Today, we begin a new series on the Great Game (also known as Bolshaya Igra), a jockeying of position between the two great empires of the 19th century, Russia and Great Britain
Today, we begin a new series on the Great Game (also known as Bolshaya Igra), a jockeying of position between the two great empires of the 19th century, Russia and Great Britain
Episode 300 – The Great Game – Part One
Last time, we listened to an interview with Professor Simon Miles, author of the book Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War. Today, we will cover a topic that I've been wanting to talk about for quite some time: The Great Game or, as the Russians know it, Bolshaya Igra, the rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. According to most historians, the Great Game would begin on January 12, 1830, and end somewhere between 1895 and 1907, depending on who you listen to. I will be open to which year I will use as I go through my extensive research.
What intrigued me about this topic was that many of the books in my library did not reference the Great Game, or as some named it, the Secret War. The only other books I found to contain material helpful to this episodic series were The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan by Gregory Feifer, Russia: A 1,000-year Chronicle of the Wild West by Martin Sixsmith, and Russia: The Once and Future Empire from Pre-History to Putin by Philip Longworth.
Before I get into this fascinating historical period, I’d like to thank all of my listeners for inspiring me to continue with the topic of Russian history. When I first launched the podcast on April 30, 2010, I expected to do this for about two years and 52 episodes. Well, that obviously didn't go as planned. Not only have we reached episode 300, but I have plans for another 25 episodes that will carry us into next year. If you have any suggestions for a topic you would like to hear about, please drop by the Russian Rulers Facebook page or email me at markschauss@gmail.com.
Now, on to the topic at hand. At first, I was going to do one episode on this topic, but that changed when I received my copy of the book The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk. It came in at a whopping 524 pages. Of course, this will be my primary source for the series, but certainly not the only one. I don't know how many episodes the series will contain, but it will be at least three.
One of the main reasons I've decided to take on this topic is that the region of Central Asia is still very much in the news today. When it was first published in 1990, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and when the version I got ahold of was published, it was 1994, and a whole slew of new countries came into being in Central Asia.
As the author writes in his foreword, “For the collapse of the Soviet rule has tossed Central Asia back into the melting pot of history. Almost anything could happen there, and it would take a brave, or foolish, man to forecast what. But one thing seems certain. Central Asia, for good or for ill, is back once more in the thick of the news, and looks like staying there for a long time to come.”
During the early 19th century, Great Britain was still an ascending power whose main threat was Napoleon’s France. They had large holdings in Central Asia, with India as their crown jewel. Their control of India and their influence on the surrounding area derived a great deal of wealth. Great Britain had no intention of giving any of this up, no matter who threatened them.
Enter Napoleon Bonaparte to plant the seeds of distrust and fear in the region. In 1801, the French Emperor sent envoys to then Tsar Paul to persuade him to invade India. The Russian ruler was quite open to the idea, something that disturbed those in his court. It also went entirely against Paul's previous hostility towards the French. He reasoned that the French were his mother Catherine's favorites, and he detested anything she liked
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You may ask what changed his mind. When Napoleon attacked and captured Malta, an island previously controlled by Paul's favorite organization, the Order of St. John, the Tsar was furious. In 1800, when Admiral Nelson of the British Navy threw out the French but refused to return it to the Order of St. John, Paul was even angrier. In retaliation, the Tsar ordered that all British vessels in Russian ports be seized, and their crews were placed into detention camps.
This is part of the erratic behavior that got Paul into trouble. Of course, this incident was not the only one that caused the Tsar to switch allegiances, but to go into all of them would take us far away from the topic at hand. Needless to say, the Russians were now entertaining entering into an alliance with Napoleon against the British. This was contrary to the interests of many Russian merchants, as Great Britain was their largest trading partner, making many very wealthy and influential men.
With Paul's assassination in late March 1801, the whole idea of invading India went by the wayside. The British and their people did not know about this possibility many years later. When it came to light, this stoked a fervent anti-Russian distrust among the British population, something that would eventually lead to the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Still, we are, yet again, getting ahead of ourselves.
Napoleon tried to persuade Paul's son, the new Tsar, Alexander I, to join an alliance with him against Great Britain, but he did not trust the French Emperor. To Alexander and his military advisors, there were other fish to fry, so to say. Aside from the threat from Napoleon, the Russians became involved in a war on their southern border, the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813.
