Setting the East Ablaze: On Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2001 - History - 252 pages
Peter Hopkirk's book tells for the first time the story of the Bolshevik attempt between the wars to set the East ablaze with the new gospel of Marxism. Lenin's dream was to liberate the whole of Asia, but his starting point was British India. A shadowy, undeclared war followed.Among the players in this new Great Game were British Indian intelligence officers and the professional revolutionaries of the Communist International. There were also Muslim visionaries and Chinese warlords - as well as a White Russian baron who roasted his Bolshevik captives alive. Here is an extraordinary tale of intrigue and treachery, barbarism and civil war, whose echoes continue to be heard in Central Asia today.

From inside the book

Contents

Prologue
8
An Absolutely FirstClass Man
8
The Strange Adventures of a Butterfly Collector
17
Bailey Vanishes
30
The Executioner
46
Hunted
58
Bailey Joins the Soviet Secret Service
76
To Set the East Ablaze
95
The Last Stand of Enver Pasha
152
Curzons Ultimatum
167
Squeezed Out Like a Lemon
176
Skulduggery on the Silk Road
185
A Lady Vanishes
194
The Last of the Central Asian Dreamers
209
The New BogyMen of the East
226
The East Fails to Ignite
238

The Army of God
108
The Bloody Baron
123
An Avenue of Gallows
137

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About the author (2001)

Peter Hopkirk has travelled widely over many years in the regions where his six books are set - Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India and Pakistan, Iran, and Eastern Turkey. Before turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York correspondent of the Daily Express, and worked for nearly twenty years on The Times: five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle and Far East specialist. In the 1950s he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister-paper to its legendary South African namesake. Before entering Fleet Street he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles - in the same battalion as lance-corporal Idi AMin, later to emerge as the Ugandan tyrant. No stranger to misadventure, Hopkirk has twice beeen held in secret police cells - in Cuba and the Middle East - and has also been hijacked by Arab terrorists. His works have been translated into thirteen languages.

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