Peter Hopkirk - Setting The East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia

Also by Peter Hopkirk

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Trespassers on the Roof of the World

The Great Game

On Secret Service East of Constantinople

Quest for Kim

My principal debt must be to those, now all dead, who took part in these events and left written accounts of them. Without these, this book could not have been written. They include Colonels Bailey and Etherton, Captain Brun, Paul Nazaroff, Dmitri Alioshin, M.N. Roy, Ferdinand Ossendowski, Georg Vasel and Sven Hedin. Their adventures and misadventures provide much of the drama of this book, and their narratives, now long out of print, are listed in my bibliography.

Two other works I found particularly valuable were India and Anglo-Soviet Relations (19171947) by the Indian scholar Dr Chatter Singh Samra, and Lars-Eric Nymans Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in Sinkiang, 19181934. All my other principal sources, to whose authors I am indebted, are to be found in the bibliography.

The individual to whom I owe most, however, is my wife Kath, who has contributed so much to the narrative in the way of suggestions and improvements, and on whom I tried it out as it unfolded. She is also responsible, as with my two earlier works, for the index.

I am indebted, too, to William Drew, perhaps the only western survivor of that period, whose memories of troubled Sinkiang between the wars were a valuable source of insight to me. I am grateful also to Dr Shirin Akiner, the Central Asian scholar and linguist, for translating material on Enver Pasha for me from the Turkish.

Others who have kindly let me pick their brains include my colleague Denis Taylor of The Times, a Soviet affairs specialist, and Dr Craig Clunas of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a Mongolian scholar. I must also thank the staff of the India Office Library, where I did much of my research, for producing an endless succession of files and for photocopying numerous once-secret papers and intelligence reports.

Finally I am indebted to my editor and publisher, John R. Murray, whose enthusiasm has been a constant spur and to Gustav Mahler, whose heady symphonies were my companions during long hours of writing, and which seemed to synchronise so well with this stormy tale.

There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian frontier... I have reports from agents everywhere. So Sir Walter Bullivant, head of British Intelligence, tells Richard Hannay, the hero of Greenmantle, before sending him off to try to prevent the coming conflagration.

But truth, once again, was to prove stranger than fiction. Within three years of John Buchan writing that in 1916, the missionaries of Bolshevism had sworn to set the East ablaze, using the heady new gospel of Marxism as their torch. Their aim was to liberate the whole of Asia. But their starting point was British India, richest of all imperial possessions. For Britain, then still the foremost imperial power, was seen by Lenin as the principal obstacle to his dream of world revolution. England, he declared in 1920, is our greatest enemy. It is in India that we must strike them hardest.

If India could be torn by insurrection from Britains grasp, then no longer would she be able to buy off her workers unwitting shareholders in imperialism with the sweated labour and cheap raw materials of the East. Economic collapse, and revolution, would follow at home. If similar uprisings could be fomented throughout the colonial world, then the long-awaited revolution would blaze its way across Europe. The East, Lenin proclaimed, will help us to conquer the West.

But the British, although exhausted by war, were not a people to take such a challenge lying down. Their secret service was still the worlds most formidable, with its tentacles everywhere. A clandestine struggle for India and the East followed, the story of which is told here. It is set largely in Central Asia, where three great empires those of Britain, Russia and China met. It is a tale of intrigue and treachery, barbarism and fear, and occasionally pure farce.

Wherever possible I have told it through the adventures and misadventures of those, on either side, who took part in this undeclared war. From remote listening-posts far beyond Indias frontiers, British Indian intelligence officers monitored every Bolshevik move against India and reported these back to their chiefs in Delhi and London. Their names are now long forgotten, buried deep in the secret archives of the day, but it is from their reports and memoirs that I have pieced together much of this tale. Often their stories read like vintage Buchan and none more so than the amazing adventures behind Bolshevik lines of Colonel F.M. Bailey.

For sixteen months this deceptively mild-looking officer played a lonely and dangerous game of hide-and-seek against the Bolos (as the British called the Bolsheviks), even being hired at one stage by the dreaded Cheka, the Soviet secret police, to track himself down. He is still remembered there, some sixty years later, with a mixture of awe and animosity, as I found when retracing his footsteps across Soviet Central Asia. Lucky to escape with his life (thanks to a remarkable skill at disguise), he died only in 1967, at the age of eighty-five, in quiet retirement in Norfolk.

Another formidable player in this shadowy war was the veteran intelligence officer Sir Wilfrid Malleson. Not a lovable man, this early master of dirty tricks ran a vast network of spies and secret agents from Meshed, in north-eastern Persia. His greatest satisfaction was to set Bolshevik and Afghan at one anothers throats by judicious leaking of the others double-dealing (invented, if necessary).

A third British officer whom the Soviets had no reason to love was Colonel Percy Etherton. He fought a ruthless, almost personal war against them from his lonely outpost at Kashgar, in Chinese Turkestan, close to the Russian frontier. So effective were his anti-Bolshevik operations that a price was put on his head by the Soviet authorities in Tashkent, the ancient caravan town which they used as the principal base for their clandestine operations against British India.