Kalmyk Project
Soviet plan to attack India (1919)
The Kalmyk Project was the name given to Soviet plans to launch a surprise attack on the North-West Frontier Province of British India via Tibet and other Himalayan buffer states in 1919–1920. It was a part of Soviet plans to destabilise the British Empire and other Western European imperial powers by unrest in South Asia. British Indian intelligence sent agents, such as F. M. Bailey, to Central Asia to trace the early Bolshevik designs on India.
Soviet Russia intended to nurture political upheaval in British India in its strategy against British imperialism. In 1919, it sent a diplomatic mission headed by the orientalist N. Z. Bravin. That was while Afghanistan had seen a coup d'état, which placed the young Prince Amanullah Khan in power and precipitated the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Bravin proposed to Amanullah a military alliance against British India and a campaign for which Soviet Turkestan would bear the costs. The negotiations, however, failed to reach concrete conclusions, and the Soviet advances were also detected by British Indian intelligence. Among other works, the Bravin expedition established links at Herat with the Austrian and German remnants of the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition and liaised with the Indian revolutionaries of the Provisional Government of India in Kabul.
A later plan considered by the Soviets had the raising a force of nearly 40,000 cavalry troops from Turkestan or the Urals and advance to India through Afghanistan, with help from Afghan tribes that rallied against Amanullah.
“Kalmyk Project” enters the record as soviet plan to attack India (1919). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kalmyk, Project and Soviet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4380086. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kalmyk Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.