Editing Great Game (section)

=== Mythologized aspects of the Great Game ===
A. Vescovi argued that Kipling's use of the term was entirely fictional, "...because the Great Game as it is described in the novel never existed; it is almost entirely Kipling's invention. At the time when the story is set (i.e. in the late Eighties), Britain did not have an intelligence service, nor an Ethnographical Department; there was only a governmental task force called 'Survey of India' that was entrusted with the task of charting all India in response to a typically English anxiety of control."<ref name=vescovi2014/>

According to military history scholar Matt Salyer, the "Great Game" as a British strategy was a fiction, but the "Great Game" as a vague descriptor of various actions of multiple empires, "as far back as the Seven Years' War" is accurate. He writes that "the 'legend of the Great Game' emerged as a distinct historiographical lens after the Second World War." However, he says, "That does not mean that historians who describe trajectories of British Imperial statecraft in terms of 'the Great Game' are wrong."<ref>{{Cite web |last=Salyer |first=Matt |date=2019-10-29 |title=Going All in on the Great Game? The Curious and Problematic Choice of Kiplingesque Inspiration in US Military Doctrine |url=https://mwi.usma.edu/going-great-game-curious-problematic-choice-kiplingesque-inspiration-us-military-doctrine/ |access-date=2023-01-31 |website=Modern War Institute |language=en-US}}</ref>

Two authors, Gerald Morgan and [[Malcolm Yapp]], have proposed that The Great Game was a legend and that the British Raj did not have the capacity to conduct such an undertaking. An examination of the archives of the various departments of the Raj showed no evidence of a British intelligence network in Central Asia. At best, efforts to obtain information on Russian moves in Central Asia were rare, ''ad hoc'' adventures and at worst intrigues resembling the adventures in ''Kim'' were baseless rumours, and that such rumours "were always common currency in Central Asia and they applied as much to Russia as to Britain".{{sfn|Morgan|1973|pp=55–65}}{{sfn|Yapp|2000|pages=190}} After two British representatives were executed in Bukhara in 1842, Britain actively discouraged officers from traveling in Turkestan.{{sfn|Yapp|2000|pages=190}}

Gerald Morgan also proposed that Russia never had the will nor ability to move on India, nor India the capability to move on Central Asia. Russia did not want Afghanistan, considering their initial failure to take Khiva and the British debacle in the First Anglo-Afghan War. To invade Afghanistan they would first require a forward base in Khorasan, Persia. St. Petersburg had decided by then that a forward policy in the region had failed but one of non-intervention appeared to work.{{sfn|Morgan|1981|pp=213}}

Sneh Manajan wrote that the Russian military advances in Central Asia were advocated and executed only by irresponsible Russians or enthusiastic governors of the frontier provinces.{{sfn|Mahajan|2001|p=56}} Robert Middleton suggested that The Great Game was all a figment of the over-excited imaginations of a few jingoist politicians, military officers and journalists on both sides.<ref name=middleton2005/> The use of the term The Great Game to describe Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia became common only after the Second World War. It was rarely used before that period.{{sfn|Yapp|2000|pages=187}} Malcolm Yapp proposed that some Britons had used the term "The Great Game" in the late 19th century to describe several different things in relation to its interests in Asia, but the primary concern of British authorities in India was the control of the indigenous population and not preventing a Russian invasion.{{sfn|Yapp|2000|pages=198}}

Robert Irwin argues the Great Game was certainly perceived by both British and Russian adventurers at the time, but was played up by more expansionist factions for power politics in Europe. Irwin states that "Prince [[Esper Ukhtomsky|Ukhtomsky]] might rail against the corrupting effects of British rule over India and declare that there could be no frontiers for the Russians in Asia, but Russian policy was usually decided by saner heads. Canny statesmen such as [[Sergei Witte|Witte]] sanctioned the despatch of diplomatic missions, explorers and spies into Afghanistan and Tibet, but they did so to extort concessions from the British in Europe. [[War Office|Whitehall]], on the other hand, was reluctant to have its foreign policy in Europe dictated to by the Raj."<ref name=":52"/>

According to historian Patrikeeff, the concept of the Great Game was also applied, possibly inaccurately, to Northeast Asia to describe Russia and Japan's contest over Manchuria – which took the form of the [[Russian invasion of Manchuria]], [[Russo-Japanese War]], and part of the [[Russian Civil War]] – and perhaps had similar ideological underpinnings to start with. However, unlike the British-Russian Great Game in South and West Asia, where clear-cut spheres of influence were established, Patrikeeff says that this supposed Great Game in Northeast Asia ignored that economic dominance did not follow political (with Japan's victory in Manchuria not fully ousting the Russian concessions such as the [[Chinese Eastern Railway|CER]]) and that centuries-old distinct traditions such as the Qing legacy there led to key differences.<ref name=":9" /> Nonetheless, ancient and even mythic appeals to legitimacy were used by exiled supporters of empire, such as [[Roman von Ungern-Sternberg|Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg]]'s attempt at reviving a 'new Mongolian khanate'.<ref name=":9" /><ref>{{Cite news |last=Goodwin |first=Jason |date=2009-02-20 |title=Mongolia and the Madman |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Goodwin-t.html |access-date=2023-03-19 |issn=0362-4331 |quote=With its panoply of outlandish tyrants, fortune tellers, mounted tribesmen and wild dreams advanced against absurd odds, the whole story [of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg] could have possessed the makings of a glorious offshoot of the Great Game, had Ungern been anything more than a murderous sadist.}}</ref> Whereas the Great Game between Russia and Britain was codifying imperial spheres of influence at their frontiers, the supposed Great Game between Russia and Japan did not end up in a similarly defined frontier, with [[Warlord Era|warlord states]] and [[Honghuzi]] emerging through the period.<ref name=":9">{{Cite book |last=Patrikeeff |first=Felix |date=2002 |title=Russian Politics in Exile |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230535787 |pages=121–124 |doi=10.1057/9780230535787|isbn=978-1-349-40636-4 }}</ref>