Eastern Approaches (7 page)

For some miles after leaving Tiflis we followed the valley of the swiftly flowing Kura. Before long this brought us to Mtzkhet, the
former capital of Georgia, now a mere cluster of houses round an ancient cathedral jutting out into the swirling water of the river. Already we were in the hills and soon the road began to climb sharply. The air became sharper and the mountains wilder. From time to time we passed little groups of travellers on foot, on horseback and in carts and sometimes solitary horsemen, fierce shaggy figures. At Pasanaur near the top of the pass we stopped to eat — a surprisingly good meal: freshly caught trout,
shashlik
— mutton grilled over charcoal on a skewer — and a bottle of local red wine. Outside the post house sat a small, rather mangy bear on a chain, a forlorn-looking little animal.

Still we climbed, more and more steeply. Our truck had seen better days and in many places the road had been washed away by the melting snow. At more and more frequent intervals it became necessary for everyone to get out and push, and I began to wonder whether we should ever reach our destination. High above us to the west loomed Mount Kazbek, a massive peak capped with eternal snow. We were passing through the towering Dariel Gap. Sheer rock rose up for thousands of feet on either side of us. Then we started to descend. Soon we found ourselves following the valley of the Terek, flowing down towards the northern slopes of the Caucasus. But our surroundings remained as wild as ever. An expanse of vast boulders lined the river bed and the mountains on either side were barren and craggy. The sun was down and it was bitterly cold. By the time we reached our destination it was dark and we were half frozen.

Vladikavkaz, the Key to the Caucasus, or, as it is now called, after a People’s Commissar of that name, Ordzhonikidze, is an agreeably placed little town rather like a decayed French watering place, but otherwise has little to recommend it, and, after spending a night at the inn, I was glad to board the train for Moscow, where I duly arrived forty-eight hours later.

My journey was over. I had not reached Central Asia and I had made a number of major tactical errors. On the other hand I had caught my first glimpse of the East and I had lived on and off in considerably closer proximity to the Soviet population than I would have believed possible. Next time, I decided, I would profit by this experience. Next time. …

B
Y
the end of the summer my turn had come for another spell of leave, and I was free to make a fresh attempt to reach Central Asia.

This time I decided to try a different line of approach: by Siberia. As far as I knew, there was nothing to prevent one from travelling across Siberia by the main Trans-Siberian line. Some friends of mine had recently gone through to China that way. My plan was to take a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Express; leave the train without warning somewhere in the middle of Siberia, and then, stage by stage, make my way southwards as unobtrusively as possible, and without revealing my ultimate destination. I hoped, by this indirect approach, to keep the ‘competent authorities’ guessing until the final, illicit stage of my journey, by when, with any luck, it would be too late for them to stop me getting where I wanted. I did not expect to remain at large in Central Asia for long, even supposing that I got there, but judging by my last journey, my experiences once I left the beaten track were likely to be unusual and entertaining. The chief danger was that I would be picked up and sent back to Moscow as soon as I left the Trans-Siberian.

I started from Moscow on September 21st with a first-class ticket, bought quite openly, a supply of roubles, some tins of
foie gras
, no more luggage than I could carry on my back, and no definite plans.

For two days I ate and slept and read the excellent novels of Monsieur Simenon. Outside the window, the Russian landscape rolled slowly by, green and monotonous. I decided that I would get off the train at Sverdlovsk, on the far side of the Urals, one of the big new industrial towns which have grown up in Siberia since the Revolution.

We crossed the Urals in the night and reached Sverdlovsk station an hour or two before sunrise. Without saying anything to anyone I shouldered my kitbag and slipped off the train. Snow had fallen in the
mountains and it was bitterly cold. Standing on the bleak windy platform, I watched the warm, brightly lighted coach from which I had just alighted sway off into the darkness.

Outside the station a tram was starting. It took me through muddy, unpaved streets of tumble-down wooden shacks to the centre of the town with its groups of vast blocks of recently built but already slightly dilapidated buildings. The largest of these, an immense reddish building, bore in golden letters a yard high the legend ‘Grand Ural Hotel’. This looked promising. I pushed my way through the swing doors.

In the hall, even at so early an hour, a seething, shouting crowd was besieging a harassed booking clerk who was trying to make them believe that not one room was vacant. A number of less impatient seekers after accommodation were sleeping peacefully on the benches in the hall, which, like the rest of the hotel, was modernistic in intention, but shabby in effect, and strongly redolent of Soviet humanity. Life-size plaster statues of Lenin and Stalin towered above them. After a struggle, I fought my way through to the booking clerk. ‘No rooms,’ he said. ‘What, no rooms at all?’ I asked. ‘No rooms unless you have a special permit from the N.K.V.D.,’ he said, and started talking to someone else.

This was not at all good news. The last thing I wanted to do was to draw upon myself the attention of the ‘competent authorities’ at this early stage. On the other hand, unless I applied to them for a permit, I should have nowhere to sleep and probably nothing to eat, and at least in Sverdlovsk I was not in a forbidden zone. I accordingly decided to visit the N.K.V.D., devoutly hoping that they would not ask me too many questions about my future movements.

To my delight, they asked me no questions at all. At N.K.V.D. Headquarters a harmless-looking functionary with pince-nez and a fussy manner, on being told that I was travelling ‘on official business’, at once issued me with the document I needed. Armed with this, I returned to the Grand Ural Hotel, having achieved something very like official status.