Here was the supposed offer that Napoleon made to Tsar Alexander I. The French Emperor would send 50,000 troops through both Persia and Afghanistan, while the Russians would send their troops south, joining forces and marching through the Indus Valley into India. Alexander looked at the logistics, and all thoughts of working together came to a screeching halt. The terrain and the lack of supplies would create significant difficulties in supplying such a large army, which played a major role in rejecting the offer.
This potential conflict brought concern to the British, but of course, they were way more concerned with the threat of Napoleon Bonapart and his Grand Armee. Great Britain’s involvement in the Napoleonic Wars began on May 18, 1803, with their declaration of war against the French. The Russians joined pretty soon away, joining Austria as part of the Third Coalition. That alliance would fall apart on December 8, 1805, after the French victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. While it took Austria out of the war, the Russians and British would remain.
The current bond between Great Britain and Russia cannot be understated. While they were bonded against Napoleon, there was a more critical glue to hold them together: their mutually beneficial trade. Even though they promised to cease their economic ties after signing the Treaty of Tilsit on July 7, 1807, the Russians never really gave up on this important trading partner, which is why Napoleon, on June 24, 1812, began his invasion of Russia.
As we all know, Napoleon and his army were repulsed and expelled from Russia and eventually defeated by the Allied forces. This would be the beginning of the end for the mutual relationship between Russia and Great Britain. They no longer had a common enemy. Russia thought that now they were one of the world's great powers, and their expansion had no boundaries. However, the only region they could expand into was an area in which Great Britain had a big stake, Central Asia.
That was part of the super-valuable Silk Road trading route, even though it was lust diminished over time by the centuries. While the British were entrenched in India, they had their eyes fixed on moving north towards Afghanistan and east towards China. The Russians' ever-expansionistic mindset also looked east but were far more successful than their Western European counterparts.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, this region of the world was not on anyone’s radar. This was to change after the Napoleonic Wars. It was considered, to quote Hopkirk’s book The Great Game, “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 was came to the region.”
One by one, the Russians began to gobble up territories in Central Asia, creating concern and alarm in the Great British capital of London and in the Indian city known then as Calcutta. Hopkirk best summed up the rapidity of the expansion. "For four centuries the Russian Empire had been steadily expanding at the rate of some 55 square miles per day, or around 20,000 square miles per year. At the beginning of the 19th 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 reign in their horses when India too was theirs.”
As you might imagine, this encroachment towards the rich British holding of India would make everyone in the western island panic, but that wasn’t entirely the case. There were some who were not at all convinced that the Russians had their eyes on India. Others believed that any invasion would be catastrophic for the Russians, given the terrain they would have to cross, as well as the formidable defenses that the British and their Indian allies (at the time) could muster.
Hopkirk lays out several reasons why this war between Russia and Great Britain would have been illogical and downright insane for both sides to get involved with. This is especially true with the Russians. While they were full of bravado after the defeat of the French in 1812-1814, they still would have been no match for the strength of the British army and definitely not their navy.
Gregory Feifer, in his book about the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, pointed out that this country, whose borders were drawn up by British surveyors, was created to provide a barrier and a buffer against any Russian incursion. He points out the geographical features of Afghanistan, like the Amu Dar’ya River in the north and the Hari Rud River in the west. Along the country's center is the mountain range known as the Hindu Kush, while in the south, you have an almost inhabitable desert that borders present-day Pakistan known as Baluchistan.
From here on, we're going to focus on the British side of this, as they would greatly impact the decisions that the Russians would make in the Great Game. The war with Afghanistan, known as the First Anglo-Afghan War (there would be three), began in 1838 and ended in disaster in 1842, was one of the most important early fights in the Bolshaya Igra.
What puzzles me is how the three wars between, what was one of the world’s great powers of the 19th century would fail to teach two other military mights of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and the USA, that a land war in Afghanistan was one that could not be won. Darius I of Persia and Alexander the Great learned this in ancient times. I always thought that history was meant to teach you about past mistakes and how not to repeat them, but alas, maybe not.
As Hopkirk points out, “If the 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 of these were only too familiar to our Victorian forebears. Indeed, the headlines of today are often indistinguishable from those of a century or more ago.”
