WPF Historic Publication

The Myths and Realities of , 1856-1907

Evgeny Sergeev December 31, 2010

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The Myths and Realities of the Great Game, 1856-1907

Evgeny Sergeev

Head of the Research Center ‘The Twentieth Century’, The Russian Academy of Scienes Institute of World History

Originally published 2010 in World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations Bulletin 7, 357–76.

1 We are on the eve of stirring times; but if we play the great game that is before us, the events will be incalculably beneficial to us and to the tribes whose destinies may change from turmoil, violence, ignorance and poverty to peace, enlightenment and varied happiness. Arthur Connolly in a mail to his friend, 1840

Since the obscure, prehistoric times, the mankind has known countless conflicts which divided people. Yet, alongside with bloody clashes, there developed cooperation between individuals, social groups of various kinds and states in general. This intermixture of mutual revulsion and tolerance, hatred and affection has been accompanying human beings for more than five thousands years of the recorded history. And it often formed a kind of a Game, or to put it differently, a competition of two, rarely of three and more, opponents for a supremacy over territories, resources, and residents. Being a typical paragon of the aforementioned dialectical circulation, the Great Game played by both the great powers and regional potentates in Central and East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century must be re-examined by historians from temporal, geographic, socio-political, economic and cultural points of view. The need for a fresh, unbiased and complex research of this historical phenomenon seems multifaceted. First, the end of the Cold War epoch symbolized the break through obscurant ideological, “black- and-white” mental stereotypes, especially through the interpretations of Russo-Western relations, which obviously contradict available documentary testimonies. Second, the present acceleration of international tension in the contact zones of civilizations, populated with Christian, Muslim or Buddhist confessionals, so brilliantly investigated by Samuel Huntington, accentuated the importance of a more scrupulous analyses of the historic background and mainsprings of current developments. Lastly, the cross-use of archival sources deposited in Britain, , , Iran, and Central Asian republics by academic scholars, has definitely expanded the very scope of research and furnished present humanitarians with principally new approaches to the history of the Great Game. If an ordinary reader, keen on understanding “the hidden agenda” of historic events, is asked to explain how he or she views the problem of the Great Game, the response may be calculated in advance. Most probably, we are told that this definition deals with the 2 Russo-British military-political rivalry from early the nineteenth to early the twentieth centuries, when the , facing the challenge launched against the British supremacy in Asia, or to be more precise, in Central Asia, by the , had to rebuff the aggression from the north with means of various kinds, nominated by contemporaries as both “forward” or “masterly inactivity” politics. However, despite series of publications by historians, journalists, and even former intelligencers, the question of origins, development, and closure of the Great Game together with its essential role in the course of not just bilateral Russo-British contacts, but also relations on a regional and global scale, remains understudied or misinterpreted. We still lack a broader panorama of the multi-sided intercourse, which great powers maintained with each other and some minor, traditional Asiatic states in the age of industrial modernization. To fill this gap is the main task of the study. Another aim, the present author is seeking to attain, consists in the reappraisal of chronological stages and activities of some prominent Great Game players in political, economic and cultural fields of contest. Finally, the attempt is made in the study to shatter false notions, expose myths or if only to correct existing conceptions of how undeveloped, peripheral, from the Eurocentric point of view, pre-industrial societies had been more or less gradually and successfully incorporated in the global system of multilateral relations by the outbreak of the First World War. As a prelude to the further context, one should analyze the definition of the Great Game itself. Presumably, we are to answer such questions of prior importance as: who originally articulated this phrase; what this definition truly meant; where its geographical scope protracted and for how long the activities of the players, including those of the upper status or lower-ranking persons on the spot, promoted the dynamics of process. It seems a well established fact that Captain Arthur Connolly of the Sixth Bengal Native Light Cavalry, a ‘daring, resourceful and ambitious’ subaltern in the service of the East India Company, according to Peter Hopkirk, was the first who articulated the idiom “the Great Game”.1 Connolly mentioned it in private correspondence with Henry Rawlinson, a military officer and later a diplomat of minister ranking, then President of the Royal Geographical and Asiatic Societies and a founder of Assyriology. In the letter of 1837, prior to a secret mission to Bokhara, this intrepid explorer had written to his friend: ‘You have a great game, a noble one, before you’. Later he reiterated this expression (see

1 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game. On Secret Service in High Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 123. 3 the epigraph of the paper) or slightly modified it as ‘the grand game’ in subsequent messages addressed not solely to Rawlinson, but, most probably, to some other fellow officers and relatives.2 But why did Connolly regard his mission to be a game after all, albeit his epistles to friends and scrap-books contained reverberations of a spiritual, anti-slavery, liberatory crusade in Central Asia? Some experts, like Peter Hopkirk, argued that Connolly did have in mind the play of rugby which was invented by William Ellis at Rugby school in the early 1820’s.3 Yet this argumentation does not seem convincing and appropriate enough. The adequate explanation may be found in the impressions of Alexander Burnes, another famous British traveler and Political Resident in Central Asia, which he jotted down after the meeting with Connoly: “He [Connolly, E.S.] is a flighty, though a very nice fellow. He is to regenerate Turkestan, dismiss all the slaves, and looks upon our advent as a design of providence to spread Christianity.”4 According to John Kaye, the British historian of the First Anglo-Afghan War, who have discovered the reference to the Great (or Grand) Game in Connoly’s epistolary heritage,5 the latter even complotted to mould an Anti-Slavery Confederation in 1838, including the khanates of Bokhara, Khiva, and Khokand, under the auspices of a group of Christian volunteers who would enter ‘the remote regions of Central Asia as Champions of Humanity and Pioneers of Civilization’. Thus, the British would take an upper hand in checking up the Russian penetration and reshaping the Middle East.6 Consequently, we may conclude that the idea of propagating Christian values among Muslims dominated Captain Connolly’s belief system, whereas he fatalistically regarded himself as a tool of Providence ‘playing’ with him and similar individuals in the ‘game’ which passed human understanding. Apart from such a theological interpretation, another, more secularized version may be represented. In the times of Connolly’s activity in Central Asia, the East India Company continued to be, at least de jure, a private joint venture, though being supervised by the British government. However, most of the

