Eastern Approaches

One course of action when you are up early in a log cottage in the pine and birch forest by a pristine lake in South Karelia, Finland, is to read by the morning sunlight (no electricity) with a freshly brewed cup of coffee (bottled gas). Days without TV, radio, the Internet, or newspaper has a way of returning one to the joys of reading known by earlier generations. The hand woven birch bark baskets and pine shelves of the cottage were full of books--flora and fauna, old novels from the 40s, biographies, guides/tourism for the local events, and some old how-to-manuals. I found only one in English, "Eastern Approaches" by Fitzroy Maclean who was a member of the British Diplomatic corps in the 1930s-40s and wrote of his experiences traveling in the USSR and Balkans during 1937-45. Although this book technically isn't on my bookshelf, it was a welcome sight.

There was one eerie passage that seemed true even 60 years later. [Communists in 1942] all had one thing in common, their terror of responsibility, their reluctance to think for themselves, their blind, unquestioning obedience to the Party line dictated by a higher authority. . . the terrible atmosphere of fear and suspicion that pervaded their lives." This would be a book to read for anyone wishing to do business in Russia today, needing to understand the roots of the culture.

Either Maclean was an outstanding writer or after a week of being deprived of reading, I was like a starving woman at a banquet. In either case, it was a good read, given the years I had spent studying the history and politics of the USSR in the 50s and 60s. The chapter on the purge of the Party in the late 1930s was riveting because of all the old familiar names, particularly Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (who was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988).

Maclean sat through the entire trial and with friends tries to sort it all out. He decides that everyone needs a cause to die for--judges, prosecutor, prisoners and NKVD. And for the prisoners, it was the Party. Even in facing death, they were characters in a theatrical production about good and evil. The trial served as a reminder to the people to be suspicious of everyone--to see spies and traitors everywhere, to shun foreigners, to explain the shortages of food and goods not on a failing economic and political system, but on those terrible traitors who were on trial. Certainly the benign and benevolent Stalin couldn't be at fault, but these traitors now being purged from the Party.

When I got home I looked up Maclean and found he was a very popular writer who had written a number of books (some think his life was the inspiration for James Bond) and that Bukharin, one of the more unforgettable characters in this book, had written an autobiographical novel while imprisoned before his death.