Back to Bokhara

Fitzroy Maclean, Scottish soldier, writer and politician, visits the USSR - Russia, Uzbekistan and Georgia in 1958, some twenty years after leaving Moscow, where he was posted to the British embassy from 1937 to 1939. His extensive travels in that time form the first third of his well known book Eastern Approaches, in which he recounted three extraordinary series of adventures: travelling, often incognito, in Soviet Central Asia; fighting in the Western Desert campaign, where he specialised in commando raids behind enemy lines; and living rough with Josip Broz Tito and his Yugoslav Partisans while commanding the Maclean Mission there.

My expectations were, in hindsight, impossibly high after that fantastic book (go find yourself a copy if you have not already), and this book didn't scale those heights, or come close really.

Maclean's visit takes place at the time of Nikita Khrushchev (spelled Khrushchov throughout this book), and a time when Stalin was being denounced (in all but the darkest corners of the USSR), a time of liberalisation and political reforms, and a softening of the relationship with the West. Maclean is welcomed and treated well, allowed a lot of freedom (and Maclean knew how to play the game to increase that freedom, and make the impossible more possible) even though all of his movements were arranged via the infamous Intourist Soviet travel agency.

Almost everything is positively reported, and Maclean is gentlemanly in his approach to people, and although he travels de-luxe, he mixes it with people of all classes, and is genuinely interested in all views. This book, and Maclean himself is as his best in Soviet Central Asia - Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, Alma Ata (now Almaty). His diplomatic skills are tested to the full in order to gain access to Bokhara, where tourists/foreigners were forbidden, but he succeeded quite ably.

A few quotes I made note of during reading:
P34
The average Soviet citizen may live in utter squalor at home, but at least he travels by Underground he can enjoy unparalleled splendor. I was also amazed by the Moscow Metro stations when I visited.

Maclean makes the important point that in viewing the Soviet Union one must have a baseline, and his was of course twenty years before. This quote summed it up well,
P56
A great many foreigners arriving in Russia for the first time would be far from impressed with all this, for the reason that they would be judging what they saw by the standards to which they themselves are accustomed. And what they saw would compare anything but favourably with London or Rome, in Paris of New York, in Stockholm or Copenhagen. On the contrary, they would in all probability be shocked by what no doubt would strike them as an atmosphere of repression and constraint, by the incessant propaganda, by lack of amenities, by the shortage of what they would regard as the necessities of life. But my judgement [...] was based on the almost inconceivably low Soviet standard of before the war. And, by pre-war standards it could not be denied that there was an all-round improvement.

A short book, a snapshot in time, written by a fascinating author, but not reaching the highs of his earlier book. I still look forward to some more of his books - I own two more I have not year read.

3.5 stars, rounded down.