Eastern Approaches (5 page)

But the little Armenian knew where his duty lay. No, he said, there were no boats. There had been boats, perhaps, but at present there were none and in any case, when there were boats, they were always full. Nor could you go to Lenkoran by land; there was no railway and no road, nothing but a great howling wilderness. Besides, when you got there it was unhealthy and unsafe, and of no interest whatever.

‘But what,’ I said, ‘about the tigers?’

‘Tigers, perhaps,’ he replied pityingly, ‘but no culture.’

I was clearly barking up the wrong tree. I left the office and strolled aimlessly down to the harbour. There, a mixed crowd of Tartars and Russians were loading ships or standing about and talking. Others queued up for what seemed to be steamer tickets. I attached myself to the nearest queue, which was mainly composed of Tartars, wild, swarthy, unkempt-looking fellows in shaggy fur hats and tight-fitting skull-caps, who jabbered to each other gutturally in their own language.

For an hour or two nothing happened. Then the window of the
ticket office snapped open and we started to move slowly forward. Eventually I reached the front. ‘Where to?’ said the pudding-faced woman behind the grating. ‘Lenkoran,’ I said wondering what her reaction would be. ‘Three roubles,’ she said giving me a ticket. ‘What time does the boat sail?’ I asked, hoping she would not notice my foreign accent. ‘In half an hour,’ she said.

There was no time to be lost. Making my way back to the hotel, I extracted my passport from a reluctant management by means of a subterfuge, shouldered my kitbag and, running back to the docks, pushed my way through the crowd and on board the S.S.
Centrosoyus
, a bare minute before the gangway was taken up.

I
N
spite of her modern-sounding name the
Centrosoyus
was a survival of the old regime, having been built on the Volga in the ‘eighties. Every inch of the very limited deck-space was taken up by closely packed Tartar families who with their bedding and their chickens were already settling down for the night. A dense cloud of flies accompanied us as we steamed slowly out of Baku harbour. After a copious but singularly unappetizing meal the non-Tartar passengers and the crew settled down for the night on the benches of the saloon. Preferring the deck, I managed, after much stumbling about in the dark, to find a vacant corner between two Tartars, where, using my kitbag as a pillow, I disposed myself to sleep.

We reached our destination an hour or two after sunrise. The scene, as we neared the shore, contrasted sharply with the barren red hills round Baku and the even more barren steppe to the south of it. Orchards and tea plantations grew almost down to the water’s edge. Behind them, in the distance, rose a line of blue mountains. A few red-tiled roofs jutted out from among the vivid green of the trees. There were no signs of anything that could be called a town.

High-prowed Tartar boats put out to meet the ship, which lay at some distance from the shore. Soon, after some preliminary bargaining, they were ferrying backwards and forwards, loaded to the gunwale with shouting, struggling humanity. To my dismay I found, that, in addition to my kitbag, I was now carrying a Tartar baby, whose mother had thrust it into my arms, and which seemed, at first sight, to be suffering from smallpox.

Lenkoran, when we reached it, proved to be no more than a fishing village of white-washed houses clustering round a single unpaved street. Having inquired whether there was an inn, I was told that there was and that it was a two-storeyed building; on the strength of which description I had no difficulty in finding it. Here I succeeded in
obtaining a room. On the wall over the bed, I noticed, a previous occupant had amused himself by squashing bed bugs in neat parallel rows, one above the other.

My British passport, which I now displayed, caused considerable excitement and an admiring crowd collected to look at it, most of whom remained my fast friends for the rest of my stay. The information that I was a foreigner clearly conveyed very little to them, and, on ascertaining that I worked in the British Embassy in Moscow they inquired whether that was the same as the Moscow Soviet. I did not seek to enlighten them. In any case they showed no signs of the panic which seized the average inhabitant of Moscow when he found that he had inadvertently come into contact with a foreigner or worse still a foreign diplomat. Indeed for the next three days I spent the greater part of my time walking, talking, eating or playing cards with the local inhabitants or visitors from Baku who were occupying the other rooms in the hotel. Amongst them was a pretty, fair, Russian girl with a small baby, who told me that she was on sick leave from the collective farm where she worked. She was supposed to have gone to a rest home in the Crimea, but had been sent here by mistake. It was, she said, with a flutter of her long eyelashes, nice to meet someone cultured in such an uncultured place.

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.