The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Read Online Free PDF

journey broke the dreadful tidings to their colleagues manning the two small wooden forts which they had built there before setting out for Khiva. From there the news was carried back to Peter the Great at his newly finished capital of St Petersburg. In Khiva, meanwhile, to boast of his triumph over the Russians, the Khan dispatched the head of Bekovich, the Muslim prince who had sold his soul to the infidel Tsar, to his Central Asian neighbour, the Emir of Bokhara, while keeping the rest of him on display in Khiva. But the gruesome trophy was hastily returned, its nervous recipient declaring that he had no wish to be a party to such perfidy. More likely, one suspects, he feared bringing down the wrath of the Russians on his own head.
    The Khan of Khiva was luckier than he probably realised, having little concept of the size and military might of his northern neighbour. For no retribution was to follow. Khiva was too far away, and Peter too busy advancing his frontiers elsewhere, notably in the Caucasus, to send a punitive expedition to avenge Bekovich and his men. That would have to wait until his hands were freer. In fact, many years would pass before the Russians once more attempted to absorb Khiva into their domains. But if the Khan’s treachery went unpunished, it was certainly not forgotten, merely confirming Russian distrust of orientals. It was to ensure that little quarter would be given when they embarked on their subjection of the Muslim tribes of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and in our own times of the mujahedin of Afghanistan (although this was to prove rather less successful).
    In the event, Peter was never again to pursue his dream of opening up a golden road to India, along which would flow unimagined wealth. He had already taken on more than one man could hope to achieve in a lifetime, and accomplished much of it. But long after his death in 1725 a strange and persistent story began to circulate through Europe about Peter’s last will and testament. From his death bed, it was said, he had secretly commanded his heirs and successors to pursue what he believed to be Russia’s historical destiny – the domination of the world. Possession of India and Constantinople were the twin keys to this, and he urged them not to rest until both were firmly in Russian hands. No one has ever seen this document, and most historians believe that it never existed. Yet such was the awe and fear surrounding Peter the Great that at times it came to be widely believed, and versions of its supposed text to be published. It was, after all, just the sort of command that this restless and ambitious genius might have given to posterity. Russia’s subsequent drive towards both India and Constantinople seemed, to many, confirmation enough, and until very recently there existed a strong belief in Russia’s long-term aim of world domination.

     
    It was not for another forty years, however, until the reign of Catherine the Great, that Russia once again began to show signs of interest in India, where the British East India Company had been steadily gaining ground, principally at the expense of the French. In fact one of Catherine’s predecessors, the pleasure-loving Anne, had returned all Peter’s hard-won gains in the Caucasus to the Shah of Persia (hardly in keeping with Peter’s supposed will) on the grounds that they were draining her treasury. But Catherine, like Peter, was an expansionist. It was no secret that she dreamed of expelling the Turks from Constantinople and restoring Byzantine rule there, albeit under her firm control. This would give her fleet access to the Mediterranean, then very much a British lake, from the Black Sea, still very much a Turkish one.
    In 1791, towards the end of her reign, Catherine is known to have carefully considered a plan to wrest India from Britain’s ever-tightening grip. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this idea was the brain-child of a Frenchman, a somewhat mysterious individual named