2 Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, Asian Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 1973, vol. 60, pt. 1, p. 55; Karl E. Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows. The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia, London: Abacus, 1999, pp.126-7; Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire. The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757-1947, London: Green Hill Books, 2006, p. 53. 3 Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 6-7. 4 Meyer, Brysac, op. cit., p. 127. 5 Milan Hauner, ‘The Last Great Game’, The Middle East Journal,1984, vol. 38, no. 1, p. 72. 6 Meyer, Brysac, op. cit., p. 126. 4 clandestine reconnaissance missions pursued by junior sons of British nobles, gentlemen explorers and surveyors, in the service of the Company across the despotic Asiatic states were regarded by London as well as by Calcutta as ‘freelancers’ trips. Hence, the volunteers ready to make them, had to act at their own risk, without any reaffirmed official support from the British government or, moreover, from the administration of the Company. In this respect, the ‘greatness’ of the civilizing mission carried on by ardent proponents of Great Britain’s colonial expansion, like Arthur Connolly, in remote Oriental countries seemed doubtless to them as well as to the multitude of contemporaries. And what other challenge at that times might have competed with the noble task of converting savages into Christianity, on the one hand, and preventing them from falling into sphere of influence of half-barbarous Muscovites, on the other!? As Edward Said put it metaphorically in his famous book on Orientalism, the Occident was seen, through Victorian period, as ‘a hero rescuing the Orient from obscurity, alienation and strangeness’.7 One should bear in mind the third possible meaning of the Game, i.e. the competition of goods and capitals in Asian markets, where European companies could more easily ‘test the water’ while ignoring certain political risks. In fact, as Max Beloff correctly remarked, ‘Britain’s rulers took it for granted that the international world was one of competing powers and that their duty was to make the most of whatever assets were available to them’.8 However, with the escalation of diplomatic struggle between great powers in the 1870’s – 1880’s, the very perception of the Great Game was undergoing apparent mutations. Characteristically, a certain ‘British Subject’ published a pamphlet in 1875 under the title ‘The Great Game. A Plea for a British Imperial Policy’. Oddly enough, the author claimed for offensive policy in the periphery of Europe, mainly in Central and South Asia, where Britain and Russia would have all chances to unite efforts ‘to keep more than half of the world in peace and security from all attack’, launched by other countries not excluding China.9

7 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1978, p. 121. 8 Max Beloff, Imperial Sunset, London: Methuen, 1969, vol. 1, Britain’s Liberal Empire, 1897-1921, p. 5. 9 A British Subject, The Great Game. A Plea for a British Imperial Policy, London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1875, p. 174- 5. 5 Judging from commentaries in media, interpretations of this kind had not gained public opinion in the United Kingdom for it continued to balance on the verge of the open armed clash with Russia through the 1880’s. Small wonder, therefore, that Rudyard Kipling, the brilliant narrator and poet of the Raj in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘visualized the Great Game in the terms of an Anglo-Indian boy, Kim, and his Afghan mentor who was foiling Russian intrigues along the highways to Hindustan’, as an American scholar truly remarked.10 Yet Kipling’s interpretation of the scramble for supremacy in Asia that came out as a novel in 1901, differed substantially from that of Connolly’s or Kaye’s. If for the British subaltern it was a crusade, while the academic scholar viewed it as a matter of pulling secret strings by the great powers in , the first British winner of the Noble Prize for literature in 1907 described the Great Game in the terms of Anglo-Indian secret service activity to expose and prevent encroachments by the Russians (and their allies Frenchmen after the conclusion of the Russo-French alliance in the 1890’s) upon British India – that pivot of the Victorian Empire.11 Interestingly, according to contemporary travelogues and analytical studies, the locution under consideration was current among them in late 1890’s – early 1900’s, apart from the power of imagination demonstrated by Kipling. For example, the prominent explorer and military commander in High Asia, Captain and later Colonel Francis Younghusband expressed his personal feeling of intercourse with his Russian colleagues- opponents in the following way: We and the Russians are rivals, but I am sure that individual Russian and English officers like each other a great deal better than they do the individuals of nations, with which they are not in rivalry. We are both playing at a big game, and we should not be one jot better off trying to conceal the fact.12

Another British authority on the problems of Persian history, H.J. Whigham, in the impartial critical review of the passive government policy in the Middle East in 1903, pointed out that: Our danger lies not so much in our failure to recognize the importance of the Shah’s kingdom as a piece on the check-board of Asia, as in the apparent inability of our rulers in Dawning Street to grasp the fact that the game is already in progress, and that without an immediate move on our part, the denouement cannot long be

10 David Fromkin, ‘The Great Game in Asia’, Foreign Affairs, 1980, vol. 58, no. 4, p. 936. 11 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, London: Macmillan, 1966, pp. 285-6; see the analyses of the Russian threat to India depicted by Kipling in his immortal novel in: Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim, pp. 202-22. 12 Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent. A Narrative of Travels in Manchuria across the Gobi Desert, through the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and Hunza 1884-1894, London: J. Murray, 1904, p. 238. 6 delayed. And it is imperative that the move should be in the right direction. We are playing against an opponent who thought out his plan of campaign long ago, and has never lost an opportunity of carrying that plan into effect. His game is masterly and consistent because he knows all the time what is his final aim.13

Apart from a series of works covering various aspects of the Great Game in the nineteenth century, particularly, from those, penned by George Curzon, the famous traveler, humanitarian and diplomat,14 the first general report of its origins in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars was manifested by Professor Henry Davis in his Raleigh Lecture dated to 1924, though he drew the audience’s attention primarily to the intelligence cycle and the structures, which had administered data collecting in South Asia and the Middle East before the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8. Thus, Davis used the Great Game as synonym to a series of reconnaissance missions by disguised Europeans conducted on the fringe of territories controlled by big powers.15 Two decades later, another British historian, Guy Wint, while reflecting upon how the British and Russian had competed in Asia, correctly remarked that ‘on each side the government gave license to its agents to plot and counterplot to the limit of causing an actual explosion, and a kind of game [my italics, E.S.] grew up with recognized, though unadmitted convention’.16 A new, more comprehensive and objective treatment of the subject was given by British and American historians: Michael Edwards, David Gillard, Gerald Morgan, and, specifically, by Edward Ingram in the 1970’s – 1980’s. According to Edwards, the Great Game, being a contest for political ascendancy in Central Asia between democratic Britain and autocratic Russia, fitted very well with the Victorian model of ‘the romance of empire’. Symptomatically, the historian quoted the expression used by the Russian Chancellor Count Karl Nesselrode who described that Russo-British secret war of illusions as ‘a tournament of shadows’.17 For David Gillard, the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent in the first quarter of the nineteenth century had been transformed to the advantage of Great Britain and Russia, the empires that substituted and China as

