Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  As I turned away from the ticket office, two men who had been standing nearby turned away after me. Their alert expressions, intelligent faces and neat dark suits immediately aroused my suspicions. I took a walk round the block. Glancing over my shoulder, I could see that they were following me. When I stopped, they stopped and pretended to look into a shop window. With a sinking heart, I boarded the southbound train. As I settled into my berth, I found that one was occupying the berth immediately above mine and the other the one below. There could no longer be any doubt about it. I had been provided with an N.K.V.D. escort.

  This was a nuisance, but at least it was better than if I had been stopped outright, politely informed that foreigners were not allowed to travel on the Turksib and put on the next train for Moscow, which was what I had half expected. Besides, the carriage in which I found myself was of the ‘hard’ variety where the cleanliness of one’s immediate neighbour is a matter of considerable interest, and my escort, although not so picturesque as the other occupants of the carriage, were less likely to harbour the vermin for which Siberia is famous.

  Railway accommodation in the Soviet Union falls into three categories. First there are the ‘International’ coaches mostly built before the Revolution on the lines of the ordinary European sleeping-cars and divided into compartments for two (or four) passengers. These coaches, in which I had travelled up to now and which are the only form of accommodation ever seen by most foreign tourists, are only included in a very few of the more important luxury expresses and are completely unknown to the average Soviet citizen. Secondly there are the ‘soft’ coaches, of which there is one on most express trains. These, which are used for the most part by the new bourgeoisie, are divided into compartments with four upholstered berths in each.

  Finally there is the ‘hard’ coach which is the means of transport of 90 per cent of the population, and of which a great many trains are exclusively composed. The ‘hard’ coach, which is built to hold forty passengers and never holds less though it very often holds more, is not divided into compartments. An open space runs down the middle and on either side there are three layers of planks arranged one above the other on each of which there is just room for a small man to stretch out at full length. In theory an ordinary railway ticket gives the right to travel ‘hard’. In reality, however, unless a passenger is ready to spend several days at the railway station on the chance of an empty train coming in, he must buy a supplementary ‘place card’ of which only a limited number are sold.

  ‘Hard’ carriages like everything else in the Soviet Union vary considerably. Some, in spite of the absence of all upholstery, are infested with vermin. Others are perfectly clean. (Much, of course, depends on one’s travelling companions.) Sometimes bedding can be hired but often one has to sleep on the bare boards. Sometimes there is electric light, but in the carriage in which I now found myself the forty occupants had to content themselves with the light of a single tallow candle placed in the middle of the central passage.

  In several respects, however, all railway carriages in the Soviet Union are alike. The windows are either not made to open or if they are, are kept tightly shut; a general conversation on a variety of subjects is constantly in progress all day and all night, and someone is always eating and drinking.

  The town of Biisk, for which I was now bound, had from my point of view two things to recommend it. In the first place it lay at the foot of the Altai Mountains which form the boundary between the Soviet Union and the Republic of Tannu Tuva and stretch far into Mongolia, and I felt that the surrounding country should therefore be worth exploring. Secondly, situated as it is on a branch line some distance along the Turksib, it seemed to me a good starting place for an unobtrusive trip to Central Asia.

  Biisk at six in the morning presented an exceptionally depressing spectacle. The weather, which at Novosibirsk had been fine, had broken. It was cold and raining heavily and at the station there was nothing to be had but black bread and greasy soup. Even the vodka had run out. A number of the inhabitants who had collected at the station to witness the arrival of the train hastened to inform me that once it started raining in these parts it went on for weeks.

  Before deciding on any course of action the first thing was clearly to inspect the town of Biisk which lay at a distance of several miles from the station. The only available means of conveyance was a strange oval wickerwork coracle on wheels filled with extremely wet hay and drawn by a wet and immensely depressed-looking horse. It was generally used, so the crowd informed me, for redistributing guests after parties. Crouched in this distressing vehicle, I set out in streaming rain along a road which was literally a foot deep in mud.

  Biisk did no credit to anyone. The dozen stone-built houses were without exception of pre-revolutionary construction and the wooden houses with their eaves carved in the old Siberian style were unbelievably dilapidated. The row of shops in the high street were a disgrace even by Soviet standards and the unpaved streets a sea of mud. What I saw of the population looked depressed, which indeed they had every right to be. Although Biisk is said to have been originally the centre to which the neighbouring Chinese and Mongols came to sell their corn and wool, the inhabitants are all Russians and I saw practically no Turkis, Tartars or Mongols here or anywhere else in Siberia.

  It had by now become quite evident that late September was not the time of year to visit the Altai and having seen the mud in Biisk itself I accepted unquestioningly the assurances of the local inhabitants that the roads up into the mountains were already impassable. Biisk as a pleasure resort had not proved a success. On the other hand it retained its advantages as a jumping-off place for a trip to Central Asia and I felt that in the circumstances the sooner I made a start the better. In the stationmaster’s office I found a fairly recent time-table and with the assistance of the acting stationmaster, a friendly though not very intelligent young lady of sixteen, I succeeded in planning out an itinerary which would bring me in the end to Alma Ata, the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, situated three days’ journey to the south at the foot of the Tien Shan range, near the Chinese frontier.

  After the usual wait — for in the Soviet Union nothing can be had without waiting — I started off once again on my travels. My immediate destination was Altaisk. Thence I would go to Barnaul, and thence, if I got as far, to Alma Ata.

  The ‘hard’ carriage I was in filled with local peasants who got in and out at the various small stations along the line: gnarled beings whose drab, ragged, sweat-soaked clothes exhaled a sour odour of corruption, and who, in the dim, flickering light of the single candle which illuminated the swaying truck, had a strangely troglodyte appearance.

  On learning that I not only came from Moscow but was actually a foreigner — a being of which most of them had only the vaguest conception — they started to describe to me the horrors of life in Siberia, interrupting each other and repeating themselves over and over again, like the chorus in a Greek play. On the collective farms, they said, things were in a poor state. The up-to-date mechanical apparatus was permanently out of order as no one really knew how to work it. They toiled from morning to night and were only just able to keep themselves and their families alive. Altogether the collective-farm system was a failure and whatever I might hear to the contrary I was to understand once and for all that the life of a Siberian kolkhoznik was a miserable one. The people to be envied, they said bitterly, were the railway workers who received enormous wages for doing nothing.

  Actual figures are always hard to get at, but the agricultural labourer sitting next to me, a man in the prime of life, said that he was quite satisfied when he earned 100 roubles (then roughly equivalent in purchasing power to one pound sterling) a month.

  At Altaisk, a few miles from Barnaul where the Biisk branch line joins the Turksib, we stopped for several hours while a number of cattle trucks were hitched on to our train. These were filled with people who, at first sight, seemed to be Chinese. They turned o
ut to be Koreans, who with their families and their belongings were on their way from the Far East to Central Asia where they were being sent to work on the cotton plantations. They had no idea why they were being deported but all grinned incessantly and I gathered from the few words I could exchange with some of their number that they were pleased to have left the Far Eastern territory where conditions were terrible and to be going to Central Asia of which they had evidently been given enthusiastic accounts. Later I heard that the Soviet authorities had quite arbitrarily removed some 200,000 Koreans to Central Asia, as likely to prove untrustworthy in the event of a war with Japan. I was witnessing yet another mass movement of population.

  By the side of the track a little Tartar boy was playing with what seemed to be a mouse. On closer inspection it proved to be an enormous spider, several inches across, its body and legs covered with thick black hair. Methodically the little boy pulled off its legs, one after another, until all that was left was a round black hairy body, squirming in the sand.

  On reaching Barnaul I went, before trying for a place on the Alma Ata train, out into the town to buy some bread, a commodity not always to be found in the small wayside stations along the line. While I was in the shop I was accosted by a young man with a brisk manner and an alert expression who said he would like a word with me outside in the street.

  Recognizing him without difficulty as an agent of the N.K.V.D., I felt little doubt that my travels were about to be brought to an abrupt conclusion. I decided nevertheless to try to brazen things out and replied that before accompanying him outside I must ask him to tell me who he was, as I was not in the habit of discussing my affairs with strangers. At this he seemed somewhat taken aback and embarrassed (I imagine that the average Soviet citizen does not tend to argue on such occasions). Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he drew me aside and whispered into my ear that he was an official of the N.K.V.D. and was anxious to avoid a painful scene in public. On being told this I expressed relief which I was far from feeling, explained that at first sight I had taken him for a khuligan (hooligan) of whom I understood from the newspapers there were many about and asked him what I could do for him. In reply he told me to hand over my papers and asked me what my business was in Barnaul. I accordingly produced my British passport, a document which completely baffles the average Soviet provincial official and is therefore far more useful than any diplomatic pass, and explained that I was about to leave for Alma Ata. I added that I should not require his services on the journey as — and I pointed to my escort who were hovering rather sheepishly in the background — I had already been provided with two of his colleagues from Novosibirsk, but that I should be very grateful if with his knowledge of local conditions he could help me to get a place on the train.

  There followed a pause during which he examined my passport which, with the exception of my expired entry visa into the Soviet Union, he was naturally quite unable to decipher, from all angles and then to my infinite relief touched his cap (all Russians are inclined to be impressed by anything new and unknown) and said that he would see what he could do about reserving me a place on the Alma Ata train.

  Under the auspices of my new-found protector I now took my place at the head of the queue amongst the Red Army soldiers, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, holders of Soviet orders and decorations, nursing and expectant mothers and other privileged persons, who in the Soviet Union are given preference to all other travellers, and soon secured the necessary place-card entitling me to a place in a soft carriage. All this was done so quickly that I still had an hour to spare before the train left in which to eat a much-needed hot meal.

  In the buffet I found myself at a table with two Soviet citizens of the successful and contented type which one occasionally encounters in places like station restaurants which are not frequented by the very poor: bluff, hearty, back-slapping characters. Both were still in their twenties and both, they hastened to inform me, members of the Party. One was foreman in a building organization and earned 900 roubles a month, the other an engineer earning 1000 roubles a month. Both were local men.

  The builder was very full of himself. Until recently he had been an ordinary workman. He owed his promotion entirely to his own skill and bodily strength and thanks to his own experience as a workman was able to see that his subordinates did their work properly. On the wages he was earning he could live comfortably and indulge his passion for beer (which we were all three drinking in large quantities at the time).

  Did workmen, he asked, live as well as this wherever I came from? I confined myself to saying that I did not think that the British workman was any worse off than his Soviet brother. But even such studied moderation brought the indignant retort that if I believed that, it showed that I had simply been deceived by what I read in the lying capitalist press which was well known to be government controlled. He, on the other hand, knew from reading the Soviet press, the veracity of which no one could doubt, that in all capitalist countries the workers were starved, underpaid and persecuted by the police and by their employers. But soon the world revolution would come and the old system would be swept away in Great Britain as it had been in Russia. Great Britain, he said, had never been the friend of Tsarist Russia and would therefore never really be the friend of the Soviet Union. But, if not a ‘genuine democracy’, she was at least, he concluded, a ‘non-fascist country’, and we parted on the best of terms. Indeed both the builder and the engineer announced their intention of coming to see me when they visited Moscow which neither of them had yet seen. Not wishing to cut short two so promising careers, I was careful to give them an imaginary address.

  In the train I found myself in a ‘soft’ compartment with three senior and somewhat supercilious officers of the Red Army, well pleased with themselves in their smartly cut uniforms and top-boots. When I woke up next morning they had gone and their place had been taken by three of the railway employees whose prosperity had been such a source of envy to the peasants I had met the day before. These were friendly and talkative and we shared our supplies of food, while the eldest of the three regaled us with somewhat salacious accounts of night life in Warsaw before the Revolution, which he said compared most favourably with life in Central Siberia at the present time. The three railwaymen got out at Semipalatinsk but were immediately replaced by three more railwaymen. What exact purpose was fulfilled by the hordes of railway officials who filled the ‘soft’ carriages in Soviet trains, I never discovered. But all had well-filled brief cases and all were travelling, so they said, ‘on Government business’.

  While my fellow travellers changed at frequent intervals, the country through which we were travelling had so far scarcely varied. From the Urals to Novosibirsk and then down the Turksib as far as Semipalatinsk the landscape remained strictly Siberian: a dead flat plain covered with grey-green moss, occasional clumps of silver birches, and an occasional magpie sitting on a stump. Such villages as I saw consisted of decayed wooden isbas, inhabited by miserable-looking Russian peasants.

  The change from Siberia to Central Asia came soon after entering the Republic of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk which we reached on the second night after leaving Barnaul. From this point onwards the Turksib, after climbing to a higher level, runs through what is apparently a waterless desert, as flat, though far more desolate than the Siberian plain. This we traversed for the whole of one day. The Turksib, which was only completed in 1930, had, unlike the Trans-Siberian, not yet been double-tracked and there were frequent and prolonged halts while we waited for trains coming in the opposite direction.

  At the side of the track at intervals were situated clusters of Kazakh yurts, or dome-shaped huts, from the inhabitants of which the passengers, in the absence of a dining-car, could buy melons, eggs and other articles of food for the most part rather fly-blown and looking, as indeed was probably the case, as though they had met every train for weeks past. Lovingly a dirty, tattered old woman would produce from the innermost folds of her dr
ess half a roast chicken, black with age, and offer it for sale at an enormous price, which only the very richest passengers could afford to pay. Personally, I stuck to eggs and fruit.

  The dwellers along the line and, by now, most of the passengers were native Kazakhs. These vary considerably in type, some having flat, round, moonlike faces with high cheekbones like Mongols and others oval faces with more aquiline features of a more Persian type. All have dark reddish-brown complexions like that of North American Indians. The women wear strange medieval head-dresses; the men long padded coats and, on their heads, skull-caps, round fur hats or helmet-shaped cones of thick white felt with sharply upturned brims. The language they speak is akin to Turkish. Russian for them is a foreign tongue. Though most of the Kazakhs are no longer nomads and have exchanged their tents for villages of mud huts, they are still born horsemen and are never out of the saddle for long.

  At sunset we came to a range of small hills, the first I had seen since the Urals. During the day the sun was blazing hot but after dark the desert was bitterly cold and, though I slept fully dressed and wore an overcoat, I shivered all night in my bunk. When I looked out next morning across the sandy waste, I saw something that filled me with pleasurable anticipation.

  Far to the south, dimly seen in the remote distance, towering high above the desert, rose a mighty range of mountains, their lower slopes veiled in cloud and vapours, their snow-clad peaks glittering in the sunlight, suspended between earth and sky.