Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (17 page)

That same night, Rawlinson headed straight back to Teheran, making the 800 miles across Persia in record time, and brought the news of the existence of the Russian delegation to Afghanistan to MacNeill on 1 November 1837. MacNeill in turn immediately sent an express messenger to Lord Palmerston in London and another to the new Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, in Calcutta.
‘The Russians have formally opened their diplomatic intercourse with Kabul,’ he wrote. ‘Captain Vicovich or Beekavitch, alias Omar Beg, a soonee Mahommedan subject of Russia, has been accredited, I am informed, as chargé d’affairs to Ameer Dost Mohammed Khan.’ In the despatch, MacNeill included Rawlinson’s detailed description of the officer, and added a few more details that his envoy had picked up in the Persian camp: ‘He called himself an aide de camp of the Emperor’s, but I understood that he was in reality an ADC of the Governor commanding at Orenburg . . . The year before last he was at Bokhara for some time, employed officially by the Russian Government. He learned his Persian and Jagatai Turkish at Orenburg and Bokhara.’
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Rawlinson’s sighting of Vitkevitch seemed to validate all the over-heated fears of his boss, MacNeill, Lord Ellenborough and other British policymakers who had long feared that the Russians wanted to take over Afghanistan and use it as a base for attacking British India. Rawlinson’s description of Vitkevitch was immediately sent to intelligence officials at Peshawar, the Khyber Pass and the other crossing points to India in case the Russian was planning to continue on to British India, or enter into negotiations with Ranjit Singh.

But the mysterious officer was not heading to India. His mission was to undermine British interests in Afghanistan and forge an alliance between the Tsar and Dost Mohammad.

One or two of Rawlinson’s suppositions about the officer were correct, but most were mistaken. He was not a Muslim, nor was he a Russian, nor was he ADC to the Governor of the Russian frontier post of Orenburg, nor was his name at birth either Beekavitch or Vitkevitch. Instead the officer was in fact a Roman Catholic Polish nobleman born Jan Prosper Witkiewicz in Vilnius, today the capital of Lithuania.

While still at the Krozach Gymnasium Jan had helped found a secret society called the Black Brothers, an underground ‘revolutionary-national’ resistance movement begun by a group of Polish and Lithuanian students intent on fighting the Russian occupation of their country. In 1823, the Brothers were exposed after they wrote anti-Russian letters to the principal and teachers of the Gymnasium, and began posting revolutionary slogans and verses on prominent public buildings in the town. Witkiewicz and the five other ringleaders were arrested and interrogated. On 6 February 1824, in an attempt to stamp out any further democratic aspirations among Polish students, three were sentenced to death and three to flogging followed by life exile to the steppe. At the time, Witkiewicz had just celebrated his fourteenth birthday.

At the last minute, thanks to the intervention of the Grand Duke Pavlovitch, the Regent of Poland, the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment with hard labour in the Bobruisk Fortress, where one of the boys eventually went mad and died in jail. Witkiewicz and two others were stripped of their titles and rank in the nobility and sent to different fortresses on the Kazakh steppe as common soldiers, without the right to promotion. They were forbidden all further contact with their families for ten years, and sent off on the long march south on foot and in chains.
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Immediately after his arrival on the steppe, Jan made a plan to escape. With one of his Black Brother colleagues, Aloizy Peslyak, he plotted a route south to India over the Hindu Kush; but the escape plan was exposed and the plotters severely punished.
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In the years that followed, Peslyak nearly shot himself, while another of their fellow Polish exiles actually did so. But Witkiewicz resigned himself to his fate and decided to make the best of his situation. He learned Kazakh and Chagatai Turkish, and allowed his name to be changed to the more Russian-sounding Ivan Viktorovitch Vitkevitch.

