Eastern Approaches (4 page)

On a lower level, one could only observe disappearances and draw the obvious conclusion. The Embassy porter went out for a walk and never came back; our cook went; so did one of the chauffeurs. The
officials at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs became more inaccessible than ever. They found themselves in a particularly unenviable situation. Contacts with foreigners were notoriously fatal; Tukachevski, it was thought, had been shot for alleged contacts with the German General Staff. Yet it was their duty to see foreigners. If they refused, they were clearly neglecting their duty, or else had a guilty conscience. If, on the other hand, they continued to see foreigners, someone sooner or later was bound to accuse them of betraying State Secrets or plotting the overthrow of the Soviet regime. Theirs was an unhealthy occupation. One after another they disappeared. Their successors were paralysed with fear, for the turn-over was very rapid.

One would ring up and ask to speak to Comrade Ivanov. ‘He is sick,’ an unfamiliar voice would reply nervously, ‘he is busy; he has gone for a walk.’ ‘And who,’ one would ask, ‘is doing his work?’ ‘For the time being,’ the voice would reply unhappily, ‘I am — Comrade Maximov.’ ‘May I come and see you, Mr. Maximov?’ one would inquire. ‘It is very difficult,’ would come the evasive answer, ‘I also am very busy.’

Next time, if one could remember his name, one would ring up Mr. Maximov. And once more there would be the increasingly familiar answer: ‘He is sick; he is busy; he has gone for a walk.’ ‘For the time being, I am replacing him.’ And the chances were that that would be the last that one would hear of Comrade Maximov.

There was much speculation as to the amount of truth in the charges brought against those purged and as to the exact numbers involved. Theories on the subject varied. One thing was certain: that a great many people took advantage of the purge to get rid of their personal enemies and rivals. If you wanted a man’s job or his room or his wife, you denounced him as a Trotskist or a British spy, and the chances were that he would disappear. The N.K.V.D. were working overtime. There was no time to go into details. Besides, the spirit of competition had entered into it. The great thing, if you were a conscientious official, was to get more convictions to your credit than the next man. Soon the dangers of this excessive zeal and widespread delation were realized and steps were taken to discourage unjustified denunciations. This process was known as ‘purging the purgers’ and gave excellent
opportunities for working off old scores. The fun became faster and more furious.

Fear hung over the city like a mist, seeping in everywhere. Everyone lived in terror of everyone else. Agents of the N.K.V.D. were everywhere. Every day one could read in the papers commendations of soldiers who had denounced their officers, children who had ‘unmasked’ their fathers. No one could be trusted. No one was safe.

Not long after the liquidation of Tukachevski and the others, the Soviet Government gave an official reception in honour of some visiting celebrity. It was attended by the Diplomatic Corps and by what was left of the Soviet High Command.

Never have I seen men look more uneasy than those Generals and Admirals, many of whom must have been close friends and associates of the dead men. They were appalled at being in the same room with foreigners; that was the most dangerous thing of all. Whenever they saw foreign naval and military attachés coming in their direction, they sidled hurriedly away. Nor were they inclined for conversation with each other or with the important figures from the political world who were also attending the party. It was impossible to say nowadays who might or might not be a traitor, or who might not, on the strength of some chance remark, denounce you as one yourself. And so they stood about in doorways and in corners by themselves, their faces a greenish-yellowish grey above their stiff uniform collars and rows of medals.

After the elaborate supper, served on the Tsar’s gold plate, still resplendent with the Imperial Cipher, a band played fox-trots and rumbas. But the feeling of impending doom could not be dispelled so easily. Even Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, his rotund figure encased in irreproachable evening dress, looked uneasy, as he trotted round the room, his shapely adopted daughter clasped tightly to him.

And so by force of circumstances the foreigners in Moscow, diplomats and journalists for the most part, were thrown back more and more on their own company. Night after night we would put on our white ties and go and dine at one or other Embassy or Legation, sitting next to the same people, discussing the same topics. It was a highly artificial existence, but one that had its compensations, for, amongst the
two or three hundred people who made up Moscow’s entire foreign colony, there were a great many who were well worth knowing and the ghetto-like conditions under which we lived drew us closer together than would have been the case elsewhere.

For our knowledge of what was going on about us in the country in which we were living, we relied on the columns of the Soviet press, often surprisingly revealing; on rumours, for the most part of dubious value; on such information as one could glean from the little incidents of everyday life; and on what one could see for oneself as one plodded in one’s heavy snow boots along the streets of Moscow.

This was often the most valuable source of all. From a tour of the poorly stocked shops, where long shabbily dressed queues of depressed-looking people waited for hours, often vainly, in the hope of obtaining the bare necessities of life, and from a comparison of prices and wage rates, it was possible to form a not inaccurate idea of Soviet standards of living. It was possible, too, by comparing these and other known data concerning industrial production to hazard a guess at the principal motive underlying Soviet economic policy: namely determination to build up heavy industry and thus at all costs make the country strong and self-supporting and ready for war.

