236 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Russian, of course, his title was pronounced "czar.") Between 1682 and
1725, one of the czars, Peter the Great, built a formidable army and began
carving out an empire east of Moscow. By 1762, when Catherine the Great
of the Romanoff dynasty came to power, this empire extended way beyond
the Caspian Sea, beyond the Ural Mountains even, deep into Siberia,
stretching across all the lands north of India, Persia, Mesopotamia, and
Asia Minor.
Catherine soon gave notice that Russia would not only push east; it
might push south as well. Catherine's armies engaged the Ottomans in a
bid to take the Black Sea coast and drive the Turks out of Europe. Fight-
ing the Ottomans was all very well, but the British could not have the
Russians coming south into Persia or worse, down into the mountains in-
habited by the Afghan tribes, for that would put the Russians within
striking distance of the jewel in the British crown. For many centuries, in
fact, the Hindu Kush mountains and the Persian highlands had served as
a staging area for conquests of India. British leaders decided they must
block Russian advances everywhere along this front. And so the Great
Game began.
"The Great Game" was the term invented by British novelist Rudyard
Kipling for the struggle between Great Britain and Russia to control the
territory stretching between the Russian Empire in the north and the
British Empire in the south. Everything that had once been Safavid Persia,
everything that is now Afghanistan, much of what is now Pakistan, and all
the territories covered by the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, Kyrghizistan, and Tajikistan-all of this was the arena in
which the Great Game was "played."
It wasn't really a game, of course, and "play" is a misnomer. But it
wasn't really a war, either. Occasional battles broke out, and a few mas-
sacres, an atrocity here and there, but the Great Game consisted mostly
of plotting, pushing, conspiring, maneuvering, manipulating, politick-
ing, bribing, and corrupting people in the region mentioned. The adver-
saries were the two great European powers, and the people who lived in
these lands, virtually all of them Muslims, were merely the chess pieces,
the game tokens.
In Iran, the Qajar kings entertained a hope of reempowering their
country by importing European technology and know-how. But whom