MORE THAN A GAME BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON BRITISH

BY SIMON HEWITT

I CAME ACROSS Murder In Samarkand some years ago in Budapest, in a second-hand bookshop (now defunct). Having been to Samarkand for a Rod Stewart Concert (as one does), while taking part in a Gulnara Karimova Press-Trip (as one did), the title caught my eye. I was surprised to learn that the author, Craig Murray, had been U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

MURDEROUSLY HOT BUT NO ROD : SAMARKAND IN 1870 BY VASILY VERESCHAGIN

He lasted just over two years and was sacked in 2004 for defying Foreign Office instructions to keep quiet about Human Rights abuse in the country.

Since leaving the Diplomatic Service, Murray has been Rector of Dundee University (his alma mater ) and launched an iconoclastic blog ( www.craigmurray.org.uk ) that I enjoy consulting for its punchily alternative views on current affairs.

On 11 December 2016, for instance, Murray dismissed the notion of Russia organizing the leaking of ’s e-mails as a ‘blatant CIA lie… this rubbish has been the lead in and , and on the BBC main news. They are not hacks, they are insider leaks. They did not come from the Russians…. Plainly it stinks.’

I learnt on this blog that His Ex-Excellency would be speaking in London during Russian Week. Not at the Russian Embassy (or Hyde Park Corner), but at the Turkish Cultural Centre on Maple Street off Tottenham Court Road – as part of the Eurasian Book Forum & Literature Festival .

Murray’s talk – about his recent biography of Sikunder Burnes , a fellow-Scot granted the sub-title Master Of (Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia) – had been arranged ‘at very short notice, so I expect my audience to be pretty intimate.’ Tickets were available via his blog for a princely £11.21 – well worth paying, I thought, to hear, see and possibly meet a man of such moral courage and literary verve.

DAREDEVIL JOURNEY

If ‘The Great Game’ conjures up anything today, it is probably Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – which first popularized the expression when published in 1901 (the novel is set two decades earlier).

The Great Game effectively began in 1828, when the Treaty of Turkmenchay placed Persia under the sway of Russia – whose presence in Central Asia was viewed by the British as a potential threat to their stranglehold on India, established in the 18 th century. became a 700-mile buffer-zone between the two Empires.

Alexander Burnes (1805-41) was a key player in the Game’s early years, though nothing predestined him for such a midfield rôle. Burnes hailed from Montrose, 30 miles up the coast from Dundee, and sailed to Bombay in 1821 to join the army of the East Indian Company. Within two years, after teaching himself Persian and Hindustani, he was appointed a translator at the Bombay Court of Appeal. In 1825 he was Persian interpreter for the British field force invading north-west India. His linguistic brilliance, personal charm and sense of initiative saw him marked him down for a career in roving intelligence, and he trained as a ‘surveyor.’ By 1829 he was Assistant Resident in Bhuj, a dusty town in north-west India, and promptly dispatched on a four-month ‘survey’ (spying tour) along what are now the India-Pakistan borderlands. In January 1831 he set off to chart the River Indus – continuing to and before crossing Afghanistan to the River Oxus, visiting , then veering south-west to the Caspian Sea, Tehran and the Persian Gulf.

This epic, daredevil journey, much of it accomplished in Muslim disguise, saw Burnes fêted upon his return to England in late 1833 – and granted audiences with King William IV and the 14 year- old Princess Victoria. He set off back to India in April 1835 after publishing a three-volume, 1200- page travelogue, and 18 months later made a second expedition up the Indus (drafting his will en route ) before heading to and through the Khyber Pass. He stayed six months in (then engagingly spelt Cabool ) before repairing to Simla – the cool British summer capital in the Himalayan foothills – to meet Lord Auckland, Governor General of India, who was set on invading Afghanistan. Burnes vehemently disagreed and offered to resign, but caved in to appeals to his patriotism, and helped lead the troops that entered Kabul in August 1839.

‘I know exactly how Burnes felt’ claims Murray. ‘To turn your back on the country you serve is not easy, above all in a time of war. I faced the same dilemma when ordered as Ambassador to give my support to a vicious dictatorship in Uzbekistan.’

