Eastern Approaches (8 page)

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 out 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 dress 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.

These were the Tien Shan: the Mountains of Heaven. At their foot lay Alma Ata, beyond them Chinese Turkestan.

A
LL
day we trundled across the desert towards those distant peaks. Then, suddenly in the early afternoon, we found ourselves once again amid cultivation: apple orchards, the trees heavily laden with fruit; golden fields of Indian corn ripening in the sun; plantations of melons; rows of tall poplars growing by the side of canals and irrigation ditches. After the desert the foliage seemed lusciously, exuberantly green. We were nearing Alma Ata. Already we could see the white houses of the town. Beyond it the tree-covered foothills of the Tien Shan rose steeply towards the snow-covered peaks behind them.

I was in Central Asia.

Alma Ata lies ten miles from the railway. After an interminable wait, followed by a sharp mêlée, I succeeded in securing myself a place in a lorry that was going there. Next to me was a grubby but cheerful individual, with a snub nose, a mouthful of irregular, broken teeth and a shock of tangled hair, who told me that he had just completed five years in a penal settlement. Life there, he said, had not been so bad, though to this day he did not know why he had been sent there. Perhaps it was because he was a Pole. But now, although he had never applied for them, he had been given Soviet papers, so things would perhaps be easier for him. Before being deported he had been a barber by profession; now he hoped to make a living by picking apples. He seemed a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, ready to take things as he found them.

After a fierce jolting down long dusty roads lined with poplars, we passed through a colony of dilapidated Kazakh
yurts
on the outskirts and almost immediately found ourselves in the centre of the town.

Alma Ata must be one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union. In character it is purely Russian, being one of the first Russian settlements in Central Asia. From its foundation in 1854 until
the Revolution it bore the name of Vierny. In Kazakh its new name means ‘Father of Apples’, an appellation which it fully merits, for the apples grown there are the finest in size and flavour that I have ever eaten. The central part of the town consists of wide avenues of poplars at right angles to one another. The houses, whether of wood or of stone, are painted white and are for the most part in a good state of preservation. In addition to the ornate pre-revolutionary buildings, a large number of austere ultra-modern constructions have been erected which include a very large block of government buildings, a telegraph, telephone and wireless building, a fine cinema, various scientific and other institutes, shops and several blocks of flats. Other buildings were nearing completion. A tramway system was being installed and many of the streets were asphalted. The shops seemed well stocked, especially the food shops. In the centre of the town there was a large open bazaar to which the Kazakhs from the neighbouring collective farms rode in to sell their wares. The population, which to judge by the crowds in the streets was roughly half Kazakh and half Russian, seemed comparatively contented, and those with whom I spoke showed themselves intensely proud of the town they lived in. I gained an impression of prosperity and progress.

Alma Ata, until a few years ago a smaller town than Semipalatinsk, owes its development almost entirely to the Turksib Railway which has linked it up with the rest of the Soviet Union. Before the Revolution the population was approximately 30,000; in 1929, before the railway reached it, it was 50,000 and now seven years after the construction of the Turksib, it had reached the figure of 230,000.

The population of Kazakhstan of which it is the capital and, which in 1936 became a Union Republic, is only about eight millions, but in area it is approximately equivalent to England, France and Germany put together. Its economic importance is principally agricultural and in the immediate neighbourhood of Alma Ata the country seemed remarkably fertile, producing Indian corn, cotton, wheat and rice and sugar beet besides the apples for which it is famous and other kinds of fruit. It is also the most important cattle-breeding area in the Soviet Union.

On arrival at Alma Ata I immediately set out in search of somewhere
to live. I was attracted by what I had seen of the town and its immediate surroundings and I was also determined to see something of the Ala Tau, the portion of the Tien Shan range which lies immediately to the south. From what I knew of Soviet methods it would be several days before I even found out what means existed of getting up into the mountains.

I had ascertained on arriving that there were two hotels, both of recent construction. One was known as the Ogpu Hotel because of its proximity to N.K.V.D. Headquarters and the other, which formed part of the central block of Government buildings, was called the Dom Sovietov or House of the Soviets. At both I was told on applying for accommodation that they were completely full, the management of the Dom Sovietov adding that even if they had had room they would not have given it to me as they only catered for Government and Party officials travelling on official business.

