The principal products of Lenkoran, as far as I could make out, were fish and tea. Apart from the high street where a flyblown and incongruous selection of over-priced Moscow-made goods were exhibited in the window of Aztorg (the Azerbaijan State Co-operative Store), the Westernizing tendency of the Russian colonists was not particularly evident and life centred round the seething Tartar bazaar, where individual enterprise still flourished and whither the peasants from the neighbouring villages ride to sell their wares to the highest bidder. Though the prices of Russian-made goods were exorbitant, local produce was cheap. Bread and dried fish, which form the staple diet of the Turko-Tartar peasant, were plentiful. Meat of sorts was also available at times for those who could afford it. Eggs, always a useful stand-by on such occasions, could, I was told, sometimes be had, but the supply had momentarily failed. There were no vegetables or fruit of any kind except garlic. On the other hand every kind of vodka was to be found, at a price, and weak tea with a judicious admixture of mud and dead flies.
Agriculture in the Lenkoran district and in the rest of Azerbaijan had been almost entirely collectivized, though most of the peasants seemed to take advantage of the rule by which they are allowed to produce and sell on their own account a limited quantity of agricultural produce, while the inhabitants of some of the more remote villages apparently still managed to hold themselves completely aloof from the collective farms.
At first sight the smiling faces of the Tartars and the comparative absence of the outward and visible emblems of the Soviet power gave the impression that this remote corner of the Soviet Union had perhaps not been entirely brought into line. But I was to change my mind before long. Lenkoran possessed no drainage system, or indeed any sanitary arrangements whatever. But it boasted, in addition to a Party Headquarters, a ‘School of Marxist-Leninist Propaganda’ housed in one of the only decent buildings in the town.
Soon I was to have an even more striking proof of the long arm of the Kremlin. On the second day after my arrival I was awakened by an unaccustomed noise. A succession of lorries were driving headlong through the town on the way to the port, each filled with depressed-looking Turko-Tartar peasants under the escort of N.K.V.D. frontier troops with fixed bayonets. As lorry followed lorry (the procession was to last, intermittently, all day) and it became clear that the operation was taking place on a large scale, the population began to show considerable interest in what was going on. Little groups formed at street corners and, to my surprise, some bold spirits even dared to express their disapproval openly, and ask the guards what they were doing. It seemed that several hundred peasants had been arrested with their families and were being deported to Central Asia. Ships (including the Centrosoyus) were waiting to take them across the Caspian.
There was naturally much speculation as to the reason for these mass arrests. The more ideologically correct suggested that the prisoners were kulaks, or rich peasants, a class long since condemned to liquidation, or that their papers were not in order.
A rather more convincing explanation was put forward by an elderly be-whiskered Russian whom I found airing his views in the minute and somewhat ridiculous ‘Park of Rest and Culture’ with which Lenkoran had recently been endowed. In his opinion, he said, the arrests had been decreed from Moscow and merely formed part of the deliberate policy of the Soviet Government who believed in transplanting portions of the population from place to place as and when it suited them. The place of those now being deported would probably be taken by other peasants from Central Asia. This, he said, had often happened before. It was, he added, somewhat cryptically, ‘a measure of precaution’. And he tugged portentously at his white whiskers.
As we watched the lorries rolling down to the shore a youngish nondescript man, with nothing to distinguish him from any other Soviet citizen, came up to me with a copy of Krokodil, the official comic weekly. I saw that he was pointing at an elaborate cartoon, depicting the horrors of British rule in India. A khaki-clad officer, with side-whiskers and projecting teeth, smoking a pipe and carrying a whip, was herding some sad-looking Indians behind some barbed wire. ‘Not so different here,’ the man said, and was gone. It had been a glimpse, if only a brief one, at that unknown quantity: Soviet public opinion.
The deportation of the Turko-Tartars was not without its effect on my own arrangements. On inquiring when the next steamer was due to leave Lenkoran for Baku, Krasnovodsk or any other port, I was told that all available shipping was being used for the transport of the deportees to Krasnovodsk. It was not known when ordinary passengers would be taken again. There were no railways in southern Azerbaijan, but in the bazaar I found some drivers mending a very old motor truck. When enough passengers had collected, they said, the truck would leave for a place called Astrakhan Bazar. Thence buses sometimes ran to another place, Hadjikabul, and from Hadjikabul there was a train to Baku. With luck the journey would not take more than four days. If I did not go by the truck, there was no saying when I should get away.
I had by now seen enough of Lenkoran and this seemed an opportunity not to be missed. One of my new-found friends provided me with a letter to someone who would give me lodging for the night in Astrakhan Bazar where, it appeared, there was no accommodation for travellers, and I returned to the hotel to get my kitbag and my passport. But the latter document was nowhere to be found and by the time I had retrieved it the truck had left. There was nothing for it but to wait.
I consoled myself with the thought that I should now have plenty of time to explore the surrounding country. Looking round, I found in the bazaar a Tartar blacksmith shoeing a horse. He was a large, brawny, jovial man, with high cheekbones, a snub nose and a villainous black moustache that curled downwards round the corners of his mouth. The sweat ran down his brown body in streams as he hammered away. Round him a typical Eastern crowd of Tartars, with here and there a Russian, had gathered to look on and exchange gossip.
The sight of the horse he was shoeing, a sturdy Tartar pony, gave me an idea. I asked him if he or its owner could let me have it for a day or two. ‘What will you pay?’ he asked immediately. As I had suspected, he did a sideline in horse dealing.
Finally, after a good deal of talk, in which most of the crowd took part, making suggestions and offering advice, I got what I wanted and, accompanied by a friendly Tartar onlooker, set out in the direction of the mountains where, my companion told me, the Moslem villagers lived their own life relatively undisturbed by the doctrines of Marx and Lenin.
It was a fine day, the horses were not bad and I jogged along contentedly enough. Soon we had left the orchards and tea plantations behind us and were riding along a dry river bed, with, on either side, a tangled mass of semi-tropical vegetation. A snake slipped out of the bushes and slid across our path; a brightly coloured bird flew out of a tree, its wings flashing in the sunlight. I had, I felt, left Europe far behind.
After we had been riding some hours, I noticed a troop of cavalry riding across country at full gallop. They were some distance away and I watched them with interest. They were well mounted and were, I noticed, wearing the uniform of the N.K.V.D. Special Troops. They seemed to be heading in our direction. Suddenly, a broad circling movement brought them face to face with us. Then, before I had taken in what was happening, I found myself staring down the barrels of a pistol and half a dozen rifles. ‘Hands up,’ said the officer, and up went my hands.
I took advantage of the somewhat embarrassing pause which now ensued to explain to my captor, a shifty-looking little Tartar, that I was a diplomat and could therefore not be arrested. Did he know what a diplomat was? To this he replied, his foolish face suddenly crafty, that he knew only too well and that if I went on arguing he would shoot me on the spot instead of waiting till we got home. I said that if he did the consequences would be very unpleasant for him, to which he replied that they would be even more unpleasant for me.
This argument struck me as convincing and I relapsed into a gloomy silence. Then, with my hands above my
head, a revolver in the small of my back and two rifles still covering me, we set out on the return journey to Lenkoran.
After we had ridden for two or three miles I thought it time to bring up once more the question of my diplomatic immunity. A first attempt to extract a Soviet diplomatic pass which I was carrying from my note case gave rise to more play with the revolver, but in the end I induced my captor to take it out for me and look at it. It did not, however, produce on him the effect for which I had hoped. Indeed it produced no effect at all and finally after a little hedging he admitted that he could not read Russian, or, as he put it, in his best Soviet official jargon, was ‘illiterate as far as Russian is concerned’. I replied that until he could find someone who could read Russian well enough to decipher my card I proposed to answer no questions. (He was anxious to know what I was doing on a horse so near the Persian frontier.) ‘Wait and see,’ he replied proudly, ‘at N.K.V.D. headquarters we shall find any number of people who can read Russian.’ Once again we relapsed into silence.
