In November 1841, Alexander Burnes, a Scotsman whose extensive travel across this region was well known in Britain thanks to his celebrated publications and his ceaseless self-promotion, was ambushed and assassinated in the capital.33 Not long afterwards, the decision was made to withdraw to India. In January 1842, in one of the most humiliating and notorious episodes in British military history, the evacuating column under the command of Major-General Elphinstone was attacked on its way to Jalalabad through the mountain passes and annihilated in the winter snow. Legend had it that only one man reached the town alive – Dr William Brydon, whose well-placed copy of Blackwood magazine saved his life: he had rolled it up and put it inside his hat in an attempt to keep his head warm; it took most of the blow from a sword that would otherwise surely have killed him.34
Britain’s attempts to forestall Russian progress elsewhere were no more successful. Missions to build bridges with the Emir of Bukhara and gain influence to the north of Afghanistan backfired spectacularly. The quaintly unsophisticated picture painted of this region by Alexander Burnes and others gave a false sense that the British would be welcomed with open arms. Nothing could be further from the case. The fiercely independent Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Khokand had no interest whatsoever in becoming involved in what one typically self-regarding would-be British power broker naively referred to as ‘the great game’.35 Two British officers, Captain James Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, who arrived in the early 1840s to offer solutions to the problems of Anglo-Russian relations in Central Asia, were decapitated in front of a large crowd of enthusiastic onlookers.36
A third figure to reach Bukhara was a colourful individual named Joseph Wolff. Son of a German rabbi, Wolff converted to Christianity; he was expelled from theological college in Rome, before studying theology at Cambridge University under the direction of an anti-Semite whose views were so provocative that he was pelted with rotten eggs by students in the streets of Cambridge.37 Setting out as a missionary, he initially headed east in search of the lost tribes of Israel. Eventually, he made for Bukhara to find the missing envoys, of whom nothing had been heard. The emir might have guessed that an eccentric was on his way after receiving a letter in advance, announcing that ‘I, Joseph Wolff, am the well-known Darveesh of the Christians.’ Be aware, he went on, that ‘I am about to enter Bokhara’ to investigate reports that Conolly and Stoddart had been put to death, a rumour that ‘I, knowing the hospitality of the inhabitants of Bukhara, did not believe’. He was lucky not to share their fate after being imprisoned and told to await his death. He was eventually released and allowed to go free; but it had been a close-run thing.38
Ironically, Bukhara and Central Asia more generally held little interest for Russia from a strategic point of view. Basic ethnographies published in this period, such as Alexei Levshin’s writing on the Kazakhs, which became popular in St Petersburg, revealed an increasing curiosity about these people who could neither read nor write, but among whom ‘the rudiments of music and poetry’ could be detected, in spite of their apparent ignorance and roughness.39 As Burnes’s writing pointed out, Russia’s aims in the region were decidedly modest: the two priorities were to encourage trade and to stop the sale of Russians into slavery. The problem was that this was not the message that sank in from Burnes’s work; what really hit home back in Britain was his alarmist report that ‘the court of St Petersburg have long cherished designs in this quarter of Asia’.40
This dovetailed with growing British anxiety in other quarters. The consul-general in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, lobbied tirelessly, warning all who would listen that unless Russia’s rise was checked the British Empire would be gravely threatened in India. There were two options: Britain should either extend the empire into Mesopotamia to build a proper buffer protecting the approach from the west; or a major force should be sent from India to attack the Russians in the Caucasus.41 Rawlinson took it upon himself to support local anti-Russian insurgencies wherever he could find them: he funnelled arms and money to Imam Shamil, whose power base in Chechnya was a constant thorn in Russia’s side in the mid-nineteenth century.42 The support he provided helped establish a long tradition of Chechen terrorism against Russia.
