depleted force following at a distance. As they approached the city gates, the Khan explained to Bekovich that it would not be possible to accommodate and feed so many men in Khiva. He proposed instead that the Russians should be split up into several groups so that they could be properly housed and entertained in villages just outside the capital.

Anxious not to offend the Khan, Bekovich agreed and told Major Frankenburg, his second-in-command, to divide the men into five parties and to send them to the quarters assigned to them by their hosts. Frankenburg objected, expressing his misgivings over allowing the force to be dispersed in this way. But he was overruled by Bekovich, who insisted that his order be obeyed. When Frankenburg continued to argue with