The Great Game, Britain’s century-long skirmish with Czarist Russia for Central Asian Supremacy, still lives up to it’s name.
The Game was a form of Cold War without the bombs, a swashbuckling battle for influence. But the Great Game makes a better read than the Cold War – featuring intrepid cast of explorers, secret kingdoms, and merciless Khans – part LeCarre, part Indiana Jones, and part Kipling.
The players carried themselves with a sort of stoic panache and more often than not met miserable ends; beheaded, thrown into insect pits, or merely the cold, dry death of desert exposure.
The Great Game is still playing. In the new oil boom on the Caspian Sea, the now nuclear India-Pakistan dispute, the turmoil in Chechnya and Afghanistan, Great Game wraiths are rattling their sabres again.
The Tournament of Shadows, past, present, and future in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)
Guests:
Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac.