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In truth, there was never any serious danger of the Russians reaching India in the years before the Crimean War. It was much too far and difficult to march an army all that way – though the Russian Emperor Paul I had once entertained a madcap scheme to send a combined French and Russian force there. The idea had been taken up again by Napoleon in his talks with Tsar Alexander in 1807. ‘The more unrealistic the expedition is,’ Napoleon explained, ‘the more it can be used to terrorize the Englishmen.’ The British government always knew that such an expedition was not feasible. One British intelligence officer thought that any Russian invasion of India ‘would amount to little more than the sending of a caravan’. But while few in official British circles thought that Russia was a serious threat to India, this did not prevent the Russophobic British press from whipping up that fear, emphasizing the potential danger posed by Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus and its ‘underhand activities’ in Persia and Afghanistan.²⁹

The theory made its first appearance in 1828, in a pamphlet, On the Designs of Russia, written by Colonel George de Lacy Evans (a general by the time he took up the command of the British army’s 2nd Infantry Division during the Crimean War). Speculating on the outcome of the Russo-Turkish war, de Lacy Evans conjured up a nightmare fantasy of Russian aggression and expansion, leading to the conquest of the whole of Asia Minor and the collapse of British trade with India. De Lacy’s working principle – that the rapid growth of the Russian Empire since the beginning of the eighteenth century proved the iron law that Russian expansion must continue until checked – reappeared in a second pamphlet he published, in 1829, On the Practicality of an Invasion of British India, in which he claimed, without any evidence of Russia’s actual intentions, that a Russian force could be built up on India’s north-west frontier. The pamphlet was widely read in official circles. Wellington took it as a warning and told Lord Ellenborough, the president of the Board of Control for India, that he was ‘ready to take up the question in Europe, if the Russians [should] move towards India with views of evident hostility’. After 1833, with Russia’s domination of the Ottoman Empire seemingly secured, these fears took on the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1834 Lieutenant Arthur Connolly (who coined the term ‘the Great Game’ to describe Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia Minor) published a best-selling travelogue, Journey to the North of India, in which he argued that the Russians could attack the north-west frontier if they were supported by the Persians and Afghans.³⁰

The Russians had in fact been steadily increasing their presence in Asia Minor in line with their policy of keeping neighbours weak. Russian agents advised Persia on foreign policy and organized support for the Shah’s army. In 1837, when the Persians took the Afghan city of Herat, many British politicians had no doubt that it was part of Russia’s preparation for an invasion of India. ‘Herat, in the hands of Persia,’ wrote a former British ambassador to Tehran, ‘can never be considered in any other light than as an advanced point d’appui for the Russians toward India.’ The Russophobic press criticized the inactivity of British governments that had failed to see the ‘underhand’ and ‘nefarious’ activities of the Russians in Persia. ‘For several years,’ warned the Herald, ‘we have endeavoured to make them understand that the ambitious designs of Russia extended beyond Turkey and Circassia and Persia, even to our East Indian dependencies, which Russia has not lost sight of since Catherine threatened to march her armies in that direction, and rally the native Indian princes round the standard of the Great Mogul.’ The Standard called for more than watchful vigilance against Russia: ‘It is of little use to watch Russia, if our care and exertion are to end with that exercise of vigilance. We have been watching Russia during eight years, and within that time she has pushed her acquisitions and military posts nearly 2000 miles on the road to India.’³¹

The view that Russia, by its very nature, was a threat to India became widespread among the British broadsheet-reading classes. It was expressed by the anonymous author of a widely read pamphlet of 1838 called India, Great Britain, and Russia, in a passage that is reminiscent of the domino theory of the Cold War: