The Persian siege of Herat

The roots of the crises of 1839, as has been long acknowledged, lay in Persia. In 1813, and again in 1828, Russia decisively defeated Fateh ‘Ali Shah Qajar and annexed substantial territory in what is now Armenia and Azerbaijan. After the second of these victories, under the Treaty of Turkmanchai, Russia acquired a preponderant influence at the court of Tehran and established a permanent legation. The destruction of the Russian mission and the murder of Alexander Griboedov in 1829 were only a temporary setback to the growth of Russian power in Persia, since it was based on the presence of overwhelming military forces in Transcaucasia.Footnote ²⁹ These developments were viewed with growing alarm in London and Calcutta as a threat to Indian security, which had come to be seen as vital to sustaining Britain's status as the world's greatest power since the end of the Napoleonic wars.Footnote ³⁰ Atkin has argued that Russia's two successful wars with Persia were the product of accident rather than design, and were certainly not originally intended to form part of a drive towards India.Footnote ³¹ In June 1832, Count K.V. Nesselrode (1780–1862), the Russian foreign minister, wrote to the new Russian envoy to Tehran, Count I.O. Simonich (1792–1855), stating that he believed the British had acquiesced to the terms of the Treaty of Turkmanchai and that he did not foresee any serious political differences emerging between Britain and Russia in Persia.Footnote ³² This judgement turned out to be overly sanguine. As Russian trade spread through Mazandaran and Persian Azerbaijan, and the Qajars increasingly seemed to be doing Russia's bidding, disquiet continued to grow. By 1835, the surgeon to the British mission to Iran, Sir John McNeill (1795–1883), who would later become the official envoy, was convinced that by encouraging expansionist ambitions to the East (where Persia laid claim to sovereignty over the Afghan state of Herat) Russia was using Persia as a tool to threaten British India.Footnote ³³ In 1836, McNeill published an alarmist pamphlet, The Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East, which did much to stimulate domestic Russophobia and had a considerable impact in the highest political circles.Footnote ³⁴ In 1837, his fears appeared to have been fully realized when Muhammad Shah Qajar launched a military expedition against Herat, seemingly encouraged and abetted by Simonich, who accompanied the troops and was present throughout much of what would be a lengthy siege, giving credence to the idea that it was conducted with Russian support.

Debate has raged over whether Simonich exceeded his instructions from St Petersburg by encouraging the attack on Herat. Mikhail Volodarsky concludes that Nesselrode's later assurances that Simonich had defied instructions from St Petersburg were a lie, while Malcolm Yapp writes that Simonich was not responsible for encouraging the assault, but that, in giving a Russian guarantee to a treaty in which Muhammad Shah took the rulers of Kandahar under Persian protection, he had exceeded his brief.Footnote ³⁵ Simonich was a slippery character, and a careful examination of his correspondence and of a self-justificatory memoir written in 1841 does not provide a completely decisive answer to this question: nevertheless, some things are clear. First, that the original initiative to attack Herat came from Muhammad Shah himself; secondly, that Russian support for it was not of long standing; thirdly, that it was designed to protect what the Russians considered to be their legitimate trade interests in Persia and Central Asia, and not as the prelude to an attack on India; and, fourthly, that Simonich became quite conscious that his behaviour was provoking British paranoia on this issue, and that this was something the Russians could and should exploit.

The first assault on Herat in 1832–33 by ‘Abbas Mirza, the heir to the throne (whom the Russians and the British alike were hoping would succeed his ailing father, Fateh ‘Ali Shah) was certainly not encouraged by the Russians.Footnote ³⁶ Immediately after the withdrawal of Persian forces Simonich reported with dismay an interview at Zanjan with Khosro Mirza, ‘Abbas Mirza's son, who stated that his father was planning to renew the attack: Simonich did his best to dissuade him, noting, ‘The ease which they found last year appears to have turned their heads.’Footnote ³⁷ He added in a later despatch that he believed the expedition was a ploy by Fateh ‘Ali Shah to keep his son and his Khorasani troops away from the capital. K.K. Rodofinikin (1760–1838), the head of the Asiatic Department, agreed with Simonich that ‘Abbas Mirza's projects of conquest in Afghanistan spelled disaster for Persia if his father were to die during his absence.Footnote ³⁸ Russian hopes for ‘Abbas Mirza were dashed after his death at Meshed in October 1833, and Simonich's opposition to an attack on Herat seems to have been largely bound up with the prince's fate.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Abbas Mirza's death was followed shortly by that of his father, Fateh ‘Ali Shah, and the British and the Russians briefly combined forces to ensure the smooth succession of a different heir, Muhammad Shah Qajar. The latter revived plans to seize Herat in 1836: Yapp writes that even then Simonich was trying to discourage this, and that his subsequent decision to accompany the Persian forces was because he was anxious to bring a group of Russian deserters serving in the Persian army into custody.Footnote ⁴⁰ Simonich was initially sceptical, particularly when Muhammad Shah proposed leading the troops himself: this was partly because of the personal inconvenience he foresaw, and also because, at this stage, he thought the campaign had scant chance of success.Footnote ⁴¹ When later asking for permission to attend the siege, he did indeed state that this was because his personal intervention was needed to reassure the Russians in the Shah's service that they would not be punished for desertion.Footnote ⁴² However, his opinion rapidly changed once he saw how the British responded to the proposed Herat expedition. In April 1836 he wrote to Nesselrode that, ‘If I take it so much to heart to see these projects succeed, it is precisely because the English are opposing them with all their means.’Footnote ⁴³ At this stage he claimed to be unaware of why the proposed invasion seemed to worry the British so much: six weeks later, in what was apparently a personal letter to Rodofinikin, he wrote: ‘Naturally I asked myself what reasons guide England in this minute surveillance of the military establishments of Persia. . . What are they afraid of? Their precarious situation in India.’ His claim that it was only in the previous few days that he had realized that this was the cause of English jumpiness was probably disingenuous, but, having prepared the ground with his superiors, he now offered this both as an example of how the English misjudged Russia, and also as a diplomatic opportunity to be exploited.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his later memoir he wrote that Persia had become a ‘spectre’ that robbed the London cabinet of rest, as they interpreted the simplest events as a putative attack on India.Footnote ⁴⁵

