Etherton at Kashgar: Rhetoric and Reality in the History of the “Great Game”

Etherton at Kashgar: Rhetoric and Reality in the History of the “Great Game” Daniel C. Waugh Bactrian Press Seattle 2007 This study is part of a larger project on the British Consulate at Kashgar between 1918 and 1924. The author is Professor Emeritus of History, International Studies and Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He may be contacted at [email protected]. © Daniel C. Waugh 2007 All rights reserved. Bactrian Press: “We deliver!” Contents [Introduction]……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Etherton’s Career………………………………………………………………………………….3 The Challenges of Being British Consul in Kashgar…………………………….6 The Origins of the Kashgar Mission……………………………………………………..8 The Consulate’s Intelligence and Communications Networks…………..15 Confusion in the British Government’s Policies Toward the Bolsheviks………………………………………………………………………………….24 Etherton’s Intelligence Activity…………………………………………………………..30 How Serious Was the Bolshevik Threat? …………………………………………..40 The Denouement of Etherton’s Kashgar Career………………………………..50 Etherton’s Book as Political Discourse and Self-Serving Propaganda………………………………………………………………………………..55 Selected Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….68 Map..…………………………………………………………………………………………………….72 Frontispiece from P. T. Etherton, Across the Roof of the World (London: Constable, 1911). The Soviet regime’s intent to spread revolution in Asia in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution is quite well known, as is the international response. However, there is much yet to be learned about events in Central Asia, where initially the new regime had but a toehold and local resistance was widespread and long-lasting. Soviet historiography understandably exaggerated British machinations to subvert the new regime there, a view that oddly enough mirrors the emphasis in Western sources which exaggerate the danger of Soviet expansion and the efforts of a few individuals to combat it. Dramatic as the story is, we still know far too little about the shadowy world of agent-provocateurs, intelligence and counter- intelligence, in part simply because evidence which has long been available has never been subject to critical scrutiny. I shall initiate here a re-examination of the British response to the establishment of a Soviet regime in Central Asia and the perceived threat it posed to British interests in Xinjiang (China) and to British India. More specifically, this is a re-assessment of the response by the British consul in Kashgar, Xinjiang, in 1918-1922, Percy T. Etherton (1879- 1963), whose own account about those years has in fact hindered a critical assessment of that history. The focus on Etherton reveals a great deal about contemporary disagreements among British policy- makers, the mechanisms of intelligence gathering and the quality of information, and the ways in which source criticism must be applied to locate the truth behind rhetorical claims. As Peter Hopkirk puts it, in Kashgar Etherton “fought a ruthless, almost personal war against [the Soviets]...So effective were his anti- - 1 - Bolshevik operations that a price was put on his head by the Soviet authorities in Tashkent.” 1 In this telling, Etherton is the hero of a dramatic chapter in the history of the “Great Game” rivalry for great power dominance in Central Asia. Yet the activities of Etherton and his successors as consuls in Kashgar await serious historical treatment.2 While there were many consular duties, my focus will be on Etherton’s anti-Soviet activities, which indeed were extensive although arguably by no means as important as Hopkirk would have it. Moreover, Hopkirk is silent about the denouement of Etherton’s Kashgar career, a chapter in his story which helps explain why he produced such a flawed account of his Kashgar years. 1 Peter Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (New York, etc., 1984; reprint ed. 1995): 2-3. Since he writes for a popular audience, Hopkirk eschews footnotes. He did do research in some of the archival material which serves as the basis for this paper, but as in his other writing, he relies uncritically on published accounts by contemporaries. My work shares with his the limitations of using mainly British sources and thus cannot pretend to be the study we yet need for this topic. I have not yet consulted Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South-East Asia, 1757-1947 (London, 2006). 