The Great Game - Irrational Russo-Phobia
England had emerged from her period of stress through the first half of the eighteenth century with the strongest national life of all the nations. From the adventurers of the Elizabethan times, through the stern assertion of the nation by Cromwell, and from the seafaring colonists of England, there had sprung a national growth unique in history. There were lapses under the indolent Stuarts, but the trend had been toward maritime and colonial supremacy. The last half of the eighteenth century saw England with the dominion of the seas and enlarged colonial possessions. England strained her resources in the Napoleonic wars, but it is doubtful if her course was altogether wise. She came out of these wars with an apparent increase of prestige and power on the sea. But all her influence had been thrown to revive the empires of Europe. Of these Prussia, Austria, and Russia were destined to have an evil effect on England's future, Prussia and Austria as enemies and Russia as an imaginary foe, against whom England has wasted her energies for a hundred years.
But after the war of 1828-29 between Turkey and Russia, which resulted in the independence of Greece, (announced by Turkey in 1830,) there grew up in the British mind a great suspicion of Russia and hostility against Russian occupation of Constantinople. A more false position would have been hard for England to find. As the commercial clearing house of the world and the great common carrier, she would have been assured of Russia's trade, and the development of Russia would have opened great markets for English goods-but all England could see was the bogey of military Russia. This unreasoning opposition to Russia became a mania with the English, and the resultant harm to England can only be measured by the present war.
It is hard to justify the attitude of the men who controlled the destinies of England. Instead of realizing that the opening of the Dardanelles to Russia meant a flood of wealth to England, Russia was pictured as an avalanche ready to overwhelm British interests in the Near and Far East. All this was at variance with the characteristics of the Slav. Yet the "Eastern question" in British eyes became a question of anything to serve as a barrier against Russia. Russia's object in seeking spheres of influence coterminous with the British was not the conquest of India. What profit could she reap from absorbing 300,000,000 of new subjects who were always within measurable distance of famine? She had no great middle class needing scope for its superfluous numbers.
The relations between England and the French Empire became very cordial, and these two powers in the Crimean war (1854) saved the Turkish Empire from the onslaught of Nicholas I of Russia and maintained Turkish rule over the outlet from the Black Sea. England went to war in 1854 to prevent the independence of Serbia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, the provisional occupation of Constantinople, and a Russian protectorate of the Christians of the Greek Church in the Turkish Empire. Shutting up Russia in the Black Sea was actually regarded as a British triumph. The result of the war was to leave Russia crippled and constricted behind the barriers of the Dardanelles. All her vast commercial possibilities were lost to England. From this time on it was a repetition of the same story. All England's efforts were concentrated on trying to hem in Russia.
No great democratic nation with the vitality of England would have been so blind to its real interests if there had not been some factor that befogged the public mind. This is found in the machinery of English politics. Members of Parliament are not elected for any definite term of office. The only limitation to the life of a Parliament is the seven-year provision of the Septennial act of 1716. Consequently, a Government is not placed in power for any term of office, nor is it dependent on representatives elected at stated times. On the contrary, the Ministry has tenure of office as long as it can command a majority of Parliament. This made any Government a target for the Opposition, and the result was a constant effort to raise a "question" on which the Ministry in office might be defeated. This system led to the manufacture of issues, to the rise and fall of Ministers from artificially pumped up "questions," and this accounts for the long tenure in office of such statesmen as Palmerston, Russell, Disraeli, and Salisbury.
A constant stream of useless issues attracted the attention of the British public, and kept England from seeing the real stakes in the great game she was playing - her supremacy of the world through control of the sea and unrestricted commerce. If it had not been for the constant bickering over what were then considered the important politics of Parliament, the public mind of England would surely have grasped Great Britain's real interests abroad, of which the most important was freeing commerce for England's profit. The "Eastern question " became a distorted fetish, to which were sacrificed England's treasures gained through her greatest era. Palmerston, Russell, Disraeli, and Salisbury were the high priests of this cult, and by catchwords and incantations deluded their followers to disaster.