On our arrival the entire force was paraded and each man inspected my card in turn but without success. By this time a certain embarrassment had become evident amongst my captors, and seeing that I had them at a disadvantage, I made some scarcely veiled allusions to the lack of culture prevalent. They began to look more sheepish than ever. Then someone found amongst my papers a card of admission to the May Day Parade on the Red Square and having succeeded in spelling out the word propusk (pass) jumped to the conclusion that it was a special pass to the frontier zone into which I had apparently unwittingly wandered. This increased their dismay. Following up my advantage I said that, as I was apparently the only person present who could read Russian, perhaps the best way out of the difficulty in which we found ourselves would be for me to read them what was written on my pass. Somewhat guilelessly, they consented and I proceeded to read out with considerable expression, and such improvements as occurred to me, what my pass said about the treatment to be accorded to the representatives of friendly Powers and in particular the inadvisability of arresting them. ‘Signed,’ I concluded, ‘Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,’ and looked up to see what effect this had had on my captors.
There could be no doubt that it had made a considerable impression. As if by magic, they abandoned the aggressive attitude which they had adopted hitherto and became apologetic and amiable. They begged me to overlook their most regrettable mistake. In particular they hoped that, when I got back to Moscow, I would not mention this unfortunate incident to Comrade Litvinov. I would understand that they had to be careful so near the frontier; some high officers of the Red Army had left hurriedly and illegally by that route a short time ago. I said I quite realized the need for care and after shaking hands with a roomful of Tartar militiamen returned to the inn.
I had not been back long when a messenger arrived from the Chief of Police to say that a steamer had ‘arrived unexpectedly’ and would leave next evening for Baku. This information caused great rejoicing among all those who like myself had been marooned in Lenkoran and we celebrated the occasion with a card and supper party which lasted late into the night. Next afternoon five or six of us, including the girl from the collective farm and her baby, an N.C.O. in the Chemical Section of the Red Army, and a large, frowsy man who described himself as a Red Economist and whose life seemed to be bound up with the Third Five Year Plan, settled into a four-berthed cabin on a very small paddle steamer bearing the date 1856. Food had run out in the saloon and some tinned Yarmouth bloaters and a bottle of whisky greatly enhanced my prestige. The atmosphere soon became highly convivial and remained so for so long that in the end I was glad once more to find a vacant space amongst the Tartar horde on deck where I spent the remainder of the night.
From Baku, where we arrived next morning, I took the train northwards to Tiflis, the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. My plan was to spend a few days there, cross the Caucasus by road, and then return to Moscow. My visit to Lenkoran must, I felt, have attracted so much attention that any attempt I might now make to reach Central Asia would be doomed to failure in advance.
I reached Tiflis after a night in the train spent in the company of a voluble gentleman of oriental appearance who introduced himself as ‘a prominent Armenian composer’. Immediately the town took my fancy. It had a graceful quality, a southern charm, an air of leisure, which I had so far found nowhere else in the Soviet Union. In the old city the houses, crazy structures with jutting verandas, hang like swallows’ nests from the side of a hill. Beneath them a mountain stream tumbles its rushing waters and more houses cluster on the far side. Where the valley opens out a broad avenue leads to the newer part of the town, built by the Russians after the conquest of Georgia a century ago.
Here I found a room in the Grand Hotel d’Orient, a long low stone building where my grandfather had stayed fifty or sixty years before. The food, by Soviet standards, was good and the cellar contained an excellent local vin rosé. The manager, a pale, spare man with a neatly trimmed black moustache, had not learnt his hotel keeping locally. He was a Slovene, a former Austrian subject who had been taken prisoner by the Russians in 1916. Before the war his father had owned the big hotel at Abbazia. When the revolution had broken out the Bolsheviks had set him free, but he had been bitten with the new ideas and preferred to stay where he was. Now, he said, a little sadly, he was a Soviet citizen and could not go back if he wanted to.
Half the charm of Tiflis lies in its people. They are southerners and wine-drinkers, mountaineers and fighters. They combine a truly Mediterranean expansiveness and vivacity with the dash and hardiness of the Highlander. As a race, they are strikingly good-looking: the men dark, wiry and aggressive in their long cloaks and sheepskin hats on the side of their heads; the women high-breasted and dark-eyed, with straight classical features. Racially they are neither Slavs, like the Russians, nor Turks like the Tartars, but belong to a race of their own with its own ancient language and customs.
