Bolshevism, Islamism, Nationalism: Britain's Problems in South Asia
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1 Bolshevism, Islamism, Nationalism: Britain’s Problems in South Asia, 1918–1923 Heather Alison Campbell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2 Abstract As many scholars have noted, in the immediate years after the First World War, the British Empire faced important challenges to its future survival, not least of which was the growth of three key movements: Bolshevism, Islamism and nationalism. This thesis examines how Britain coped with these problems, by exploring the internal government debates regarding foreign policy formulation towards South Asia, specifically in the countries of Persia and Afghanistan. It is the contention of this work that the current literature on this subject suffers from certain flaws, the first being that not enough writers have discussed the interrelation of these three movements. Secondly, there has been a lack of focus on how officials in London and in Delhi thought quite differently on the issue of Britain’s foreign policy in South Asia after 1918. This thesis will address these, and other, gaps in the literature. It will contend that there were those within the Home government who displayed a particular mode of thought – a ‘Great Game mentality’ – towards this region. This mentality was influenced by the legacy of the earlier, 19th-century rivalry between Britain and Russia, and resulted in a tendency to over-emphasise the threat of Russian Bolshevism to Britain’s imperial interests in South Asia, whilst at the same time under-emphasising the threat of nationalism and pan-Islamism across Persia, Afghanistan and India. When the Indian government questioned this Great Game mentality, it was largely ignored and frequently maligned. The work will demonstrate how those of the Great Game mind-set dominated the creation of Britain’s policy towards Persia, Afghanistan and adjoining regions in 1918 and 1919, how events of 1920 and 1921 forced London to reassess this Great Game thinking, and how (by 1922 and 1923) this re-evaluation had developed into re-formulation of British foreign policy in South Asia. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 4 The Foreign Office 9 The Foreign Office Mind and Mental Maps 18 Prestige 24 Russia 29 Argument, Sources and Structure 38 Chapter One: Curzon, Russia and the Great Game 43 The Anglo-Russian Convention 46 The Great Game Mentality 56 Curzon 64 Bloody Retribution 75 Chapter Two: The Iron Hand and the Velvet Glove, 1918–1919 80 Two Voices 81 Good Red Herring 86 The Wasp’s Nest 106 Blown Sky High 119 Chapter Three: A Nice State of Affairs, 1920 123 Mutiny and Revolution 124 I Told You So 129 Bolshevist Bogeys 139 An Act of Dementia 161 Chapter Four: Making Friends, 1921 166 Shadow for Substance 169 Quid Pro Quo 184 The Year of the Treaty 202 Chapter Five: A Gigantic Drum, 1922–1923 206 Excellent Medicine 208 Russians, Turks, Afghans and Indians 221 Build, Build, Build 246 The End of an Epoch 249 Appendix I 262 Bibliography 264 4 Introduction ‘The East will help us to conquer the West. Let us turn our faces towards Asia.’ Vladimir Lenin1 ‘It is the prestige and the wealth arising from her Asiatic position that are the foundation stones of the British Empire.’ George Nathaniel Curzon2 This thesis was conceived while researching the little-known case of the 26 Baku Commissars – the execution of a number of members of the Azerbaijani Baku Commune on the night of 18 September 1918 outside the city of Krasnovodsk. In the context of the First World War and the Russian civil war, the murder of a few men might not appear very significant, but the incident quickly became a cause célèbre for Russia’s new rulers, who blamed the British for the act.3 Essentially, the case of the 26 Commissars was a small but distinct example of just how important this region of the world has always been to Anglo-Russian relations. Indeed, it was only because a small British contingent had been in Baku to defend the area from Turkish encroachment that Britain was in a position to be accused of executing the Commissars.4 It was such considerations which led to one of the founding questions of the work at hand – how did Britain’s foreign policy towards South Asia affect its 1 As quoted in P. Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University, 1986), p. 102. 2 As quoted in H. Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925: A Study in Post-War Diplomacy (London: Constable, 1934), p. 38. 3 B. Pearce, ‘The 26 Commissars’, Sbornik (1981), pp. 54–66; P. Hopkirk, On Secret Service East of Constantinople (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 366–370; J. Stalin, ‘The Shooting of the Twenty-Six Baku Comrades by Agents of British Imperialism’, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1919/04/23.htm [8/8/13] and C.H. Ellis, ‘Operations in Transcaspia, 1918–1919, and the 26 Commissars Case’, St. Antony’s Papers, No. 6 (1959), pp. 131–150. 