THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN CENTRAL ASIA.
BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HENRY RAWLINSON, K.C.B.
It is easier to write about the Russian advance at the present day than it was a few years back. The ground has been cleared of much of the rubbish which formerly encumbered it. Not long ago the apologists of Russia were wont to compare the progress of her arms in Central Asia with the progress of our own in India. We were warned of a certain law of nature which impelled civilisation to advance on barbarism, and were asked to hail with sympathy, rather than view with suspicion, the extension of a Power which, as it swept on in its resistless course, diffused the blessings of order, of knowledge, and of commerce over a vast region hitherto sunk in a savagery of the worst description. But public opinion is now somewhat changed. No one questions that Russia is entitled to great credit for the civilising influence that has attended her progress, for the large benefits she has conferred upon humanity in her career of conquest through Central Asia. By crushing the Turcoman raiders, indeed, and by abolishing the slave markets of Khiva and Bokhara, she has restored peace and prosperity to districts which were groaning in misery, and has earned the gratitude of thousands of terror-stricken families. Whatever may happen in the future, she has gained imperishable glory in the past by her victories of peace along the desolated frontier of Khorassan; but here the register of her good deeds must end. To suppose that she launched her forces across the Caspian in 1869 and engaged in Central Asian warfare with a view to these beneficent results, is to ignore the whole spirit and character of her policy. Fortunately there is now no room for misconception. Her soldiers and statesmen have recently laid bare her springs of action with a plainness that is almost cynical, but at the same time with a fulness of detail that must carry conviction to all unprejudiced minds. It was during the Crimean war, we are told, that Russia first realised her false position in regard to England. In her schemes of aggrandisement in Europe she was liable to be met and thwarted at every turn by British alliances and British influence; and when engaged in war she was open to our attack in every quarter, in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azof, the Baltic, or the coast of Georgia, without any possibility of retaliation. If she was to develop in due course, as had so often been predicted, into the leading Power of the world, it was thus absolutely necessary that the inequality complained of should be redressed. Some weak point in our armor must be discovered. Some means must be found to shatter the palladium of our insular security. Hence there arose the idea of creating a great Oriental satrapy, under Russian administration, which should envelop the north-west frontier of our Indian Empire, and from which, as occasion might arise, pressure could be exerted, or, if necessary, armed demonstrations might issue, which would neutralise British opposition in Europe, and would place our policy on the Bosphorus or elsewhere in subordination to her own. In former times, as is well known, elaborate schemes have been discussed at St. Petersburg for the actual invasion of India, and, if we may judge from the utterances of the Moscow press and the fervid letters of certain Russian generals, the same exalted ideas still prevail in many military circles; but assuredly no such extravagance has been apparent in the careful plan of trans-Caspian operations hitherto adopted by the Russian Government, which has, on the contrary, been of the soberest and most practical character.
The end in view has been simply to arrive by gradual accretion of territory at the frontier of India. In pursuance of this object Russia has incurred expense without any immediate prospect of return, to an extent which has filled economists with dismay; fifty millions sterling, at least, having been expended by her in Central Asia during the last twenty-five years. Native rights at the same time have been mercilessly trampled on, and, above all, diplomacy has pushed its privilege of deception far beyond the bounds hitherto recognised as legitimate; but success, which condones all such irregularities, has rewarded her efforts, and the crisis has now arrived, almost sooner than was expected.