13 H.J. Whigham, The Persian Problem. An Examination of the Rival Positions of Russia and Great Britain in Persia with some Account of the Persian Gulf and the Baghdad Railway, London: Isbister, 1903, pp. 1-2. 14 See especially: George Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889, London: F. Cass, 1889; Idem, Persia and the Persian Question, London: Longman, Green, 1892, 2 vols; Idem, Problems of the Far East. Japan – Korea – China, London: A. Constable, 1896. 15 Henry W. Davis, The Great Game in Asia, 1800-1844, London-Oxford: H. Milford – Oxford University Press, 1927. 16 Guy Wint, The British in Asia, London: Faber & Faber, 1947, p.142. 17 Michael Edwards, Playing the Great Game, London: H. Hamilton, 1975, pp. VII-VIII. 7 the hegemonic states in the race for ascendancy in Asia. The inaugurated a new stage of this race, when the focus of events removed from the Caucasus to the Pacific.18 In his turn, Gerald Morgan argued that the Great Game was a nick-name for an affair of a more imaginative that real nature. His understanding of this process highlighted the problem of cross-verification of the reports by spy-masters on the spot, either British or Russian, who did not balk to exaggerate, and sometimes even fabricate data on adversary’s designs. Finally, doubting upon Professor Davis’ notion of espionage web created by British and Russian military intelligencers, Morgan maintained that the ‘tournament of shadows’ was a myth spawned by initiatives of a few subalterns to promote their military careers in the entourage of Muslim fanatics.19 Edward Ingram, who published a series of studies on the origins and early flaws of the Great Game, greatly contributed to the multi-aspect evaluation of this unprecedented concurrence. ‘Between 1828 and 1907’, wrote Ingram in the book which initiated a general series of his publications, ‘the Great Game in Asia was Britain’s search for a method of preventing the power of Russia from endangering British India’. Ingram moreover focused upon its genesis: ‘A fact of geography, that the British had a frontier to defend, and a fact of politics, that they could find no one to defend it for them, were the origins of the Great Game in Asia’.20 While re-orientating his research back to the period of the French Revolution, the scholar supposed that ‘the Great Game had been rehearsed in Egypt and Baghdad during the war of the second anti-Napoleonic coalition in the very end of the eighteenth century’.21 Thus, in Ingram’s view, the acute Anglo-French struggle for domination in Europe actually signified the end of the Columbian Era and simultaneously triggered the Great Game, while Russia had replaced France as the key ‘player’ by the 1820’s.22 In the final study of the period protracting from the years before the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the researcher came to somewhat bizarre conclusion that ‘it was an attempt made by the British in the 1830’s to impose a

18 David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914. A Study in British and Russian Imperialism, London: Methuen, 1977, pp. 9, 95. 19 Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, pp, 64-5; Idem, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia: 1810-1895, London: F. Cass, 1981, pp. 133-58. 20 Edward Ingram, The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia, 1828-1834, London: Clarendon Press, 1979, pp.13, 339. 21 Idem, Commitment to Empire: Prophesies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797-1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, p. 17. 22 Ibid., pp. 399-401. 8 view on the world and, afterwards, to escape the consequences of their failure’.23 To supplement this interpretation, Ingram depicted the Great Game in his book ‘as a British invention, played in Asia in cooperation with the Turks, Persians, Afghans, and Sikhs, against the Russians’.24 Indeed, all the aforementioned authors seem to have reduced the influence of a cluster of factors to a limited scope and in favour of one-two aspects which impressed them most of all. In this light, a more balanced account of events may be found in the paper by David Fromkin, who was the first to have differentiated between ‘a narrow’ and ‘a wide’ understanding of the Great Game. In the former case, they mentioned this term to nominate a struggle of intelligence services, while in the latter case, they tended to look upon it through a lens of solely Russo-British rivalry in Asia. It should be noticed that Fromkin’s study benefited much from the multifaceted approach to the Great Game’s roots and reverberations, since the scholar gave much attention to its geostrategic, economic, socio- psychological peculiarities.25 A fresh start for the reassessment of the Great Game was given by the collapse of the in the late 1980’s – early 1990’s. This time, ex-diplomats, former intelligence officers and journalists joined in the research and publication process. For example, Gordon Whitteridge, the UK Ambassador to in 1965-8, classified it as a series of ‘tentative moves by the British and Russian Empires on the Central Asian stage to find a satisfactory defensive frontier’.26 Peter Hopkirk, the journalist and analytic, who had worked for decades on The Times, The Daily Express and ITN, and who had popularized the history of the Great Game in a number of lengthy essays which came out in the 1990’s, considered it to be ‘a shadowy struggle for political ascendancy’, the ultimate prize of which was British India.27 Besides Hopkirk’s, albeit not always deeper, insight into the Russo-British clandestine struggle, a married couple of American journalists, Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac sketched a lucid picture of ‘the Victorian prologue to the Cold War’, following the

