The map showed three main lines of approach to Turkestan. You could travel direct by train across the Orenburg Steppe from Moscow to Tashkent. This was the simplest way, but people who tried to buy a ticket to Tashkent at the Moscow railway station were, it appeared, simply told that they could not have one unless they first produced a permit from the ‘competent authorities’. Alternatively, you could travel across Siberia as far as Novosibirsk, and then change trains and go south to Turkestan by the recently completed Turksib Railway. But here, too, I felt, at some stage, the traveller would be faced with an embarrassing request to produce a permit or pass. Finally — and this looked to me the most promising route — you could travel by train to Baku on the Caspian, a perfectly normal and legitimate journey, even for foreigners. There, if you were lucky, you might find a ship to take you across the Caspian to Krasnovodsk and so, via the Transcaspian Railway, to Samarkand, Bokhara and Tashkent. Perhaps in Baku the ‘competent authorities’ might be less vigilant than in Moscow, perhaps there would be a chance of slipping aboard one of the ships in the harbour unnoticed. And anyhow, if the worst came to the worst and I got no further than Baku, I could always come back through the Caucasus and see that, having also acquired, no doubt, much useful experience for the future.
Accordingly, after first booking a sleeper to Baku, I packed some clean shirts, some sardines, some books and a spare pair of boots in a kitbag, dressed myself as inconspicuously as possible, and boarded the train.
The three days’ journey from Moscow to Baku was so uneventful as to be monotonous. Once again I had a palatial first-class sleeping-compartment to myself. The sheets were clean; at intervals the conductor brought me glasses of tea from the samovar, and there was a dining-car in which I consumed copious meals in company with a nondescript collection of officials and Red Army officers. After several attempts to eat at ordinary Western European times, I gave up and went over to the Russian time-table: luncheon at eleven, dinner at five, supper from midnight onwards and glasses of tea at all hours of the day and night. Apart from this concession to local usage and the uncertainty of my ultimate destination, I might not have been in the Soviet Union.
For the first two days there was little change in the landscape. We travelled southwards at a leisurely pace through green, fertile country to Kharkov, and then through the eastern Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don. Even the towns we passed through seemed familiar — like Moscow on a smaller scale, the onion-shaped domes of the Middle Ages mingling incongruously with the solidly ornate official and industrial style of the nineteenth century and the utilitarian austerity of the modern skyscraper.
After Rostov the railway crosses the Kuban Steppe, the home of the Kuban Cossacks, born cavalrymen, descended from the Cossack garrisons sent by the Tsars in the eighteenth century to guard what were then the frontiers of the Empire against the inroads of marauding tribes. That night we skirted eastwards along the northern foothills of the Caucasus and woke next morning to find ourselves travelling south once more along the shore of the Caspian, between the smooth, grey sea and the wild mountains of Daghestan. Here Shamyl, the leader of the Caucasian tribes in their struggle for independence, held out against the Russians until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Already the names of the towns, Makhach-Kalà and Derbent, had an Eastern sound.
Even before you reach Baku, the derricks of the oil wells and the all-pervading smell of oil warn you that you are approaching the town. Oil is the life of Baku. The earth is soaked with it and for miles round the waters of the Caspian are coated with an oily film. In ancient times Persian fire-worshippers, finding flames springing from the ground at places where the oil-sodden earth had caught fire, founded a holy city here.
On alighting from the train, I put myself in the hands of an elderly Tartar baggage porter and together we walked to the nearest hotel. The manager, however, after looking doubtfully at my passport, announced that his establishment was ‘not suitable for foreigners’ and suggested that I should seek accommodation at the big new square white hotel on the sea front. This turned out to be run by Intourist, the State Travel Agency for Foreigners, and although at the moment there were no foreigners in it the management clearly knew exactly how to deal with them. I was given a room and my passport was at once taken away from me. It was not, I was beginning to discover, as easy to stray from the beaten track as I had thought it might be. Still wondering what my next move should be, I had dinner and went to bed.