Murray writes that, like Burnes, he was ‘completely unsuited by belief and temperament’ to kow-tow to political diktat – and admits, in his Preface, that he ‘identifies with Burnes to a considerable degree.’ This empathy derives partly from their origins – two East Coast Scots who achieved ‘a hard-won position from a non-privileged background.’ When Murray was named Ambassador to Uzbekistan, ‘following in the footsteps of Burnes was directly on my mind.’

Curiously Murray does not mention Burnes in his autobiographical Murder In Samarkand – though he does cite his hapless compatriots Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, both beheaded in Bukhara for spying in 1842. Burnes had been cut down by a rebellious mob in Kabul just seven months earlier, aged 36.

NEW EMBASSY

I ventured out of Warren Street tube station on the chilly morning of 26 November 2016 and found my way to the Turkish Cultural Centre, a forbidding brick building on Maple Street. I had been too late to secure a ticket on-line, so hoped to pick one up on the black market outside the door. Alas! not a tout in sight.

Luckily I was able to secure a ticket inside, from the girl at reception, for a bargain £10. I scurried up to the intimate gathering on the third floor. Murray arrived 10 minutes late, clutching a suitcase and clad in a loose white woolly sweater, oozing self-unimportance.

One theme of his talk was how events and attitudes recur throughout history – and how little we learn from the past. He likened the Palmerston government’s doctoring of Burnes’ reports from Kabul to the ‘sexed-up’ accounts of Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction under – ‘dishonesty as shocking in 1838 as in 2003.’ Sikunder Burnes includes chapters entitled The Dodgy Dossier and Regime Change .

Murray addressed the Eurasian Book Forum without notes. He spoke humorously, densely and fast. The term ‘Eurasia’ being Putinist code for Late Lamented USSR, I was unsurprised that Festival proceedings were conducted in Russian rather than Turkish. Murray paused after each sentence to allow for translation by Mumtoz Kamolzoda, a smouldering Tajik in the James Bond Girl mould.

‘Actually she’s a PhD Student’ reported Murray conspiratorially, after collaring Miss Kamolzoda over lunch. This was served around the corner at Fitzroy House – former home, now shrine to Scientology guru Ron Hubbard (1911-86) – and followed by an awards ceremony wherein David Parry, the messianic Chairman of the Eurasian Creative Guild, ‘bestowed his blessing’ on lucky laureates.

Murray was asked to bestow the main prize. ‘You’ve had enough of listening to me so I won’t give a speech’ he declared breezily. ‘The winner is…’

Afterwards we retired to a ground-floor drawing-room (doubling as a temporary cloakroom) for an interview.

Murray told me he had come up that morning from Ramsgate, stopping off in Canterbury to pick up a USB-key full of wikileaked material which, after the Eurasian Forum, he was delivering to at the Ecuadorian Embassy before slipping north on a fast train to Edinburgh.

It sounded like a programme scripted by John Buchan.

Murray is thrilled to be a member of what he calls ‘The Whistleblower Community’ – inducted therein by Daniel Ellsberg, who released the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971 (revealing nefarious aspects of U.S. conduct during the Vietnam War), and who arranged for Murray to undertake an American speaking-tour after leaving the Diplomatic Service.

We also talked about another great game – Dundee United’s 2-0 defeat of Roma in the 1984 European Cup semi-final, which Murray savoured from the Tannadice terraces – and discussed one of Scotland’s all-time greats, Derby County legend Dave Mackay who, according to Murray, ‘had a bit of a pot-belly.’

‘Barrel-chested’ I retorted.

I was keen to ask Murray about Gulnara Karimova, whom I had last seen in Geneva in December 2008, at a Gala Dinner held by the ‘Cercle Diplomatique’ to mark the 60 th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She had been invited, with obsequious cynicism, as Guest of Honour.

Murray had recently blogged about rumours of Gulnara’s death.

‘No Western Embassy will ever ask the Uzbek government where Gulnara is’ he snorted. ‘A lot of people would be most happy if she is dead…. The U.K. is the only country where she had a house and major assets but is not wanted by police because, no matter how immoral and twisted your activity, it is probably not illegal in the City of London.’