Inevitably, then, Britain seized the chance to cut Russia down to size as soon as the opportunity presented itself. A series of scuffles about the treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Empire was quickly and deliberately escalated until a substantial British force was dispatched to the Black Sea in 1854, where it was joined by the French who were anxious about protecting their extensive business interests in Constantinople, Aleppo and Damascus. The aim was simple: Russia was to be taught a lesson.43
As Lord Palmerston put it while hostilities were raging, ‘the main and real object of the war was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia’. The obscure war that was being fought in the Crimea, in the Sea of Azov and with flash outbreaks elsewhere – in the Caucasus and by the Danube, for example – had a prize at stake that was far more significant than it seemed at face value. Indeed, the charismatic and respected British Foreign Secretary himself went so far as to present a formal plan to his colleagues in the government for the dismemberment of Russia: the way to control Russia, and by implication to protect British interests in India, was to hand control of the Crimea and the entire Caucasus region to the Ottomans.44 Although this extravagant scheme did not get off the ground, it is a powerful indication of what a major issue Russia’s expansion had become in the British official mind.
Some were appalled by the Anglo-French invasion. Writing furiously and voluminously about the war as it progressed, Karl Marx found fertile material with which to develop ideas about the ruinous impact of imperialism that he had first set out in The Communist Manifesto a few years earlier. Marx documented increases in military and naval expenditure in detail and provided running commentaries in the New York Tribune in which he fiercely attacked the hypocrisy of those who had dragged the west to war. He could hardly contain his glee when Lord Aberdeen was forced to stand down as Prime Minister in the face of widespread disillusionment at the heavy casualties sustained in Russia. As prices rose in London, sparking protests at home, it seemed obvious to Marx that Britain’s imperialist policies were being dictated by a small elite and came at the expense of the masses. Communism was not born of the Crimean War, but it was certainly sharpened by it.45
So was the unification movement in Italy. After Russia’s nose had been bloodied – at the expense of many French and British troops, including those who took part in the infamous charge of the Light Brigade – settlement terms were finally discussed in Paris. One of those at the negotiating table was Count Cavour, Prime Minister of Sardinia, who owed his place to the decision of Vittorio Emanuele, the island’s king, to send a force of auxiliaries to the Black Sea in support of France. He used his moment in the spotlight shrewdly, calling for a united, independent Italy, a rallying cry that was viewed sympathetically by the allies and helped galvanise supporters back home.46 Five years later, the King of Sardinia had become King of Italy, a new country forged of disparate cities and regions. The imposing Altare della Patria monument that stands in the centre of Rome and which was built three decades later, in the words of Primo Levi, in order to make Rome feel Italian and to make Italy feel Roman, marked the culmination of developments that had been given momentum by the fight over land and influence thousands of miles to the east.47
For Russia, the terms imposed at the peace talks of Paris in 1856 were nothing short of disastrous. Britain and France collaborated to tie a noose around their rival’s neck: stripped of hard-won gains in the Caucasus, Russia suffered the ignominy of being deprived of military access to the Black Sea, which was declared neutral and closed to all warships. Likewise, the coastline was to be demilitarised, free from fortifications and stores of armaments.48
The aim was to humiliate Russia and to strangle its ambitions. It had the opposite effect – this was a Versailles moment, where the settlement was c
ounter-productive and had dangerous consequences. Quite apart from the fact that the settlement was so punitive and restrictive that the Russians immediately tried to slip its shackles, it also prompted a period of change and reform. The Crimean War had revealed that the Tsar’s army was no match for allied troops, who were more experienced and better trained. After some hard-hitting reports had been prepared for the Tsar, Alexander I, which set out the shortcomings of the Russian army in merciless detail, a root-and-branch overhaul of the military was carried out.49
Dramatic steps were taken: conscription was reduced from twenty-five years’ service to fifteen, lowering the average age of the army at a stroke, while bulk orders of up-to-date equipment were issued to replace antiquated and inefficient matériel.50 But the most striking change came from far-reaching social reform. Although a severe banking crisis in the late 1850s also played a role, it was defeat in the Crimea and shame at the terms that followed that prompted the Tsar to abolish serfdom, a system under which a significant part of the population was tied to the land and indentured to wealthy landlords. Within five years, serfdom had been swept away, ending centuries of slavery in Russia.51 This was not before time, according to some contemporaries.52 It presaged a surge towards modernisation and economic liberalism that propelled growth at a phenomenal rate in the second half of the nineteenth century: iron production rose five-fold between 1870 and 1890, while the impressive expansion of the railway network served, as one modern scholar has put it, to ‘emancipate Russia from the limitations imposed by her geography’ – in other words, by linking the vast country together.53 Far from bottling Russia up, the British helped let the genie out of the bottle.