23 Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India. Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775-1842, London: F. Cass, 1984, p. 7. 24 Ibid., p. 152. 25 D. Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 936-51. 26 Gordon Whitteridge, Charles Masson of Afghanistan: Explorer, Archaeologist, Numismatist and Intelligence Agent, Westminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986, p. 114. 27 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, p. 2. See also other works by the same author on the subject, in particular: Trespassers on the Roof of the World. The Race for Lhasa, London: J. Murray, 1982; On Secret Service East of Constantinople. The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, London: J. Murray, 1994. 9 tradition to compare, often not quite accurately, the Great Game with the confrontation among Soviet Union and the USA after the Second World War.28 Characteristically, Lawrence James, the expert in the history of the British Raj, revealed the origins of the conflict in a dramatic dissimilarity of Russian and Western belief systems like it used to be with the ideological divergence of the West and East in the Soviet epoch. ‘The personal, political and legal freedoms which characterized Britain and, according to many, gave its strength and greatness, were totally absent in Russia’, he wrote in the fundamental treatise on the rise and fall of the British Empire.29 On the other side, Peter Brobst, the American biographer of Sir Olaf Caroe, one of the most brilliant explorer and high-ranking administrator in British India in the first half of the twentieth century, contended that ‘the Great Game was largely an economic contest, but commercial profit was not the measure of victory’.30 Other academic scholars continued to scrutinize the Great Game primarily through the prism of developments in either military decision-making process or espionage. The paragons of such studies are the books published almost simultaneously by Robert Johnson and Jules Stewart, dealing with some key protagonists of the Great Game – the intelligencers and their masters31. Typically, another reviewer of espionage history, Frederick Hitz, the retired CIA officer, refers this term to the competition between Britain, France, and Russia for the control of the Hindu Kush, and the area, wherein Afghanistan, , and much of India are situated now. ‘Ironically’, he remarked in the book, ‘religious terrorist threat ‘will require a reversion of the tradecraft and technique of an earlier espionage era – that of the Great Game, before the gadgetry and sophistication of overhead photography and instant wireless communication’.32 To draw the line for all the interpretations of the Great Game, one should also mention those conceptions elaborated by Russian and Asiatic historians. Despite the fact that there is no such term in Soviet historiography, for the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy required a strict adherence of any humanitarian to a group of commonsensical dogmas: first, both tsarist Russia and democratic Britain were aggressive imperialistic powers;

28 Karl E. Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac, op. cit., p. XXV. 29 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, London: Little, Brown & Co., 1994, p. 180. 30 Peter Brobst, The Future of the Great Game. Sir Olaf Caroe, India’s Independence and the Defence of Asia, Akron, Ohio: The University of Akron Press, 2005, p. 75. 31 Robert Johnson, op. cit.; Jules Stewart, Spying for the Raj. The Pundits and the Mapping of the Himalaya, Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2006. 32 Frederick Hitz, The Great Game. The Myth and Reality of Espionage, New York: Vintage Books, 2005, pp. 6, 61. 10 second, they competed with each other through the nineteenth century while applying various military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural methods to submit preindustrial regimes in the Orient; third, the prospects of British rule were regarded by local nationals as more hazardous to them than those of Russia’s, because, despite its backwardness, the tsarist civil and military officials governed Asiatic population more tolerantly and professionally than the British did, especially in India; fourth, the Russians had to carry on routine covert counter-intelligence operations against countless British secret agents in disguise who swarmed across Russian, Afghan, and Chinese Turkestan in the second half of the nineteenth – first quarter of the twentieth centuries; fifth, the Russo-British relations in Asia in the Victorian period proved to be exclusively antagonistic, when both sides were tipping on the brink of open hostilities for several times. Hence, the full pathos of Soviet academic scholars concentrated upon the exposure of ‘the devious imperialistic plots against both Russia and all the free-loving people in the East’. Theories of this kind may be easily traced in the treatises by Aleksandr Popov, Evgeny Shteinberg, Goga Khidoyatov, Nina Kinyapina, Olga Zhigalina, etc.33 But a completed conception of Russian imperialism in the Middle East was, in fact, created by Naftula Khalfin, an eminent historian from Soviet Uzbekistan, whose arguments hinged on highly informative archival documents in local depositories of Central Asia, albeit his interpretation of the Russo-British rivalry almost exclusively as ‘the economic war’ seems at present absolutely out-of-dated.34 Regrettably, the transition of Russia to democracy in the 1990’s – 2000’s has not yet given raise to any scholarly reappraisal of the Russo-British relations. Although great interest in the history of the Caucasus and Central Asia, including their colonial past, has recently increased, a generality of authors tackle the Great Game according to a somewhat trite conception of British offensive and Russian defensive policy in the region. Some of them viewed the Great Game as the anti-Russian plot of the West and a prelude for the

33 Alexander Popov, ‘Bor’ba za sredneaziatskii platsdarm’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 1940, vol. 7, pp. 182-235; Evgeny Shteinberg, Istoriya angliiskoi agressii na Srednem Vostoke, Moscow: Voennoe izdatelstvo, 1951; Goga Khidoyatov, Iz istorii anlo-russkikh otnoshenii v Srednei Azii (60-ye – 70-ye gg. XIX v.), Tashkent: Fan, 1969; Nina Kinyapina, ‘Srednyaya Asiya vo vneshnepoliticheskikh planakh tsarisma (50-ye – 80-ye gg. XIX v.)’, Voprosy istori,1974, no. 2, pp. 56-71; Olga Zhigalina, Velikobritaniya na Srednem Vostoke (XIX – nachalo XX v.). Analiz vneshnepoliticheskikh kontseptsii, Moscow: Nauka, 1990. 34 Naftula Khalfin, Angliiskaya kolonial’naya politika na Srednem Vostoke (70-t gg. XIX v.), Tashkent: Sredneaziatskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1957; Idem, Politika Rossii v Zentralnoi Azii, Moscow: Nauka, 1960; Idem, Prisoedinenie Srednei Azii k Rossii (60-e – 90-e gg. XIX v.), Moscow: Nauka, 1965; Idem, Rossiya i khanstva Srednei Azii (pervaya polovina XIX v.), Moscow: Nauka, 1974. 11 Cold War in the twentieth century. They argue that the Great Game has never ended because big powers still pursue this policy for the protection of national interests.35 To typify their approach, it is sufficient to quote the following passage: ‘The essence of historical process for the last centuries was the mortal combat of the Russian fighter in the defence of his Motherland against the British invader’.36 Interestingly, the First Channel of the Russian TV broadcasted a documentary movie serial on the history of the Great Game with mostly a propagandist effect in 2008. Given to increasing interest among the readership to the current affairs along the so- called ‘Arc of Instability’, or to put it differently, ‘the Muslim Crescent’ stretching across the Middle East through Northern India to South-East Asia, there has been recently published a number of well-founded monographic works by Asiatic scholars, covering the history of the Great Game through a lens of local nationals. Such are copious studies by present Indian, Iranian and Turkish humanitarians. Their view on the Great Game reflects the evident pro-British sympathies alongside with an exposure of illusions among a majority of tsarist strategists and publicists of an immediate outbreak of anti-colonial uprising in India in case of Cossacks approaching its boundaries. At the same time, they sharply criticize His Majesty Government’s final entente with Russia in 1907 allegedly at the expense of indigenous population.37 A typical version of the Great Game is suggested to the reader in the unpublished doctoral dissertation by the Turkish scholar Memet Yetigsin, who commented upon it in the following way: The British decided to resist Russia by seeking alliances with the European big powers and helping decadent states, such as the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Afghanistan, and China. These states also feared Russia’s unsatisfied appetite for expansion. Thus, under the so-called Eastern Question, Central Asian Question and the Far Eastern Question, a ‘great game’ and ‘a cold war’ (sic!) determined the course of history.38