On first meeting her in Tashkent, Murray had found Gulnara ‘charming and girlish, giggling delightedly’ – a poignant contrast to her likely fate, ‘chained to an iron bedstead in an ex-Soviet mental institution being pumped full of lobotomising chemicals.’

We also, of course, talked about Murray’s new book – his third, after The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known (an account of his time in Africa).

It was in Lagos that he had begun reading about The Great Game in the 1980s, thanks to an immigration officer who lent him ‘loads of books’ on the subject.

His interest in derived from George MacDonald Fraser’s first novel set in 19 th century India. Burnes’ last purported words – ‘Run, Charles, Run’ (addressed to his equally hapless brother) – had fuelled Murray’s imagination.

He found Burnes unjustly neglected compared to the African explorer Richard Burton – subject of ‘five modern biographies’ (plus the film Mountains of the Moon ).

His ‘absence of racism, respect for local culture, religious scepticism and non-aristocratic background’ all, opines Murray, made Burnes ‘the ideal scapegoat for the Afghan disaster – which is why he has been abused by historians ever since. ’

GETTING SERIOUS

Sikunder Burnes runs to 382 pages and represents ‘eight years of unfunded hard work.’

The Daily Mail , beneath a typically deadpan headline ( Real-Life Flashman had his own Harem and was HACKED to Death ), called it a ‘terrific read’ and ‘rollicking life of Alexander Burnes.’ Their reviewer may have read the press-release, but clearly not the book. Your average Daily Mail reader would get no further than Page 3. It is indeed a fascinating read – but only if you stick at it and keep a clear head, downing your glass of Scotch after each chapter rather than before.

Murray has written Sikunder Burnes – ‘Sikunder’ being an Indian version of Alexander – to nail his academic credentials to the mast. Although Murder In Samarkand offered rare, primary-source insight into the harsh realities of modern Uzbekistan, Murray was wounded that it had ‘no impact in academic circles, and was not thought serious.’ Sikunder is serious all right. Murray consulted 234 sources and racked up over 1200 footnotes.

As an otherwise laudatory review in The Scotsman puts it, Murray ‘seems reluctant to leave anything out. This doesn’t make either for easy reading or clear understanding.’

The narrative flits from country to country, character to character, period to period. At one juncture we get six names in fourteen words: ‘Macnaghten instructed Wade not to push Dost’s proposal to Ranjit. Burnes wrote to Masson….’

If you haven ’t been ‘living ’ with these chaps for the past eight years, that sort of rat-a-tat narrative is some challenge.

‘Fane was initially tasked to march to Herat, not Kabul’ writes Murray on page 275.

Which Fane? General Sir Henry Fane? Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Fane? Lieutenant Henry Fane? I scoured the index and cross-checked all the references till I was weary wi’ hunting and fain wad lie down .

In some chapters it is almost impossible to know which year we are in. Murray gets confused himself, starting the Siege of Herat in November 1838 rather than November 1837 – a source of mind-numbing confusion for the next 19 pages.

DELHI DELIGHTS

His Preface is subtitled Historian Interrupted and begins with the words ‘To anticipate the critics’ before boasting of his ‘First in Modern History’ and offer of a ‘place for a PhD’ (turned down in favour of the Diplomatic Service).

I am perplexed why Murray – after achieving Ambassador status without an Oxbridge background, then serving as Rector of a Scottish university ranked among the world’s Top 200 – should be so desperate to assert his intellectual credentials.

His chief strength as a writer lies in conveying personal insight with effervescent scepticism and caustic humour. He is a master of dialogue. When I asked him if he had envisaged becoming a writer when he was young, he replied ‘Yes, comedy books.’

Sikunder Burnes is rescued from floundering in a swamp of burdensome detail by Murray’s un-academic gift for the telling personal aside.

In response to the ’s quixotic plans to annex Uzbekistan because of its ‘unequalled salubrity,’ Murray observes acidly: ‘I have experienced +52°C in summer and -32°C in winter in the countryside between Karshi and Samarkand.’

