Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  Feeling that I was being made a fool of, I climbed back on to the bus. It was fuller than ever, and this time there were eight children. On the way we stopped at the village of Makanchi for a much-needed evening meal which we were given in the eating-house of the local collective farm: tea, vodka, fried eggs and beef-stew. The eating-house which was a converted mud hut, seemed to be monopolized by the higher kolkhoz officials whom I found engaged in preparations for the forthcoming elections to the Supreme Council of the Kazakh S.S.R. These consisted in plastering the walls of every building inside and out with the not very prepossessing portrait of the local candidate, a typical officer of the N.K.V.D. troops. He was, needless to say, unopposed.

  After driving all through the night I reached Ayaguz in time to throw myself on board a hard carriage bound for Alma Ata, where I arrived, tired, cross and dejected, twenty-four hours later.

  On reaching Alma Ata, my first care was to call on the Plenipotentiary Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, the same pleasant young Kazakh with whom I had had dealings the previous autumn. I explained to him what had happened and asked him to find me accommodation for two or three days while I endeavoured to communicate with Urumchi through the intermediary of the Chinese Consul. He was as usual extremely amiable and, after providing me with a letter to the director of the Dom Sovietov, the hotel where I had stayed on my first visit, proceeded to try to ring up the Chinese Consul on my behalf.

  This proved to be no easy matter, and when, after the sixth attempt he had still not got through, I told him that I would walk round to the Chinese Consulate and see what I could do myself. He seemed a little embarrassed at the idea of my paying a personal call on the Chinese Consul and assured me that if I would leave it to him he would arrange everything for me himself. I thought it nevertheless better not to take advantage of his kind offer and set out to find the Chinese Consulate on my own.

  It was a revealing experience. The consular offices were installed in a tumble-down native house in a side street. As I was about to enter the front door I was challenged very abruptly by the N.K.V.D. militiaman on duty outside, who asked me where I thought I was going. I replied that, although the matter scarcely concerned him, my intention was to call on the Chinese Consul. At this the militiaman, who had by now, I think, realized that I was not a native of Alma Ata filled with a sudden desire to move in consular society, entered the courtyard of the Consulate, closely followed by myself, and emitted a tremendous bellow. A seedy-looking Chinese appeared in answer to this somewhat unorthodox summons and was told in the most peremptory fashion to ‘come and talk to this man’. The Chinese, who introduced himself as the Secretary of the Consulate, was evasive as to the whereabouts of the Consul but assured me that he himself would be glad to deal with any points I might wish to raise. I accordingly explained to him my business and asked him to send a wireless message to Urumchi requesting that instructions for my admission to Sinkiang should be sent to Chuguchak with as little delay as possible. At this he seemed slightly embarrassed and asked me whether I had been to see the Plenipotentiary Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. He was afraid that the Soviet authorities might be opposed to my visiting Sinkiang. I pointed out that the Soviet authorities had done everything to facilitate my journey and added that I had already in the ordinary course of events been to see the Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, although I did not see how this affected the matter. After extracting from him a promise to send an immediate wireless message to Urumchi I returned to the Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to report progress.

  The two offices were only a few hundred yards apart and I had hardly arrived there when the telephone rang. It was impossible for me not to hear that this was the Chinese Consulate asking the Government of the country in which it was stationed for instructions with regard to a matter which, in theory at any rate, exclusively concerned China and a third Power. The Plenipotentiary Representative, whom I suspected of being a little simple, made no attempt to disguise this fact from me and proceeded in my presence to authorize the Chinese Consulate to refer the matter to Urumchi without further delay. After putting down the receiver he said, not, I think, without a desire to show off, that he would see to it that an answer was obtained from Urumchi without delay. In the meanwhile, he said, I could rest after my journey and once again enjoy the amenities of Alma Ata. I accordingly went to the hotel and, after a good meal, lay down to rest with the feeling that if I had achieved nothing else my visits had at any rate thrown an interesting light on the position occupied by the Chinese Consulate at Alma Ata.

  I was aroused from deep sleep by a loud knock at the door and, sitting up in bed, found myself in the presence of an imposing-looking officer of the N.K.V.D. Militia who opened the conversation somewhat abruptly by announcing that, as the laws of the Soviet Republics of Central Asia did not allow foreigners to reside there without special permission from the N.K.V.D., and as in my case the N.K.V.D. had no intention of giving such permission, I was to leave Alma Ata at once.

  At this I got out of bed as quickly as I could and, asking the officer to sit down, proceeded to explain why I was in Alma Ata and pointed out that if the N.K.V.D. refused me permission to remain in Alma Ata until an answer had been received from Urumchi they would in fact be hindering me in the performance of my official duties after the Soviet Government had been requested to afford me all possible assistance on my journey. I further pointed out that I had spent a week in Alma Ata in the previous autumn when the N.K.V.D. had not only made no mention of the regulation which he was now quoting but had shown themselves most helpful in every way, and finally observed that, as there was a Plenipotentiary Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in residence in Alma Ata, the N.K.V.D. should communicate with me through him and not direct.

  The officer replied that he quite saw my point of view but that nevertheless I must leave by the first train. As to the Representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, he had made a mistake in obtaining accommodation for me, and this mistake, I could rest assured, would duly be brought to his notice. In any case he could assure me that the views of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs carried very little weight with the N.K.V.D. He then cut short the discussion by leaving the room.

  There was nothing for it but to return to my friend the Plenipotentiary Representative and ask his advice. Before I had had time to explain to him what had happened, he greeted me with the news that the Chinese Consulate had now received a reply from Urumchi and would like me to call in order that they might communicate it to me. In the circumstances I proceeded without delay to the Chinese Consulate where I was once again received by the dejected-looking Consular Secretary. Other Chinese drifted in and out of the room whilst we were talking, interrupting the conversation with vague but polite inquiries about the state of my health. I said I heard that the answer had come from Urumchi. Yes, they said, it had. The necessary instructions had now been sent to Chuguchak. They were to the effect that I was on no account to be allowed to cross the frontier. I said that I regarded the decision of the Provincial Government as most surprising and added that His Majesty’s Government would in due course be informed of it. There ensued a further prolonged exchange of courtesies and I then took my leave.

  There was no longer anything to keep me in Alma Ata, even if I had not been under an order of expulsion. But I was determined that if the N.K.V.D. wished me to leave Alma Ata, they should enable me to do so in style.

  On being told that there were no first-class seats available on the Moscow train, I replied that while I could not prevent them from expelling me from Alma Ata I could at least insist that I should travel in comfort. At once the influence of the N.K.V.D. was brought to bear on the railway authorities, the necessary number of minor officials were arbitrarily evicted from the sleeping-car and I and my escort of police spies left for Mosc
ow in luxury. Anything to get rid of me.

  I had been scored off heavily and all the way back to Moscow I turned over in my mind ways of getting even with the N.K.V.D. Long before I arrived, I had decided that I would come back to Central Asia before the end of the year, whether they wanted me there or not. And next time I would not make them a present of my itinerary in advance.

  Chapter IX

  A Little Further

  BY the early autumn it had become clear that, for reasons outside my control, any further attempt on my part to reach Urumchi would have to be postponed at any rate until the spring of 1939. In the circumstances I decided instead to attempt a journey through Soviet Central Asia to the Oxus and thence through Afghan Turkestan to Kabul.

  The possibility of the journey from India into Soviet Central Asia being undertaken by a British official had been considered from time to time in the past, but special permission would have been required, and the well-known unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to allow foreigners access to the Central Asian Republics made it extremely unlikely that they would have agreed to grant the necessary entrance visa.

  My own case was different. Being in the Soviet Union already, all that I required, in theory at any rate, was a Soviet exit visa, and at that time the exit visas issued to members of the Diplomatic Corps were, strangely enough, technically valid for any frontier point. Having furnished myself, then, with an exit visa no different from those with which we regularly left the Soviet Union when bound for Paris or London, and an entry visa into Afghanistan, obtained discreetly and without difficulty from the Afghan Embassy, I set out again for Central Asia, for once at any rate theoretically well within my rights.

  On my first visit to Soviet Turkestan I had left Moscow without informing the Soviet authorities of my intentions and consequently without visas or permits of any kind, and had banked simply on the assumption that, if they could be taken by surprise, their reactions would be too slow for them to put an effective stop to my activities before I had seen what I wanted to see. This had worked once, but was not likely to work again. The best proof was my expulsion from Alma Ata in June. Moreover, since my first trip the N.K.V.D. had taken to following me about everywhere, even in Moscow, where a car, containing sometimes as many as five men, waited outside any house that I visited and two plain-clothes agents sat behind me whenever I went to the theatre.

  Careful thought was required. If, I reasoned, I were to travel to the Oxus direct without stopping or turning aside, the authorities were likely to make the best of a bad job and do everything in their power to get me out of Soviet Central Asia across the frontier into Afghanistan as quickly as possible. The prospect of travelling direct to the frontier did not, however, appeal to me particularly. The journey to the Oxus, like almost any journey through outlying parts of the Soviet Union, was likely to be in itself instructive and amusing. But in my eyes its principal interest lay in the fact that it would take me through the station of Kagan which is the nearest point to Bokhara on the main Central Asian line.

  On my previous visit to Uzbekistan I had failed to reach Bokhara, and this had rankled, until in my mind it had come to outshine even Samarkand and the other legendary cities of Turkestan. It should, I now decided, be possible to pay an unobtrusive visit to the former capital of the Emirs, either on my way to Afghanistan or on my way back. At any rate, if I were to have trouble with the authorities my position would, I hoped, be pleasanter than that of the Hungarian, Vambery, who visited Bokhara in 1863, disguised as a dervish, and passed some months there knowing that capture meant a singularly disagreeable death in the pit, full of specially bred vermin and reptiles, which the Emir reserved for unwelcome visitors to his domains.

  I left Moscow on October 7th by a more or less comfortable express train bound for Askhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan. Not only did it boast a restaurant-car which is apt to be a somewhat problematical feature of Soviet trains, but the crew of the latter turned out to be old friends, already encountered on a previous journey. I was greeted effusively and before I had had time to order anything was confronted with half a tumbler of vodka and a plate of cabbage soup, which had evidently stuck in my friends’ memory as staple articles of my diet. My fellow passengers were for the most part officers of the N.K.V.D. Frontier Troops, travelling back to the outposts of empire on the Oxus and in the Pamirs, fully conscious of belonging to a corps d’élite.

  For two whole days after leaving Moscow we travelled through European Russia: pine woods, birch woods; villages of decayed wooden isbas clustering round decayed white churches and inhabited by decayed-looking peasants; magpies on stumps, in flight and on telegraph wires; the Volga, a mighty stream.

  On the third evening we reached Orenburg, which for more than one hundred years marked the furthest point of Russia’s advance against the Kirghiz and Turkomans and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva. On a previous occasion when I had passed through Orenburg, presumably merely on account of my doubtful appearance, I had been arrested on the platform outside my railway carriage and had almost been left behind. This time I was more careful and nothing untoward occurred.

  By next morning we were well into Asia and for two days travelled through the Kara Kum or Black Desert, a howling wilderness of (paradoxically) pale red sand and parched and distorted shrubs and grass, its monotony broken half way through by the dreary storm-swept expanse of the Sea of Aral and its bleak mud flats. At the stopping-places the Kirghiz and Kazakh women in their high medieval head-dresses and long coats of dirty velvet came out of their round skin tents to sell us kumiss, fermented mare’s or camel’s milk, flat unleavened loaves, melons, skeins of camel-hair, dried fish from the Sea of Aral, necklaces of cockle-shells, and, occasionally, eggs. Remembering journeys when I had been entirely dependent on their products, I was glad of the restaurant-car with its cabbage soup.

  In the middle of the fifth night we reached Tashkent and next morning awoke to find ourselves nearing the oasis of Samarkand. To the south, the mountains of Kirghizia, the westernmost extremity of the Tien Shan Range, were in sight and, instead of the Hungry Steppe, the vineyards and cotton fields of Uzbekistan. At the wayside stations, Uzbeks with oval faces and regular features in brightly striped khalats, sashes and turbans or embroidered skull-caps had taken the place of the Kazakhs and Kirghiz in their sheepskins. In the villages flat-roofed houses of sun-baked mud bricks had replaced the skin tents of the nomads.

  During the long train journey I had had plenty of time to consider my plans and had decided not to postpone my attempt to reach Bokhara until my return journey. I would go there at once. Samarkand would have to be left this time, unless I were to prejudice my chances of reaching Bokhara; and so I resisted the temptation to revisit the glittering domes of Shakh Zinda and the Gur Emir, and reluctantly contented myself with buying some grapes for my breakfast on the platform of Samarkand railway station. Westwards from Samarkand I was travelling through a part of Uzbekistan which was new to me, but which had little to distinguish it from the country further east, except that it was perhaps rather more fertile, for we were now following the course of the Zaravshan, the river which waters the oases of both Samarkand and Bokhara.

  At Kagan, which we reached in the afternoon, and which looked very much like any other small Soviet railway station, I shouldered my luggage and slipped unobtrusively from the train. Two alert-looking young men, whom I had already noticed in the dining-car, did so too. I deposited my luggage in the luggage office. They followed my example. I strolled into the station buffet. They came too, developing a sudden interest in a bun whenever I stopped. There was no doubt who they were. So long, however, as they did not interfere with me, I had no objection to being followed by them. If, as I suspected, their purpose was to see what I did, rather than to stop me from doing it, I had no reason to anticipate trouble from them. What I needed to avoid at all costs was unduly attracting the attention of the local authorities who were far more likely to interfere.

  My first object
was to ascertain as discreetly as possible how to get to Bokhara. I believed that an occasional train still ran along what used once to be the Emir’s State Railway. This idea, however, had to be abandoned almost immediately, for the first person I met on emerging from the luggage office was a portly local Jewess lamenting loudly that the only train of the day had already gone and that there was no bus service. While I was condoling with her and wondering what to do next, I caught sight of a lorry laden with bales of cotton moving off down the only road in sight which, I felt, probably led to Bokhara. A short sprint and a flying jump landed me head first in a rather loosely packed bale of cotton, from which I emerged to see one of my N.K.V.D. men running after the lorry, which he obviously had not a hope of catching, while the other disappeared into the door of the Militia guardroom presumably in order to get help. Meanwhile, the lorry, with me on board, was heading for the open country and showing a pretty turn of speed. The situation, I felt, was fraught with amusing possibilities.

  At this point the lorry suddenly stopped for no apparent reason, and a few seconds later a breathless N.K.V.D. man landed in the next cotton bale to mine. I felt reassured and hoped that his colleague would not now persist in his intention of turning out the guard and that I should be able to complete my journey to Bokhara undisturbed in this providential vehicle.

  But this was not to be. The sight of two people jumping on to a lorry had put the same idea into a number of other heads. There was a rush and we were trampled over and rolled on as the lorry filled with a variegated crowd of Uzbeks, kicking and biting, as only Uzbeks can, in their efforts to get themselves on and their friends off.

  All might yet have been well, had not the driver, who had let in the clutch and was moving off again, at this point put his head round the corner and caught sight of this multitude of uninvited passengers. It was, he said, overdoing it. One or two might pass, but not a whole crowd. We must all get off at once. There ensued a general argument which ended in the driver letting down the sides of the lorry and pushing off as many of his passengers as he could reach, while others climbed in again on the other side.