Eastern Approaches (6 page)

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, who 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.

After this unsuccessful attempt to make use of the correct channels, I decided to address myself direct to the local authorities, in this case the Tiflis Municipal Soviet. It was installed in a large building on the main square of the town, opposite the seminary — now the Palace Hotel — where the young Stalin had received his education. I found it to be a hive of mostly misdirected activity. The officials were mostly Georgians, with a sprinkling of Armenians. Every office that I visited was filled with a depressed crowd of citizens in search of somewhere to live; from their remarks, I gathered that most of them were living five to a room. In the end, together with one or two of the more enterprising supplicants, I penetrated to the office of the Vice-President of the Soviet, an indolent-looking Armenian who was treated with exaggerated deference by his subordinates.

But it soon became clear that he was not interested, and I was just going to leave the building in despair when I was stopped by his secretary, a white-skinned, black-haired, Georgian girl of very considerable personal attractions. Her name, she said, was Tamara, and would I like to come to the cinema? This seemed too good an opportunity to miss and so, postponing my inquiries about the cemetery, I repaired with Tamara and some friends of hers to the special cinema run by the Tiflis Soviet for its employees. There we saw a historical film in Georgian depicting a rising of the Georgians against their Russian oppressors. It was received with enthusiasm by the Georgian audience and I could not help wondering if in their applause there was not perhaps a note of wishful thinking. The uniforms of the Tsarist
troops, who fell such easy victims to the fusillades of the Georgian patriots, did not somehow look so very different from those of the N.K.V.D. Special Troops who were to be seen walking about the streets of Tiflis.

After the cinema I asked Tamara, who seemed friendly and intelligent, what she thought was the best way of finding out about the cemetery. ‘Ask the N.K.V.D.,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘They are the only efficient people here.’ This seemed sound advice and accordingly without further ado I presented myself at N.K.V.D. Headquarters, where I eventually found an official who had heard of the cemetery. He did not, he said, know where it was, but he could give me the address of an Englishwoman who might know.

I could hardly believe my ears. An Englishwoman living in Tiflis was something quite unheard of. I set out for the address I had been given, wondering if the N.K.V.D. really knew what they were talking about.

The house was a large one in the old quarter of the town. In the middle was a courtyard with wooden balconies giving on to it, draped with festoons of washing. A little Georgian boy was playing in the yard. Could this be the right place? I wondered. At that moment a voice issued from the uppermost balcony. ‘Come here at once, Tommy,’ it said in commanding tones. ‘It’s time you were in bed.’ ‘Coming, Miss Fellows,’ said the little Georgian in English which bore no trace of an accent, and trailed reluctantly off to bed. It was, I decided, the right house.

Following Tommy up the stairs, I found Miss Fellows at the top, small and white-haired. ‘And what do you want?’ she asked briskly. I told her about the cemetery. ‘Of course I know where it is,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked after it for twenty years, ever since our troops left.’ Then she told me her story. It was quite simple. She was the daughter of a Colonel in the Indian Army. She had come to Tiflis as a governess in 1912 and had stayed there ever since, through the war, through the Revolution, through the Allied intervention, through the Bolshevik reoccupation. She had never been home. Indeed I was the first Englishman she had seen for many years. She had been with the same family of Georgians ever since she arrived, teaching first one generation and then another. First the whole house had belonged to them. Now
they lived in one room of it and she with them. There was another child in bed, a little girl. ‘Poor mite,’ she said, ‘she had a touch of fever, so I put her to bed.’ Then she went out and shouted across the courtyard to some neighbours. It was quite clear that hers was the dominant personality in the neighbourhood. I noticed with pleasure that she still spoke Russian with a strong English accent.

I asked her if she had had any trouble with the local authorities. ‘None to speak of,’ she said. ‘They keep trying to make me give up my English nationality. But I tell them not to be silly.’

Later on she took me to see the cemetery, a sad little place, hidden away on the outskirts of the town, which she had cared for and tended for the best part of twenty years, fighting a never-ceasing battle against weeds, stray dogs, hens and marauding Soviet children.

Before leaving, I asked Miss Fellows if there was anything I could do for her. She asked for two things, some English books and help in getting a wall built round the cemetery. I asked her if that was really all she wanted. She said yes, she could manage perfectly well. To anyone who knows the Soviet Union, it will be apparent that Miss Fellows was a very remarkable woman.

There was no longer anything to keep me in Tiflis and my spell of leave was running out. The passes over the Caucasus were now clear of snow and trucks were running across the Georgian Military Road. Without much difficulty I got a seat in one, and, stuffing my belongings into my kitbag, set out on my homeward journey, in company with a miscellaneous collection of Georgians and Russians.

The Georgian Military Road, which runs from Tiflis across the main Caucasus Range to Ordzhonikidze, was built by Russian engineers in the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily as a means of subduing the warlike Caucasian tribes who were still holding out against them in the mountains. By enabling them to move considerable forces rapidly to important strategic points, it made it easier for them to contend with the highly mobile mountaineers and led finally to the defeat of Shamyl and the pacification of the Caucasus.