He perceptively identifies the spread of cholera epidemics as a ‘marker of trade-flows from Central Asia in this period’ – before lobbing in the intriguing assertion (which he does not bother to justify) that ‘the revolutionary outbreaks in European cities in 1830/1 and 1848/9 coincided with cholera pandemics travelling from Bokhara.’

Murray also enchants the reader with his journalistic eye for quirky detail.

Flash floods are ‘frequent in Afghanistan, ’ he informs us, ‘often caused not by precipitation but by strong sunlight hitting snow in high mountains.’ During the rainy season, when the roof of his bungalow sprang a leak, Burnes would eat dinner with a servant holding an umbrella over his head. In 1836 the Tsar was introduced to Central Asian merchants at the annual trade fair in Nizhni-Novgorod (‘with great impact,’ according to Burnes). Soon after British troops arrived on Afghan soil, ‘three-quarters of the 40,000 baggage animals were rotting corpses’ because there was no grazing after a three-year drought; famished soldiers had to carry ‘thirteen pounds [6kg] more than usual.’ It was ‘a small army with which to subjugate Afghanistan’ muses Murray, ‘though any larger an army could not have been fed.’

Murray did not muster such recondite detail by googling away on his home computer or ensconcing himself in the British Library. He packed himself off to the National Archives in Delhi.

One can understand his dismay when, after consulting the Archives’ computerized catalogue, he found a paltry three references to Burnes.

So Murray asked to see the original hand/typewritten catalogue dating from the 1920s.

No chance. It was, barked the Senior Archivist, off-limits.

I suspect Murray greeted this news with a stiff drink, before attempting to charm and cajole other members of staff into granting him access to the old catalogue while the Senior Archivist wasn’t looking.

Few can resist Murray’s charismatic blend of boyish enthusiasm and trust-me gravitas. He was in luck. The old catalogue contained ‘hundreds of references’ to Alexander Burnes (whose name had been mangled beyond recognition by the ‘ill-qualified people’ responsible for the computerized catalogue). Murray was a beavering daily presence at the Archives for the next four months.

Burnes’ letters and despatches preserved in Delhi had remained untouched ‘for decades, sometimes over a century.’ Murray studied each one with a magnifying glass; it took him ‘weeks and weeks’ to decipher Burnes’ spidery handwriting. Some manuscripts were in such a state of decay they disintegrated on touch.

Murray quotes from them illuminatingly. This is high-calibre academic research worthy of any professional historian. It seems odd that he undermines his intellectual approach by frequently referring to Burnes as Alex , in the matey style of showbiz biographers, and by choosing chapter-titles that veer from the breathless ( Death in St Petersburg , A Rape in Herat ) to the clichéd ( Mission Accomplished , The Gathering Storm ) via the banal ( To Bokhara and Back , While Alex was Away ) and the artfully alliterative ( Peshawar Perverted , Dissent and Dysfunction , A King in Kandahar , To Bokhara and Back ).

PARADISE

Burnes pursued his duties as Surveyor in the broadest sense – delving into local history, agriculture, architecture, archeology, geography, geology, paleontology and coinage (according to Murray, he was keen to prove that Masonic symbols had ancient Asian origins). Burnes was never without his sextant or compass, calculating longitude and latitude wherever he stopped. Noting that the level of the Caspian was ‘clearly below the level of the ocean,’ he set out to estimate by how much. When his thermometer boiled at 2 1 213 /3° rather than the normal 212 /3°, he calculated that the Caspian was 800ft below sea- level… and refused to believe it. ‘Much too great!’ he gasped (the Caspian is actually 92ft below sea-level). He even ‘took much pains’ to ascertain average camel-speed, would you believe (2 miles, 300 yards per hour) – adding with delicious irrelevance that ‘22 camels in kittar or string, i.e. following and tied to each other, cover a space of 115 paces of 2½ feet, or 94 yards.’

Burnes would record his observations every night, however exhausted, and felt his true calling was writing, rather than military service. That assertion warrants more attention than the book’s hyperbolic subtitle allows. To describe Burnes as a ‘Master of The Great Game’ is misleading: he was a Master Explorer, but less than masterful when it came to collating intelligence.