Judging from the aforementioned studies, one concludes that, if on the origins of the term itself, scholars have come to a sort of consensus, they still lack any comprehensive,

35 Alexandr Shirokorad, Russia – England, neizvestnaya voina, 1857-1907, Moscow: AST, 2003; Mikhail Leontiev, Bolshaya Igra, Moscow-St Petersburg: AST-Astrel, 2008; Sergei Porokhov, Bitva imperii: Angliya protiv Rossii, Moscow-St Petersburg: AST-Astrel, 2008. 36 Sergei Porokhov, op. cit., p. 6. 37 See for example: Nayana Goradia, Lord Curzon. The Last of the British Moguls, Delhi, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1993; Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, The Small Players of the Great Game: the Settlement of Iran’s Eastern Borderlands and the Creation of Afghanistan, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004; Chakravarty Sukash, Afghanistan and the Great Game, Delhi: New Century Publications, 2002. 38 Memet Yetisgin, ‘How The Times of London Covered and Interpreted Russian Expansion into Central Asia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Ph. D. Diss., Texas Technical University, 2000, pp. 168-9. 12 panoramic analysis, though some discrete areas of competition for control over Asia have been thoroughly examined in a number of works.39

39 See recent works on the Persian question: Anthony Wynn, Persia in the Great Game. Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy, London: J. Murray, 2003; John Tchalenko, Images from the Endgame: Persia through a Russian Lens, 1901-1914, London: Al-Saqi Press, 2006; Laura Akhmedova, Politica Anglii v zone Persidskogo zaliva v poslednei treti XIX – nachale XX v.(1870-1914), St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2006; Elena Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism, London-New York: Routledge, 2007; on the situation in the khanates of Bokhara, Khiva and Kokand: Stephen Page, ‘The Creation of a Sphere of Influence: Russia and Central Asia’, International Journal, 1994, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 788-813; Zh. Alymbaeva, ‘Istoriya zavoevaniya Turkestana Rossiei v XIX – nachale XX v.’, Kand. Diss., Tashkent: Tashkentskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2002; Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003; Natalia Lisitsyna, ‘Zakaspiiskii krai v anglo-russkikh otnosheniyakh (1880-e gg. – 1907)’, Kand. Diss., Moscow: Moscow State Open University, 2006; Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2007; Olga Yegorenko, ‘Bukharskii Emirat v period ptotektorata Rossii (1868-1920). Istoriographiya problemy’, Kand. Diss., Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet turizma i servisa, 2008; on the Afghan problem: D.S. Richards, The Savage Frontier. A History of the Anglo-Afghan Wars, London: Macmillan, 1990; Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, The Amirs of the Borderlands and Eastern Iranian Borders, London: Urosevic Foundation, 1995; on the struggle for the control over the Pamir: Andrei Smirnov, “U sten Indii. Pamirskie pokhody pri Aleksandre III’, Rodina, 2001, no. 8, pp. 67-70; Aleksei Postnikov, Skhvatka na ‘kryshe mira’. Politiki, razvedchiki, generally v bor’be za Pamir v XIX v., Moscow: Ripol-Classik, 2005; on the modern and contemporary history of Sinkiang: Paul Henze, ‘The Great Game in Kashgaria: British and Russian Missions to Yakub Bek’, Central Asia Survey, 1989, no. 2, pp. 61-95; Dinara Dubrovskaya, Sud’ba Sintsyana. Obretenie Kitaem novoi granitsy v kontse XIX v., Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, 1998; Kim, Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877, Stanford: Hoover Institutions Press, 2004; Aleksandr Kolesnikov, Russians in Kashgaria (vtoraya polovina XIX – nachalo XX v.), Missions, expeditions, travels, Bishkek: Raritet, 2006; Vadim Obukhov, Skhvatka shesti imperii za Sintsyan, Moscow: Veche, 2007; on the Great Game in Tibet: Helen Hundley, ‘Tibet’s Part in the “Great Game’, History Today, 1993, vol. 43, pp. 45- 50; John Snelling, Buddhism in Russia. The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev, Lhasa’s Emissary to the Tsar. Longmead, Shaftsbury: Dorset, 1993; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, ‘Tournament of Shadows: Russia’s Great Game in Tibet’, Tibetan Review, 1994, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 13-20; Alex MacKay, Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Staff, 1904-1907, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997; Tatiana Shaumian, Tibet. The Great Game and Tsarist Russia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000; Nikolai Kuleshov, ‘Agvan Dorjiev, the Dalai Lama’s Ambassador’, in: A. McKay (ed.) The History of Tibet, London-New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, vol. 3, pp. 57-68; Michael MacRae, In Search of Shangri-La: The Extraordinary True Story of the Quest for the Lost Horizon, London: M. Joseph, 2003; P.L. Madan, Tibet: Saga of Indian Explorers (1864-1894), New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2004; Wendy Palace, The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922, London-New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005; Alexandr Andreyev, Tibet v politike tsarskoi, sovetskoi i postsovetskoi Rossii, St Petersburg: St Petersburg State University – Nartang, 2006; on the British counter-measures to lay off the alleged Russian invasion of India: Derek Waller, The Pundits. British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990; Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier, London: J. Murray, 2000; Idem, Duel in the Snows: The True Story of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa, London: J. Murray, 2004; Pavel Litvinov, ‘Britanskaya Indiya I Russkii Turkestan vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX v.’, in G.I. Kuznetsov (ed.) Rossiya – Indiya: Perspectivy regional’nogo sotrudnichestva, Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, 2001, pp. 60-8; Ian Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756-1905, New Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Robert Johnson, ‘Russians at the Gates of India? Planning the Defense of India, 1884-1899’, Journal of Military History, 2003, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 697-743; Ben Hopkins, ‘The Myth of the “Great Game”: The Anglo-Sikh Alliance and Rivalry’, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies, Occasional Paper, 2004, no. 5, pp. 1-36. Peter Brobst, The Future of the Great Game. Sir Olaf Caroe, India’s Independence and the Defense of Asia, Akron, Ohio: The University of Akron Press, 2005; Konstantin Kubanov, “Pokhody v Indiyu v proektakh rossiiskikh voennykh i politicheskikh deyatelei XVIII – nachala XIX v.’, Kand. Diss., Nizhnevartovsk: Nizhnevartovskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2007; on the Russo-British rivalry in the Far East: S. Paine, Imperial Rivals: Russia, China and Their Disputed Frontier, 1858-1924, New York-London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996; John Evans, Russian Expansion on the Amur, 1848-1860. The 13 On the other hand, in the present author’s opinion, none of definitions of the Great Game may be regarded as sufficient. It appears most probable that numerous travelogues as well as lengthy descriptions of adventures and clandestine operations in exotic faraway places, irrespective of personal sympathies expressed by historians with British, Russian, or any other country’s politics in the region, can not contribute to a more objective picture. What we need at present is an unbiased through analysis of the phenomenon. We must combine perfectly some principal fragmentary pieces of the jigsaw, in order to represent the Great Game in three interrelated dimensions: above all, as a competition between different models of incorporation of non-European, then decadent states and peoples in the modern industrial global system; next, as a complex, multi-level decision-making and decision-implementing activity directed by politicians, diplomats, strategists, both from high offices and those acting on the spot; finally, as a crucial stage in the development of Russo-British intercourse through a prism of both European and world policy. To impose the Great Game within the distinct chronological frames, one should take into account extensive amplitude of opinions on its beginning and closure. Some authors, like Ingram, Morgan, Edwards, Hopkirk, Meyer and Brysac, Chavda, etc. believed that it had started in the eighteenth century (e.g. Robert Johnson begins his analysis in 1757) or in the Napoleonic Wars. For example, Edwards wrote about July 1807, when Alexander I and I met in Tilsit to discuss the plan of a joint combined offensive against British India in the course of the policy of the so called ‘frontier megalomania’.40 A kind of comparable fixation of the Great Game’s start is represented by Ingram, who indicated 1798, 1828-1834 or 1828-1842 as its turning points.41 Curiously, in his final study of the British policy in the Middle East in the interval of 1775-1842, the historian even pointed out to the exact date – 29 December 1829. It was on that very day when the President of the Board of Control for India, Lord Ellenborough, told the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, to open up a new trade route to Bokhara. Pursuant to this concept, the goal of the government, headed by the Duke of Wellington, was to respond to the