One of his later patrons subsequently wrote:

Exiled to a remote garrison on the Orenburg line, Vitkevitch served as a private soldier for over 10 years and, placed under the command of drunken and debauched officers, he managed to preserve a pure and noble soul and, moreover, to develop and educate his intelligence; he learned oriental languages and so familiarized himself with the steppe that one can positively claim that ever since the Orenburg District came into being, no one around here knew the Kazakhs better than he does . . . all the Kazakhs respect him for his upright behaviour and for the hardiness he has shown more than once on his outings into the steppe.
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Soon Vitkevitch had memorised the entire Koran by heart, and began inviting the nomadic Kazakh elders back to his lodgings, giving them tea, pilaf and lamb, and learning from them their customs and manners as well as the rich idiom of their language. He also collected books, especially about the steppe and exploration, and it was this that finally began his rise through the ranks of the Russian military.

Vitkevitch’s love of literature had attracted the attention of the Commandant of the fortress of Orsk, on the Ural River, who invited him to become a tutor to his children. In 1830, the Commandant hosted the celebrated German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who was amazed to see his most recent book,
Tableaux de la Nature
,
about his travels in Latin America, lying on a table in the house. When he asked how it had got to be there, he was told about the young Pole who had a complete collection of the great traveller’s works, and Humboldt asked to meet him. Vitkevitch was brought in:

The young man’s pleasant appearance despite the rough private soldier’s overcoat, his good looks, modest manner and learnedness all impressed the great scientist. Upon his return from his Siberian journey to Orenburg, he immediately informed the Governor, Count Pavel Suhktelen, of the deplorable position of Vitkevich and asked the Count to lighten the young man’s lot. The Count summoned Vitkevich to Orenburg, promoted him to an NCO, appointed him his orderly, transferred him to the Orenburg Cossacks and later found him work at the Kirghiz Department office.
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Before long, Vitkevitch was being used as an interpreter, then later was sent out alone on missions through the Kazakh steppe. He had found his career, but only at the cost of joining the Russian imperial machine he had grown up hating, and faithfully serving the state that had destroyed his life, and about which he presumably still harboured the most bitter feelings.

If Humboldt had begun Vitkevitch’s rise, the person who did more than anyone else to continue it was, quite unknowingly, Alexander Burnes. On his return from his expedition to Bukhara, Burnes had published his
Travels into Bokhara
, and found himself an overnight celebrity. He was invited to London to meet both Lord Ellenborough and the King, was lionised by society hostesses and gave standing-room-only lectures to the Royal Geographical Society, which presented him with its Gold Medal. On the publication of the French translation of his book soon afterwards,
Voyages dans le Bokhara
was again a bestseller and Burnes went to Paris to receive further awards and more medals.

It was this French translation that brought Burnes’s journey to the notice of the Russian authorities. His expedition had been intended to spy out Russian activity in Afghanistan and Bukhara at a period – the early 1830s – when both areas were in reality not part of St Petersburg’s ambitions, which were closely focused on Persia and the Caucasus. Ironically, it seems to have been Burnes’s writings that first provoked Russian interest in Afghanistan and Bukhara, not least to head off British intrigues so close to the Russian frontier. As so often in international affairs, hawkish paranoia about distant threats can create the very monster that is most feared. According to General Ivanin, Chief of Staff to V. A. Perovsky, Governor of the Russian steppe frontier garrison at Orenburg, St Petersburg was becoming as frustrated as London had been with its poor intelligence from Central Asia. ‘All the information that Russia procured was meagre and obscure and was supplied by Asiatics, who either through ignorance or timidity were not able to furnish really useful accounts,’ he wrote, reflecting the same prejudices as his British rivals.