The First Anglo-Afghan War was eerily similar in the beginning to both the Soviet and American incursions into the Central Asian nation. As Feifer writes, “The British forces, eager for conquest and laden with servants and camels, met little resistance at first. Capturing Kandahar and Ghazni in July 1839, they moved on to capture Kabul the following month. When Dost Mohammed surrendered, they installed a puppet, Shah Shuja, on the throne, and then returned most of their troops to India." This sounds all too familiar to anyone who followed the news reports of the 20th-century invasions.
Believing that they had already won the war, the British became somewhat complacent, although one of their major problems was the total incompetence of their military leader, General William Elphinstone. He would suffer the ultimate humiliation as, at the end of the war, he would be captured and would die as a prisoner. The guerilla war tactics that the Afghans employed would stimulate the British, as it would the Soviet and American armies. One example in the First Anglo-Afghan War was the retreat of 16,500 British and Indian troops from Kabul through the snow-covered mountain passes. Heading to Jalalabad in what is now Pakistan, only one survivor made it through the 92-mile trek, an injured doctor. With all this losing, the British would return for two more bouts, with a pyrrhic victory in the second war and another loss in the third.
So, what were the real intentions of the Russians leading up to the start of the Great Game? Some have suggested that it was merely a continuation of the expansionist path that had guided Russian thought since the time of the state of Muscovy. Others, like Martin Sixsmith, author of Russia: A 1,000 Year Chronicle of the Wild East, have stated that it was Russia's history of being invaded by the Ottomans, Mongols, and Persians from the south that compelled them to concur more territory to prevent incursions into their territory.
Sixsmith also writes that he thinks the Bolshaya Igra began: "The decline of the Ottoman Empire left Russia and Britain facing off in a struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Ottomans." This is one of the most reasonable and likely explanations of the situation during the early part of the 19th century. This is further shown to be accurate by the reasoning behind the Crimean War starting in 1854. Russia was gobbling up Ottoman territory at such a frenetic pace that Constantinople was in jeopardy, and the British, along with their French, Sardinian, and Turkish allies, could not allow it.
We need to go back in time to see where the Russians' fears of southern and eastern invasions come from. It should be more than obvious to you, my loyal listeners, that it was the 1240 invasion of the land of the Rus by the Mongols. As Hopkirk writes in his book The Great Game, “Crushed 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 bedeviled their foreign relations ever since.”
More importantly, when looking at present-day Russia and the situation with Ukraine, Hopkirk goes on to say, “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 the stoical acceptance of tyranny at home.”
We also know that the remnants of the Mongol horde were to bedevil the Russians as they expanded. The khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea would pose threats to Russia for centuries to come. This would create a situation where Russian expansion had to head westwards as long as there was a strong foe to the south. This led to Russia making it all the way to Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. Of course, this expansion met little resistance as very few people lived out there at the time.
It wasn't until the time of Peter the Great that we saw Russia looking at the lands of Central Asia. The first was an offer made by the Khan of Khiva, in what is now Uzbekistan, to become a vassal of Peter, to which Russia would protect his territory and family from hostile neighbors. It took the Tsar many years to agree, but once the deal was done, the Russians were in possession of an important region near India.
Unfortunately for the Russian merchants and soldiers, especially the officers, this wouldn't turn out as they had hoped. In 1717, the Khivans set up a trap for the Russians, killing a number of officers and troops before allowing the remaining men to return to the forts along the Caspian. Luckily for the Khan, Peter decided not to seek retribution, instead focusing on the Caucasus. The road to India was now cleared of any Russian interference until the time of Catherine II, some forty years later.
While she never gained the territories that she wanted, like Constantinople or a road to India, Catherine did regain the Caucasus given back to Persia by one of her predecessors, Empress Anne. Catherine also finally rid Russia of the last of the threatening khanates, Crimea. This would break the stranglehold that the Ottomans had on the Black Sea.
This territorial gain was the first time that the British, through their trading arm, the East India Company, began to concern themselves with the expansionistic policies of Russia. This would soon come to a halt when the appearance of a new threat came over the horizon, Napoleon Bonapart.
Well, this is where we stop for today. Join me next time when we continue our discussion of the Great Game between Russia and Great Britain.
Until then, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vinyamineya.