Much of Burnes’s travelling was designed to assess the threat of a Russian assault on India – and which route it might take.

Orenburg, founded in 1743 as the Tsarist Empire’s southernmost military outpost, was regarded as the likely springboard for any such invasion – either overland (through inhospitable tracts of steppe and desert), or partly via the Caspian or Aral Seas, each around 500 miles south of Orenburg.

One might have expected a visit to these seas to have been among Burnes’ priorities during his epic journey to Bukhara and Tehran in 1832.

But he did not follow the Oxus downriver to the , contenting himself with information gleaned from travellers. ‘So great is the body of water drawn [from the Oxus] for the purposes of irrigation,’ he wrote in Travels to Bokhara , ‘that it forms a swampy delta.’ The Oxus ‘might be ascended from the Sea of Aral to near Kunduz [north of Kabul]… were it not for the marshes which choke its embouchure.’ The Aral Sea – perhaps as a result – was ‘without vessels of any other description than small canoes.’

This was all remarkably accurate, so it is mystifying to read of Burnes blandly reporting to the East India Company, at around the same time, that Russian artillery could be moved up the Oxus from the Aral Sea, thereby rendering an attack on India via Balkh and Kabul just as viable as one along the more southerly, overland route via Herat and Kandahar.

In fact, there would be no Russian naval presence on the Aral Sea until 1847 – when three ships were built in Orenburg, taken to bits, carted across the Kazakh steppe and rebuilt in the new Russian base of Fort Aralsk at the mouth of the Syr Darya River.

As for the Caspian: Burnes had originally planned to join a Russian caravan heading to Mangyshlak (now Aktau, Kazakhstan) on its north-east shore – but was dissuaded from doing so by the Vizier of Bokhara (just as well: the caravan was ‘plundered by Kirgizzes ’ [Kyrgyz] Burnes later learnt, ten days after setting out).

Burnes journeyed instead to the south-east corner of the Caspian, which he first glimpsed away in the distance from humid Astrabad (now Gorgan, ) in October 1832. Some 30 miles further on, at Nokandeh, the Caspian ‘rolled before us like an ocean.’ Surely poetic licence: Nokandeh overlooks the Gulf of Gorgan, a lagoon separated from the Caspian by the mile-wide Ashuradeh Peninsula.

The Gulf itself is just six miles across and no more than 12 feet deep. Even allowing for a drop in water-level over the last 185 years, it can never have been suitable for troop ships. The only boats Burnes saw were ‘half-a-dozen small, two-masted Russian vessels,’ one of which he boarded. Its captain, he reports, ‘had a bit of sturgeon broiled for my refreshment… I cannot say I relished it’ (Murray generously improves the menu with ‘caviar and Russian champagne’).

The map in Murray’s book has Burnes veering halfway up the Caspian to the site of Krasnovodsk (now Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan) – founded in 1869. In 1832 there was not a single port on the arid, 500-mile-long Caspian coast south of Mangyshlak.

Burnes also planned to visit ‘Balfurosh, and its port on the Caspian – a place of some note.’ Presumably he meant Babolsar, 80 miles west of Nekondeh and Persia’s main port at the time, where he ‘hoped to see more Russian vessels, and enlarge my acquaintance with this sea.’ But he beat a ‘precipitate retreat’ after learning that plague – said to have been brought by ship from Astrakhan the year before – was raging in the area, and ‘took the high road ’ to Tehran. He was received by the Shah, disingenuously informing him that ‘curiosity ’ had prompted his journey, during which he had ‘measured the mountains, examined the roads, and sounded the rivers. ’ When the King of Kings asked him which city he had most admired, Burnes replied ‘Kabul, ’ calling it the ‘paradise ’ of his travels.

Burnes was fortunate that his remit concerned territories so distant from British India that it was impossible for his reports to be double-checked. But even so. Any Russian advance on India depended on the transfer of vast amounts of men and matériel over vast distances. Guessing the likely route of such an advance was crucial for assessing the degree of threat.