However, Simonich's satisfaction at having rattled the British rapidly turned to fear once he received confirmation of rumours that they had responded by sending an envoy to Afghanistan, and he melodramatically foresaw the complete eclipse of Russian power in Central Asia. Simonich argued for the creation of a powerful Afghan buffer state under Persian suzerainty and Russian protection to counter this threat, something he attempted to bring about himself by undertaking, on his own authority and initiative, to guarantee a treaty between Muhammad Shah and the Sardars of Kandahar.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simonich did not deny that he had exceeded his brief somewhat, but justified it in terms that reveal an overweening ambition and sense of self-importance: ‘[Any] minister of Russia, sought out on both sides, finding himself in such favourable circumstances, and able with the stroke of a pen to render his nation the arbiter of the Orient—would he not have profited from such a fine occasion? I gave the guarantee.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In August 1837 Simonich was removed from his post in Tehran, but it is not clear whether this was because St Petersburg thought he had been insubordinate or because Simonich himself was anxious to rejoin his wife (the beautiful Princess Orbeliani) and their ten children in Tiflis.Footnote ⁴⁸ He was replaced by A.O. Duhamel (1801–1880), the former Russian envoy to Egypt. Contrary to Mosely's suggestion, Duhamel does not appear to have been explicitly instructed to repudiate Simonich's guarantee of the treaty with the Sardars of Kandahar.Footnote ⁴⁹ He did not arrive in Tehran until September 1838, and while still en route he sent repeated requests to Nesselrode asking for a decision on the matter, himself advocating further support for the Afghan ruler of Kabul, Dost Muhammad Khan, against British aggression. In December 1838 he wrote:

This fear of being perceived as weak by ‘Asiatics’ was a recurring theme in all Russian thinking on Central Asia over the course of the nineteenth century, and here it was compounded by a fear that they were losing ground to the British. In 1839 it became clear that the British were going to invade Afghanistan, and at this stage the hollowness of Russia's pretensions to be able to give direct assistance to Dost Muhammad were clearly revealed. Nesselrode chose to present this to the tsar as a case of Asiatic cunning and intrigue, writing that Simonich had been used as a tool by Dost Muhammad and the Sardars of Kandahar, and he launched a diplomatic rapprochement with Britain in an unsuccessful attempt to avert the invasion.Footnote ⁵¹ The former envoy became the scapegoat, condemned for having provoked the British invasion of Afghanistan, which, until the disasters of 1842, the Russians believed to have been a success, permanently establishing British power in Central Asia to their detriment. Duhamel, carefully eliding his own earlier advocacy of Russian intervention in Afghanistan, wrote:

Simonich himself was unrepentant, and considered that a golden opportunity to knock back the British in Central Asia had been lost: ‘the fate of India was in our hands’.Footnote ⁵³ In fact, within a few months the Anglo-Sadozai regime in Kabul would fall, and the longer term significance of the British reaction to the siege of Herat would be clear—namely, that it was one of the factors that had caused them to overreach themselves disastrously in Afghanistan.

The British and Russian missions to Afghanistan

British policy on the Indian empire's northwest frontier in this period has been the subject of exhaustive study over the last 50 years: Edward Ingram concluded that countering the Russian threat on a global scale was the paramount concern,Footnote ⁵⁴ and Yapp that significant disagreement existed between different ‘schools’ of frontier policy, but that they were more narrowly concerned with the defence of India itself. Most recently, as part of a (very welcome) attempt to escape the stranglehold which the so-called ‘Great Game’ has exercised on the Anglophone historiography of Central Asia and give local actors their proper due, Benjamin Hopkins has argued that the British were much more concerned with the potential threat from Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Khalsa—and with the power of rumour to destabilize their rule in India—than they were with the distant Russian menace.Footnote ⁵⁵ None of these arguments is wholly satisfactory, largely because to escape from the preoccupations found in British documents, as advocated by Hopkins, one needs to find alternative sources—either in Russian or Persian—which none of these authors has managed to do. The fact that the British feared that mere rumours of a Russian advance might be sufficient to threaten the East India Company, even without an actual invasion, was certainly the case and Hopkins’ suggestion that the emphasis on the Russian threat reflected a bureaucratic need for a recognizable and comprehensibly European opponent is intriguing (if, in my view, unproven, particularly given the British tendency to characterize the Russians as oriental and inscrutable). Although he is quite correct that various parties emphasized the Russian menace in official correspondence in order to push forward an expansionist agenda, the suggestion that this obscured a more profound fear of Ranjit Singh is less convincing: the evidence presented by Hopkins himself suggests that, while Sikh ambitions in Sind and towards Peshawar were a cause of concern, it was only after Ranjit Singh's death in the summer of 1839 that the Anglo-Indian leadership really began worrying about political instability in the Punjab and the danger posed by a leaderless Khalsa.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yapp has shown convincingly how, after some debate, by 1837 Lord Auckland (1784–1849), the governor-general, had decided that the East India Company's alliance with the Sikh ruler was the key to British security. Nothing could be allowed to compromise this, least of all the interests of the amirs of Sind and the Barakzai rulers of Afghanistan, chief among whom (although it took a while for Auckland to realize this) was Dost Muhammad Khan at Kabul, who had deposed the Sadozai ruler Shah Shuja ul-Mulk in 1809. Dost Muhammad deeply resented the seizing of Peshawar from his brother, Sultan Ahmad Khan, by the Sikhs in 1833, at a time when he had been distracted by an unsuccessful attempt by Shuja ul-Mulk to regain his throne (with, so the Barakzais suspected, covert British support).Footnote ⁵⁷ Dost Muhammad's failure to obtain any kind of redress from the British at the time, together with the Persian threat to his western frontier, had prompted him to make approaches both to them and to the Russians.

This was the political background to Captain Alexander Burnes's (1805–1841) mission to Kabul in autumn 1837. Burnes was visiting Afghanistan for the second time, having passed through Kabul in 1831 on his celebrated journey to Bukhara, when he was accompanied by his Kashmiri secretary, Mohan Lal.Footnote ⁵⁸ He was not the first British ‘expert’ on Afghanistan: that distinction belonged to John Lewis, better known as Charles Masson, a deserter from the Company's army who became a newswriter in Kabul and whose (unacknowledged) advice and assistance had been crucial to Burnes's introduction to Kabuli society six years earlier.Footnote ⁵⁹ Burnes's brief on this occasion was to resolve the dispute between the Afghans and the Sikhs, and to draw up a commercial treaty, but he rapidly exceeded his remit. The reappearance of a British agent at Kabul encouraged the amir to believe that some sort of restitution of Peshawar might be possible in return for an alliance with the British. This was also the policy advocated by Burnes himself, in direct contradiction of what he knew to be his superiors’ views and the ostensible purpose of his mission. In October 1837 he was already boasting to his friend Captain G.L. Jacob at Rajkot that he had abandoned commercial negotiations in favour of political intrigue, and was about to arrange an alliance with Dost Muhammad and a Sikh withdrawal from Peshawar in return for Afghan tribute.Footnote ⁶⁰

Burnes would soon discover his error—the government of India had no intention of putting pressure on Ranjit Singh to withdraw from Peshawar, and Dost Muhammad had no intention of paying tribute to a non-Muslim ruler. All parties made severe misjudgements—Dost Muhammad had exaggerated expectations of what the British would offer, Burnes exaggerated the Russian threat and went far beyond what Calcutta was prepared to support, while Auckland misunderstood Dost Muhammad's position, thinking that he feared further attacks from the Sikhs, and greatly overestimated the value of a British alliance to the Afghan ruler.Footnote ⁶¹

Three factors helped to raise the stakes in Afghanistan and convince the British that there was a real danger of Russian influence being established within a few hundred miles of their Indian frontier. The first, as we have seen, was the Persian attack on Herat in 1837. The second was the preparation of a punitive Russian expedition to Khiva, and the third was the dramatic arrival in Kabul of a Russian envoy, Captain Ivan Viktorovich Vitkevich (1809–1839) of the Orenburg Cossacks, just a few weeks after Burnes. This prompted the latter to write to his brother-in-law, Major James Holland, with great excitement:

In his official report to Lord Auckland, Burnes also referred to ‘This dazzling specimen of caligraphy [sic]’.Footnote ⁶³ The file on the Vitkevich mission in the Russian Imperial Foreign Policy Archive contains neither the original (which presumably remained with Dost Muhammad) nor even a copy of the text of this magnificent document, but judging from the translation (from Russian via Persian into English), which Burnes forwarded to Auckland, it was formal and fairly innocuous. The letter to Dost Muhammad from Simonich caused more misgivings, as he had written: ‘I hope that on his [Vitkevich’s] arrival at your Court you will treat him with consideration, and trust him with your secrets.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Although Burnes was initially suspicious of Vitkevich's credentials, he subsequently wrote to Calcutta that he was sure that the envoy was who he professed to be and had full authority to negotiate at Kabul.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless there have been suggestions that Simonich exceeded his instructions in writing to Dost Muhammad, and that Vitkevich's mission was unauthorized. Given how large this mission has tended to loom in British accounts of the origins of the First Afghan War as evidence of the reality of the Russian threat, it requires more detailed examination from a Russian perspective.

In a statement to the Asiatic committee in May 1835, Nesselrode had attempted to lay out the correct response to the emissaries Russia had been receiving from India and Afghanistan requesting assistance in fighting off English aggression. While acknowledging the benefits that would accrue were Russia to extend friendly trade relations in the region, Nesselrode added that: ‘entering into relations with Afghanistan and India must be done with care and extreme circumspection, in order not to excite the habitual distrust of foreigners, and in particular the English Government’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although exchanges of presents and trade agreements could be authorized, there could be no guarantees of protection or support. In May 1836 this policy was tested by the arrival in Orenburg of Hussain ‘Ali, an envoy from Dost Muhammad Khan, accompanied by Vitkevich, who had met him while on a mission to Bukhara. Hussein ‘Ali bore letters to the tsar and the governor of Orenburg, V.A. Perovsky (1794–1857) which appealed to Russia to grant him the same degree of support as that which the Persian government now enjoyed, to enable him to counter the Sadozais, the Sikhs, and the British.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perovsky was the central figure in Russian policy towards Central Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century: the illegitimate (but acknowledged) son of one of Russia's greatest magnates, Count A.K. Razumovsky, he was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars (where he had been wounded at Borodino) and was ennobled in his own right by Alexander I. He had a close personal relationship with Nicholas I, whom he had accompanied on his educational tours around Russia and Europe before his accession, and whom he had personally protected on St Isaac's Square during the Decembrist Revolt.Footnote ⁶⁸ As such, his views carried considerable weight in St Petersburg, and he did not doubt that this represented a golden opportunity to halt what appeared an unstoppable English advance in Central Asia:

Rodofinikin, the head of the Asiatic Department, was not quite so eager to embroil Russia in the affairs of Kabul. He expressed doubts about Hussain ‘Ali's credentials, citing two previous envoys from Dost Muhammad and a bogus envoy from Lucknow called Kafayet Khan who had turned up in Tiflis the year before, escorted by Simonich, who accepted his bona fides, but whom Rodofinikin claimed had been sent by the English as a spy.Footnote ⁷⁰ What also troubled him was that Hussain ‘Ali had been in Russia before, when he accompanied a refugee Sadozai prince called Shahzada Farrukh to Orenburg, a circumstance Rodofinikin thought rather suspicious:Footnote ⁷¹ ‘he seems to us rather strange and wonderful: how can the Khan of Kabul [sic] have decided to send him to Russia, when he could not have been unaware that he had visited us before with a prince of that very dynasty which he overthrew?’Footnote ⁷² Rodofinikin also thought the tone of the letters unusually subservient for an Asiatic monarch. Perovsky disagreed, insisting that the letters from Dost Muhammad were genuine, and that he had probably chosen Hussain ‘Ali because of his previous familiarity with the Russians, while the subservient tone reflected the immense pressure the amir was under. In this, as in most other aspects of the Afghan mission, Perovsky's views prevailed. Hussain ‘Ali was granted a passport and allowed to proceed to St Petersburg, where Rodofinikin interviewed him personally.Footnote ⁷³ He would be accompanied by the same young, newly promoted Cossack officer who had brought him to Orenburg from Bukhara, an exiled Polish nobleman called Jan Prosper Witkiewicz (Russified to Ivan Vitkevich) who had become Perovsky's unlikely protégé.

Vitkevich is an intriguing, enigmatic figure. He was exiled from Vilna in 1822 at the age of 14, together with five schoolmates from the gymnasium, one of whom, Peslyak, later recorded his experiences in a short memoir (which, together with the reminiscences of the military topographer I.F. Blaramberg, constitutes our principal source for Vitkevich's biography). Their crime was membership of a ‘revolutionary-national’ organization called the ‘Black Brothers’: two of the other accused were sentenced to death, and although this was commuted to imprisonment, one died mad in gaol. Vitkevich was sent to serve as a private soldier in Orsk, and the remaining three to different steppe fortresses. Here they were placed under harsh military discipline and forbidden to write letters, even to their families.Footnote ⁷⁴ Where Peslyak sought solace in natural history, teaching children how to read, giving dancing classes, and learning how to make shoes and boots, Vitkevich devoted himself to learning oriental languages and understanding the steppe culture that surrounded him. In 1829 he had a well-known encounter with the German natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt, at that time carrying out geographical research for the Russian government, who was amazed to find a complete collection of his works in the young soldier's quarters, and to whom Vitkevich is supposed to have confided a plan to escape from Orenburg across the steppe to India. Notwithstanding this apparent indiscretion, under Governor Sukhtelen, Vitkevich was promoted to officer cadet and appointed a translator with the Orenburg frontier commission. He seems to have attracted Perovsky's attention immediately after the latter took up his post as governor of Orenburg in 1833: soon Vitkevich had been commissioned as an ensign and sent on a mission to Bukhara, from which he returned with accurate information and maps of his route which apparently earned him an audience with the tsar.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was unsurprising then that Perovsky wrote to Nesselrode in 1836 to say that Vitkevich had more than made up for his youthful political mistakes at the Vilna gymnasium, and that he would be the ideal person to accompany the Afghan ambassador and act as his translator, first in St Petersburg, and then on the return journey to Kabul via Persia.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, Hussain ‘Ali fell ill in Moscow, and although he eventually reached Tiflis and was sent on from there by Baron Rozen to Tabriz and Tehran, he does not appear to have reached Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁷ Vitkevich instead took charge of the tsar's official letter to Dost Muhammad, and Nesselrode authorized him to continue alone to the Caucasus (where he met Blaramberg, who accompanied him as far as Tabriz) and then on through Persia to Kabul.Footnote ⁷⁸ His instructions from Nesselrode indicated that it would be up to Simonich to decide whether to send him on to Kabul or not, depending on the political situation. If he were to carry on, then he was to urge the Afghan rulers of Kabul and Kandahar to unite in a strong confederation to resist the British, but without making any offer of direct assistance.Footnote ⁷⁹ He was also told to try to reach a trade agreement, to encourage Afghan merchants to travel to the great fair at Nizhny Novgorod, and to gather as much information as possible about Afghanistan and the relations of its rulers with the British. In Tehran he met Simonich and may have received further, verbal instructions from him: Simonich himself later claimed that he had simply repeated St Petersburg's orders, although, had he told Vitkevich to give assurances of Russian military support, he would have been unlikely to admit it.Footnote ⁸⁰ From Tehran Vitkevich proceeded first to the royal encampment at Herat, where he had an audience with Muhammad Shah, before continuing to Kandahar and Kabul, where his appearance so startled Burnes.Footnote ⁸¹