Push to the Pacific, New York, etc.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, 2 vols; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun. Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan, DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001; Vladimir Moiseev, Rossiya i Kitai v Tsentralnoi Azii (vtoraya polovina XIX v. – 1917 g.), Barnaul: Az Buka, 2003; Aleksei Voskresenskii, Kitai i Rossiya v Evrazii, Moscow: Muravei, 2004. 40 Michael Edwards, Playing the Great Game, p. 3; also see V.K. Chavda, India, Britain, Russia. A Study in British Opinion (1838-1878), Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1967, p. 23. 41 Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India, p. 2; Idem, Commitment to Empire, p. 17; Idem, The Beginning of the Great Game, pp. X, 13. 14 Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish Treaties of Turkmanchai in 1828 and Adrianople in 1829, which, according to Ingram, were regarded by the British political elites as steps towards the consequent conversion of Persia and into the Russian protectorates.42 But the most fabulous version was suggested by the Russian publicist and TV commentator Mikhail Leontiev, who correlated the anti-Russian speech delivered by the Prime-Minister William Pitt, the Younger, to the Commons after the tsarist troops had seized the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov (1791), with the beginning of the Great Game!43 However, all these notions seem to muddle together the Anglo-Russian rivalry, which had been going on in different parts of the world, including Europe, at least since the reign of Peter the Great, and the special period of this contest, which had truly begun in the aftermath of the Crimean War, i.e. from the second half of the 1850’s.44 Despite controversial opinions upon overtures made to Russia by Napoleon, on the one hand, and suspicions of the British allegedly complotted the coup d’etat which led to the assassination of Paul I in 1801, on the other, the memoirs and diaries penned by contemporaries reflected friendly relations between the UK and Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. As one Russian expert in the Russo-British relations truly commented: ‘After the victory over Napoleon, Alexander I hoped to arrange the work of state and economic apparatus of his empire according to the British model, and to nurture his subjects in the British way. The Russian public state of opinion seemed to favor these plans. However, soon the emperor began to consider this idea as utopia’.45 Thus, the obvious pragmatism of national interests consequently replaced the short-living Russo-British anti-Napoleonic alliance.46 In fact, it would appear most probable that the Great Game started from the late 1850’s onward, for a combination of driving forces putting this process into motion: first, the actual termination of the Caucasus War by 1859, that had released huge amount of tsarist expeditionary troops ready for further military campaigns; second, the outburst of the Sepoy Mutiny and its suppression by the reinforced Anglo-Indian detachments in 1857-