I had been asleep for some hours when I was abruptly awoken by the blare of music and by a series of cataclysmic crashes. It was clearly useless to try to sleep and so I got up and went upstairs to see what was going on.
The room above mine was, it turned out, a restaurant, and at a point which must have been just above my bed a team of six solidly built Armenians were executing, with immense gusto, a Cossack dance, kicking out their legs to the front and sides and springing in the air, to the accompaniment of a full-sized band and of frenzied shouting and hand-clapping from all present. There was no hope of sleep. I ordered a bottle of vodka and decided to make a night of it. From national dances, the band now switched to jazz and soon the floor was crowded with the élite of Baku; officers and officials and their girls, Party Members and the big men of the oil world. They danced with more enthusiasm than skill. Up to a year or two before jazz, or ‘dzhaz’, as it was called, had been frowned on as bourgeois stuff. Now suddenly, by one of those sudden, unaccountable changes of line which form such a bewildering feature of Soviet conduct, it had become the height of Soviet culture. Indeed in Moscow a State Dzhaz Band had been formed, whose leader, it was rumoured, drew a higher salary than Stalin himself. Obedient to the Party line, the chief citizens of Baku, Russians, Tartars, Jews, Georgians and Armenians, clasping their peroxided companions to them, shuffled solemnly round to the strains of ‘I ain’t nobody’s baby’ rendered with considerable feeling by a Tartar band, which presently broke into a swing version of the ‘Internationale’. The women, though for the most part drably dressed, all wore painted nails and a great deal of lipstick. This, too, was evidently a sign of culture.
Thinking it over as I retired to bed for the second time, I wondered whether the Soviet Government did not perhaps regard such things as jazz, lipstick and red nail varnish as aphrodisiacs and had not encouraged them in the hope of putting up the birth-rate and thus increasing the nation’s war potential. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
Next morning I set out to see what I could of Baku. It was a pleasant enough town, well-laid-out avenues of trees gave a grateful shade. The streets were thronged with a motley crowd of different racial types and outside the shops the same queues as in Moscow waited patiently for their turn to choose from a rather poorer selection of goods at rather higher prices. Like that of most Soviet towns, its population had risen sharply since the Revolution, and there was the usual housing shortage. To the south, in the direction of the main oilfield, a whole suburb of square white tenements had sprung into being, but many of the oil workers were still housed in tumble-down shacks and cabins.
Side by side with the modern Russian city and rapidly being squeezed out of existence by it, is the old Persian town which Tsar Alexander I captured from the Shah of Persia in 1806. Its mosques and minarets and flat-roofed houses of pale, sun-baked, clay bricks reminded me that I was already on the fringes of Asia, as did also a string of camels encountered on its outskirts.
On one of the desolate red hills that overlook the town I found a memorial to the British troops killed in the fighting against the Bolsheviks twenty years before, an episode in our military history which few English people any longer remember. But the Soviet authorities have never ceased to do everything they could to keep alive the memory of Allied intervention, and while I was in Baku elaborate preparations were being made for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the death of the Twenty-six Commissars of Baku, said to have been shot after they had been taken prisoner by the British.
&n
bsp; I have always heard that the twenty-seventh Commissar (who somehow escaped) was no less a personage than Anastasi Mikoyan, today a prominent member of the Politbureau. Meeting him at official parties, I could not help wondering, as he pressed on us delicious wines ‘from my little place in the Caucasus’, whether this elegant Asiatic statesman still bore us any ill-will. Looking at his fierce, handsome, inscrutable face above the well-cut, high-necked, silk shirt, smiling so amiably at a visiting British celebrity, I felt that he almost certainly did.
Amongst the local inhabitants, on the other hand, both here and elsewhere in the Caucasus, there were a number who retained pleasant enough memories of the British occupation and of the short-lived independent states of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Those, they said, were the days. The Highlanders in particular had won all hearts.
