Read Online Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean - Free Book Online
Authors: Fitzroy MacLean
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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 hardinessof 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 besome 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
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 hardinessof 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 besome 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
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