They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous people. I — I do not want to consort with them without a witness.”Those words could come from any number of politicians, businessmen, sports personalities and media figures across world today. Russophobia is rampant, way it hasn’t been since the Cold War, the dread presence of President Vladimir Putin seems everywhere.TV shows like McMafia depict Russian crime networks. Oscar-winning documentary Icarus showed Russian manipulation in sports. A Russian-born academic has key role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Russian agencies apparently funnel fake news. The president of the USA may have Russian links. And then, of course, there is the Novichok nerve-agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and the expulsions of diplomats that followed.But those words came from a fictional character and a very Indian one: Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the Babu in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Behind the picaresque adventures of Kim is a storyline of Russian spies in the hills. And when two of them appear, Kim and the Babu neatly work together, without the Russians realising, and checkmate them.

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It is a reminder that Russian espionage may be a global concern now, but India was the reason it grew into its truly transnational form. Kim is set in the Great Game, the rather jokey term for the covert battle waged across most of the 19th century by Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain, against the vast backdrop of Central Asia, to control access to the great prize that was India.

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It has been argued that the Great Game was more romantic than real, an invention of writers like Kipling. But paranoia about Russia definitely did exist. In its very first month of existence, in November 1838, the Bombay Times & Journal of Commerce, which later became the Times of India (ToI), published a detailed article speculating about the routes Russia could take to attack India:“That the attempt will be made, even in our days, we can hardly doubt; for Russia has long envied the prosperity, and hated the liberal constitution of Britain.” Even during Napoleon’s war when Russia nominally allied with Britain, “it has since been ascertained that she was treacherously employed, by the agency of spies and emissaries, in forming plans for the future conquest of our Indian empire.”This is the same explanation used for Putin: he hates the constitutional liberalism of the West, and its economic success, especially when compared to his own country’s wreckage of manufacturing and dependence on basic extractive industries. That 1838 article also noted that if India was at risk from invasion, “Russia is still more exposed to revolt.” Russia’s aggression was linked to its weakness, and Putin is accused of causing problems abroad to distract from the problems at home.

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The British were particularly apprehensive of Russians targeting the princely states (this is part of the plot in Kim). In 1877, there were allegations of Russians influencing “Maratha Chiefs” in the heart of India. ToI carefully avoided naming the princes directly, but mentioned a report in a London paper of approaches being made to the courts of the Scindias (of Gwalior) and Holkar (of Indore). In 1885, suspicions were raised that a Father Kanovics, who claimed to be a Hungarian monk travelling to Cochin, was actually a Russian spy (in fact, he seems to have been a French swindler on the run).Spies on both sides passed as merchants in the great trade caravans that crossed Central Asia. By 1903, ToI was reporting on the stringent checks the Russians were putting on all merchants. The same article lamented that the “Eastern races” seemed to make for better spies than the British: “Russia’s agents, when out of uniform, betray their calling by being so well informed, which is unusual in Russia, but it takes a clever, educated man to detect them…”By then, though, the Great Game was winding down. Russia was distracted by a new enemy in Japan, while Britain was slowly waking up to the threat from Germany. In 1907, the two powers finally signed the Anglo-Russian convention, demarcating clear areas of interest in Asia.But But the Russian spy was soon reborn in the Russian Revolution. As Peter Hopkirk describes in his history Setting the East Ablaze: On Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia, Lenin decided that Russian spies must destabilise the colonies to weaken the imperial powers, leaving them ready for revolution at home: “‘England,’ he declared, ‘is our greatest enemy. It is in India that we must strike them hardest.’” By choosing the Indian communist MN Roy to lead this effort, Lenin made Russian espionage even more fearsome for the British. Now it would not just be done by ethnic Russians, but by people of all races and nationalities, bound by their devotion to Communism.

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Roy’s actual results, both in Central Asia and India, were rather lacking, and questions have always been raised about whether the real success of Russian espionage lies in what it can do — or the fears it stirs up about what it can do. As far back as 1856, the Bombay Times published a weary comment about how “Russia manages to get up periodic panics and has but to send a ragamuffin or two into Afghanistan to assume the name of envoy or spy and spread every kind of wild rumour.…”Presciently, given that the Indian Rising was about to break out, the article wondered if, rather than worrying about Russian invasions, the British should consider the weaknesses of their own rule that allowed them to feel weak. And more than 160 years later, Russian spies have raised the question again: are they the real enemy that Western style democracies must fear, or is it their own weaknesses that allow Russia to assume that role?