The Persian Siege of Herat in 1837/8 – feared as a means of piggybacking the Russians into western Afghanistan – was one of the reasons why the British attacked Kabul in 1839. British fears were reinforced by the Russian military expedition against Khiva in late 1838. As Tsarist troops set out from Orenburg, Burnes wrote of his ‘serious apprehension that their plans are not confined to the chastisement of Khiva.’

The expedition was expected to ‘proceed across the Caspian’: Burnes’ man in Bokhara had reported the Russian depot at Mangyshlak being stocked to the gills. The same agent reckoned the Russians could march from the Caspian to Khiva in four days. Strangely, acknowledges Murray, Burnes did not correct him – even though he knew such a march would take ‘many weeks.’ After all, Burnes ‘had explored this territory.’

No he had not. Burnes had never been to Khiva or within 500 miles of the northern Caspian. The Russian invaders did not take to the sea. After delaying their departure until November, in the hope of Winter rains, they marched down from Orenburg to the Kizyl Kum Desert 200 miles short of Khiva, where their 10,000 camels died of frostbite.

RUSSIAN ALTER EGO

The Russian threat to British interests was embodied by the ‘splendidly mysterious’ intelligence officer Jan Prosper Witkiewicz (1808-39), a Polish nobleman who taught himself Persian, Turmen and Pashto (Afghan) in exile in Orenburg. In 1836 he met the Envoy of the Emir of Kabul in Bukhara, and accompanied him to St Petersburg, serving as his interpreter. A few months later, in May 1837, the Tsar dispatched him to Kabul. Witkiewicz travelled via Tbilisi and Tehran, where he met the Russian plenipotentiary Count Ivan Simonich – whose predecessor Alexander Griboyedov (the celebrated author of Woe From Wit ) had suffered an ominous fate: massacred by the mob.

Witkiewicz reached Kabul just in time for Christmas Dinner. With Burnes. Both were polyglot spies who travelled in disguise through Central Asia. Both came from illustrious families: Burnes’ great-uncle was Scottish bard Robert Burns (1759-96); Witkiewicz’ great- nephew would be the towering Polish artist/writer Witkacy (1885-1939). Both would die brutally in their thirties. Tsarist officials said Witkiewicz committed . Murder was more likely, reckons Murray, adding: ‘As with Burnes, a proper biography is long overdue.’ His next assignment?

BETRAYED AT THE DEATH

Burnes glimpsed paradise in Kabul on All Souls Day 1841. After two years as Number Two to the ‘increasingly delusional ’ William Macnaghten, Burnes was about to take over. Macnaghten was due to leave next day to become Governor of Bombay. Burnes bade him farewell and sat down to a celebratory dinner. Festivities lasted into the wee hours, when an Afghan mob attacked his house. After stout resistance from his guard and escort, Burnes was cut down in the courtyard ‘about 10.30 to 11.00am. ’

Two eye-witnesses relate that Burnes was killed jut after stepping outside his door. Murray bizarrely places their accounts before and after a second-hand Afghan version (cited by William Dalrymple in 2013) claiming Burnes’ executioners dragged him from a bath where he was making love to a mistress.

Macnaghten, based at the British garrison ten minutes up the road, ‘could easily have saved Burnes, ’ accuses Murray, but declined to send troops. His departure for Bombay was postponed and, seven weeks later, he was assassinated in turn – then dismembered, with his headless torso strung up in Kabul Bazaar. The British army of 4,500 men fled with 8,000 camp-followers. They were routed. Two-thirds of them were killed.

It is a tale of Shakespearian tragedy but, rather than bringing his tome to an epic climax, Murray concludes dispassionately that Burnes had ‘decided to brave it out, and paid for his courage. It was a gamble worth taking….’

Although the story of the decimated army ‘is beyond the scope’ of his biography, Murray devotes several paragraphs to a ‘mass rape’ perpetrated by the British in a ‘tiny village’ in June 1842.