Nowadays, as I was reminded every time I opened a local newspaper or looked at a public notice, Baku is the capital city of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, one of the federal republics of the Soviet Union, with its own President and its own Government and the right to secede from the Union whenever it likes. In theory the Soviet Constitution grants a considerable measure of autonomy to the sixteen or so Soviet Socialist Republics (the number has been increased by the addition of the Baltic States and other spoils of war) which go to make up the Union. In practice, policy in all save minor administrative matters is dictated from Moscow. It is true to say, however, that in each case the local instruments of Soviet power are for the most part natives of the republic in question rather than Russians. Thus in Azerbaijan the office-holders were mainly Azerbaijanis, a Turko-Tartar race closely akin to the inhabitants of Persian Azerbaijan across the border, while in the neighbouring Republic of Georgia, Stalin’s native land, power was in the hands of Georgians. Samarkand, my ultimate destination, was in the Republic of Uzbekistan, the land of the Uzbeks, who are Turkis, akin in language and origin to the Ottoman Turks. And so on; all these different races being no more like European Russians than the people of Birmingham are like Chinese.
As the basis for a policy of imperialism, this system has much to recommend it. Power is vested in the hands of a group of reliable natives, who are responsible for seeing that the wishes of the central authority are carried out. If they prove unreliable, they can be replaced by others, while, if the worst comes to the worst, an emissary of the central authority can be sent to put things right. By this means, no risks are taken and an appearance of autonomy is preserved. Moreover it is a system which is capable of application to any new country which happens to fall under Soviet dominion. Thus, more recently, in Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania Soviet Socialist Republics have been set up and politically reliable governments formed from members of the local Communist Parties. It is, we are now learning, a stereotyped pattern into which almost any people or country can be made to fit with a little squeezing and pushing.
After two or three days I had seen all I wanted of Baku, and directed my attention to the next stage of my journey. My first move was a blunder. I walked into the local branch of Intourist and informed the seedy little Armenian clerk behind the counter that I wished to book a passage across the Caspian to Central Asia.
I could not have upset him more if I had told him that six Turks were outside waiting to skin him alive. At first he said nothing. Then, when he had recovered sufficiently from the shock, he started, with truly oriental reiteration, to enumerate the reasons which made it impossible for me to go where I wanted. Central Asia was a closed zone; it was dangerous; it was unhygienic; it was of no interest; there were no ships running across the Caspian; if there had been any ships there would have been no room on board; why did I not go back to Moscow where everything was so much more cultured?
I decided that I had better go away and think again. Taking a seat in a restaurant I ordered a late breakfast of vodka and fresh caviare from the Caspian and settled down to read the local newspaper.
The front page, I noticed, was given up to the Twenty-six Commissars, and featured a highly fanciful drawing of their execution by a mixed firing squad composed of Tsarist officers, Turkoman tribesmen and British other ranks, but on the back page an article caught my eye which I was soon reading with the most lively interest. It related the experiences of a scientific expedition of some kind in the neighbourhood of a place called Lenkoran in the extreme south of Soviet Azerbaijan, on the Persian frontier. The expedition, who had travelled by ship from Baku, had found much to interest them in southern Azerbaijan. The climate was subtropical and the flora exotic and luxuriant, while the fauna, it appeared, actually included tigers. The inhabitants, the writer added, were a little backward, but coming on nicely.
Lenkoran might be (and probably was) unhygienic; it might even be dangerous; but no one could tell me that it was not full of interest or that it could not be reached by sea from Baku. Triumphantly waving my copy of the Bakinski Rabochi or Baku Worker, I burst once more into the Intourist Office. This might not be Central Asia, but it was on the way there and sounded as if it was well worth having a look at.
But the little Armenian knew where his duty lay. No, he said, there were no boats. There had been boats, perhaps, but at present there were none and in any case, when there were boats, they were always full. Nor could you go to Lenkoran by land; there was no railway and no road, nothing but a great howling wilderness. Besides, when you got there it was unhealthy and unsafe, and of no interest whatever.
‘But what,’ I said, ‘about the tigers?’
