The Anglo-Russian Game
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN The Anglo-Russian Game "You could smell them coming, it was said, even before you heard the thunder of their hooves. But by then it was too late. Within seconds came the...
...It was a factor in Britain's denial of a homeland to the Kurds in what is now, with no ethnic or moral justification, northern Iraq...
...George") for his Hashemite friends...
...Then, in 1966, in Lawrence: The Arab View, Suleiman Mousa said Lawrence was not only a liar but a traitor to Arab nationalism...
...Lawrence of Arabia, was a schoolboy during the last decade of the Great Game, and the adventures of some of its players were known to him...
...One senior officer had 60 camels to transport his personal gear...
...The Japanese blitzkrieg against the Russian naval base at Port Arthur in 1904 revealed the Tsar to be almost as lightly clad as Hans Christian Andersen's emperor...
...Sidney Sugarman's book is a fascinating reappraisal of the "Arab revolt" and the enigmatic man who concocted it—a man of action to whom, in the end, fantasy meant more than action...
...Add a sado-masochistic urge, incipient megalomania, a bent for fantasy, a mysterious lover ("S...
...It, too, is now in ruins, but the people of Central Asia are far from emancipated...
...The Great Game fizzled out, and an Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in 1907...
...but there was something debonair about it when it was coined, around 1840, by a young Army captain, Arthur Conolly...
...The thunder and arrows are those of Genghis Khan's Mongols, who invaded Russia in the 13 th century...
...and in his latest book—The Great Game (Kodansha, 564 pp., $30)—he is in great form...
...Many more Arabs sided with Turkey than with Britain...
...As Sugarman establishes, the help Lawrence's Arabian tribesmen gave the Allies was of little significance...
...Yet Lawrence siphoned out of the UK Treasury huge sums in gold pounds ("the horsemen of St...
...A mine of eloquent facts and quotations, it is important because some of the problems Lawrence created still bedevil Mid-eastern affairs...
...In Bokhara and elsewhere along the main caravan routes, "the bazaars were filled with Russian goods...
...While the British Foreign Office urged caution, the London Times denounced "the Russian fiend...
...The contest, Hopkirk says, was commercial as much as political and military...
...Preyed upon by East and West, Russians developed "a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has bedeviled their foreign relations ever since...
...Then they were upon you—slaughtering, raping, pillaging, and burning...
...Not many history books begin like that...
...It was a cheap sport, financed mainly by the East India Company...
...Lawrence, a.k.a...
...Russian and British officials realized that Japan was now a power to be reckoned with, and that the territories they had been squabbling over were not worth a major conflict...
...Discontent and subversion spread, and a few years later it collapsed...
...When at last the Mongols were overpowered, the impetus of victory carried Russian explorers, soldiers and traders across Asia in what Hopkirk calls "one of the great epics of human history...
...British and Russian officers and traders admired each other's courage and, when they met, ate and drank together...
...An officers' mess needed two camels to carry its cigars...
...For many Britons, Russophobia was a welcome diversion from the squalid aspects of Victorian society...
...When the 1914-18 War took him to the Middle East, where the rickety Turkish Empire was an ally of Germany, he acted as if he saw himself as the star of a new Great Game...
...To all Muslims, the British were infidels, and rumors that they were ruled by a woman aroused contempt...
...Lawrence was, in the jargon of his day, "illegitimate" and had a major identity problem, parental and sexual...
...The Emir received Conolly...and imprisoned him, too...
...This scam hobbled British policy for decades...
...It fostered doubt about Israel's right to exist, and indifference to the plight of Lebanese and Egyptian Christians—despised, it must be admitted, by many British officials who, echoing Lawrence, dismissed them as "Levantines who ape Western ways...
...Eager to impress, he served half-promises to Arabian sheikhs and half-truths to his British colleagues...
...Now, after years of research, Sidney Sugarman, a British authority on the region and period, has published a cool incisive study: A Garland of Legends: Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab Revolt (Spa Books, 255 pp., $25...
...In the 19th century, as the distance between Russian- and British-held territory in Asia shrank from 2,000 miles to about 200, British merchants and officials feared that the Cossacks might overrun northern India...
