The Crimean War полностью

Alexander commissioned a report from Sukhozanet, ‘On the Possibility of an Armed Clash between Russia and England in Central Asia’. Although the report rejected the idea of a British military threat, the Tsar persisted in his fear that the British might deploy their Indian army to conquer Central Asia and expel the Russians from the Caucasus. In the spring of 1857 the British steamer Kangaroo and several smaller vessels carrying military supplies for Shamil’s forces had been caught on the Circassian coast. Russia no longer had a Black Sea Fleet to block such acts of intervention into its affairs by the British. Alexander demanded ‘categorical explanations’ from the British government, but received none. The ‘unmentionable infamy’, as he called the Kangaroo affair, reinforced the Tsar’s belief that Russia would not be secure against the British threat as long as the Caucasus remained unconquered and the Central Asian steppe beyond her political control.

Throughout the Crimean War the Russians had considered various ideas for an attack through Central Asia towards Kandahar and India, mainly as a means of diverting British troops from the Crimea. Although these plans were all rejected as impracticable, rumours of a Russian invasion were widely circulated and believed in India, where inflammatory pamphlets called on Muslims and Hindus to take advantage of the exhaustion of the British in the Crimea to rise up against their rule. The outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in the early summer of 1857 encouraged the Tsar to reconsider his Central Asia plans. The Royal Navy could threaten Russia’s coastline in the Baltic, in the Pacific Ocean and in the Black Sea, which was now defenceless as a result of the demilitarization imposed on the Russians by the Paris Treaty. The only place where the Russians could even pretend to mount a counter-threat was in India. The British were extremely sensitive to any threat against their Indian empire, mainly because of their fragile tax-base there, which they dared not increase for political reasons. Few Russians strategists believed in the reality of a campaign against India, but exploiting British nervousness was good tactics.

In the autumn of 1857 the Tsar commissioned a strategic memorandum on Central Asia by a brilliant young military attaché, Nikolai Ignat′ev, who had been brought to his attention after he had represented Russia on the question of its disputed border with Moldavia at the Paris congress. Considering the possibility of a renewed war against Britain, Ignat′ev argued that the only place where Russia stood a chance of victory was in Asia. Russia’s strength in Central Asia was the ‘best guarantee of peace’, so Russia should exploit the Indian crisis to strengthen its position at the expense of Britain in ‘the countries which separate Russia from the British possessions’. Ignat′ev proposed sending expeditions to explore and map the ‘undiscovered’ steppe of Central Asia for the benefit of Russian trade and military intelligence. By developing commercial and diplomatic ties with the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, Russia could turn them into buffer states against British expansion. Giving his approval to the plan, the Tsar sent an exploratory party to Khiva and Bukhara under the leadership of Ignat′ev which concluded economic treaties with the two khanates in the summer of 1858. Officially, the mission had been sent by the Foreign Ministry, but unofficially it was also working for the War Ministry, collecting topographical, statistical and ‘general military information’ on various routes into Central Asia. From the start of the Russian initiative there was a more forward policy, favoured by the followers of Bariatinsky in the War Ministry, to set up protectorates and military bases in the khanates for the conquest of Turkestan and the Central Asian steppe right up to the borders of Afghanistan.⁴⁴