Hereafter Vitkevich's story is incomplete, as the documents relating to his embassy to Afghanistan include only the most formal communications from him concerning his whereabouts, together with inaccurate reports that he had left Afghanistan for Khiva and been killed there (in fact, he returned safely to the Russian encampment at Herat in June 1838, accompanied by the son of one of the rulers of Kandahar).Footnote ⁸² On 9 May 1839, shortly after returning to St Petersburg, Vitkevich shot himself in his room at the Hotel ‘Parizh’, having first supposedly burned all the notes and materials he had brought back with him from Afghanistan.Footnote ⁸³ As L.G. Senyavin (1805–1861), the new director of the Asiatic Department, noted in a personal letter to Perovsky shortly afterwards: ‘In a word, with him perished all the information about Afghanistan which would now be particularly precious and useful to us. Only what he managed to relate to me about it is known.’Footnote ⁸⁴ As it is, the file on Vitkevich's mission contains just four personal letters, all written to Vitkevich while he was in Kabul. Three were from V.I. Dal’ (1801–1872), Perovsky's secretary and later Russia's greatest lexicographer, who within a year would be accompanying the force marching on Khiva.Footnote ⁸⁵ Dal’ had kept Vitkevich abreast of events in the steppe, taking advantage of their shared skill in Oriental languages to write most place names in the Arabic script.Footnote ⁸⁶

Vitkevich and Dal’ had become close friends after the latter's posting to Orenburg in 1833, and Vitkevich wrote to him from the time of his departure with Hussain ‘Ali to St Petersburg in August 1836 until he left Tehran for Kandahar in September 1837 on what he described as his ‘labours of Hercules’ (Gerkulesovskiya trudy). The letters reveal a wry sense of humour, and impatience at the length of his superiors’ deliberations as he waited with Hussain ‘Ali in St Petersburg in the summer of 1836. He refers to the British as ‘artful’ (khitrosplemmenyi), but the context was a whimsical passage in which he asked why they had not yet built a ‘self-flyer’ (samolet —the word that would eventually become the Russian for ‘aeroplane’) which would have allowed him a better view of the Caucasus. He reflected little on the political implications of his mission, writing only that he felt amply rewarded for it by the adventures he had already had and the new sights he had seen.Footnote ⁸⁷

The only other surviving materials from Vitkevich's Afghan mission appear to be a series of brief descriptions of the routes from Persia to Afghanistan compiled by him en route to Kabul, which were published in 1853 by Blaramberg, who claimed he had obtained them from Vitkevich's travelling companion, one ‘Abduwahhab. Intriguingly, Blaramberg also referred to ‘Abduwahhab's own account of the journey, written in Persian, which, if it ever comes to light, might give more insight into Vitkevich's character and activities.Footnote ⁸⁸ In its absence, however, we are little closer to understanding the man or why he shot himself. One explanation, which later reached the British via their letter-writer at Bokhara, was that Vitkevich felt humiliated because St Petersburg had repudiated the offers of support he had made to Dost Muhammad Khan.Footnote ⁸⁹

Although this and similar rumours from British sources have been uncritically repeated since as evidence of a ‘disavowal’ of Vitkevich's mission that led to his suicide,Footnote ⁹⁰ this is unlikely, partly because he had only just returned to Russia and had not even submitted a full report, but primarily because there is every indication that the authorities in St Petersburg were extremely pleased with the outcome of his mission. Vitkevich had returned to Tehran in March 1839, where Muhammad Shah Qajar awarded him the order of the Lion and the Sun, with St Petersburg's approval.Footnote ⁹¹ He reached St Petersburg in May, where he was given a preliminary, congratulatory debriefing by Senyavin, who pronounced himself baffled by his subsequent suicide, writing to Perovsky that in the eight days after his arrival in St Petersburg Vitkevich had seemed in excellent spirits, and that he was about to be transferred to the Guards, among other signs of imperial approval:

Vitkevich's suicide note gave no clues (assuming its reliability). He made no mention of his mother, brother or friends, and simply stated that he was taking his life of his own accord and gave details of various debts that were to be settled.Footnote ⁹³ It is always possible that, as Sir John Kaye later alleged, he was murdered or driven to suicide, and that Senyavin, in this letter to his principal patron, was somehow seeking to disguise this, but this seems implausible and melodramatic, reflecting little more than British prejudices about the nature of the Russian state.Footnote ⁹⁴ Rather than looking to the outcome of his Afghan mission, as Senyavin's rather chilling reference to the ‘Polish jig’ (Pol’skaya zhiga v nem razlilos’) suggests, we should instead seek the reason in his experiences as an exile. At least one of Vitkevich's fellow exiles became so depressed that he shot himself, and Peslyak wrote that he also came very close to it. Blaramberg writes that, in contrast to the playful letters he wrote to Dal’ at this time, Vitkevich appeared permanently melancholy when they were travelling together from Tiflis to Tabriz, saying that he was fed up with life, and brandishing a pistol before him with the words: ‘Avec се pistolet la, je me brulerai un jour la cervelle.’Footnote ⁹⁵ The reason for his suicide probably lies in the trauma of youthful exile and separation from his family, and perhaps a sudden surge of self-loathing and disgust at having served so well the state that had inflicted this on him.Footnote ⁹⁶ Suicide in early nineteenth-century Russia was often an overtly political act, an ultimate assertion of the autonomy of the individual in the face of autocratic power, and this is another possible reading of Vitkevich's death, although not necessarily the one he intended.Footnote ⁹⁷ What is more certain is that Vitkevich's melancholy fate contributed to the aura of mystery that he had acquired among the British, and lent credence to rumours of the sinister nature of Russian intrigue in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁹⁸

The official nature of Vitkevich's mission is not in doubt, but it is less clear what he had been authorized to offer—his written instructions were vague and the letter he carried contained little more than expressions of friendship and hopes for the establishment of trade relations, but while in Kabul he seems to have offered more, including financial assistance, in the struggle against the British and the Sikhs.Footnote ⁹⁹ To the extent that he was ‘Perovsky's man’, he probably had the governor of Orenburg's authority to offer a degree of Russian financial support, and Volodarsky argues convincingly that, in this, Perovsky and the tsar had overridden objections from the more cautious Nesselrode.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Vitkevich's presence was certainly designed to strengthen Dost Muhammad's resolve to resist British blandishments, creating in Afghanistan a barrier to the further encroachment (as the Russians saw it) of British trade and political interests into Central Asia. Almost a mirror image, in other words, of what the British were simultaneously trying to achieve in Afghanistan, but not a direct attempt to threaten British security in India. The British response—an outright invasion and occupation of Afghanistan—was disproportionate to the threat posed by Vitkevich and his mission. The Persian attack on Herat was a more concrete threat to India's security, but even as preparations for the deposition of Dost Muhammad were being put in place, Auckland received news that the siege had failed, partly owing to the efforts of a British officer, Eldred Pottinger, in strengthening Herat's defences. Nevertheless, Auckland insisted that the operation must go ahead ‘to raise up a permanent barrier against schemes of aggression from that quarter’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The fear of an extension of Russian influence into Central Asia continued to drive British policy.

It was Burnes who, partly as a means of exaggerating the importance of his mission, talked up the Russian threat (‘a cabinet, Oriental and dark in its diplomacy’Footnote ¹⁰²), and who gradually, with McNeill in Tehran, and the foreign member of the Governor-General's Council, William Hay Macnaghten (1793–1841), won over the more cautious Auckland to the necessity of pursuing an aggressive policy in Afghanistan. Burnes would reiterate this position in his last despatch from Afghanistan, sent from Jalalabad on the road back to Punjab, stating that ‘consequences of a most serious nature’ would flow from the situation in Central Asia unless the British government ‘applies a prompt, active and decided counteraction’ to the machinations of Russia, ‘a nation which makes no scruple to dazzle men's minds by promises’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Burnes's solution to this problem, as is well known, was the creation of a strong, unified Afghan state able to resist Persian and Russian aggression, and he exceeded his instructions by promising British arms and money to Dost Muhammad Khan's brothers at Kandahar to resist the Persians. For this he was rebuked by Auckland, who feared that the creation of a more powerful Afghan state on British India's frontiers might become a threat in itself, and would certainly be viewed unfavourably by Britain's oldest and most important ally in the region, Ranjit Singh. At this stage Auckland professed to attach ‘little importance’ to the arrival of a Russian agent in Kabul, but later revised this opinion.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Auckland would eventually write to the Court of Directors that, although he had no objection in principle to the tsar's original letter to Dost Muhammad, he viewed Simonich's role with much greater suspicion.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

A month later Burnes wrote: ‘I am at Simla with the Governor General, who has determined to place Shah Shooja on the throne in the cold weather’ and suggested that Vitkevich's presence at Kabul had proved crucial in reaching this decision.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yapp has shown how rapidly—and with how little consideration—what was originally supposed to be an arm’s-length mission mounted by the Sikhs in support of Shuja's restoration evolved into the re-creation of Afghanistan as a fully fledged buffer state under British control, the cornerstone of a new system of imperial defence. Auckland would later claim that Dost Muhammad had already made up his mind to ally himself with the Russians and Persians as early as November 1837, but there is no evidence for this—and Burnes's negotiations suggest the contrary. It was an ex post facto justification for the aggressive policy Auckland had decided to embark upon early in 1838. Auckland believed that Shuja's ‘legitimacy’ as the representative of the senior branch of the Durrani dynasty would lead the Afghans to welcome his return and the ousting of the ‘usurper’, Dost Muhammad. Subsequent events would show that Auckland had overestimated Shah Shuja's popularity in Afghanistan, something that became obvious within weeks of the Sadozai ruler's restoration. Nevertheless the conviction persisted that the blood descent of a ruler counted for more with ‘Asiatics’ than his popularity or competence, and that the hierarchical nature of Afghan society meant that simply replacing one ruler with another would be sufficient to establish British control.

Thus crucial decisions over Afghan policy were taken on the basis of faulty intelligence and an exaggerated fear of Russia by a small group of officials in India, albeit within parameters set by London where, at that particular juncture, Palmerston was quite happy to see Russia thus baulked.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By the middle of 1839 the British also had another justification for advancing beyond the Indus—long-standing rumours that the Russians were planning an invasion of Khiva had been confirmed. This caused concern, not because the British thought it a prelude to an invasion of India or Afghanistan, but because it would create unrest and rumour in India itself, and make the Russian alternative to British patronage in Central Asia seem all the more attractive. As Auckland wrote a year later (by which time—although the British did not yet know this—the last remnants of Perovsky's frostbitten and scurvy-ridden troops were staggering back into Orenburg):

The genesis of the Khiva expedition

If the British invasion of Afghanistan—which was widely reviled even at the time as an unprovoked attack on a neighbouring ruler—seemed to come out of the blue, the Russian invasion of Khiva was generally seen as justified by substantial grievances. The Russians could point to Khivan raids on caravan traffic and repeated attempts to extract revenue from nomadic groups over whom the Russians claimed sovereignty. The more historically minded could also invoke the massacre of Prince Bekovitch-Cherkassky's expedition in 1717, or the supposed ‘political testament’ of Peter the Great, which called for the subjugation of Khiva.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Above all, as Madhavan Palat has suggested, the presence of what were variously estimated as hundreds or thousands of Russian slaves in the Khanate, captured by Kazakh or Turkmen raiders along the Orenburg line and the Caspian coast, played a crucial role in legitimizing and motivating the Russian advance. This was despite the fact that the number of Russian slaves was grossly exaggerated (in fact, most of the Khanate's slaves were Shia Persians), that Russia itself was engaged in slave trafficking in the Caucasus in the same period, and that many of the ‘slaves’ were in fact prisoners of war.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The effectiveness of these complaints in a diplomatic sphere dominated by the rhetoric of anti-slavery can be seen in the government of India's acknowledgment that it was a legitimate justification for a punitive expedition, even though it feared that a permanent Russian presence in Khiva might be damaging to Indian security.Footnote ¹¹¹ What gave these reasons for attacking Khiva force and urgency within Russia was the new, self-conscious sense among the administrative and military elite that they were the servants of a European ‘Great Power’ with prestige and standards to maintain, a tendency Michael Khodarkovsky identified on the steppe frontier as early as the 1750s (where it took the form of a mission civilizatrice), and which reached its apotheosis in 1814, when Alexander I marched into Paris.Footnote ¹¹²

