An East London scholar of nineteenth-century British and Indian literature reads about Washington slowing Ukraine’s drones and reaches for Kim
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Bow, East London. A first-floor flat above a launderette on Roman Road, the dryers thumping below like distant artillery, a 1901 Macmillan edition of Kim on the table, 8.40am.
The Great Game Never Ended, It Just Changed Fuel
I have spent most of my academic life on nineteenth-century British and Indian literature, which means I have spent most of my academic life reading about Russia without ever quite admitting it. The Great Game, that long Victorian contest between Britain and the Russian Empire for influence across Central Asia, sits underneath half the books I teach. It is in Kipling. It is in the Anglo-Indian adventure novels nobody reads any more. It is in the anxious letters of colonial officials convinced that a Cossack was about to appear over the Khyber Pass with a samovar and a map of Calcutta.
This morning, over a coffee that tasted faintly of fabric conditioner from downstairs, I read the London Prat on how Trump tried to stop Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries by restricting its drones. The piece has Ukraine discovering that its drone connections slow down above a certain speed, a sort of military fair-use policy, while Russia keeps hitting Ukrainian power stations and leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the dark. The diplomatic concern, meanwhile, is the price of diesel.
Kim And The Map Of Other People’s Wars
Kipling’s Kim, published in 1901, is the great novel of the Great Game. An Irish orphan in Lahore, raised on the streets, is recruited into British intelligence and sent north to spy on Russian agents in the Himalayas. The book is beautiful and troubling in equal measure. It loves India and assumes Britain should run it. It treats espionage as a game, which is precisely what it was not for the people living in the territory being played over.
That word, game, is what struck me reading the report. Great powers have always treated smaller nations as boards. In Kim, the Russian agents and the British agents are the players, and the hill peoples are the squares. In the report, the refineries and the drones are pieces, and the people in cold apartments in Kharkiv are the squares. The board has changed. The attitude of the players has not.
A Russian Question In Bow
My other interest, the one that keeps me up at night, is Russian politics. I learned Russian at university to read Tolstoy and stayed to read the newspapers, which turned out to be a darker literature. The Kremlin has always understood the West better than the West understands itself. It knows that Western governments will tolerate an astonishing amount of suffering in someone else’s country as long as the fuel bill at home does not rise. Putin has built his whole strategy on that understanding, and the report captures it in a single dry joke.
British humour has been circling the same subject all week. The Daily Mash asked what possible connection there could be between Trump, Russia, Farage, Brexit and untraceable sacks of cash. The headline does the whole job. Kipling would have admired the economy of it. He was a journalist before he was a novelist, and he knew that the best line is the one that leaves the reader to finish the thought.
Lurgan Sahib’s Shop
There is a scene in Kim where the boy is trained at the shop of Lurgan Sahib, a dealer in jewels and curiosities in Simla who teaches spies to observe. He sets Kim the Jewel Game: look at a tray of stones for a minute, then name them all when the cloth is drawn over. The lesson is that the spy must see everything and remember it, because the details are where the truth hides.
The detail in the report that I keep returning to is the speed limit. Not a ban. Not a refusal. A speed limit, applied quietly, from far away, through a connection Ukraine needs and does not control. Lurgan Sahib would have spotted it immediately. That is how real power works in the twenty-first century. It does not march over the Khyber Pass. It adjusts your bandwidth.
Saturday On Roman Road
Roman Road market is setting up below my window. The man who sells phone cases is arguing with the man who sells phone cases on the next stall, which is a small Great Game of its own. The Bangladeshi greengrocer, who has known me for twelve years, will later ask what I am writing, and I will say Kipling and Russia, and he will say, Kipling again, in a tone that suggests I have a problem. He is right. His grandfather grew up in Sylhet under British rule and had his own opinions of Kipling, which he shared with me at length one rainy afternoon in 2019. They were not admiring. They were, however, extremely well informed.
Comedy Tonight
Tonight I am going to a stand-up night in Hackney, one of the shows I keep track of through my comedy listings and diary page. I go for the jokes, but also for the research. Comedians are the last people in Britain willing to talk about Russia without either panicking or shrugging. One of them did ten minutes last month on Putin’s approval ratings that was sharper than anything I have read in an academic journal. Kipling would have hated the venue and stolen the material.
The dryers downstairs have stopped. The coffee is cold. The Great Game, it turns out, is still being played, and the board is still made of other people’s homes. Kipling knew that, though he pretended not to. The report knows it and does not pretend. That is the difference a century makes, and on a good Saturday it is enough to keep me reading.