![]() ![]() Yet despite assurances of each empire by their diplomats in London and St. Russian troops already faced challenges protecting merchants and missionaries from slaughter or capture (many military missions were dispatched to free hostages in Central Asia) the incursion of British soldiers there would only arrest Russian efforts to pacify Central Asia. Russia’s aims were primarily defensive and were intended to curb British expansion. The Russians believed that the British sought to extend their empire into Central Asia, the land “east of the sun,” as the Russians called the forbidding Siberian terrain that led to the Pacific. (This fear arose, at least in part, from an apocryphal legend about a tsarist ambition, uttered by the dying Peter the Great, that Russia would one day conquer India and then liberate Byzantium.)įor the Russians, the Great Game was called “the tournament of shadows,” a phrase that suggests the adversaries never quite apprehended one another. The primary British objective was to defend interests in India, which many British strategists believed the Russians would eventually try to seize. The British and Russian strategies were seemingly defensive. ![]()
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