Read Eastern Approaches Online
Authors: Fitzroy MacLean
Tags: #History, #Travel, #Non-Fiction, #Biography, #War
Eastern Approaches
EASTERN APPROACHES
INTRODUCTION TO THE PENGUIN EDITION
XIII ISLAND BASE AND BRIEF ENCOUNTER
8
BOSNIA: ALL ROUND, THE SNOW LAY DEEP
10
SIR FITZROY WITH TITO
(
on left
)
MAPS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Fitzroy Maclean had a varied and adventurous life. Posted to Moscow as a young diplomat before the Second World War, he travelled widely, with or without permission, in some of the wildest and remotest parts of the Soviet Union, then virtually closed to foreigners. His account of the last of Stalin’s notorious state trials, which he attended as an official observer, remains a classic.
During the war he took part, as a founder member of the SAS, in some of that unit’s now famous raids behind Rommel’s lines in the Western Desert. In 1943 he was dropped by parachute into German-occupied Yugoslavia as Winston Churchill’s personal representative and Commander of the British Military Mission to the Partisans, and he remained there until 1945, all enemy attempts to capture him proving unsuccessful. A Member of Parliment for over thirty years, he served as Under-Secretary for War in the Churchill and Eden governments. Among his best-known books are
Bonnie Prince Charlie, Portrait of the Soviet Union, All the Russias: The End of an Empire
and
Highlanders: A History of the Highland Clans.
He lived with his wife and family at Strachur in Argyll, where he farmed and was the owner of a famous West Highland inn. Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Bt, died on 15 June 1996.
To
MY FATHER and MOTHER
TO THE PENGUIN EDITION
Looking back over an unexpectedly long life, I am constantly struck by how lucky I have been. Lucky, I would say, in living when I did. Lucky, too, in my experience of life. And lucky, finally, in living long enough to see some of the great events I witnessed or was somehow involved in carried through, not so much to any logical conclusion as to an outcome considerably more encouraging than one could reasonably have hoped for at the time.
Written more than forty years ago,
Eastern Approaches
spans the eight years between 1937 and 1945. In February 1937, after an enjoyable spell at our Embassy in Paris, I was, at my own suggestion, posted to Moscow. Moscow seemed (and was) an interesting and exciting place to be going to. The years I spent there, 1937, 1938 and 1939, were, as it turned out, just about the most horrendous in the whole of Russia’s blood-stained history. They enabled me to form at first hand my own opinion of a system which to a surprising number of my contemporaries seemed to offer great hope for humanity. They left me, too, with a liking not just for the Russians themselves but also for several of the entirely different races I had encountered on my travels to the Caucasus and Central Asia.
I left Moscow early in 1939 both shocked and fascinated by what I had seen there, and, as I drove back across Europe in that doom-laden spring, I wondered, as I was bound to, what the future could possibly hold for the Soviet Union, indeed for any of us. The Soviet–German Pact of 1939, linking for a couple of years two of the most repellent regimes humanity has ever had to endure, made war inevitable.
Being descended from six successive generations of regular soldiers (and a good many generations of less regular soldiers before that), I knew, as I listened to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast on 3 September, that I had to get into the Army. Having succeeded, not
without difficulty, in extricating myself from the Foreign Office (which I had recently taken so much trouble getting into), I found myself, appropriately enough, back at Cameron Barracks in Inverness, where life had started for me just on thirty years before.
At an early stage in my military career I was, as it turned out, lucky enough to fall in with David Stirling and so join the fledgling S.A.S., today a valued and significant part of our national defences then consisting of no more than half a dozen officers and perhaps a score of other ranks, but already being used to remarkably good effect against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert. David was an inspired exponent of guerrilla tactics, which he used with equal success not only against the Germans but also in his dealings with a frequently bewildered G.H.Q. Middle East. I was to learn a lot from him in the next year or two.
But what was perhaps my biggest stroke of luck was yet to come. On the strength of my limited experience of irregular warfare and such knowledge as I possessed of Communists and Communism, I was in the summer of 1943 chosen by Winston Churchill to be dropped into German-occupied Yugoslavia as his personal representative with Tito and Commander of the Allied Military Mission to the Yugoslav Partisans or, as he himself characteristically put it, ‘a daring Ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted guerrillas’.
The assignment was in itself an immensely exciting one. But it was only on reaching Yugoslavia that I realized the full extent of my good fortune. After my years in Stalin’s Russia, I had expected to find myself confronted on arrival with a typical
apparatchik
, a puppet of the Kremlin tightly bound by a party line imposed from above. But Tito, greatly to my relief, proved to be different. An outstanding resistance leader, by now containing a score or more of enemy divisions, I found him, for a Communist, amazingly independent-minded, ready to discuss any question on its merits and take a decision there and then without reference to any higher authority. ‘Is it your intention, when the war is over, to make Yugoslavia a Russian colony?’ I asked him when I got to know him better. As I had intended, my question infuriated him. ‘Have you not seen enough of the sacrifices we are making to free our country
from the Germans,’ he replied, ‘to realize that we will never give up our independence to anyone?’ If he really meant this, it occurred to me the Russians might find him a tough nut to crack. Intrigued, I passed on my impressions to the Prime Minister. ‘Much,’ I wrote towards the end of 1943, ‘will depend on Tito and whether he sees himself in his former role of Comintern agent or as the potential ruler of an independent Yugoslav state.’
This was the question which was to pose itself in acute form three or four years later when Tito, having, largely by his own efforts, driven out the German forces of occupation, found himself in power in his own country and in no way prepared to take his orders from Moscow. In the summer of 1947 I came away from a private visit to Tito at his castle of Brdo in Slovenia with the impression that he was having trouble with the Russians. Other straws in the wind followed, and not long after came the day when, sitting in his study in Belgrade, he gave me a blow-by-blow account of his break with Moscow. ‘It was the toughest decision I have ever had to take,’ he said. ‘But, now that I have taken it, I feel remarkably well satisfied.’
That in the ensuing confrontation Tito, seemingly Moscow’s favourite satellite, managed to defy the Kremlin and, more important still, survive, was, as Western Governments fortunately recognized, an event of the greatest importance. The unthinkable had happened. A first crack had appeared in the Stalinist monolith; after this, world Communism could never be the same. It was the beginning of a process that was to reach its logical conclusion forty years later with the final disruption of Moscow’s extended empire.
The future destiny of Yugoslavia, poised precariously between East and West, was only one of the question marks with which
Eastern Approaches
ended. Another, bigger and more disturbing for us all, was this: whither the Soviet Union, now set, to all appearances, on a collision course with the West?
I did not revisit the Soviet Union until 1958, a score of years after I had left it and ten years into the Cold War. Already, under Khrushchev, whom I was greatly interested to meet, the atmosphere had changed out of all recognition. Human nature,
which, as I had learned during the war, can be an irresistible and extremely subversive force, was hard at work there and Russian human nature is more human than most. After ten years Khrushchev, it is true, was eliminated. But the lid had by now been lifted from Pandora’s Box and would clearly be difficult to replace. However hard Brezhnev tried, the clock could no longer be turned right back. Slowly but surely, the process of de-Stalinization, which Khrushchev had so boldly initiated, continued. As Jean-Paul Sartre so nearly put it, ‘C’est la déStalinisation qui déStalinisera les déStalinisateurs.’ The process was to reach its logical conclusion twenty years after Khrushchev’s dismissal with the emergence of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
For me part of Russia’s charm has always been its unpredictability — the cliff-hanger aspect of its history, which leaves one always wondering what can possibly be going to happen next. Again the time has come to ask ourselves: whither the Soviet Union? Will it manage to hold together? What kind of system will eventually emerge from the melting-pot in which it at present finds itself? At the time of writing, the answer is yet to seek. But this time, in contrast to fifty years ago, the prospect is encouraging.
To take a single but significant example. Few things in a long and fairly full life have left a deeper or more horrifying impression on me than the trial of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, which I attended in Moscow in March 1938, or the appalling predicament of the wretched accused, fighting valiantly for what he believed in against desperate odds. Happening to find myself in Moscow just fifty years later and opening my copy of
Pravda
, I read that now, in early 1988. Bukharin was to be officially rehabilitated and, for what it was worth, posthumously readmitted to the Party. And not long after that I was actually able to dine with his widow and hear from her at first hand the moving story of their last hours together. These were things I had never for a moment conceived could happen. The wheel had in truth come full circle.
But this is only one of the astonishing new phenomena which greet me every time I go back to the Soviet Union: a consistently turbulent political scene, recurrent demonstrations openly hostile to
the Government, rampant nationalism in most of the Republics including Russia itself, the Party’s increasing loss of authority, the gradual return of the Orthodox Church to something approaching its former role, determined attempts by the country’s rulers to introduce a market economy, surprising new trends in literature and art, increasing freedom of speech.
As I climb into my aircraft next month, bound for what for the moment is still Soviet Georgia, the fascination for me of what I may find on arrival there will be every bit as great as it was on that bleak February evening all those years ago when I first boarded my sleeping-car in the Gare du Nord en route for Stalin’s Moscow.
AUGUST
1990