TIBET THE GREAT GAME & TSARIST RUSSIA Dalai Lama CHINA

Tibet : The Great Game and Tsarist Russia

Preface

It is with a sense of deep emotion that I take this opportunity of making my book on the historical events of the early years of this century, in researching which I devoted almost thirty years of my life, accessible to English speaking readers just as the century comes to a close.

I started my work in the early 1960s as a post graduate student at the Institute of Oriental Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences. In Asian politics this period was turbulent and tension-filled because India and China, two great neighbouring powers, who had just previously enunciated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as the cornerstone of their foreign policies, were in a state of war.

Professor G.L. Bondarevsky was my research superviser, and I owe him the deepest gratitude for all his help then, and subsequently during the most crucial moments of my work. It was his suggestion that I study India-China border problems and analyze the events associated with the Shimla Conference of 1913—14 which was crucial to events in the Himalaya.

I began my research at the Lenin Library and subsequently worked at the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian empire. There I discovered numerous files of documents on Tibet, on the Dalai Lama, and regarding the visits of his emissary Agvan Dorjieff on special missions to the Russian Tsar and the like. All these documents had a direct or indirect bearing on the Shimla Conference, but in themselves, it appeared to me, were so interesting in terms of the general problems of Asian politics and Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia, that I decided to concentrate my attention on Russian-Tibetan relations.

 

After defending my thesis in 1966, I was required to study the current problems of international relations in south and central Asia and the Himalaya, but continued collecting materials on Russian-Tibetan relations on the eve of the twentieth century Taking Professor Bondarevsky's advice, I collected documents from the National Archives of India (NAI), and I am extremely grateful to NAI officials for their assistance. These documents in essence confirmed the information I had gleaned from the Russian archives and considerably broadened my knowledge regarding the reaction of the Anglo-Indian government and the British cabinet to Agvan Dorjieff s missions to the Russian Tsar. The result of my research was a book I published in 1977 entitled Tibet in International Relations at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, 1977). This is a substantially revised and expanded version of that book translated into English.

There is of course a very substantial body of Western, Indian, and Russian literature relating to Tibet and Russian-Tibetan relations as an important component of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia. I should add that interest in this region has demonstrably increased since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new independent actors in Asian politics in the form of the former Central Asian republics of what used to be the Soviet Union. I can scarcely agree with those scholars who, while analysing Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, seek to place the full responsibility for this on the Russian side and maintain that Russian policy in Central Asia was aimed at conquering India, 'The Pearl' of the British colonial empire. At the same time, it is difficult to agree with the attempts of some Russian scholars to rewrite our history and to paint Russia as absolutely blameless; as a country that had never courted 'rivalry' with anybody, anywhere. Such a 'new' conception of Russian policy in Tibet is expounded in Professor N.S. Kuleshov's book Russia and Tibet at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Moscow, 1992) as well as in his articles. The author sees in the Russian position towards Tibet and the Dalai Lama only religious interests and nothing more. Documents in the Russian foreign policy archives and the National Archives of India, the correspondence between Russian, British and Chinese diplomats and politicians, paint quite a different picture. The truth is that the Russian authorities never contemplated direct military intervention in Tibet, nor did they nurture plans to conquer India, but skilfully and often successfully exploited the Tibetan question to exert pressure on Great Britain and thereby obtain concessions in other regions that were more germane to their military-strategic and political interests. It was no accident that the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, a very important international document of the eve of the First World War, contains a special clause on Tibet . . .