...Involuntarily, perhaps, he harmed Christian, Jewish, Kurdish and other minorities who were later victimized by the " Arabism" he helped manufacture...
...He looked down on non-Bedouin Arabs, considered Syrians ape-like, and felt "hurt" that blacks "possess exact counterparts of our bodies...
...A.") and an interest in fascism, and you have a biographer's dream...
...The Company's English officers were brave men where the need arose, but they were a privileged caste whose camels and mules tottered under the weight of champagne and brandy whenever they moved to a new camp...
...The name the "Great Game" was popularized by Kipling in his no vel Kim in 1901...
...Conolly and other intelligence officers preferred the Russians—who were, after all, "Christians of a sort"—to the "heathen savages" and triple-dealing tyrants of Central Asia...
...The Great Game is a brilliant introduction to the region...
...But of the many books that have been devoted to Lawrence, most are naive or propagandist...
...and when fighting broke out, Indians and Afghans considerately did most of the dying...
...Within seconds came the first torrent of arrows, blotting out the sun...
...Still, a few Asian chiefs decided, if these red-faced unbelievers could be played off against the Russians—as the Russians were against the Persians, and the Persians against the Turks—why not cut them into the game...
...The two officers were made to dig their graves...
...For nearly four centuries the Russian empire expanded at a rate of about 20,000 square miles a year...
...In 1842 Conolly volunteered to nego-iate the release of a British colonel who was being held captive, in a rat-infested pit, by the "vicious and despotic" Emir who ruled the Central Asian trading center of Bokhara...
...Arabian Nights T.E...
...In addition, two kingdoms (Hejaz and oil-oozing Iraq) and the emirate, later kingdom, of Transjordan were invented for them...
...That Peter Hopkirk's book has been published in America by a Japanese firm is interesting and appropriate, for Japan was the deus ex machina that helped bring the major players to their senses...
...and the scriptwriter of the film based on Seven Pillars admits having abandoned "objective truth...
...Russia stagnated and suffered under the Mongol yoke for more than two centuries, and during that time some European rulers took advantage of its prostration to carve slices off its territory...
...Where British garrisons were installed, "the pursuit and seduction of women by the troops, particularly by the officers," provoked anger...
...Television and tourist buses have arrived, but, Peter Hopkirk says, there have been few fundamental changes in the last hundred years, and "little appears to have been learned from the painful lessons of the past...
...The Muslim rulers of Central Asia were violent, tyrannical men, embroiled in feuds and slave-trading...
...The region is a tangle of ethnic and religious strife, with Islamic powers like Iran, Pakistan and Turkey watching events and each other mistrustfully, and even distant Libya and Saudi Arabia, themselves politically vulnerable, financing fanaticism and militias...
...But A Garland of Legends is not only a myth-buster: it will add a new dimension to most readers' understanding of the Middle East...
...The British East India Company sent agents—Army officers and native scouts —into Afghanistan and beyond to map likely invasion-routes and seek local allies...
...The "Iraqi" Kurds and Shiites must, it seems, resign themselves to lifelong discrimination and insecurity—in the name of Iraqi stability and in memory of Lawrence...
...Peter Hopkirk, a journalist in a previous incarnation, writes history as if it were an adventure story (well, isn't it...
...It was not until 1955 that Richard Aldington's uninhibited biography, Lawrence of A rabia, revealed the hero to have been a poseur and a liar...
...then, watched by a passive crowd used to public executions, they were beheaded...
...The Russian monarchy was discredited...
...It had become a blood-caked cliche by then...
...Its successor smothered the Tsars' empire under a Communist variety of imperialism...
...But each side had its mischief-makers and hardliners...
...haunting and troubling the human race and perpetrating malignant frauds...
...Even so, politicians and editorialists the world over were bamboozled by the Lawrence lobby into believing that Britain owed "the Arabs" a huge debt and had stabbed them in the back politically...
...In Central Asia, as in much of the Middle East, current affairs are all too often an attempt to remake history...
...His myth was launched by Lowell Thomas (an American journalist he briefed carefully, but pretended not to have done), and honed by his own beguiling Seven Pillars of Wisdom...
Vol. 76 • March 1993 • No. 4