As soon as they saw the document with which I had been issued the attitude of the hotel staff changed completely. After a brief whispered conversation I was provided with a
propusk
(pass) admitting
me to the upstair regions and installed in a room of which the furniture consisted of three rather doubtful beds, a wireless loudspeaker which poured out propaganda at me until I succeeded in silencing it, and a large mauve marble inkwell in the shape of a bird. Then, having eaten a greasy but filling meal in the fly-infested hotel dining-room, I set out to inspect the town.

Sverdlovsk, the former Ekaterinburg, where Nicholas II and his family were put to death by the Bolsheviks in 1918, was now one of the chief centres of Soviet heavy industry sited, for strategic reasons, beyond the Urals. Before the Revolution Ekaterinburg with a population of 40,000 must have been a typical Russian provincial town. Now, twenty years later, it could boast a population of close on half a million. Some of the old churches and official buildings still survived but the latter were completely outnumbered and overshadowed by the vast modern constructions which had sprung up of recent years and were still springing up: factories, department stores, Government buildings, cinemas, clubs and blocks of flats.

Seen, or, better still, photographed, from a distance these were impressive both on account of their size and of their up-to-date design. But little attention had been paid to detail. From nearby or from inside the new buildings were considerably less impressive, shoddily constructed and roughly finished. Indeed in many respects they compared unfavourably with the more solidly built and better-finished houses of the old regime. Sverdlovsk had manifestly been modernized in a hurry and the fine asphalted streets of sub-skyscrapers tended to tail off into muddy lanes of wooden shacks. In the outlying parts of the town where the majority of the working population lived there were no paved streets and no stone or brick houses; nothing but mud and hovels.

But in spite of these imperfections, Sverdlovsk gave an impression of energy and progress. The new factories seemed to be working day and night and, although the finest blocks of flats were of course reserved for the new bourgeoisie of Party members, high officials and highly paid skilled workers, a considerable number of more modest buildings were being built to provide accommodation for a considerable proportion of the population and do something to relieve the appalling housing shortage.

Shopping facilities seemed to be confined to one street and indeed to one shop, an enormous Universalmag (State department store). This, by Soviet standards, was well fitted, while the selection of goods for sale was no worse than that to be found in Moscow stores and the prices roughly equivalent to those current in Moscow. As usual, the counters at which the necessities of life were on sale were besieged by a seething crowd of anxious would-be purchasers while there was far less demand for fancy goods and ‘luxuries’. In the side-streets the usual queues were waiting outside the kerosene and bread shops. In Sverdlovsk as in every other Soviet town half at least of the shop-windows were filled with Soviet-made scent and soaps.

Considerable attention seemed to have been paid to providing amusements for the population or rather for the portion of it which has the time and money to be amused. One of the most striking modern buildings was the ‘Dynamo’ sports club, an organization with branches all over the Union, whose members are drawn from the new Soviet
jeunesse dorée
. A fine neo-classical building which was presumably the Governor’s residence under the old regime has been converted into a school and Communist Boy Scouts’ Club and the garden in front of it into a playground for the children. Near a new basalt-faced block of Government offices and flats for Government officials was a large new cinema and dance hall and there were other cinemas and theatres in other parts of the town. On the outskirts, an attractive ‘Park of Rest and Culture’ was being laid out on a large scale in a pine wood on the shores of a lake.

But, in spite of all these means of recreation, the crowds which thronged the badly paved streets looked uniformly and profoundly depressed. Almost all were poorly clothed, badly shod industrial workers or rather industrialized peasants. The smartly dressed members of the new bourgeoisie, so conspicuous in Moscow, were few and far between.

On the whole I felt little inclination to linger in Sverdlovsk and it was with feelings of relief that, after rising at three in the morning and waiting for some hours on the station platform, I learned that there was one vacant berth on the incoming train to Novosibirsk. I decided to take it.

Novosibirsk, two days’ journey eastwards, had little to distinguish it
from Sverdlovsk. Both were centres of heavy industry. There were, in both, the same blocks of pretentious modernistic buildings in the centre of the town and the same fringe of muddy streets and dilapidated shacks on the outskirts; the same factories working day and night and the same crowds of unsmiling workers in the streets. But while Ekaterinburg was already an important provincial town in 1917, Novosibirsk or rather Novonikolaievsk was before the Revolution no more than a medium-sized village, and the present town of 300,000 or more inhabitants with its street-cars and skyscrapers has been entirely constructed under the Soviet regime.

It was at Novosibirsk that I planned to leave the Trans-Siberian line and branch southwards along the Turksib Railway which joins the Trans-Siberian at Novosibirsk and links it up with Turkestan. Accordingly, having seen all I wanted of the town, I took my place in a queue for tickets. For hour after hour I shifted my weight wearily from one foot to the other. Finally, after waiting for no less than ten hours, I was lucky enough to secure the last available ticket for Biisk, two or three hundred miles to the south at the foot of the Altai Mountains. After which the window of the ticket office shut with a snap and the remainder of the queue settled down to wait patiently for another twenty-four hours until the next day’s train was due to leave for Biisk and a fresh supply of tickets would be put on sale.

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.