‘Tigers, perhaps,’ he replied pityingly, ‘but no culture.’
I was clearly barking up the wrong tree. I left the office and strolled aimlessly down to the harbour. There, a mixed crowd of Tartars and Russians were loading ships or standing about and talking. Others queued up for what seemed to be steamer tickets. I attached myself to the nearest queue, which was mainly composed of Tartars, wild, swarthy, unkempt-looking fellows in shaggy fur hats and tight-fitting skull-caps, who jabbered to each other gutturally in their own language.
For an hour or two nothing happened. Then the window of the ticket office snapped open and we started to move slowly forward. Eventually I reached the front. ‘Where to?’ said the pudding-faced woman behind the grating. ‘Lenkoran,’ I said wondering what her reaction would be. ‘Three roubles,’ she said giving me a ticket. ‘What time does the boat sail?’ I asked, hoping she would not notice my foreign accent. ‘In half an hour,’ she said.
There was no time to be lost. Making my way back to the hotel, I extracted my passport from a reluctant management by means of a subterfuge, shouldered my kitbag and, running back to the docks, pushed my way through the crowd and on board the S.S. Centrosoyus, a bare minute before the gangway was taken up.
Chapter IV
Trial Trip
IN spite of her modern-sounding name the Centrosoyus was a survival of the old regime, having been built on the Volga in the ‘eighties. Every inch of the very limited deck-space was taken up by closely packed Tartar families who with their bedding and their chickens were already settling down for the night. A dense cloud of flies accompanied us as we steamed slowly out of Baku harbour. After a copious but singularly unappetizing meal the non-Tartar passengers and the crew settled down for the night on the benches of the saloon. Preferring the deck, I managed, after much stumbling about in the dark, to find a vacant corner between two Tartars, where, using my kitbag as a pillow, I disposed myself to sleep.
We reached our destination an hour or two after sunrise. The scene, as we neared the shore, contrasted sharply with the barren red hills round Baku and the even more barren steppe to the south of it. Orchards and tea plantations grew almost down to the water’s edge. Behind them, in the distance, rose a line of blue mountains. A few red-tiled roofs jutted out from among the vivid green of the trees. There were no signs of anything that could be called a town.
High-prowed Tartar boats put out to meet the ship, which lay at some distance from the shore. Soon, after some preli
minary bargaining, they were ferrying backwards and forwards, loaded to the gunwale with shouting, struggling humanity. To my dismay I found, that, in addition to my kitbag, I was now carrying a Tartar baby, whose mother had thrust it into my arms, and which seemed, at first sight, to be suffering from smallpox.
Lenkoran, when we reached it, proved to be no more than a fishing village of white-washed houses clustering round a single unpaved street. Having inquired whether there was an inn, I was told that there was and that it was a two-storeyed building; on the strength of which description I had no difficulty in finding it. Here I succeeded in obtaining a room. On the wall over the bed, I noticed, a previous occupant had amused himself by squashing bed bugs in neat parallel rows, one above the other.
My British passport, which I now displayed, caused considerable excitement and an admiring crowd collected to look at it, most of whom remained my fast friends for the rest of my stay. The information that I was a foreigner clearly conveyed very little to them, and, on ascertaining that I worked in the British Embassy in Moscow they inquired whether that was the same as the Moscow Soviet. I did not seek to enlighten them. In any case they showed no signs of the panic which seized the average inhabitant of Moscow when he found that he had inadvertently come into contact with a foreigner or worse still a foreign diplomat. Indeed for the next three days I spent the greater part of my time walking, talking, eating or playing cards with the local inhabitants or visitors from Baku who were occupying the other rooms in the hotel. Amongst them was a pretty, fair, Russian girl with a small baby, who told me that she was on sick leave from the collective farm where she worked. She was supposed to have gone to a rest home in the Crimea, but had been sent here by mistake. It was, she said, with a flutter of her long eyelashes, nice to meet someone cultured in such an uncultured place.
Eastern Approaches Page 4