A brief summary of the salient points which have marked the persistent advance of Russia in Central Asia seems to be all that is required at present. For the first ten years following on the Crimean war her generals, having crossed the Kirghiz steppes from Orenburg, were gradually feeling their way along the valley of the Jaxartes. Creeping up the river, and taking fort after fort and city after city, they everywhere defeated the rabble soldiery of the Uzbegs, and finally, in 1867, planted the Russian flag on the famous citadel of Samarcand, adjoining the mausoleum of Timúr. Here, according to prearranged design, the progress of the Russian arms was arrested, pending the approach of co-operating columns from the Caspian; but, in the meantime, the neighboring Khanate of Bokhara, hitherto the most important of the Central Asian States, was brought completely under control, and the influence of Russia was fully and firmly established on the Oxus. To the westward a still more important series of operations was now commenced. In 1869 the first Russian detachments crossed the Caspian, and boldly invaded the country of the Turcomans. Had such an expedition been carried out in Europe, it would have been stigmatised as piracy, for there was absolutely no provocation on the part of the tribesmen, nor even was the formality observed of declaring war. Coercive measures, without further warning and with varying success, were directed against the tribes of the neighborhood. Gradually the sphere of action was extended. Khiva was reduced in 1873, and then the Tekkehs, the principal tribe of the Turcoman confederacy, who inhabited the steppe from Kizil-Arvat to Merv, were seriously attacked. The western division of this tribe, called the Akhals, made a stout resistance, on one occasion in 1879 beating off the regular troops led by Lomakin, and seriously imperilling the whole Russian position. Ultimately, however, in 1880, the renowned Scoboleff, greatly assisted by the Persian chiefs of Kuchán and Bujnoord, who furnished carriage and supplies from the adjacent frontier of Khorassan, penetrated to the heart of the Akhal country and took their stronghold, Geok Tepeh, by storm. All active opposition then collapsed, and in due course conciliation, combined with intimidation, being skilfully employed against the Eastern Tekkehs, who were demoralised by the subjugation of their brethren in Akhal, and who applied for support in vain both to Persia and to Cabul, Merv—“the Queen of the East,” as she has been called—surrendered to Russia in February, 1884, and the first act of the great Central Asia drama, after twenty-five years of sustained and energetic action, was brought to a successful close. It is needless to say that during this long and desperate struggle to reach and occupy Merv there were many phases which tended to distract public attention from the main object in view. To many persons who followed the Russian proceedings with an observant and even friendly eye—for the atrocities committed by the Turcomans had excited general indignation against them—the explanation which most commended itself was, that as Russia had already established an important government in Turkestan very imperfectly supplied with the means of communication with the Wolga, she found it indispensable to supplement the northern line with a more direct and assured route to the west, which route should traverse the Turcoman steppe viâ Merv and Askabad, and should thus connect Tashkend and Samarcand with the Caspian. And it is quite possible that consideration of this nature—which from a strategical point of view were perfectly sound and proper—may have had some weight in determining the course of events, combined, as they naturally were, with a full appreciation of the advantages in respect to prestige and military power which must accrue from the creation of a new empire in Central Asia; but I must adhere to my view that neither strategy, nor lust of conquest, nor military glory, nor any of the thousand and one motives which in matters of peace and war ordinarily actuate nations, was the governing principle in directing the Russian advance into Central Asia. That principle was, I believe, an intense desire to reach the threshold of India, not for the purpose of direct or immediate attack, but with a view to political pressure on Great Britain, with which Power she would thus, for the first time, be brought in territorial contact.
With this conviction strong on my mind, and with a lively sense of the inconvenience to India of Russian contiguity, is it surprising that I should feel constrained to put the following questions? Ought we to have remained passive while the meshes were thus being woven round us? Ought we not rather to have impeded by all the means at our command the passage of the Russian columns from the Caspian to Merv? There were many such means available. We might have persuaded Persia, whose jealousy was already excited by the movement of the Russian columns along her frontier, to interdict that supply of grain and transport animals from Khorassan which was indispensable to a successful advance. We might have furnished the Tekkehs of Akhal with arms and money to resist the invaders. We might have warned the Russian Government in plain but forcible language that her occupation of Merv would infallibly lead to war. It is impossible, indeed, to acquit ourselves of shortcoming in this respect. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that, by a want of firmness in action as in language, the crisis which now threatens us has been unduly accelerated. I have no wish to reopen old sores, or to revive the acrimonious strife of 1881, when the questions of the evacuation of Candahar and the abandonment of the Quetta railway were debated with the keenness of political disagreement, embittered by the virulence of party feeling; nor, indeed, although strongly advocating at the time the retention of the Western Afghan capital, and believing as I still do that Russia was mainly encouraged to advance on Merv by our retirement from Candahar, am I at all insensible to the solid advantages which resulted from the adoption by the Government of the day of an opposite course of action. I freely admit three distinct sources of gain. Firstly, the considerable expense of maintaining an independent government in Candahar for the last four years has been saved to the public treasury; secondly, we have avoided local friction with the Dúrání population, which might have seriously hampered us under present circumstances; and, thirdly, we have succeeded during the interval in maintaining friendly relations with the Amir of Cabul, a result which, according to the best authorities—I refer especially to Sir Lepel Griffin’s statement on this head—would have been impossible had he been subjected to the constant sense of humiliation, as well as to the pecuniary loss, occasioned by the dismemberment of his kingdom and the continued presence of a British garrison at Candahar. Yet, admitting the value of such results, I cannot but think them a poor compensation for the cramped position, both military and political, in which we now find ourselves. At any rate, if we were at present established in strength at Candahar as we were in 1881, with the railway completed to that town from Sibi, and with a small detachment occupying Girishk on the Helmend, the improvement in our military position would be at least equivalent to an additional force of 20,000 men in line should hostilities really supervene with Russia, whilst the relations we should have been able to establish during the interval with the Hazáreh and Parsiwán section of the population—relations which must in the future constitute our chief element of strength in the country—would have rendered us almost indifferent to the jealousy and opposition of the Afghans.
