Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean Read Free Book Online

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, myultimate 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,