Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean

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 mewith 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