Having thus disposed of all preliminary matter, I now take up the frontier question, from which arises our present acute misunderstanding with Russia. Oriental states have notoriously elastic and fluctuating frontiers, and Afghanistan is no exception to the general rule. At different periods, indeed, since the institution of the kingdom of Cabul by Ahmed Shah in 1747, the Afghan power has extended on one side to Cashmire, on another to Deregez in Khorassan, while to the south it has stretched into Beluchistan and even to the frontiers of Sinde. More frequently of late years it has been circumscribed within much narrower dimensions, and has moreover been disintegrated and broken up into three distinct chiefships. The normal condition of the kingdom may be considered to be such as it presented on Shir Ali Khan’s accession to power in 1868, Herat and Candahar being united to Cabul, and the seat of government being established at the eastern capital. It was shortly after this, in 1872, that, on the invitation of Russia, who had already brought Bokhara under her influence, and was exercising a tutelary direction of her affairs, we undertook, in the interests of Shir Ali Khan, to specify the northern districts over which we considered that he was entitled to claim jurisdiction, the object being thus to define a frontier between the Afghans and Uzbegs, which should obviate in the future all risk of collision or misunderstanding. As Russia at that time had no relations whatever with the Turcomans of Merv, it is not very obvious why it should have been thought necessary to protract the Afghan frontier beyond the Bokhara limit to the west of the Oxus. Perhaps the object especially was to protect the Afghan-Uzbeg states of Andekhúd and Mymeneh, which in the time of Dost Mohammed Khan had been subject to Bokhara. Perhaps Russia already contemplated the absorption of Merv, and foresaw that all territory outside of the Afghan boundary would naturally fall into her own hands. At any rate, the memorandum of 1872, better known as the Granville-Gortchakoff arrangement, after defining the Bokhara frontier as far as Khjoa Saleh on the Oxus, went on to name, as districts to be included in Shir Ali’s dominions, “Akcheh, Sir-i-Púl, Mymeneh, Shilbergán, and Andekhúd, the latter of which would be the extreme Afghan possession to the north-west, the desert beyond belonging to independent tribes of Turcomans;” and further: “The Western Afghan frontier between the dependencies of Herat and those of the Persian province of Khorassan is well known and need not be defined.” Now, however much it may be regretted that this memorandum, which was evidently drawn up as a mere basis for negotiation, and not as a formal declaration of territorial rights, was not more explicit in defining the trace of the line, and especially in marking the points at which it would cross the Murgháb and abut on the Heri-rúd, it did at any rate establish two main points of geographical interest. In the first place, it clearly distinguished between the independent Turcoman desert to the north and the Afghan hilly country to the south; and in the second place it naturally, and as a matter of course, assigned to Afghanistan the “dependencies of Herat” to the west of the Murgháb, which dependencies again were divided, it was said, from Persian territory by the “well-known” boundary of the Heri-rúd.
The terms of this agreement were in February 1873 formally accepted by Russia; and, faulty and irregular as the document is from a diplomatic point of view, it has quieted all frontier agitation between the Oxus and Heri-rúd for the last ten years, and would have served the same purpose for another ten years in advance but for the unfortunate intrusion of Russia into the controversy as a sequel to her conquest of Merv.
Russia first reintroduced a discussion on the frontier early in 1882, suggesting, in the interests of peace and order, that the arrangement of 1872-3 should, in respect to the western portion of the line, be complemented by some formal demarcation, determined by actual survey of the country; but as the Tekkehs were then independent, and there seemed to be no advantage in encouraging Russia to absorb their territory up to the line of demarcation, the proposal for a joint commission of delimitation was received by us at the time with some coldness. Two years later, in February 1884, affairs having much advanced in the interim, negotiations were resumed, and in due course (July 1884) commission ad hoc was appointed, General Lumsden being nominated by the British Government, and General Zelenoi by the Russian, with instructions to meet at Serakhs in the following October.