ELUSIVE IMAGERY

Burnes’ papers were recovered by Mohan Lal (1812-77), the devoted personal assistant he had hired a decade earlier in Delhi. In Autumn 1843 Mohan Lal journeyed to Britain. He was received by before slipping north on a fastish train to Edinburgh. He continued to Montrose, where he returned Burnes’ papers to his father. They later came into the possession of Sir John Kaye (‘doyen of British Indian historians’) and disappeared – probably in ‘one of those infamous Victorian study fires in which papers potentially embarrassing to the Imperial narrative were apt to vanish’ grunts Murray, who reckons they were destroyed because of ‘their evidence of religious scepticism (and perhaps sexual adventure).’

Murray’s book includes an early, unattributed photographic portrait of Mohan Lal. It must date from November 1843, during his stay in Edinburgh, and have been taken by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill – who had teamed up five months earlier to exploit the revolutionary new calotype process invented by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, and introduced to Scotland by his friend David Brewster, Principal of St Andrews (where Adamson’s elder brother was Professor of Chemistry).

Hill & Adamson produced 2,500 portraits before Adamson’s untimely death in 1848, aged 26. Mohin Lal’s was one of the finest. He cuts a majestic figure in Indian robes, gazing upwards with an unforgettable expression of wistful indomitability.

In Edinburgh Mohan Lal also had his portrait painted by Sir William Allan, President of the Royal Scottish Academy. Murray does not mention this – even though Allan was a manic Russophile who lived in Russia from 1805-14, sold works to the future Tsar Nikolai I in Edinburgh in 1818, and painted Peter the Great Teaching Shipbuilding for Nikolai in St Petersburg in 1841.

Murray does, however, reproduce an oil portrait of Alexander Burnes. It is one of the most significant discoveries in his book.

Burnes is shown, front-on against a plain background, as a thin-faced, tousle-haired man with a large forehead and moustache, wearing dress uniform with gold-braid collar and epaulettes. With his right hand he is removing a cloak that Murray identifies – albeit without explanation – as ‘his Bokharan robe.’

This painting was unknown until Murray stumbled across it in the Mumbai Asiatic Society, where Burnes became a member in 1827. It was lying on its side ‘in a gloomy corner under a tarpaulin,’ its frame ‘littered with bat droppings.’ It had been commissioned by the Society – then the Bombay Branch of London’s Royal Asiatic Society (of which Burnes became a member in February 1835) – from the British artist William Brockedon (1787-1854). Murray describes it as the ‘twin’ of Brockedon’s portrait of a clean-shaven Burnes in civilian dress to be found in London’s Royal Geographic Society.

It isn’t. The Bombay portrait must have been painted several years later: the cross pinned to Burnes’ chest appears to be that of military Companion of the Order of the Bath, to whose ranks he was elevated in June 1840.

Brockedon’s civilian portrait was unveiled at the Royal Academy in 1835 and is similar to his chalk-on-paper portrait of Burnes dated 24 April 1834 , now in London’s National Portrait Gallery. The attire is the same in both versions but, in the sketch, Burnes is looking over the viewer’s shoulder with his head slightly tilted; in the oil portrait he gazes at the viewer head-on.

In the Mumbai painting the hair, facial lighting and frontal pose are identical to the portrait in the Royal Geographical Society but, instead of looking over his right shoulder, Burnes’ posture is virtually frontal. The quizzical expression of the two 1834 portraits has given way to self-assured defiance.

I can think of no other portrait revisited in such a way in the history of art. The re-make is imbued with quasi-Kitchener-like assertiveness, and is surely evidence of the esteem in which Burnes was held in Bombay – in brazen defiance of the unscrupulous treatment he had received from the government in London.

Brockedon must have felt special empathy for Burnes. He was a travel-writer himself, and moved in the same social circles: a founder-member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830; elected to the Athenæum the same year; and made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1834 – the year Burnes was elected to both the Royal Society and the Athenæum, and awarded a Royal Premium of 50 Guineas by the Royal Geographical Society… a few days after posing for Brockedon.

END OF THE LINE

The Great Game lasted nearly 70 years, encompassing a second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878-80. It ended with Russia in control of Central Asia from the Caspian to the Himalayas after a military campaign begun in the 1860s, chronicled by the great war artist Vasily Vereschagin. The Afghan buffer-zone between Russian and British territory shrank from 700 miles to twenty. But, for all the fears of Burnes and his colleagues in Calcutta and London, Russia never launched an attack on British India.