We had reliable information that the agents of the East India Company were continually appearing either at Khiva or Bokhara; we were also aware that this enterprising company had enormous means at its disposal and was endeavouring not only to establish its commercial influence throughout the whole of Asia, but was also desirous of extending the limits of its Asiatic possessions . . . It was accordingly decided in 1835, in order to watch the English agents and counteract their efforts, to send Russian agents into Central Asia. In order to watch the march of events in Central Asia, sub-Lieutenant Vitkevitch was despatched thither in the capacity as an agent . . .
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Twice, Vitkevitch was sent off to Bukhara. The first time he travelled in disguise with two Kirghiz traders and made the journey in only seventeen days through deep snow and over the frozen Oxus. He stayed a month, but found it much less romantic than the Oriental Wonder House described by Burnes. ‘I must note that the tales told by Burnes, in his published account of his journey to Bukhara, presented a curious contrast to all that I chanced to see here,’ he wrote back to Orenburg. ‘He sees everything in some glamorous light, while all I saw was merely disgusting, ugly, pathetic or ridiculous. Either Mr Burnes deliberately exaggerated and embellished the attractions of Bokhara or he was strongly prejudiced in its favour.’
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Despite his distaste, Vitkevitch managed to make a rough set of plans of the city while maintaining his disguise. ‘No one, least of all the fanatical Bokharans, could recognize a European and a Christian in this Kazakh-dressed, Kazakh-speaking man, who had assimilated the Kazakh manners and customs,’ wrote one of his admirers. ‘Moreover, his handsome dark eyes, beard and cropped hair made him look like an Asian and a Muslim.’
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On his second visit, in January 1836, Vitkevitch went openly as a Russian officer, to request the release of several Russian merchants who had been detained by the Amir of Bukhara. On arrival in the caravan city he recorded that he was immediately asked: ‘Do you know Iskander? I thought they meant Alexander the Great but they were, in fact, talking of Alexander Burnes.’ This early indication of British influence did not stop Vitkevitch almost immediately trying to reverse it, and it took him only a couple of weeks to uncover the intelligence network that Burnes had established in order to send news back to India: ‘The British have their man in Bukhara,’ Vitkevitch soon reported to St Petersburg.

He is a Kashmiri called Nizamuddin and has been living in Bukhara for four years now under the pretext of trade . . . He is a very clever man, rubs shoulders with everyone and entertains the Bukharan noblemen; at least once a week he sends letters with secret messengers to Kabul, to the Englishman Masson who passes them on. The most curious thing is that Dost Mohammed is aware of Masson’s activities; the Khan has even intercepted his letters but leaves the spy alone, saying: one man cannot harm me. Apparently, Dost Mohammed does not want to incur their displeasure out of respect to Europeans in general, and he tolerates Masson too. This man lives in Kabul under the pretext of looking for ancient coins.

Nizamuddin had a kinsman in Bukhara, added Vitkevitch,

who does all the paperwork for him. They have taken lodgings, rather luxurious by local standards, in Koosh Begee’s [chamberlain]caravansarai, where they entertain the nobility; Nizamuddin dresses in fine clothes and is a man of rare physical beauty; his companion is very clever if unseemly and behaves as a subordinate although it is obvious that he is the one who runs the affairs. They receive their money from Indian bankers. Nizamuddin sought my acquaintance as soon as I arrived and asked me many questions: about Novo-Alexandrovsk, the New Line, our relations with Khiva, etc. Having been forewarned, I did not give him any definite answers. All the same, he sent a letter to Kabul the very next day.
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It was on this second visit to Bukhara that Vitkevitch had an extraordinary break. By chance, his visit coincided with that of an Afghan emissary, Mirza Hussein Ali, who had been sent by Dost Mohammad Khan on a mission to Tsar Nicholas. After defeating Shah Shuja outside Kandahar in 1834, Dost Mohammad had discovered letters from Wade encouraging the Afghan chiefs to support the restoration of the Sadozai monarchy with Shuja at the helm. Britain’s secret aid for the Shah had come as a great shock to Dost Mohammad, who had believed that he and the Governor General were on excellent terms. In response he decided to appeal to Russia as diplomatic insurance in case the British made any further attempts to interfere in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan’s independence is threatened by British expansion,’ he wrote to the Tsar. ‘This expansion is also a threat to Russian trade in Central Asia and the surrounding countries to the south of it. Should Afghanistan be defeated in its lone struggle against Britain, it would also mean the end of Russia’s trade with Bokhara.’
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