Emboldened by my experience at Sverdlovsk I decided that the time had come to invoke the help of the N.K.V.D. At N.K.V.D. Headquarters I was told that the competent officer was out but would be back in two hours, and on returning two hours later, I found no one except an apparently half-witted Kazakh sentry from whom I gathered that Headquarters had shut down for the night. My own N.K.V.D. escort had no suggestions to offer and seemed in some doubt as to where they were going to spend the night themselves. The immediate outlook was scarcely promising, but before resigning myself to the prospect of a night on the streets, I decided to go back to the Dom Sovietov, which had seemed to me in every way preferable to the ordinary hotel, and see whether I could not by sheer persistence make the management relent. I accordingly deposited my luggage in the front hall and fought my way through the crowd surrounding the booking desk. An hour later, although the management showed no signs of weakening as far as sleeping accommodation was concerned, I had succeeded in securing permission to have supper in the hotel dining-room, a success of which I hastened to take advantage.

I had expected the filthy oilcloth-covered tables, the rude attendants and the greasy, stodgy food with which I had grown familiar at Sverdlovsk and elsewhere. Instead, I found a pleasant room, obsequious
waiters and waitresses, and good food. After eating a meal of bortsch, roast duck with apples, and pancakes, which cost me only ten roubles, and drinking several glasses of vodka I felt a great deal happier and more determined than ever not to be turned out of this preserve of the privileged classes.

But the tired, solitary, middle-aged woman who had been left in charge of the booking desk stuck to her guns and an hour or two later, in spite of every kind of threat, taunt and appeal, I had still made no progress and was preparing to spend the night on a bench in the local Park of Rest and Culture, when, suddenly, as is the way in the Soviet Union, her opposition collapsed and she told me that, if I would promise to go away next day, I might have a bed in the Lenin Corner which had been turned into a temporary dormitory. I was issued with the necessary
propusk
or pass and a few minutes later I was installed in a fairly clean bed immediately under the outstretched arm of a life-sized statue of Lenin and opposite an equally imposing bust of Stalin. The fifteen other beds in the room were occupied by snoring Kazakh or Russian minor officials, all of whom woke and protested loudly when I tried to open the window.

Next morning, having been told that the impending arrival of 70 visiting members of the Communist Youth Association made my continued presence in the hotel impossible, I returned to the attack with the N.K.V.D. This time I was received almost immediately by the Commanding Officer, who was clearly unaccustomed to foreigners and seemed at a loss to know what to do with me. In the end he turned for advice to his lady secretary who told him with an air of authority, which under any other system would have been surprising, that he was to have nothing to do with me at all. I was accordingly turned politely away from N.K.V.D. Headquarters and advised to try the Dipagentstvo or Diplomatic Agency.

This, I felt quite convinced, did not really exist. In any case my experience of Mr. Stark in Tiflis made me feel certain that even if there really was a Diplomatic Agent in Alma Ata he would be worse than useless. But I was mistaken.

After a prolonged search I at last found the Diplomatic Agency which, in the absence of the Agent, who I gathered was an official of the
People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, was in charge of a most amiable and zealous young Kazakh who assured me that he was delighted to see me as he felt that my arrival justified his existence. In spite of the fact that he was employed in a Diplomatic Agency, I was the first foreigner with whom he personally had ever come into contact. After a brief struggle in which he was completely victorious, he brought the Dom Sovietov into line and a good single room was put at my disposal for as long as I liked. Moreover, on learning of my desire to visit the Tien Shan he provided me with a recommendation to the Society of Proletarian Tourists.

When I applied next day to the offices of that organization I was told that a car and a guide had now been found but that there was no petrol to be had as every drop was required for bringing in the harvest. I accordingly decided to make an excursion on my own. After loitering for some time round the motor-lorry base in the centre of the town I succeeded in obtaining a place on a lorry going to Talgar, a large village in the hills some forty miles to the south-east of Alma Ata.