In 1895 the Pamir Boundary Commission established the 20-mile buffer-zone between Tajikistan (Russian Empire) and Kashmir (British Empire) in the form of the 200-mile-long Wakhan Corridor assigned to Afghanistan. This absurd, handle-like appendage resembles the 280-mile-long Caprivi Strip adjoined in 1890 by another bilateral British treaty (this time with Germany) to what is now Namibia, on the crackpot premise it would facilitate access to the Indian Ocean.

The Pamir Commission’s Russian and British teams met on the banks of Lake Zorkul on 22 July 1895, and spent the next six weeks trying to finalize the boundary across impassibly mountainous terrain eastwards to China – where, wrote Colonel T.H. Holdich, ‘amidst a solitary wilderness 20,000 feet above sea-level, absolutely inaccessible to man and within the ken of no living creature except the Pamir eagles, the three great Empires meet.’

In-between building a dozen 9ft-high stone pillars to mark this final frontier, Commissioners indulged in horseplay and boozy evenings – establishing such entente cordiale that General Povalo-Shveykovsky, the Russian Commissioner-in-Chief, invited Brigadier-General M.G. Gerard, his British counterpart, to travel back with him. Gerard’s racey account of this trip was published in Calcutta in 1896.

Their first stop was 80 miles away: the rough and ready garrison of Pamirsky Post (now Murghab, Tajikistan), founded in 1893 as Russia’s furthest military outpost in Central Asia, 12,000ft above sea-level: the highest town in the Russian Empire (and the USSR).

They proceeded to the ‘charming little town’ of Osh (now Kyrgyzstan), where the streets were hung with English and Russian flags; took a troika along a road lined by ‘magnificent crops’ to Margilan (now Uzbekistan), where the Russian soldiers (mostly from Poland) ‘seemed perfectly equipped, disciplined and trained’; then stopped off in Kokand, which was ‘decidedly unhealthy’ due to bad water. It was, though, the ‘chief centre’ of a cotton industry thriving from American seed: ‘so great are the profits that the cultivation of corn is being relinquished.’

Although Brigadier Gerard found Tashkent ‘mean and disappointing,’ it was home to ‘the second-biggest telescope in Russia.’ From Samarkand, surrounded by ‘large vineyards,’ he embarked on a 900-mile journey with the Trans-Caspian Railway, enjoying its ‘very tolerable restaurant car.’ After Ashkhabad (now Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan) it was ‘difficult to keep the rails clear of drifting sand’ until they arrived at the terminus: ‘godforsaken Uzun-Ada, where you go to bed with a sandhill at your back door, and wake to find it has moved round to the front.’

Of Uzun-Ada, whose every building was made of wood, there is no longer a trace: the terminus was shifted 60 miles north-west to Krasnovodsk a few years later.

ALL CHANGE: NIKOLAI KARAZIN’S VIEW OF UZUN-ADA IN 1888

The ageing, London-built steamship Grand Duke Constantine was waiting for the Brigadier-General in Uzun-Ada, manned by its Finnish officers. It had been ploughing the waters of the Caspian for a decade, also making the run to Baku. A stormy 36-hour crossing took them to Petrovsk (now Makhachkala, Dagestan), where Gerard caught a train to London via Rostov (home to ‘one of the best hotels I have ever seen’), Kharkov and Warsaw.

A few months later, in St Petersburg, Russian War Minister Piotr Vannovsky told Gerard he had been ‘only too glad to let English officers travel through Turkestan’ – i.e. the vast swathe of Central Asia that Russia had acquired during The Great Game – ‘to disabuse your minds of the erroneous notions propagated by your press.’

Which reminds me: Mr Murray declared that we were living through ‘a period of extreme Russophobia in the Western media’ during his intimate talk on Maple Street. 

Craig Murray: Sikunder Burnes (Birlinn Ltd, £25.00)

GATEWAY TO CENTRAL ASIA : THE PORT OF UZUN-ADA circa 1896