2 The career of the first British consul in Kashgar, George Macartney, is treated in some detail by C. P. Skrine and Pamela Nightingale, Macartney at Kashgar: New Light on British, Chinese and Russian Activities in Sinkiang, 1890-1918 (London, 1973). Macartney’s wife wrote a memoir of her years in Kashgar: Lady [Catherina] Macartney, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan (London, 1931). Ella Sykes and Percy Sykes, Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia (London, 1920), covers the brief period in which Percy Sykes relieved Macartney while the latter was on leave in 1916 but is really Ella Sykes’s travel account and says little about consular affairs. An overview of the consulate of Etherton’s successor, Clarmont Skrine is in John Stewart, Envoy of the Raj: The Career of Sir Clarmont Skrine, Indian Political Service (Maidenhead, 1989), chs. 12-13, and encompassed by Skrine’s own Chinese Central Asia (London, 1926), which, however, carefully avoids political questions. Diana Shipton, The Antique Land (London, 1950), is a memoir by the wife of Eric Shipton, the last British consul in Kashgar before the consulate closed in 1947. The crucial documents for writing the history of the consulate are in the India Office files of the British Library and the Public Record Office in London. My analysis is based on the first of these collections, which contains a quite complete, if rather disorganized and repetitious, array of documents about intelligence and counter-intelligence. The Kashgar consulate was under the supervision of the Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India. - 2 - Etherton’s Career Etherton distinguished himself as a British officer, as a traveler in often remote parts of the globe and as a prolific author of books on travel and the geopolitics of East Asia. He fought for the British in South Africa in 1901, where he attracted the attention of Lord Kitchener, and then joined the Garhwal Rifles, a largely native regiment in northern India. 3 As a Lieutenant in 1909-1910, he took a leave in order to travel overland from India to the Trans-Siberian Railway, a journey which resulted in a book which he described modestly as “a plain record of a year’s wandering in the lesser known parts of Central Asia for the purposes of sport and travel.”4 Significant segments of the book focus on big game hunting in the Central Asian mountains, a popular destination for British officers stationed in India. Since Etherton traversed in part terrain not previously followed by any Englishman, his book is also a useful record of descriptive geography, more attentive to its physical than its human side. His occasional excurses into history and ethnography were reinforced by an apparently limited amount of reading in the literature which was 3 My acquaintance with the bare facts of Etherton’s biography relies in part on the short and not fully accurate obituary by his colleague on the Kashgar-Tashkent Mission and later on the Everest adventure, Stewart Blacker, “Colonel P. T. Etherton,” The Times (London), April 2, 1963, Issue 55665, p. 15, col. A. I am not aware of any substantial biography, nor have I found any references to an archive of Etherton’s papers. 4 P. T. Etherton, Across the Roof of the World: A Record of Sport and Travel through Kashmir, Gilgit, Hunza, the Pamirs, Chinese Turkistan, Mongolia and Siberia (London, 1911; New York, 1911; reprint, Camden, S.C., 1994), p. xv. On his way to India to join the Kashgar mission with Etherton, F. M. Bailey wrote his mother about Etherton’s being on board the S. S. Egra, bound for Bombay and noted that Etherton had written the book but confessed to not having read it. See: British Library India Office Library and Records (hereafter abbreviated BL IOLR) Mss EurF157/178, F. M. Bailey to Florence Bailey, February 21, 1918. - 3 - readily available at the time.5 We come away with an admiration for Etherton’s logistical planning and toughness. He crossed the mountains in winter, and he and his Indian orderly finished the trip frostbitten in the bitterly cold Siberian winter. After distinguishing himself in World War I, Etherton returned to India, where he was a logical choice to be part of the Government of India’s intelligence-gathering mission to Kashgar and Tashkent in the summer of 1918. Etherton’s second book, In the Heart of Asia (1925), is more solidly grounded than the first in the literature on Inner Asia, but first and foremost is a vehicle for emphasizing the importance of his work in Kashgar and draws extensively on his consular reports. 6 With its geopolitical observations, the book helped launch a new phase in his career, that of author and commentator on East Asian affairs.7 By the time he died at age 83, his bibliography included eight solely authored books on world affairs and travel and an equivalent number of 5 Etherton never tells us what he had read. It is clear that the section of his book on the history and ethnography of the Ili Valley, pp. 296ff., closely follows Henry Lansdell, Russian Central Asia including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva and Merv, Vol. I (Boston, 1885; reprint, 2005), pp. 201 ff. He may also have read Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja, Vol. II (New York, 1877), where compare pp. 197-198 with Etherton’s p. 299. In passing Etherton notes he took along on the journey a limited library, including Boswell’s Life of Johnson and a book (unnamed) on the Russo-Japanese War.

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