The attack on Khiva had a lengthy genesis: in 1804 Prince G.S. Volkonsky, the governor of Orenburg, proposed a punitive expedition to Alexander I, although at that time there were other pressing foreign policy priorities. In 1819 Captain N.N. Murav’ev was despatched on a mission to Khiva from Tiflis and succeeded not only in traversing the Turkmen country to reach the Khivan oasis, but also, more remarkably, in returning alive, but without procuring any lasting agreement or securing the release of any slaves.Footnote ¹¹³ In 1831 the head of the Orenburg Frontier Commission, General G.F. Gens, wrote a strongly worded memorandum on the plight of the Russian prisoners in Khiva, which in 1833 prompted Nesselrode to acknowledge that an expedition ought to be sent to free them, although he was concerned about the cost and the difficulties of the route.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus there was agreement in principle to some sort of punitive expedition even before Perovsky's arrival in Orenburg, although its feasibility had yet to be established. As Zakhar’in recounted it, on taking up his post in 1833 on the death of Governor Sukhtelen, Perovsky was shocked to discover that Kazakhs around the Ural River, while nominally acknowledging Russian sovereignty, were still in the habit of capturing Russian subjects and selling them into slavery in Khiva. One particularly affecting tale concerned a Cossack officer's widow who was kidnapped from Orenburg itself in 1825, on the eve of the first visit to the town by Alexander I. Thanks to the latter's intervention she was eventually found and brought back, but even the autocrat of all the Russias had been forced to offer a large sum to her captors.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Whether this story is true or not, Perovsky clearly felt a strong, almost personal, sense of affront and moral outrage at Khiva's enslavement of Russians. In 1834 he asked the Orenburg Frontier Commission to prepare a list of known Russian prisoners held in Khiva, which eventually amounted to 599 names.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Early the following year he sent a melodramatic memorandum to St Petersburg, advocating a punitive expedition and invoking the common ‘civilizing’ mission of the European powers in the Muslim world:

The sense of competitive imperial emulation emerges clearly: Russia could not be left behind by Britain and France, nor could one of Europe's Great Powers continue to tolerate the insults of a petty Asiatic state like Khiva. The response from the war minister, A.I. Chernyshev (1786–1857), was enthusiastic: he wrote that the tsar was entirely in agreement with the memorandum's sentiments and wished to see a detailed plan for an expedition; once again, Perovsky's close personal connection with Nicholas I had borne fruit.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The first practical consequence of this was an imperial decree of 1836 ordering the detention of over 350 Khivan merchants in the menovoi dvor (Asian caravanserai) outside Orenburg and a total suspension of Russian trade with the Khanate.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Military preparations were temporarily postponed owing to a rebellion among the Kazakhs, and to what the khan of Khiva would later describe to James Abbott as genuine efforts to reach a diplomatic settlement by freeing some of the Russian slaves.Footnote ¹²⁰ Ivanin wrote that the Russians simply saw these as delaying tactics, possibly inspired by British interference.Footnote ¹²¹ Perovsky himself, while paying lip-service to the idea that the trade embargo might be used to bring Khiva to the negotiating table, made it clear that nothing less than the immediate release of what he claimed were 3,000 Russian prisoners in the Khanate would do: ‘the Khivans meet their guests with knives, poison or the shackles of a prisoner’.Footnote ¹²² In practice he was not prepared to negotiate: when two Khivan envoys arrived with five freed Russian prisoners in August 1838 Perovsky refused to receive them, had them detained with the merchants, and interrogated the ex-slaves for useful information.Footnote ¹²³ In March 1839 the special committee, consisting of Perovsky himself, Nesselrode, and Chernyshev, which met to consider Perovsky's proposal for a military expedition, added a further consideration:

In other words, while the Khiva expedition would hopefully combat British influence by reviving both Russia's trade and her prestige in Central Asia, they were anxious to avoid an open clash. The committee added that alluding to the Afghan example would be a sufficient response to any British complaints, but it would be better to wait until the outcome there had been decided. In April 1840, Nesselrode wrote to Perovsky to let him know the substance of what had passed between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the British government, which evidently regarded the Khivan expedition with suspicion, seeing it as a response to their invasion of Afghanistan and an attempt to meddle with its affairs. Nesselrode claimed to have dispelled these fears by explaining Russia's grievances against Khiva and categorically denying that the expedition had anything to do with the invasion of Afghanistan.Footnote ¹²⁵

Nevertheless, the committee also cited Afghanistan when it came to the expedition's aims, one of which would be to depose the khan of Khiva, Allah Quli, and replace him with a Russian client: ‘this measure, which is not against the customs of the asiatics, would be entirely consistent with the actions of the British in their current expedition against Dost Muhammad Khan, the declared purpose of which [. . .] lies in the deposition of its ruler and the restoration of its former Shah, Shuja ul-Mulk’.Footnote ¹²⁶ However the proposed candidate, Sultan Bai Muhammad Aichuvakov, head of the western section of the Orenburg Kazakhs, wisely turned down the opportunity to become the Russian Shah Shuja (although he would later accompany the expedition). Instead Perovsky proposed replacing Allah Quli with his younger brother, Rahman Quli Inaq, who was rumoured to be ‘a very reasonable man, and, so far as is known, secretly wishes the friendship and patronage of Russia’.Footnote ¹²⁷ There was no indication of where this information had come from, nor indeed of whether the Khan's brother had been made aware of the honour in store for him. The Russians did not even know his name, referring to him simply as ‘Inaq’, which was not a name but a title conventionally bestowed on the younger brother of the khan.Footnote ¹²⁸ Richmond Shakespear, who met Rahman Quli at Hazarasp in 1840, certainly had no inkling that he was under consideration as a potential Russian ally.Footnote ¹²⁹ Despite this, Nesselrode endorsed the proposal, reiterating that by preserving the same dynasty in power it would be agreeable to the understanding of ‘Asiatics’, and again pointed to parallels with British policy in Kabul.Footnote ¹³⁰ Any further details seem to have become swamped in the sheer logistical complexity of sending a military force into the barren steppe in winter, and the plans for Khiva's future government in the event of the expedition's success remained vague until its departure. One of the few indications that any thought had been given to this was a small (and, as it turned out, very premature) pamphlet published in 1840 which contained wildly inaccurate claims about the wealth and resources of Khiva which would accrue to Russia after its conquest.Footnote ¹³¹

Because the Khivan expedition was halted by the weather, Perovsky was later able to claim that it remained militarily undefeated. The political and military planning and intelligence behind the expedition received far less scrutiny than that of the British in Afghanistan, where European troops had been very publicly worsted by supposedly ‘savage’ tribesmen. Instead the Russians emphasized the one engagement they had with the enemy, when a small detachment under Captain Erofeev easily defeated a group of Khivan raiders: in his address to the troops on announcing the decision to retreat, Perovsky made great play of the ‘contemptible’ and ‘cowardly’ nature of the enemy, with which the Russians had failed to come to grips.Footnote ¹³² Although the Russian force was indeed almost certainly superior to anything Allah Quli could have put in the field, it was still small and it seems likely that even if the weather had been more favourable, it would have been exhausted and in severe need of supplies by the time it reached the cultivated lands of the Khanate.