42 Idem, In Defence of British India, pp. 7, 11. 43 Mikhail Leontiev, op. cit., p. 16. 44 The present author agrees on this point with Edmund Clubb, the American diplomat, who had been in active consular service in Urumchi, Mukden, Vladivostok, and Chanchun for more then twenty five years, see Edmund Clubb, China and Russia. The Great Game, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971, pp. 91-103. 45 Aleksandr Orlov, Soyuz Peterburga i Londona. Rossiisko-Britanskie otnosheniya v epokhy napoleonovskikh voin, Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 2005, p. 325. 46 For further information on the history of Russo-British relations in the period of Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855) see Idem, ‘Teper’ vizhu anglichan vblizi…’: Britaniya I Britantsy v predstavleniyakh rossiyan o mire i o sebe (vtoraya polovina XVIII – pervaya polovina XIX vv.). Ocherki, Moscow: Giperboreya, Kuchkovo Pole, 2008. 15 8, the event that had greatly alarmed British authorities, both in Calcutta and in London, and modified the administration of the Raj; third, the Second Opium War of 1856-60 in the Far East, which led to the first partition of spheres of influence in China between European powers; fourth, the Anglo-Persian confrontation around Herat in 1856-7; finally, the culmination of British preponderance in the Asian markets, that almost coincided with the Russia’s rapid modernization after abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the Civil War in the USA of 1861-5 which severely hampered trade, for example, that of cotton. Additionally, the outburst of the first world economic crisis of 1857-1858 also formidably affected the situation in Oriental markets. In contradiction to these changes, traditional Muslim states in the Middle East, lagging far behind the European countries, were doomed to be conquered or subjugated by the great European states, which could not agree to the vacuum of power in the vast region from Persia to Japan and sought to replace it with their political, economic, or cultural influence. Before the Crimean War that should be regarded as a preventive blow, which Britain inflicted upon Russia at the approaches to India, the epicenter of rivalry sited in the Straits of the Black Sea, around Constantinople. The stakes in this struggle were the south-eastern part of Europe and the south-western part of Asia. The situation totally changed after the peace treaty had been signed in Paris. It is not accidental, therefore, that Russian Chancellor Prince Aleksandr wrote to the tsar in 1856: ‘Russia is not facing great challenges in Europe, while she has a vast field of political activity in Asia’. The emperor penned a note on the margin: ‘I completely agree with this’.47 Thus, one could be easily led to conclude that the Great Game symbolized new period of both Russian and British foreign policy in the mid of the nineteenth century, when national ambitions removed former principles and approaches of the in Europe to the dustbin of diplomacy. With regard to the final stage of the colossal experiment in Asia carried off by Russia and Britain, three main conceptions prevailed among historians. Some of them maintain, as it is mentioned earlier, that the Great Game had been developing through the last two centuries, in time becoming more acute, in time almost dieing away, but never closing up.

47 Quoted in , Stat’i i rechi po voprosam mezhdunarodnoi politiki, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsial’no- economicheskoi literatury, 1961, p. 86. 16 ‘The Great Game did not end with British rule in August 1947. Nor did officials of the late Raj expect that it would’, wrote, for example, Peter Brobst.48 Other scholars believe that Russia and Britain had been engaged in the contest until 1917, when the Bolshevik revolution broke out. For example, Jennifer Siegel, the American historian who intensively worked in Russian federal archives, disagrees with the 1907 Russo-British Convention, an event that put an end to their longtime controversies. She mentions the disappointments which British and Russian ruling elites, especially the military ones, suffered because of the implementation of its clauses, while a chapter in her book is entitled ‘The Death of the Anglo-Russian Agreement in 1914’. ‘Yet for both Britain and Russia, the 1907 agreement proved to be not a solution, but a temporary bridge over the gaping divided that separated British and Russian aims and desires in Central Asia’, contended Siegel.49 The third group of specialists argues that the Great Game had evaporated by 1947, when the British granted independence to states occupying the Hindustan peninsula.50 There also exist other, more exotic, chronologies, e.g. that suggested by Gerald Morgan, who called 1895 – the year of the last Russo-British dispute in the Pamirs – as the end of the Game.51 Nevertheless, this author maintains that the so-called ‘diplomatic revolution’ in the early twentieth century ought to be regarded as its real closing date. To corroborate this hypothesis, two epochal events should be taken into account: the end of the British ‘splendid isolation’ in 1902-7 and the elections to the first Russian parliament – the State Duma in 1905-6.52 Significantly, in the present author’s opinion, the period of the Game encompassed four consequent stages, beginning with 1856-64 as the initial phase of the Russo-British contest, following by 1864-73 as the period of Russian full-scale offensive against the khanates of Central Asia, then coming the climax of the Russo-British race for domination, accompanied by both empires tipping on the brink of war from 1874 to 1885, and ending in the interval of 1885-1907, when the tension in Russo-British relations decreased step by

48 Peter Brobst, op. cit., p. XIII; for similar opinion, also see Milan Hauner, ‘The Last Great Game’, pp. 73-4; 200. 49 Jennifer Siegel, Endgame. Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia, London-New York: Tauris Publishers, p. 197. This conception is also supported by British scholars; for example, see Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917, London-New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006, p. 161-2. 50 Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire , p. 24. 51 Gerald Morgan, Anglo-Russian Rivalry, pp. 200-14. 52 See Evgeny Sergeev, ‘Diplomaticheskaya revolutsiya 1907 g. v otnosheniyakh Rossii i Velikobritanii’, Vostok, 2008, no. 2, pp. 80-93. 17 step. It is also worth mentioning that Russia and Britain were about to open hostilities for four times: because of Polish rebellion in1863-4, Russo-Turkish War in1877-8, the conflict around Turkmen lands in 1885, and the ill-starred sea incident of Hull in1904. Apart from, so to say, internal factors, the ‘tournament of shadows’ was provoked by external political and economic causes, such as wide national movements in Europe (Germany, Italy, Polish territories, the Balkan states), the decline and crisis of the Ottoman and Qing Empires, the so-called ‘Great World Economic Depression’ of 1873-96, and strange as it may seem, the American Civil War of 1861-5 in the USA.53 Factually, it coincided with the onset of globalization, albeit the latter acquired speedy development only after the Second World War. Despite intensive studiy of the subject in question, the geographic boundaries of the Great Game remain unclear as well. Traditionally, academic scholars kept on views, summarized by Peter Hopkirk, 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 feverently hoped by ambitious Russian officers serving in Asia, was British India.54

Indeed, such a contracted definition may be accepted only in case we are keen on the limitation of the Game’s scale within the problem of Russian invasion of British India and other neighbouring backward minor states. On the contrary, the view of ‘the Southern British World which runs from Cape Town through Cairo, Baghdad and Calcutta to Sydney and Wellington’ expressed by Leopold Amery, a famous journalist and public figure in the letter of 8 June 1918 to David Lloyd George, the Prime-Minister, seems more appropriate to be used as a geographic definition.55 Given in a broader sense, this interpretation recognizes the extension of British influence along the above stated Eastern Arc, or the areas inhabited with mostly Muslim adepts and famous for severe intercontinental climate.

