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In his book Mission To Tashkent, Lt. Col. FM Bailey describes his remarkable 1918-19 journey from British India, though Xinjiang Province in far western China to newly Soviet Central Asia, and his subsequent escape from the Bolshevik Secret Police, the Cheka. Famously, having been forced into hiding in Tashkent, and disguised as an Albanian, Bailey is at one point recruited by the Cheka and later dispatched to Bukhara to arrest himself.  Mission To Tashkent is, according to Peter Hopkirk, ‘one of the best books about secret intelligence work ever written‘.

Though never explicitly describing himself as such, Bailey is a spy, attempting to establish the threat posed to British India by the Bolshevik regime.  Mission To Tashkent therefore offers a unique snapshot of the latter stages of the Great Game, in the aftermath of the collapse of Asia’s two great Empires. The Russian Empire had fallen in the February Revolution of 1917, triggered in part by Russia’s massive losses in WWI. Only months later Lenin’s October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. (By mid-1918 the new state was young enough that, as Bailey entered Tashkent, Tsarist sympathisers still held government positions, and it was not clear that the Bolsheviks would survive the Civil War.) In China, the Kuomintang’s Republic of China had brought to an end two thousand years of Imperial history; the Republic was now barely six years old, and since 1916 Beijing had held little real authority: the country had descended into feuding fiefdoms (this was the so-called Warlord era). Xinjiang, under the virtual dictatorship of Yang Zengxin, was relatively stable during this time. The British and Russians also exerted some authority here – the winnings of the Great Game; both powers had Consulates in Kashgar, while the Russians maintained a Cossack detachment, and the British a guard of Gilgit Scouts.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks won their Civil War, and Russian Central Asia was fully integrated into the USSR as the Turkmen, Tajik, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics. In China, Chiang Kai-shek brought an end to the Warlord era in the late 20′s, continuing the ROC even after being forced to retreat to Taiwan by Mao’s Communists in 1948. During Bailey’s mission, though, the geopolitical stakes were still very high.

Summit of Mintaka Pass, 1918

One tale from Mission to Tashkent, concerning the Mintaka Pass – at the nexus of Russia, China and British India – is worth recounting here, but requires a little background. (Note that Wikipedia’s photograph of the Mintaka Pass was taken by Bailey during his journey; the border cairn is clearly visible.) Since 1916 a number of parties of Norwegians had been arriving in Khotan (‘from China’, as Bailey puts it; Xinjiang had at the best of times never been a part of China proper), always without proper visas. In fact, these ‘Norwegians’ were Germans from Eastern China, trapped at the outbreak of the War by the Russians to the north, and, seawards, the British and Japanese. Their only practical means of escape was via the Wakhjir Pass [see also a previous post here] to neutral Afghanistan, which entailed a months-long journey across the entire breadth of Warlord-era China; the Gilgit Scouts in China were mandated to prevent such movements.

Descending from the Mintaka pass in May 1918, Bailey is met by a Chinese Guard of Honour and by Gilgit Scouts. Very much as an aside he relates a previous visit to the Mintaka by the Scouts’ commanding officer: the officer had been ordered by the British Consulate to intercept a party of two ‘Norwegians’ in Xinjiang who were straying from their stated route to Kashgar. He found them a number of days from the Wakhjir but was unable to arrest them on Chinese territory. Instead, dressed as a local man, he befriended them and offered to act as their guide to Afghanistan, where – coincidentally – he was also travelling. They travelled in this manner for a number of days, he allaying their concern that they had perhaps moved too far to the south. And so he led them over the pass, although this was not the Wakhir, but the Mintaka; and as soon as they set foot in British India he drew his revolver and arrested them. They spent the remainder of the War as POWs.

Mintaka Pass on Google Maps

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References and further reading
F. M. Bailey. Mission to Tashkent (1946)
Peter Hopkirk. Setting the East Ablaze (1984)
Lonely Planet Guidebooks. Pakistan & the Karakoram Highway Travel Guide (May 2008)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 03:52 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.