Bologan, Victor – Selected Games 1985-2004
General:
Name: Bologan, Victor – Selected Games 1985-2004
Format: pdf
Size: 16.67 MB
Book:
Title: Victor Bologan Selected Games 1985-2004
Author: Viktor Bologan
Language: angielski
Year: 1975
Subjects: N/A
Publisher: Wydawnictwo: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN: N/A
Total pages: 238
Description:
‘THE nineteenth-century historian of empire, John William Kaye, found the expression in the papers of Arthur Conolly, one of its most enthusiastic players, who was murdered at Bokhara in 1842. The "Great Game" took its comfortable place among all those other sporting metaphors – "play up, play up, and play the game", "the game is greater than the players of the game" – with which the British tended to conceal the harsh realities of their imperial business. The Great Game subsumes more than a century of public drama and private tragedy, of high policies in ruins, needless wars, lonely deaths in wild places. It was a scenario which, ruthlessly edited, fitted very well with the Victorian concept of ‘the romance of empire’.
But the romantic element should not be discounted. It was part of the attraction for the men who willingly and joyfully played the Great Game on the playing fields, not of Eton, but of Central Asia. Most of them were young. They gloried in their tremendous journeys of exploration and espionage, often in disguise, through some of the wildest parts of the earth. With no more authority than their own eagerness for action, they grasped the opportunity to organise the defences of remote cities. They sat down with the barbaric rulers of kingdoms with romantic names like Bokhara and Samarkand, Khiva and Khokand, and intrigued for their allegiance
to an empire whose power could only be talked about and never adequately proved. They did all this with the belief that their actions contributed to the defence and stability of that empire, and were repaid for their efforts not with generosity and respect but with indifference, and were frequently allowed to suffer and die for policies that were in the main the product of the illusions, the ignorance, the fears, and the megalomania of generals and politicians in London, in Simla, and in St Petersburg.
The Great Game was a contest for political ascendancy in Central Asia between Britain and Tsarist Russia. The secret agents, British and Russian, were the advance guards of armies that never met, for there was never to be open conflict between the forces of the two empires in Central Asia. But their clandestine activities often fed the dreams and terrors of the decision-makers thousands of miles away in their comfortable offices. Other wars were embarked on, despite the protests of those who had often risked their lives to gather the facts on which sensible and pragmatic policies might be based.
In high politics, however, illusions acquire a special armour against reality, and so the Great Game-in the graphic words of the Tsarist foreign minister, Count Nesselrode – was but "a tournament of shadows", a secret war of illusions. What follows, then, is the history of those illusions, of the dangerous and bloody illusions that first took shape not in Asia but on a great raft moored on a river in east Prussia’. (Introduction)
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