4 Dunsterforce was a small military group under the command of General L.C. Dunsterville, sent from Baghdad to Baku in the summer of 1918. See: A.H. Arslanian, ‘The British Decision to Intervene in Transcaucasia during World War I’, Armenian Review Vol. 27 (1974), pp. 146–159; A.H. Arslanian, ‘Dunsterville’s Adventures: A Reappraisal’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 12 (1980), pp. 199–216; R. Teague-Jones, The Spy Who Disappeared: Diary of a Secret Mission to Russian Central Asia in 1918 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1991). 5 relationship with Soviet Russia?5 If Britain had not been busy trying to protect its Indian empire from Germany and Turkey, it would not have come into conflict with Russia over the case of the Commissars. The importance of Asia to Anglo-Russian relations has certainly been recognised by historians of the pre-1917 period, and the Great Game is a well- established area of historical research. It is in Asia that Britain and Russia battled for supremacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; where adventure and intrigue were sought by some of the most colourful characters of history; and where Rudyard Kipling found his inspiration for Kim.6 Contemporaries of the post-Russian revolution period also recognised the continued importance of this region of the world, as the above quote from Lenin shows. As S.D. Gupta and I. Spector (among others) have demonstrated, the Bolsheviks were keenly aware of the benefits of spreading revolution among the discontented Asian masses.7 An ‘Appeal to the Working Moslems of Russia and the East’ was among the first declarations made by the party upon its seizing power,8 and in Spector’s opinion this suggests ‘that the Soviet government believed the success of the Bolshevik Revolution to be contingent upon its alliance with the Muslim Orient’.9 At the founding of the Comintern in 1919, ‘there was certainly a distinct awareness of the colonial question’, notes Gupta.10 And, as Stephen White explains, as the chances of revolution breaking out 5 As research progressed, this question would actually morph to ask, instead, how Britain’s opinion of Soviet Russia influenced the creation of its policies towards South Asia? – more on which later. 6 More will be said about the Great Game in Chapter One. 7 S.D. Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India, 1919–1943 (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2006) and I. Spector, The Soviet Union and the Muslim World, 1917–1958 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959). See also Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze; M.A. Persits, Revolutionaries of India in Soviet Russia: Mainsprings of the Communist Movement in the East (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973); Z. Imam, ‘The Effects of the Russian Revolution in India, 1917–1920’, St. Antony’s Papers, No. 18 (1966), pp. 74–97 and D.N. Druhe, Soviet Russia and Indian Communism, 1917–1949 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1959). 8 J. Bunyan and H.H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1918: Documents and Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934), pp. 467–469. 9 Spector, Soviet Union, p. 37. 10 Gupta, Comintern, p. 53. 6 in Europe faded in the years after 1917, so the Bolshevik regime looked increasingly to southern Asia to deliver them from isolation.11 Given the state of Asia in the period after the First World War, it is unsurprising that Lenin and his comrades looked keenly at the revolutionary potential there. Nationalist fervour, combined with a resentment against Western imperialism, had been growing among the populations of Asia for some time, and after 1918 would only increase in potency, while Muslim discontent (also apparent before the First World War) was inflamed by the involvement of Turkey in the conflict. Great Asian leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Reza Khan and Kemal Ataturk would harness these feelings to initiate mass popular movements within their respective countries, and everywhere in the region the oppressed would start pushing back against their domineering rulers. For Britain, this heady combination of nationalism and pan-Islamism was to provide a particular set of difficulties; for the Bolsheviks, it appeared a perfect opportunity. All of which has been well documented by other scholars. A number of good works have discussed Britain’s policies in the Middle East and South Asia in the years after 1918, while the relationship between the Bolsheviks and their southern neighbours has also received an adequate amount of attention.12 The nature of some aspects of Anglo-Soviet affairs in this period have been studied and a few have even tried to address the three way dynamic between Britain, Russia and southern Asia.13 And yet, despite all of this, there still remain a 11 S.