Now, it is quite evident that in the earlier stages of these frontier discussions the Russian Foreign Office understood the provisions of the 1872-3 arrangement, which were held to govern the later negotiation, in their natural and common-sense acceptation. The principle of a distinction between plain and hill was fully recognised, and the phrase “dependencies of Herat” was held necessarily to include the province of Badgheis, a tract which extended from the Paropamisus range to Serakhs, and which had been a dependency of Herat from the time of the Arab conquest. The line on which the commissioners were to be engaged is thus everywhere spoken of by M. de Giers and M. Zinovieff in the preliminary negotiations as a direct line from Khoja Saleh to Serakhs, or to the neighborhood of Serakhs, and there is no hint of any deflection of the line to the south. After the annexation of Merv, however, and especially after M. Lessar had perambulated Badgheis and made a careful study of the valleys of the Kushk and Murgháb rivers, larger views appear to have dawned upon the Russian authorities. Geographical and ethnological conditions were then invented that had never been thought of before. It was discovered that the Paropamisus range was the true natural boundary of Herat to the north, that the district of Badgheis, which lay beyond the range, had been absolved from its allegiance to Herat by efflux of time, Afghan jurisdiction having been suspended during the Turcoman raids which had desolated the district for above fifty years; above all, it was asserted that the Saryk Turcomans who dwelt at Penj-deh and in the valley of the Kushk, well within the Afghan border, must be registered as Russian subjects, because another detachment of the same tribe, who dwelt at Yolatan, beyond the desert and near Merv, had proffered their allegiance to the Czar. Questions of principle of such grave moment, it was further stated, required to be settled by the two European Governments before the commissioners could enter on their duties, and General Zelenoi was accordingly, without further explanation or apology, sent to rusticate at Teflis, regardless of the public convenience or of the respect due to his colleague, who had been waiting for him for four months on the Murgháb with an escort of 500 men and a large gathering of attendants and camp-followers.
The abrupt and discourteous manner in which Russia gave effect to her altered views, by withdrawing her commissioner, was not calculated to improve the prospect of an amicable settlement. Other graver matters, too, soon supervened. Before General Lumsden had arrived at the Heri-rúd, Russia had pushed forward a patrol to Púl-i-Khatún, about fifty miles south of Serakhs, thus occupying one of the points on which the Commission would have had to adjudicate; and subsequently she extended her advance still further into the “debateable” land, placing a strong post at Ak Robát, in the very centre of Badgheis, so as to cut off from the Afghans a famous salt lake which supplies the whole country with salt as far as Meshed and Askabad, and was thus a valuable source of revenue; and also taking possession of the pass and ruined fort of Zulficár, fifty miles south of Púl-i-Khatún, where one of the favorite tracks of the old Turcoman raiders crossed the Heri-rúd, and where an Afghan picket was already stationed. This last aggression, which was later sought to be justified by Russia on the ground of retaliation for an unauthorised Afghan advance on the Murgháb, brought the outposts of the two nations into immediate contact, and would certainly at the time have caused a collision but for General Lumsden’s urgent remonstrances. On the Murgháb, too, affairs were equally critical. As long ago as 1883, before the appointment of a frontier commission was ever thought of, the Amir of Cabul, alarmed by the Russian proceedings at Merv, had established a strong military post at Bala Murgháb, in the Jamshídí country,[1] and about fifty miles short of the Saryk settlement at Penj-deh. This was a purely military precaution, with no political significance, and could give offence to no one. In March of the following year, however, the situation was a good deal altered. Owing to a visit from M. Lessar, who came from Merv for the express purpose of testing the fidelity of the Saryk Turcomans to the Amir of Cabul, and who was generally regarded as the forerunner of a Russian advance, so much alarm was created in the neighborhood that application was made to the commandant at Bala Murgháb to send a detachment of his troops to Penj-deh for the protection of the Saryk tribesmen; and it was fortunate that this requisition was complied with, for otherwise the chances are that the Afghans would have lost the place, as the Russians were actually preparing to attack it.