Hunted Through Central Asia: On the Run from Lenin's Secret Police

Pavel Nazaroff was a Russian "burjui" (bourgeois) and a prominent figure in efforts to overthrow the Bolsheviks who had assumed power in Tashkent in 1918. He was imprisoned, released during a short-lived counter-revolution, and then spent many months hiding amongst the local Muslim population and wandering through Russian Central Asia in disguise before escaping to Sinkiang.Although I wouldn't award this at times torpor-inducing account of his adventures any more stars than the previous reviewers, I do feel they are being a little hard on the author. His constant vilification of the Bolsheviks, though tiresome to the detached modern reader, is forgivable, bearing in mind they destroyed his world and tried their best to kill him. He could hardly tell us much about his anti-Soviet activities without endangering people left behind in Tashkent; indeed, it's surprising he admits any involvement at all. And the ripping yarns penned by British spies active in this region at this time (Bailey, Teague-Jones et al) tell us no more about their authors' politics and emotions, never mind the historical context. It just wasn't the done thing.But the jacket blurb, promising "hair-breadth `scapes and survival against all odds" is indeed misleadingly OTT. You will enjoy this book more if you approach it as a work of travel or exploration in the vein of Freya Stark, Aurel Stein or Sven Hedin. Such tomes were very popular in their day and botanical, geological and anthropological observations - which Nazaroff copiously supplies - were de rigeur. Nowadays they fail to enthral, as we can get a glut of this kind of stuff on the National Geographic channel. Even so, Nazaroff's enthusiasm for nature is engaging and his scientific musings are not without interest. His description of a Kirghiz woman nibbling the seams of her husband's clothes to pop the lice lurking there (thus achieving simultaneous pest control and food supplementation) is an image that will stay with me a lot longer than I particularly want it to. Perhaps an idea for a new stunt in certain celeb-based TV reality shows?

So if you're after a thrilling roller coaster read, then I can see that this might disappoint. However the details that bore the other reviewers I found to be totally captivating - the flora and fauna, the archaeological sites, the culture of the tribespeople, the landscapes are described so vividly and confirm my fascination for the incredible Tien Shan. So if your interest includes the area as well as the adventure, then I urge you to dive in, as I have several times now.

not quite as I though it would be, got rather boring sadly to say, it seemed tedious

An exciting, gripping and tragic human story. The kind of book that you want to keep and recommend. This is the second time that I buy this book: the first one I gave to a friend.

This book is a combination travelogue and revolutionary thriller that, in important ways, is inadequate at both.The geopolitical terrain of Central Asia is very different from what Paul Nazaroff saw when he fled Lenin's secret police almost a hundred years ago. Even some of the geographical terrain is different -- he describes Pishpek as tiny and run-down; today it is Bishkek, the capital of modern Kygyzstan, with a population of 900,000.And the revolutionary thriller aspect of the book leaves out many of the details I would love to have seen. Nazaroff organized a major anti-Bolshevik uprising, but we don't know how or where or when: only that it failed, and forced the author to flee for his life.But take the book for what it is, and not what it isn't. We have a unique, eye-witness account of Soviet abuses in Central Asia after the turn of the century. We have a picture of lands that even today remain largely unknown. We have a proto-ethnography of interesting groups of people (chiefly the Sarts and the Kyrgyz) and the world in which they lived. And we have them through the eyes of a man who loved nature, freedom, and the excellence of the human spirit (whether Russian, Turkoman or otherwise), and who was not afraid to decry the abuses and failings of the communists.