After the Revolution the Georgians, who had always resented what they regarded as foreign domination, broke away from Russia and set up an independent state, which, despite a certain flavour of comic opera, survived until 1921. Then, on the withdrawal of the British troops who up to then had helped to hold the ring, internal dissensions broke out and the Red Army, swooping across the mountains, completed the task of subjugation which the Tsars had begun a hundred years earlier. In 1924 the Georgians made another bid for independence, but by now the hand of Moscow lay heavy on them and the rising was savagely suppressed.
The Georgians must, I think, regard with mixed feelings the meteoric rise of Stalin, otherwise Joseph Djugaschvili, the local Georgian boy who made good. Stalin was born in a little village up in the mountains, in a region where for centuries warring tribes had swooped down on each others’ flocks and burnt each others’ villages, where blood-feuds flourished and there was little intercourse between one steep valley and another; and where he learned, as a child, that it did not do to trust your neighbour further than you could see him. As a youth, he was sent to Tiflis by his mother to be educated as a priest at the local seminary and to receive a grounding in dialectics which was also not to be without its uses later. Then, very soon, he became a professional revolutionary, starting strikes, throwing bombs and robbing banks. At different places in the Caucasus one comes on marble plaques commemorating these activities which must have played their part in forming his character. At any rate, looking back on them in later life, he knew the kind of thing that revolutionaries were apt to do, the kind of thing to look out for when you were building up and consolidating a dictatorship which you did not mean to have overturned. For the Georgians, undergoing this iron rule along with the other races of the Union, and watching it extend its authority over the world, it may be some consolation to recognize in the force that directs it some of their own less amiable qualities.
Old Mrs. Djugaschvili, w
ho had sent him to the seminary, was, it seemed, still alive, a determined old lady in her ’nineties. Deeply religious, she was reputed to regard many of her son’s activities with distaste, and the relative freedom from persecution of the Georgian branch of the Orthodox Church was generally attributed to her influence on him.
Knowing that somewhere in Tiflis there was a British War Cemetery containing the graves of the British soldiers who had died or been killed during the British occupation at the end of the war, I decided to find it and see what state it was in. As there was a resident Representative of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Tiflis (Georgia, although it had been elevated to the dignity of a Soviet Socialist Republic, was not encouraged to have a foreign policy of its own), I decided that I had better in the first place get in touch with him. I found his office in a side street, in a house with a courtyard. Its occupant turned out to be a large, flabby man called Stark.
This surprised me, for when I had last heard of Stark, he had been Soviet Ambassador in Afghanistan, where for many years he was known to have intrigued actively and conscientiously against our interests and to have organized rebellion in India. He hastened to explain that he had only been transferred to a quieter post because of his health and for no other reason. I replied, perhaps not very tactfully, that there seemed to have been a good many transfers in the Soviet Diplomatic Service recently, and then, to give interest to the conversation, which seemed to be flagging a bit, I mentioned that, while in Baku, I had heard that Podolski, the Representative there of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and former Soviet Minister in Vienna, had been replaced only a few days before.
I have never seen a few words, casually spoken, have such an effect. Mr. Stark’s large, flabby face turned a dirty white. Clearly he was in the power of a very strong emotion, and from then onwards it became evident that, even if he had wanted to, he could not have kept his attention on the subject under discussion. From time to time he would make an effort to jerk himself back from the terrifying speculations in which he was engrossed; but it was no good. He could not bring his mind to bear on the question of the cemetery, at any rate not of that cemetery. For some reason, he evidently regarded Podolski’s fate as linked to his own, and the news of his removal, so short a time after his arrival at Baku, where he occupied the equivalent post to Stark and whither he, too, had been transferred from a more important post abroad, had filled him with terror for himself. After a time I gave up trying and took my leave. As I went down the stairs, I could hear him talking to his wife in low, hurried whispers. I did not see him again. Not long afterwards it was announced that he, too, had been replaced. His forebodings had been justified.
Eastern Approaches Page 5