On reaching Talgar I set out on foot into the hills followed by one of the two local N.K.V.D. men who had relieved their colleagues from Novosibirsk soon after my arrival. After we had gone some distance I allowed my new escort, to whom I had not yet spoken, to catch up with me and remarked on the beauty of the scenery. He agreed and, taking advantage of the opening, inquired whether I proposed to go on walking all day without anything to eat. I suggested that we might pick some apples off the trees. He replied that if I wanted apples and some hot food too we could stop at a peasant’s cottage, as he was a Talgar man himself and the peasants were all old friends of his. I agreed and we turned into the next cottage we came to.

The cottage, which was surrounded by three or four acres of ground, including an apple orchard, a plot of Indian corn, a plot of melons and a plot of sunflowers, contained one large room where the occupants slept and ate, a kitchen and a space under the eaves for drying fruit and vegetables. It was built of mud bricks and whitewashed inside and out. Sitting in the sun outside it we found a very old Russian peasant woman and her two grandchildren aged four and five. They seemed
delighted to see visitors and the grandmother immediately started to prepare a meal while I played in the garden with the puppy, the children and the N.K.V.D. man. Later we were joined by the children’s mother, a fine healthy-looking peasant woman, and their elder sister aged nine who arrived with the bread, and finally by their father who had been into the bazaar with his horse and cart to sell his Indian corn crop.

The meal to which we now sat down after the family had duly crossed themselves in front of the numerous ikons which were hanging in a corner of the extremely clean and quite well-furnished living-room, was a good one. There was no meat; but a large bowl of pancakes with sour milk into which we all dipped, eggs, tea and magnificent apples and melons which the children were sent out to pick. After we had finished, we discussed, as always happens on such occasions in the Soviet Union, our respective modes of life. My hosts told me that they worked on the neighbouring collective farm. In addition to what they earned there, they were able to sell on their own account the produce of their plot of ground which they had bought twelve years before. They also kept pigs and hens. They said that all the peasants in the district had been collectivized but that life there was pleasant and prosperity fairly general. This was certainly borne out by the appearance of most of the peasants I saw near Talgar and Alma Ata.

After refusing an urgent invitation to spend the night, my escort and I set out for Talgar at dusk having failed to induce our hosts to accept any reward in return for their hospitality. Before leaving I was called on to hear the little girl’s reading and geography lessons. She seemed to possess a fair knowledge of both subjects and to my relief I found that her reader contained ordinary fairy stories and practically no propaganda. At Talgar we boarded a lorry full of highly Sovietized Kazakh girl students returning to Alma Ata after spending the free day in their villages. They, too, seemed pleased with life and squeaked and giggled shrilly as we jolted along.

Early next morning I again visited the Tourist Base only to find that there was still no petrol. I had by now decided that this was probably a case of deliberate obstruction rather than mere disorganization, but as a last resource I suggested that an attempt should be made to obtain me
some official petrol from the Alma Ata Town Soviet, a body with whom I had as yet had no dealings. To my intense surprise the reply came back in a few minutes that the necessary quantity of petrol had been put at my disposal by the Town Soviet and that one of the more active members of that body would himself accompany me on my expedition. An hour or two later I drove out of Alma Ata in an extremely dilapidated open Ford car, accompanied by a decorous young Soviet official in a neat blue suit and a ferocious-looking one-eyed Kazakh guide in a sheepskin. My N.K.V.D. escort were left gaping outside the Dom Sovietov.

First we climbed by a road in a very early stage of construction, south-eastwards through the foothills of the Ala Tau as far as the village of Issik. At frequent intervals gangs working on the road made it necessary for us to make considerable detours through the scrub. At Issik, a mountain village which much resembled Talgar, we turned southwards up a more or less non-existent mountain track, passing on the way a native
aul
with its mud huts clinging insecurely to the almost perpendicular mountain side. The corn cobs were spread out to dry on the roofs as being the only available flat space. The sides of the valley through which we were climbing were thick with wild apple trees and rose bushes. Finally we arrived at the point where the track ceased to exist and, leaving the car in charge of a Kazakh lumberman whose solitary
yurt
happened to be nearby, set out on foot for the lake, climbing up the rocky bed of a mountain stream.