53 See Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism. British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa. 1870-1970, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 56. For a deeper insight into economic tendencies, see A.J.H. Latham, The International Economy and the Underdeveloped World, London: Croom Helm, 1978. 54 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, p. 2. 55 Quoted in Jeffrey Keith, ‘The Eastern Arc of Empire: A Strategic View 1850-1950’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 1982, vol. 5, no. 4, p. 534. 18 To complete our chronology, one should also point out to ‘three fronts’ of Russian penetration into Asia through the eighteenth – twenty centuries: Western Siberia and Sinkiang, Eastern Siberia and Far East, Kazakhstan and Turkestan. The advance in each direction was proceeding hand in hand with the construction of defence lines, establishment of military-administrative control over acquired tracts of territory, and further assimilation of autochthon nomadic or settled ethnic groups.56 In my opinion, the arena for the Great Game should not be reduced to the Middle East, Central Asia or North India, but expanded from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia and Korea, with the gradual removal of its focus to the north-west direction: from the conflict zone in the Caucasus in the first half of the nineteenth century through Persia, Afghanistan, Western and Eastern Turkestan in the 1850’s – 70’s and the North-West Frontier of India, the Pamirs and Tibet in the 1880’s – 1890’s, to China and Korea in the 1900’s. As one British journalist commented on the current events of 1903 in the Far East: ‘Russia hopes to oust the Briton from China and, in obtaining Port Arthur [in 1898, E.S.] effected the key- move of the political game, the European powers were playing in the Far East’.57 To put it short, the present author is convinced that the Great Game was played approximately in the immense Central and East Asian region of 500 – 20o northern latitude and of 500 – 1300 eastern longitude. In corroboration of this statement, one should keep in mind a contemporary definition of Central Asia by the UNESCO as the terrain, ‘protracting from Mongolia to North-East Iran, and from taiga to the plateau of Decan’.58 It is also important to pay attention upon the search of natural or ‘scientific’ frontiers by European explorers and spies (mostly British, Russian, French and German), who frequently juxtaposed them with existing state boundaries along the lines of ethnic or confessional divergence.59 That is why it appears more appropriate to begin the Great Game from the mid of the 1850’s henceforth, albeit international political rivalry gave raise to the so-called Central Asian Question much earlier, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As

56 On the conception of three fronts in Asia, see I. Strebelsky, ‘The Frontier in Central Asia’, in James Bater and R.A. French (eds) Studies in Russian Historical Geography, London, etc.: Academic Press, 1983, vol. 1, pp. 143-73. 57 Wirt Gerrare, Greater Russia. The Continental Empire of the Old World, London: W. Heinemann, 1903, p. 308. 58 Quoted in Artiom Ulunian, Novaya politicheskaya geographiya, Moscow: Institute of World History, 2009, p. 128. 59 The pioneer works on the problem are the articles by George Curzon, ‘The “Scientific Frontier” an Accomplished Fact’, The Nineteenth Century, 1888, no. 136, pp. 901-17; Idem, ‘The Fluctuating Frontier of Russia in Asia’, The Nineteenth Century, 1889, no. 144, pp. 267-83. Later, he summed up his views on frontier in the lecture at the Oxford University, Idem, Frontiers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. For more recent interpretation, see especially Alastair Lamb, Asian Frontiers. Studies in a Continuing Problem, London: Pall Mall Press, 1968. A new interpretation of strategic zones of conflict is suggested by Milan Hauner, ‘The Last Great Game’, pp. 74-5. 19 V.K. Chavda, an Indian scholar of the University of Baroda, correctly asserted, it was a sort of riddle to be guessed and resolved, for the intervening regions which were drawn in the Great Game had also remained incognito to the players’.60 The landscape of the spatial region under consideration varies from the highest, thinly populated mountain terraces of the Tien Shan, Hindu Kush and Tibet, ‘the Roof of the World’, to the densely inhabited oases of Western and Eastern Turkestan. It is also known in the world for colossal deserts stretching between mountain ranges in Central Asia, Sinkiang, and Mongolia. The blend of multi-ethnic, poly-confessional, either nomadic or settled rural communities, adapted to the sub-tropical or arid continental climate, remains one of the main characteristics of this zone. Another important feature is the paucity of great rivers or lakes with the exception of the Caspian and Aral Seas, and the rivers of Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Yaxartes). In compliance to severe climatic conditions with temperature varying from of -30 in winters and +40 in summertime, European explorers had to suffer regular attacks of poisonous snakes, spiders and other vermin, which communicate contagious diseases, like malaria, to people. Small wonder, the travelogues were inundated with tales of natural horrors, the authors had encountered in the Heartland of Eurasia.61 A competent observer must have grouped all the nations adjacent to the aforesaid Eastern Arc in the following three categories: – formally sovereign, big states with ancient tradition and culture, which attempted to avoid taking side of any European power: Persia, Afghanistan, China; – minor weak khanates and principalities, which once had been incorporated in former great Asian empires, but consequently gained more or less independent status, being challenged in the period of the Great Game by the Russians and Britons: Khiva, Bokhara, Khokand, Kashmir, , Hunza, Yettishar – the Muslim State of Emir Yakub Beg in Chinese Turkestan, etc.;

60 V.K. Chavda, op. cit., p. 220. 61 It is interesting to compare the travel diaries by prominent Russian and European explorers, for example, by Nikolai Przhevalsky and Arminius Vambery, see Nikolai Przhevalsky, ‘Sovremennoe polozhenie Zentralnoi Asii’, Russkii Vestnik, 1886, vol. 186, pp. 473-524; Arminius Vambery, His Life and Adventures, London-Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914; also see vivid descriptions of relief, flora and fauna in Central and Inner Asia by Dmitry Logofet and Vladimir Obruchev, Na granitsakh Srednei Asii. Putevye ocherki, St Petersburg: V. Beresovsky, 1909, kn. 1-3; Vladimir Obruchev, Ot Kiakhty do Kul’dgi. Puteshestvie v Zentralnuyu Asiyu i Kitai, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk, 1950. 20 – frontier zones with Turkmen, Afghan, and North India’s tribes, which needed proper delimitation and lacked effective administration, swamped with gangs of bandits and plunged in permanent feuds. In conclusion, it should be stressed that those minor states of the Middle East which had been independent from foreign domination until the second half of the nineteenth century, preserved sovereignty not because of their powerful state institutions, but for the isolated geographic location. Being surrounded by the highest mountain ranges, deficient in passages, and immense sandy deserts or arid steppes, these ‘Lost Worlds’ proved to be ‘a hard nut’ to be cracked by invaders, which had to overcome countless natural barriers and survive in deadly climatic conditions. Besides, the ‘playground’ of the Great Game appeared to be the last Asiatic region where the Europeans carried out the mission of civilizing traditional societies. The myths of the Great Game still need to be disclosed while the realities are to be profoundly investigated in the light of the present dialogue of civilizations.