Book review: Setting the East Ablaze

I follow numerous blogs. They are a constant source of interest, stimulation and often lead me to topics of history about which I was not previously aware. So it was that a post on Keith’s ‘Bydand’ blog about a Russian Civil War game using ‘The Back of Beyond’ rules lead me to a search on the internet, to ’discover’ Hopkirk’s book and hence to borrow it through our local library.

This book, ostensibly, is about the Bolshevik’s attempts, under Lenin and then Stalin, to spread the Revolution to central and western Asia, particularly then British India. At one level it is a boys own adventure, “like a Buchan novel” as Hopkirk describes it; but it has a darker and more menacing edge. To me it is more akin to a Le Carré novel or an episode of Callan, except that, as is so often the case, fact is stranger (and far more harrowing) than fiction.

Spanning 1918–1949 the book describes British clashes with Russia—spying, espionage as well as political manoeuvring and grand-standing. This began in the late 19th century with what was known as the Great Game, ceased when the two were allies in the First World War and then re-started under Bolshevist regime. Thus the concurrence of the Russian revolution with what were to be the last months of the First World War intersected with the struggle for empire. As I said previously though, there is far more to the book than this.

The ‘more’ is that the book is really about nations and individuals using central-west Asia as their ‘playground’. The events described by Hopkirk occurred to the north and north-east of Afghanistan and northern India, along the silk road—modern day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang and Mongolia. Where Bolsheviks, White Russians, English, Chinese, Japanese or assorted ‘exiles’ from these various camps, sought to dominate the region through espionage and manipulation, or simply by force of arms or terror, for their own interests and/or aggrandisement.

Events in the book take place around modern day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang and Mongolia. Detailed maps help the reader to place the location of people and events.

Amongst the individuals and actions that Hopkirk relates are the coup in Tashkent lead by former junior Czarist officer Osipov, the Bolshevik reprisals following its defeat, brutal actions by the White Russian army and Bolsheviks alike and, perhaps the worst of all, the activities of the ’bloody baron’, Baron Ungern-Sternberg.

Sixteen pages of black and white plates show contemporary photographs of the key participants and some of the locations and actions described in the book.
 
The appalling actions of the baron make for particularly difficult reading. Even though Hopkirk spares us from too many details, the three days of excesses of his men, upon the capture of Urga (modern Ulan Bator), amongst other horrific actions, are described in sufficient detail to convince me that he was worse than most, if not all, of the most infamous, sadistic tyrants of history.

Immersed in these events, Hopkirk describes the ‘adventures’ of Colonel Bailey and Paul Nazaroff (a White Russian leader in Tashkent) and  Lt. Col. P.T. Etherton, British Consul-General at Kashgar. Here we are treated to amazing tales that outdo any ‘boys own’ annual as well as some truely humorous incidents.

Photographs of Colonel Bailey in some of his many guises. 

For example, in the case of Colonel Bailey, when it became too dangerous to remain in Tashkent, we follow him through a series of narrow escapes in his various hiding places—examples of boldly hiding ‘in plain view’—escaping to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, being walled in to a room to avoid a house-to-house search and even entering the Soviet secret service in the guise of an Albanian army clerk. Early on (in fact in October 1918, before he had left the city), the Cheka had assumed that Bailey had likely escaped or been eliminated by the Germans. “The evidence for the latter, it seems, rested on the fact that he had disappeared without his toothbrush. This, the Bolsheviks felt, no Englishman would ever do” (p. 59).

Hopkirk’s book is engrossing from the first page, although it took me until around chapter four to weave the various threads of events and individuals together in my mind (as a complete newcomer to the period). It is a little-known part of the 20th century, but one can see how these events contributed to those that many of us lived through (vicariously for most) and gave it the now often-used epithet of the ‘violent century’. While much of the subject matter is gut-wrenching, the book is fascinating, at times entertaining and always enlightening.

Bibliography

Hopkirk P (1984) Setting the east ablaze : Lenin's dream of an empire in Asia. John Murray, London.

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