If James Abbott's account is to be believed, Allah Quli Khan was well aware of the size of the advancing force (4,000 to 5,000 men) and of the fact that by January 1840 they were stuck fast in the snow.Footnote ¹³³ Even if other rumours had not reached him before, the khan would have been alerted to the preparation of the expeditionary force when the lengthy and complicated process of assembling the 10,000 camels required for transport began in August 1838.Footnote ¹³⁴ At this stage the cover for the preparations remained a ‘scientific expedition’, but given the prodigious numbers involved, this soon wore rather thin: Ivanin described how already in March 1839 the female traders of the Orenburg bazaar knew that an expedition against Khiva was being prepared, while ‘false’ rumours about Russian movements were circulating in the Steppe.Footnote ¹³⁵

By May 1839 the Kazakhs clearly knew that a military expedition was being prepared, as the Biis (judges) of the Nazarov division wrote to General Gens expressing their relief on learning that it was not intended to chastise them: ‘it is not unknown to your Excellency that our people were afraid of the force which you are sending out, not knowing the reason’—Gens, however, refused the request to be told the route the expedition would take.Footnote ¹³⁶ Rumours of these preparations spread far ahead, as Alexander Burnes had already heard of them in garbled form from his agent in Bukhara in October 1839.Footnote ¹³⁷ Allah Quli thus had ample warning of the Russian advance and had made preparations to resist it.Footnote ¹³⁸ After the expedition's failure, the commander of the Novo-Alexandrovsk fortress sent in a proclamation in ‘Tatar’ that a spy had brought him, which bore the khan of Khiva's seal, and which urged Kazakh and Turkmen Biis and Batyrs (heroes) to join him in fighting against the Russians.Footnote ¹³⁹

Perovsky's scheme to depose a khan who seems to have been a fairly popular ruler was based, as in the case of Auckland's removal of Dost Muhammad, on a mixture of prejudice and poor (or non-existent) intelligence. If at first sight the Russians appeared to have a stronger case for invading Khiva than the British had had in Afghanistan, their specific grievances against Allah Quli Khan were only part of the story. Like the British, they saw their invasion as a means of countering a threat from another great power in Asia and, like the British, they had devised an ill-thought-out scheme to impose a ruler of their choice on a neighbouring state, in the expectation that, as ‘Asiatics’, the population would simply submit. Both powers also indulged in dubious legal justifications for their acts of aggression—the British by claiming that Dost Muhammad was a usurper, while Ivanin later asserted that in the eighteenth century the Khivans had chosen five Khans in succession who were ‘Russian subjects’ by virtue of being ‘Kirgiz’ (Kazakh), and that therefore Russia had an ‘indisputable claim’ to sovereignty over Khiva.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ However, the political failings of the Russian plans for Khiva were never revealed as starkly as were those of the British occupation of Afghanistan, because the Russian forces never reached their destination.

Ignoring the ‘native’ voice

We should perhaps be wary of using hindsight to criticize the follies of 1839, although Perovsky and Auckland were not exactly the sort of people that E.P. Thompson had in mind when he referred to the historian's task as rescuing his subjects ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ From our current standpoint, British and Russian imperialist adventures in Central Asia seem morally repugnant in and of themselves, but it is still important to understand why they were unable to translate their substantial military superiority into victory and territorial annexation—or even a stable diplomatic relationship with the Central Asian states. In the aftermath of the Afghanistan disaster, people flocked to denounce Auckland's policy, but fewer condemnatory voices were heard beforehand. The failure of the Khiva expedition, meanwhile, could be attributed to an Act of God over which nobody had any control. However, in both cases there were contemporary voices that pointed out the errors in British and Russian policy, and it is important to establish why they were not listened to. For Afghanistan, the most celebrated is that of Sir Alexander Burnes—‘the martyr of Kabul’—canonized after his death by Sir John Kaye and by his surviving relatives.Footnote ¹⁴² Although Burnes had initially wanted the British to support Dost Muhammad, once that had been ruled out by Auckland, he agreed to support the alternative policy of restoring Shah Shuja—his private correspondence makes it quite clear that he considered some kind of decisive action to counter Russian intrigues to be the overriding priority, and that his own personal ambition played a substantial part in this.Footnote ¹⁴³

In any case, Burnes's misgivings are so well known that he can hardly be considered a silenced voice, and on the subject of the Russian threat he was listened to —with disastrous results. Instead, even using purely British and Russian accounts, it rapidly becomes clear that the voices that were almost entirely ignored were those of the ‘natives’ or ‘tuzemtsy’. This can be seen, first, in accounts of diplomatic relations, where neither the British nor the Russians were prepared to deal with Central Asian rulers on anything approaching equal terms. This disregard is echoed in much ‘Great Game’-dominated historiography, which views Central Asia as no more than a ‘chessboard’ on which the Great Powers made their moves and ignores the crucial role played by local states and their rulers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Perovsky entirely ignored the repeated attempts of Allah Quli Khan to reach a negotiated settlement of the outstanding grievances between Russia and Khiva. On the khan's side, this included the construction of the Russian fortress at Novo-Alexandrovsk on what he considered to be Khivan territory; for the Russians this matter was not even negotiable.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Russians responded to these overtures (which Ivanin would later describe as a typical instance of Oriental untrustworthiness) by detaining all Khivan ambassadors and merchants and refusing further dialogue.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Meanwhile, both Burnes and Abbott had a greatly exaggerated idea of the attractiveness of a British alliance to Central Asian rulers. Allah Quli Khan had sent a straightforward response to a letter from Pottinger in Herat that had requested him to satisfy Russia's grievances by releasing the slaves at Khiva. After pointing out that Yar Muhammad Khan, who ruled Herat under British auspices, was also a keen slave trader, Allah Quli Khan wrote that he was preparing for conflict with Russia and asked the British to send him some experienced artillerymen as a mark of their good faith.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The government of India consistently refused to offer anything other than empty assurances of friendship. As the prime minister (mehtar) of Khiva bluntly told Abbott: ‘What then have you come hither for? If you will grant none of our demands, of what use is it to call yourselves our allies?’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Similarly, in response to Lord Auckland's grudging offer to ‘restrain’ Ranjit Singh in return for Dost Muhammad's allegiance, Nawab Jabbar Khan, one of the amir's brothers, who was friendlier to the British than any other Barakzai, told Burnes plainly that British promises to ‘protect’ Dost Muhammad against Ranjit Singh were worthless, as the Afghan ruler did not fear an attack from that quarter:

Many of the subsequent mistakes made by Auckland and his cabinet stemmed from a refusal to accept the justice of this remark, as repeated opportunities to establish good diplomatic relations with Dost Muhammad were spurned. The sad tale of the disasters that followed the decision to depose him and set up Shuja ul-Mulk is too well known to be rehearsed at length here, but an inability or refusal to understand local points of view remained a common factor.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As Kim Wagner has shown, although ‘native informants’ remained important to the British in the early nineteenth century and were often invoked to add authority to intelligence reports, the raw information they provided was increasingly ignored or woven into new and fantastical forms if it did not coincide with official preconceptions.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Beyond the frontiers of the East India Company's territory, increasingly the crucial figure was not the independent local ‘newswriter’, but the British agent who reinterpreted his missives to suit his own purposes and repackaged them for Calcutta, of whom Burnes was the pre-eminent example.Footnote ¹⁵² He certainly had a network of informants, who ensured that he knew that all was not well, as he frequently noted in his letters before the disaster.Footnote ¹⁵³ However, in the days leading up to his murder Burnes also ignored numerous warnings from ‘native’ sources. The most vehement of these came from his erstwhile companion, the Kashmiri, Mohan Lal.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Lal survived the massacres, and would subsequently provide some clear-sighted analyses of what went wrong, but it is instructive to compare the reception of his writings on the Kabul disaster with those of British critics such as Burnes, Kaye or David Urquhart. General Pollock, forwarding Lal's report on the affairs of Afghanistan, wrote that ‘The subject is one of two [sic] great importance to be ably treated by a person so indifferently educated as the Moonshee.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ It was clear that most of the value attached to Lal's testimony was because of his association with Burnes: he could be an informant, but not an agent in his own right. Lal was still in Kabul, living in the house of a merchant called ‘Khan Sheree’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He thus had access to better intelligence than either the garrison at Jalalabad or the British hostages seized by the Afghans (the other main sources of information at this stage). His memorandum summed up the various reasons why the rebellion in Kabul had taken place and why the garrison there had failed to quell it. He focused primarily on the inadequacy of Shah Shuja's ministers, the drunkenness of the British troops, the sexual conquests made by their officers among the Afghan women, the decision to withdraw allowances from many of the tribes in Kohistan and along the vital supply route to the Khyber (where he himself had been sent on an unsuccessful placatory mission), continual disagreements between Macnaghten and Burnes, and finally the indecision and double-dealing in which Macnaghten and Elphinstone had indulged after Burnes's murder.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Yapp has since argued convincingly that, important as all these factors were, the root cause of the rebellion was the prospect faced by many of the Kabul-based Afghan elite of seeing their power-base and revenues eroded by the new military structures which the Anglo-Sadozai government was seeking to introduce, but Lal's was surely the earliest complete summary of the failings of British policy and remains one of the most accurate.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Lal also revealed that he had warned Macnaghten that his life was in danger on the eve of his murder by Dost Muhammad's son, Muhammad Akbar Khan, and begged him not to attend his fatal rendezvous with the Afghan leader, but that he had been ignored.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Lal would later reproduce some of these descriptions and conclusions in his Life of Dost Muhammad Khan, which received a strikingly negative critical reaction.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The reviewer for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine described the book as dull, wordy, and stale, adding caustically that in his admiring portrayal of the amir he was ‘thus betraying a certain Oriental laxity of principle which European education and Society might be expected to eradicate’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The Calcutta Review was equally sneering, ‘Historical accuracy being thus set aside, as of impossible attainment, Mohan Lal, Esquire, doubtless, determines to compensate for this important deficiency, by extraordinary graces of style—the excellence of the manner atoning for the imperfections of the matter. Not at all.’ Instead the reviewer took strong exception to what he saw as the deficiencies of Lal's English, while also accusing him of ‘an absence of all capacity to discern the important from the unimportant’.Footnote ¹⁶²

As Bayly and Hopkins have concluded, the growing British tendency to disregard information from ‘native sources’ was a crucial factor in the colossal intelligence failures that surrounded the First Afghan War.Footnote ¹⁶³ In the case of the Khiva expedition, there are clear parallels. The freezing weather may have been beyond Perovsky's control, but he took the decision to continue the advance, even as conditions deteriorated still further—had he turned back earlier many lives would have been saved. Throughout his later memoir of the expedition, Ivanin referred to the Kazakhs on whom the force relied for the management of its camels in the most disparaging terms, as ‘asiatics unworthy of entire confidence’, and bemoaned the lack of reliable information about routes to Khiva because ‘the testimony on these points of the asiatics who have been there, because of their inclination to deceit [obman] and exaggeration, can in no degree be relied upon’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ He often noted the possibility that they might mutiny or go over to the Khivans. Matters came to a head when the columns prepared to move off from the fortification at Aty-Yakshi on the river Emba, which they had only reached with the greatest difficulty, through still deeper snow to the advanced post at Aq Bulaq, when the 300 Kazakh drivers with the leading column refused to carry on; when threatened with death, they ‘stated that they were all prepared to die, but that to go on was against their faith, and that caravans never travelled when there was such a frost’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Two of the ringleaders were then seized and shot, and the crowd eventually dispersed. Revealingly, when Perovsky reminisced about this incident during a recuperative sojourn in Rome, he transformed it into a grotesque anecdote about a ‘mullah’ accompanying the expedition, who refused to obey orders and only yielded once Perovsky had shot two of his sons and was about to send the third to the firing-squad.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ He had chosen to remember it as an instance of Islamic ‘fanaticism’, an interpretation echoed in several other Russian accounts of the ‘mutiny’ and subsequent executions: all refer to this as a moment of crisis, where Perovsky's decisive action saved the column from being stranded in the steppe by their unreliable Kazakh allies. Ivanin also attributed the rebellion to Kazakh ‘fanaticism’ stimulated by Khivan propaganda, placing great emphasis on the ‘wild shouts’ of the Kazakhs and saying nothing about the more practical objections of the drivers to proceeding any further.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Peslyak, however, wrote that it was the freezing conditions that caused the Kazakh drivers to try to halt the expedition,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ and Dal’ wrote that the Kazakhs claimed the camels were simply not up to the journey.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ There is also a striking contrast between what Perovsky reported the Kazakhs as saying in his original missive and the reasons he then adduces for their discontent. It seems clear that it was the sheer insanity of trying to travel in the steppe under such conditions that had aroused the drivers’ anger, not fears of a possible Khivan attack. In effect they were telling Perovsky what he would belatedly discover for himself a month later at Aq Bulaq, when he announced that the expedition would have to turn back owing to the severity of the weather.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ By that time, not only would over half his camels be dead, almost half his men would also be either dead or incapacitated by frostbite and scurvy. In ignoring the views of those who actually lived on the steppe and failing to turn back earlier, when most of his camels were still alive, Perovsky had been guilty of a folly almost as great as that of Macnaghten and Elphinstone at Kabul.

Whether we view Britain and Russia's aims in the region as being primarily those of annexation or dominance, or take at face value the claims made by their leaders that all they sought were stable frontiers, the protection of trade, and the release of slaves, it is clear that both powers systematically undermined these aims through their failure to regard either Central Asian rulers or Central Asian informants as worthy of serious consideration as equal partners, and instead to assume their ‘fanaticism’, ignorance, and bad faith from the very outset.