The intensification of Russian aspirations could be felt even as the ink was drying on the treaty signed in Paris. One of the Tsar’s delegates at the peace talks, a military attaché named Nikolai Ignat’ev, was so enraged by the treatment of Russia, and by the restrictions of Russian control over its own littoral on the Black Sea in particular, that he made arrangements with Prince Gorchakov, former classmate and confidant of Alexander Pushkin, to lead a mission into Central Asia. The aim was unequivocal: ‘the investigation [of this region] and the promotion of friendly ties will raise Russia’s influence – and lower that of Great Britain’.54
Ignat’ev lobbied intensively for expeditions to be sent to Persia and Afghanistan, and for envoys to visit the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara. The aim, he said bluntly, was to find a route to India via either of the two great rivers that flow from the Aral Sea – the Syr Darya or the Amu Darya. It would be ideal, he argued, if Russia could build an alliance with the peoples bordering India and also work up their hostility to Britain: this was the way to set Russia on the front foot – and not just in Asia.55
The missions led by Ignat’ev and others paid dividends. In the fifteen years that followed the end of the Crimean War, Russia brought hundreds of thousands of square miles under its control without having to resort to force. Well-led expeditions, coupled with shrewdly applied diplomatic pressure on China, allowed ‘immense strides’ to be made in the Far East ‘in the short space of ten years’, as one seasoned observer noted in a report for the Foreign Office in London in 1861.56
Not long afterwards, yet more of the southern steppe fell into Russia’s lap, along with the oasis cities straddling the heart of Asia. By the late 1860s, Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as much of the prosperous Fergana valley, had become ‘protectorates’ or vassals of St Petersburg, a prelude to full annexation and incorporation within the empire. Russia was building its own massive trade and communication network, which now connected Vladivostok in the east to the frontier with Prussia in the west, and the ports of the White Sea in the north to the Caucasus and Central Asia in the south.
The story was not unremittingly positive. Although a much needed programme of modernisation had been embarked on after the debacle of the Crimean War, Russia’s sinews strained as it grew. Generating cash to help fund the empire’s transformation was a constant problem, one that led to the embarrassing decision to divest it of Alaska for geopolitical and financial reasons.57 Nevertheless, as concerns grew about what change in Russia meant for Britain’s empire, thoughts in London turned to devising ways to stem the tide; or failing that, to divert Russia’s attention elsewhere.
