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 From the Cartographic archives
Prudent Paranoia
Nineteenth-century British policy makers divined a threat to British India in Russia’s gobbling up of Turkistan, a fait accompli at the time of this 1921 Society map of Asia.

Russian and British diplomatic intrigues, called the Great Game, were immortalized in 1890 in Rudyard Kipling’s “Ballad of the King’s Jest,” whose players,

“hearked to rumour, and snatched at a breath,
Of ‘this one knoweth,’ and ‘that one saith,’—
Legends that ran from mouth to mouth
Of a grey-coat coming, and sack of the South.”

The coming of the grey-coats, or Russians, started in the 1860s, as one after another of Turkistan’s cities fell to tsarist cannon and cavalry, followed always by that logistic engine of imperial ambition, the railroad. The Russians reached Tashkent in 1865, and the Afghan border 20 years later. For a short time, the Russian revolution gave hope for independence to the Muslim peoples of this vast area, but by 1924 the new Soviet government had consolidated its power in Central Asia. Now, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, new players vie for influence in the Eurasian heartland.

 

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