Game Over? Russia’s Conquest of Central Asia Reconsidered

Abstract

Game Over? Russia’s Conquest of Central Asia Reconsidered David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (bio) Elena Andreeva, Russian Central Asia in the Works of Nikolai Karazin, 1842–1908. 369 pp. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN-13 978-3030363376. $89.99. Irina Kantarbaeva-Bill, Entre imaginaire et réel: Les voyageurs britanniques en Asie centrale au XIXe siècle (Between Fantasy and Fact: British Travelers to Central Asia in the 19th Century). 441 pp. Geneva: Éditions Olizane, 2019. ISBN-13 978-2880664859. CHF 42.00. Rudolf A. Mark, Händler, Forscher, Invasoren: Russland und Zentralasien 1000–1900 (Merchants, Scientists, Invaders: Russia and Central Asia, 1000–1900). 587 pp. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020. ISBN-13 978-3657792450. €83.18. Alexander Morrison, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914. 613 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-11107030305. £75.00. Artem Rudnitskii, Vitkevich: Buntaŕ, soldat imperii (Witkiewicz: Rebel, Soldier of Empire). 335 pp. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2019. ISBN-13 978-5907189072. In the summer of 1840, a year after Britain had occupied Afghanistan to install its own client as the country’s ruler, one of the kingdom’s political agents, Captain Arthur Conolly, wrote to Major Henry Rawlinson, a colleague who [End Page 641] had just been posted to Qandahar. The subaltern reminded Rawlinson of his duty to bring the benefits of civilization to the Asian realm: “You’ve a great game, a noble game before you.” As Conolly made clear in another letter to the major, this was the task of all European powers: “if the British Government would only play the grand game, help Russia cordially to all that she has a right to expect … we shall play the noble part that the first Christian nations of the world ought to fill.”1 Captain Conolly saw the Russian bear as a benevolent creature engaged in friendly play with his own country. But it was Rudyard Kipling who gave the term “Great Game” a much more sinister connotation in his novel Kim.2 Published at the turn of the 20th century, Kim is a ripping yarn about the adventures of an intrepid boy who is enlisted by British intelligence to spy on tsarist intrigues in the Himalayas to undermine London’s hold on the South Asian colony. To Britons, the Great Game now began to signify a momentous struggle between their kingdom and Russia for hegemony over Central Asia. Like some Victorian Cold War, this was a twilight contest that involved espionage, subterfuge, and subversion. At its heart was the belief that the tsars’ Cossacks were advancing into the sands of Turkestan to conquer British India.3 While for much of the century, scholars and journalists rarely invoked the Great Game, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as well as the publication of Peter Hopkirk’s eponymous book a decade later brought the phrase into common parlance.4 ________ In his splendid new history, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia, Alexander Morrison firmly rebuts the notion of the Great Game—that tsarist imperial expansion into the region was driven by a desire to expel Albion from South Asia. Indeed, if most previous books about the topic tended to ascribe the conquest to a single motive, Morrison wisely avoids a monocausal explanation.5 Thus he deftly dismisses such other motives as the insubordinate [End Page 642] actions of officers on the spot eager for easy victories to pin another medal on their tunics.6 The author is particularly effective when he counters the “cotton canard,” the Marxist thesis that blamed lobbying by merchants who wanted the army to take Turkestan so that they could cultivate cotton there to replace American exports of the crop that had been disrupted by the US Civil War.7 But above all, Morrison is keen to sweep the notion of a Great Game into the historian’s dustbin. As he puts it, “it is remarkable how seldom British India featured in the calculation of the Russian soldiers and statesmen who planned and undertook the conquest of Central Asia” (12–13). Morrison, a Fellow and Tutor in History at Oxford’s New College, explains that the story...