走近东方 (1949)

Eastern Approaches (1949) is a memoir of the early career of Fitzroy Maclean. It is divided into three parts: his life as a junior diplomat in Moscow and his travels in the Soviet Union, especially the forbidden zones of Central Asia; his exploits in the British Army and SAS in the North Africa theatre of war; and his time with Josip Broz Tito and the Partisans in Yugoslavia.

Maclean was considered to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for James Bond, and this book contains many of the elements: remote travel, the sybaritic delights of diplomatic life, violence and adventure. The American edition was titled Escape To Adventure, and was published a year later. All place names in this article use the spelling in the book.

Golden Road: the Soviet Union

Fresh out of Cambridge, Maclean joined the Foreign Office and spent a couple of years at the Paris embassy. He loved the pleasures of life in the French capital, but eventually longed for adventure. Against the advice of his friends (and to the delight of his London bosses), he requested a posting to Moscow, which he received right away; once there, he began to learn Russian. Travelling within the Soviet Union was frowned upon by the authorities, but Maclean managed to take several trips anyway.

The Caucasus

In the spring of 1937, he took a trial trip, heading south from Moscow to Baku on the Caspian Sea. The Intourist official tried to dissuade him, but he found a ship to take him to Lenkoran (Lankaran, Azerbaijan), where he witnessed the deportation of several hundred Turko-Tartar peasants to Central Asia. Stuck there for a few days, he bargained for horses with which to explore the countryside, and was arrested by the NKVD cavalry near to the Persian border. He explained that he held diplomatic immunity, but his captors could not read his Soviet diplomatic pass. Eventually, as the only person literate in Russian, Maclean "read out, with considerable expression, and such improvements as occurred to me" the contents of his pass, and was set free. He took an 1856 paddle steamer back to Baku, and then a train on to Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia). British troops had supported the Democratic Republic after World War I, and Maclean sought out the British war cemetery, in the process discovering an English governess who had lived in the town since 1912. He caught a truck through the Caucasus Mountains, via Mtzkhet (Mtskheta), the former capital of Georgia but by then merely a village, to Vladikavkaz (capital of North Ossetia), and then a train to Moscow.

To Samarkand

His second trip, in the autumn of the same year, took him east along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Although he disembarked without warning at Novosibirsk, he acquired an NKVD escort. He travelled on the Turksib Railway south to Biisk (Biysk), at the foot of the Altai Mountains, and then to Altaisk and Barnaul. On the trains he heard the complaints of the Siberian kolkhozniks (workers on collective farms) and witnessed another mass movement, this time of Koreans to Central Asia. His first main destination was Alma Ata (Almaty), the capital of the Kazakh republic, which lies near to the Tien Shan Mountains. He characterised it as "one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union" and particularly appreciated the apples for which it is famous. From there he took a truck to a hill village called Talgar and went walking with one of his NKVD escorts; Maclean availed himself of peasant hospitality and commented on the general prosperity. He managed to hire a car and made it to Issyk-kul, the lake that never freezes, but had to turn back because of the season. From Alma Ata Maclean took the train for Tashkent, passing through villages where "nothing seemed to have changed since the time when the country was ruled over by the Emir of Bokhara"; men still rode bulls and women still wore veils made of black horsehair. From Tashkent, which then had a reputation for wickedness, he made the final leg to the fabled city of Samarkand. He returned to Moscow with plans for a further trip.

Maclean spent the winter working in Moscow and amusing himself at the dacha (country cottage) of American friends, including Chip Bohlen. In March 1938 a show trial was announced, the first such public event in over a year; he attended every day of what became known as the Trial of the Twenty-One. The book goes into great detail, spending 40 pages on description and analysis of the trial, its prominent figures and its twists and turns.