16
The Road to War
In the late nineteenth century, Russian confidence, bullishness even, was rising fast. It was not long before attention turned to having the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris rescinded. One after another, chanceries across Europe were quietly canvassed for support for revising the treaty in general and removing the relevant clauses in particular. Most presented little opposition. There was one exception: London. In the winter of 1870, a copy of the circular outlining a proposal to drop the clauses that had been presented to the British Cabinet was leaked to the press in St Petersburg, along with the news that it had been flatly rejected in London. Prince Gorchakov’s efforts to force the matter went down well in Russia; they were met with howls of fury in the British press.1
The line taken by the Spectator was typical of the shocked indignation. Russia’s attempt to renegotiate was diabolical, it declared; a ‘more daring and open defiance of European law, of international morality and of British policy than the Russian note was never uttered to the world’.2 The proposal to drop the clauses convinced some that war was imminent and that Britain had no choice but to use force to maintain the restrictions on Russia. This reaction was monstrous, wrote John Stuart Mill in a letter to The Times; the moves might be provocative, but they should not lead to military conflict. Even Queen Victoria agreed, sending a telegram to her Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville: ‘Could any hint be given to the leading journals’, she wrote, ‘to refrain from rousing the war spirit here?’3
The high levels of anxiety were triggered not so much by concerns about the Black Sea as by the general worry about Russia flexing increasingly strong muscles. With military action an unrealistic possibility and faced with a poor hand of cards, Britain had little choice but to concede – prompting acerbic exchanges between the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and the charismatic Benjamin Disraeli in the House of Commons. Russia got what it wanted, namely the freedom to do as it chose along the littoral and to station warships in the ports of the Crimea and elsewhere on the northern shore of the Black Sea. This was met with euphoria in St Petersburg, according to one British eyewitness, and was presented as a ‘triumph’ for Russia. Tsar Alexander II, who was ‘said to be personally overjoyed’, ordered the ‘Te Deum’ to be sung in the chapel of the Winter Palace, before praying at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul ‘for some time with signs of deep emotion’.4
Britain had been powerless to translate its economic power into diplomatic and political success. New approaches were soon adopted. One of the topics that came up for discussion was that of the title of the British ruler. Given the size and distribution of the dominions, regions, peoples and places that were subject to the British sovereign, it was proposed that the monarch should be upgraded from a royal to an imperial title. This cosmetic change provoked fierce debate in the Houses of Parliament, with traditionalists appalled by the idea of changing ranks, titles and names that had held good for centuries. Kings had supreme authority over subordinate rulers, Lord Granville told the House of Lords; there was no reason or justification for upgrading the sovereign’s title. ‘My Lords,’ he declared, ‘in regard of the dignity of Her Majesty herself, no name can appeal to the imagination so forcibly as that of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.’ This was how the monarch should be known.5
The problem was Russia and the Tsar. Apart from harking back to imperial Rome (the word Tsar is a simple contraction of ‘Caesar’), the Tsar’s formal title in all its glory when used in official correspondence and on formal occasions made reference to an elaborate and lengthy list of the territories that he lorded over. In the mid-1870s, Disraeli – by now Prime Minister –
stressed to Parliament that a higher title than queen would help give confidence to the population of India, already concerned about the Russian advance into Central Asia. Queen Victoria agreed with the principle, writing to Disraeli to say that ‘attacking Russia from India is the right way’, and that an upgraded title might help focus the loyalty of her subjects in India.6
Some MPs were unconvinced of the need to compete in this way. Surely we British, ‘who have ruled India for a hundred years’, said one parliamentarian, are not so unsure of ourselves that we need to alter the title of the queen, solely ‘in order that our sovereign may be placed on terms of equality with the Emperor of Russia?’7 Others, however, stressed the dramatic change in the situation in the east, defiantly proclaiming that ‘the British hold over Hindoostan is intended to endure’, and that therefore ‘no part of that territory must be ceded’. That Russia’s frontiers were now only a few days’ march from those of Her Majesty’s dominions in India was a cause for alarm.8 After heated debate in Parliament, the Bill was passed in 1876 proclaiming that Victoria was not only a queen, as she had been crowned nearly four decades earlier, but an empress too. She liked it: at Christmas she sent Disraeli a card signed ‘Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix’ – Victoria, Queen and Empress.9
Seemingly superficial steps like this were accompanied by more practical measures in an increasingly tense environment as the British constantly fretted about losing ground to their rivals. Both Britain and Russia became obsessed with setting up networks to spy on each other, to win over the local population and to cultivate those with influence. Colonel Maclean of the Punjab Cavalry and the Indian Political Service was one of those deputed to monitor events in the borderlands between Persia, India and Afghanistan in the 1880s. He established groups of merchants and operators of local telegraph exchanges and incentivised them to pass on information about what was going on in the region. Maclean homed in on Muslim clerics, providing them with gifts of shawls, carpets, cigars and even diamond rings in order to impress the local population with the benefits of co-operating with Britain. Maclean justified these bribes as a way of channelling support to influential friends. In fact they served to strengthen religious authority across a fractious region that was the focus of intense competition from outside.10
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