With Russia shut in as a result of the Crimean war, there followed "the most mistaken period" of English history. The projects of Louis Napoleon were given full headway-and the aggrandizement of Prussia was unrestrained. Russia recovered her strength, and the new revolt of the Balkan Slavs (1875-76) had again aroused her to action. England resumed her task as watchdog of the Turkish Empire in Constantinople. Behind all Balkan questions, there ever arose the one question which dominated the whole situation-Constantinople and the Bosphorus. Who was to hold the keys of the Straits?
The real danger in Central Asia was largely self-created, but still it existed. It consisted in the idea, with which British writers and officials diligently inoculated the Asiatic mind, that every advance of Russia in the direction of Afghanistan endangered the British position in India. The strength of the Russians for mischief was not material but moral. It was based, not upon the proximity of their cannons, hut upon the ubiquity of British alarmists.
Lord Salisbury once remarked to General Ignatieff that, unless rumor lied, - Russia had many agents in India. "Thousands of agents," coolly replied the ablest Russian in the diplomatic service- "we have literally thousands of most useful agents in India." "What do you mean?" asked Lord Salisbury, in some amazement at the cynical avowal. "Our agents" replied General Ignatieff, "are headed by your own Viceroy, and they include almost every official in your service and every newspaper writer in India. They occupy themselves constantly in doing, far more effectively than any one else could do it, the kind of work for which we are supposed to employ agents in other countries. They disquiet the minds of the well-disposed by spreading fears of a Russian advance ; they encourage the hopes of the ill-disposed by simulating alarm at our approach ; they fill the bazaars with stories of our irresistible prowess, and, in short, they do everything that we could wish to magnify our reputation. and prepare every mauvais sujet [wicked subject], every native who is discontented with your Government, to turn with longing and hopeful gaze towards the great white Tzar."
"The Great Game" involved not only the confrontation of two great empires whose spheres of influence moved steadily closer to one another until they met in Afghanistan, but also the repeated attempts by a foreign power to impose a puppet government in Kabul. Finally Britain drew a frontier line across the north of Afghanistan, beyond which the Russians admitted that they had no interest, and up to which the British may advance their frontier. On the north of that frontier line the Russians were at home. They had garrisons stationed there connected by railway within a couple of days of their base on the Caspian. They answered for order, they policed their frontier, and they were by telegraph within a few hours of St. Petersburg. On the other side of that frontier line the British were not at home. Their nearest outpost was nearly 1,500 miles off. A territory as large as France, as mountainous as Switzerland, as poor as the highlands of Scotland, and inhabited by fierce and fanatical tribes, stretched between the furthest British point and the Russian lines.
To create a buffer between British India and Russian Central Asia the Durand Line was drawn in 1893 as Afghanistan's Eastern border, including a long panhandle called the Wakhan corridor, reaching all the way to China and separating the Russian and British empires. Unfortunately, it left half the Pashtus or Pathans in Afghanistan and half in British India, later to be carved off as Pakistan in 1947.
For a time, England and Germany had drawn closer together. English money was loaned to Germany for her pressing financial needs, and while England imagined she was building up a barrier against Russia, Bismarck was using these resources to build up an organized foreign trade. Before England realized her error much of her trade, even in her own colonies, had been taken away by Germany. In the nineties the commercial expansion of Germany, at the expense of England's foreign trade, began to alienate the English from Germany. The British merchants began to realize that English trade was the greatest sufferer from German competition, but this feeling was slow to spread through the nation.
Great Britain at last awoke to the fact that Germany was not a "friendly nation." There was an immediate change in feeling toward the United States. Yet even then England did not see the light in regard to Russia. The next phase was the Russian "threat" in the Far East. This was the period that followed "Russia at the Gates of Herat." Again Russia was painted as an avalanche ready to overwhelm the British possessions. Tibet, Afghanistan, and Persia were made so important that all other interests were forgotten, and England was ready to make use of any possible means to do harm to Russia.
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