The Great Game

In the winter of 1823, in the Polish-Lithuanian town of Kroz, a group of high school students who called themselves the Black Brothers were arrested by the czarist police for conspiring to circulate poetry resisting the Russian occupation. They had not managed to post a single poem, but they were tried and sentenced to death. Later their death sentences were reduced to lifetime service in the army of the czar, and one of the convicted conspirators, Jan Witkiewicz, who was fifteen years old, was posted as a private soldier to Orenburg on the Ural River at the frontier of the Russian empire, beyond which lay lands ruled by Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribes.

Jan Witkiewicz belonged to the impoverished gentry (his father was a court official in the Duchy of Samogitia, in the western part of Lithuania). He was well educated and spoke several European languages. He quickly picked up a number of Kazakh dialects, as well as Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkmen, and within a few years had produced several handwritten dictionaries, and he became indispensable as an interpreter for the local army command and the czarist bureaucracy. When Witkiewicz was twenty-one, in the fall of 1829, the celebrated Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (“the most famous man in Europe” except for Napoleon, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) journeyed across Russia. In the course of his search for diamonds and other possible riches in the Ural Mountains, he stopped in Orenburg and was surprised to find one of his own books on the table in the local military headquarters. The book was Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, an account of his Mexican sojourn, and it belonged to Private Jan Witkiewicz. Witkiewicz was out on patrol but Humboldt inquired about him and was moved by his story to write two letters to Czar Nicholas I, recommending him for promotion (both letters, elegantly rendered in French, can be found in the Military Historical Archives in Moscow). Witkiewicz was raised to the rank of master sergeant, and then lieutenant. In 1836, at the age of twenty-eight, he was transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dispatched to Persia and Afghanistan as a Russian agent.


On his arrival in Kabul in Afghanistan, Witkiewicz learned that the British had already installed an agent of their own, a Scot named Alexander Burnes, who had been there for several months. Witkiewicz’s arrival and then his stay in Kabul, where he lodged in the house of Abdul Samad, minister to the emir, were reported to be the cause of the migraine headaches that Alexander Burnes began to suffer in that year.

The source of the migraine headache intelligence was James Levis, a deserter from the British army posing as an American traveller named Charles Masson, and who had been recently employed as a spy for the British East India Company. Levis’s real talent was not spying; he was an amateur archaeologist who had discovered the vast ancient city founded by Alexander the Great on the plains of Bagram north of Kabul, a site that, although only partially excavated, has yielded thousands of ancient coins and artifacts of Hellenic, Roman, Chinese and Indian origin. Today a good part of Bagram Plains lies buried under a massive air base built by the Russians in 1980 and abandoned by them in 1989. Americans took it over in 2002 and since then it has grown at least twice as large.

The objective of the British agent Alexander Burnes was to keep Afghanistan within the British sphere of influence. The objective of the Russian agent Jan Witkiewicz was to draw Afghanistan into an alliance with Russia and possibly Persia. The objective of the emir of Kabul, Dost Mohammad, putative ruler of Afghanistan, was to play off the British and the Russians against each other.