To this end everything was sacrificed, the interests of the individual consumer first of all, an exception only being made in the case of those engaged on work of national importance, who, for the good of their health and as a reward for their services, were allowed special privileges. This, it appeared, was the official explanation of the life of luxury led by the Soviet aristocracy — the People’s Commissars, the Generals and the high bureaucrats — of whom we occasionally caught glimpses driving in magnificent cars to and from their country estates or entertaining blonde young ladies to champagne under the gold chandeliers of the Hotel Metropole. But theirs, though a merry life, was usually a short one too, for, though all were in danger, the tallest were usually the first to fall — a thought which, I suspect, consoled many of the humbler members of the community for much of what they had to put up with.

It was not until May Day, after I had been in Moscow for a couple of months, that I first saw Stalin.

Holding at that time no official position save that of Secretary General of the Communist Party, he did not attend the state receptions to which foreign diplomats were invited. Nor would he receive Foreign Ambassadors. Sometimes our own Ambassador, Lord Chilston, after a long, inconclusive and exasperating interview with Litvinov, then Commissar for Foreign Affairs, would demand to see him, more as a joke than anything. Litvinov’s chubby little hands would spread themselves in an appeasing gesture, while his round bespectacled face arranged itself in an apologetic smile. ‘I am very sorry,’ he would say in that fluent but guttural English which he had learnt as a refugee in London before the Revolution, when his name had been variously Finkelstein, Wallach, or just plain Mr. Harris, ‘I am very sorry indeed. But Mr. Stalin, he is just a private gentleman, and he does not like to see foreigners. He leaves that to me.’ And Mr. Litvinov’s tubby little body would shake with laughter.

But at least twice a year Stalin would appear in public, on May 1st and November 7th, when, standing on Lenin’s tomb, he would take the salute at ceremonial parades of the Red Army. And then there wat no doubt about the position he occupied, however unofficial it mighs be. Unobtrusively, he would emerge from a little side door in the Kremlin wall, followed by the other members of the supreme Politbureau of the Party, and, clambering up to the top of the Mausoleum, would take up his position a little in front of the others, looking out over the great expanse of the Red Square, a squat Asiatic figure in a peaked cap and drab semi-military greatcoat: narrow eyes close set under heavy brows, the downward sweep of his moustache ponderous beneath a hawk-like nose, his expression alternating between benignity and bored inscrutability. Infantry, cavalry, tanks would sweep past while fighters and bombers roared overhead. Every now and then he would raise his hand, palm outstretched, with a little gesture that was at once a friendly wave, a benediction and a salute. But most of the time he would chat affably to those around him, while they, for their part, grinned nervously and moved uneasily from one foot to the other, forgetting the parade and the high office they held and everything else in their mingled joy and terror at being spoken to by him.

From time to time there would be loud bursts of cheering: cheers
for Stalin; cheers for the infantry, rank upon rank of goose-stepping automatons; cheers for the Cossacks galloping past in their traditional uniform; cheers for the heavy tanks, thundering and rattling at full speed across the cobbles; especially loud cheers for the Special Security Troops of the N.K.V.D. in their smart royal-blue and scarlet caps.

At first it did not occur to me to look and see who was cheering. When I did, the answer was not immediately apparent. For the first time, I realized that, except for the Diplomatic Corps, clustered in an unenthusiastic group round the foot of the mausoleum, and some heavily guarded school-children about a quarter of a mile away on the far side of the square, there was no one there to cheer. All round the Red Square stretched a grim, silent line of security troops, blocking the entrances, extending into the neighbouring streets and down to the river, perched on the roofs of the surrounding houses. Nowhere in sight was there anyone who looked like a member of the general public.

It was then that I grasped that the cheering was potted, synthetic cheering, issuing from loudspeakers, discreetly sited at the four corners of the square and conveniently obviating the need for unhygienic, insecure spectators. Only later did the ‘toiling masses’ make their appearance, in the form of a ‘Spontaneous Workers’ Demonstration’, consisting of two or three columns of ordinary Soviet citizens, who were marched past at a brisk trot, freely interspersed with Security Troops. Not content with keeping an eye on the marchers, these lost no opportunity of urging the laggards among them to walk faster and cheer louder. But the cheers that came from them were poor, half-hearted, half-starved cheers, not like the full-throated roars that issued from the loudspeakers.

Living in Moscow, even under the conditions to which we were condemned, one could in a few months find out more about the real character of the Soviet Union than one could hope to learn by reading all the books that were ever written on the subject.

But I, for one, had not altogether given up hope of seeing Soviet life at rather closer quarters; nor had I for a moment abandoned the idea of somehow or another getting to Central Asia. With the melting of the snows, I started to draw up a plan of campaign.

O
NE
thing was quite certain. I should not get permission from the Soviet Government to travel in Central Asia. The older residents among the diplomats laughed at the idea of my even applying for it. The whole of Turkestan had long been a forbidden zone and now, with the spy-scare and purge at their height, steps were being taken to restrict the movement of foreigners even in other parts of the Union. In short, if I went at all, I should have to go unofficially. The question was whether or not, if I travelled without permission, I should succeed in evading the vigilance of the N.K.V.D.

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.

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.