Meyer, Karl Ernest.
Tournament of shadows : the great game and the race for empire in
Central Asia / Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac
Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, c1999
xxv, 646 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm
обзор, http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,418703,00.html :
Jan Morris
Sunday January 7, 2001
Observer
Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia
Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac
Little, Brown £25, pp644
<...>A cast of characters more remarkable even than the towering bravos of the nineteenth century strode or skulked on to the stage.
An emblematic performer was the baffling Russian Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), one of the earliest of the persuasive gurus who have bewitched susceptible Westerners with the Timeless Wisdom of the East. Diaghilev's brilliant set-designer, Roerich was a celebrated painter, a learned ethnographer, a Himalayan explorer, probably a Soviet spy and a disciple of the mystic Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophy movement. He was claimed to be a reincarnatiion of the Fifth Dalai Lama, because of seven moles on his neck, and he was a believer in the hidden paradise called Shambala, an undiscovered city in northern Tibet.
This obscure conviction made him politically significant, too, because incarnated from the legendary kings of Shambala were supposed to be the Panchen Lamas crucial to the international rivalries swirling around Lhasa. Roerich brought the bewilderments of the later Great Game to America, where he propagated the idea of Shambala, claimed healing powers for his paintings, diddled the taxman and corresponded in mystic codes with Henry Wallace, FDR's Secretary of Agriculture and later Vice-President ('I have thought of the New Country going forth, to meet the seven stars and under the sign of the three stars').
Inevitably, the Americans did go forth, sending an intelligence mission to Lhasa under the leadership of one of Tolstoy's grandsons. The Nazis had been there already. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, who believed Tibet to be the cradle of the Aryan race, had sent an SS expedition to Lhasa, establishing a connection so suggestive that in Hitler's ruined bunker, years later, rumour said the remains of uniformed Tibetans were found among the rubble.
Of course the CIA figures in this vertiginous welter. The Great Game overlapped the Cold War, especially when Mao's China marched into Tibet. As one CIA man said, what the Gurkhas were to the British Empire, Tibetans could be to the Free World's struggle against Chinese Communism. From a lonely airfield in the American West, unfortunate Tibetan guerrillas were flown back to their homeland to harass the Chinese, who killed nearly all of them. Thus the exploits, devices and self-delusions of the Great Game's earliest players were handed down to us.
Lenin, Himmler, a CIA expedition to Tibet led by Tolstoy's grandson, the costume-designer of Stravinksy's Rite of Spring, the occult, the strategic and the archeological - through the labyrinth of the post-imperial Game Meyer and Brysac warily lead us, only occasionally tiring, or forgetting, that they have already introduced us to somebody, and finally reaching the conclusion that the Game had no prizes.
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