Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia by Peter Hopkirk (PDF)

Description

Let us turn our faces towards Asia’, exhorted Lenin when the long-awaited revolution in Europe failed to materialize. ‘The East will help us conquer the West.’ Peter Hopkirk’s book tells for the first time the story of the Bolshevik attempt to set the East ablaze with the heady 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 spies, Communist revolutionaries, 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 violent repercussions continue to be felt in Central Asia today.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is my 5th Peter Hopkirk in the last few months. He is a terrific writer. History told through people’s stories is so engaging. Reading his various books on Central and South Asia regarding The Great Game and some of the different stakeholders has been super for building up in my mind the bigger, longer picture. I have a 6th book lined up, Like Hidden Fire. Highly recommended!!

⭐In a search for a true Indiana Jones style adventure, finding such an epic in detailed historic accounts between two imperialist powers would seem less than probable. Hopkirk however not only meets the challenge, but entirely overwhelms any such prospect having been achieved through any type of fiction. Hopkirk delivers a suspense filled account of an adventure so great, inventing any possible contender to it through a vivid imagination would only lack its sincerity. Outstanding recount of history and an adventure epic of a lifetime to top it off.

⭐Peter Hopkirk’s books on Central Asia are very good. Begin with The Great Game, go on to On Secret Service East of Constantinople, and follow with Setting the East Ablaze. Hopkirk was apparently inspired by Fitzroy MacLean’s Eastern Approaches, to do much research and write his own books set in Central Asia. MacLean, after his diplomatic service in Moscow, with accompanying forays into ‘Central Asia,’ went to join The Phantom Major (David Stirling) in North Africa, before being sent by Churchill to ‘Yugoslavia’ to discover which resistance group was the strongest, and the one most likely to help drive the Germans and Italians out of the Balkans — this group, then, Britain would send supplies to. MacLean and Churchill recognized that they would be choosing to help a Communist resistance group (The Partisans), and that there would be ‘problems’ related to the choice at the end of the war. [Read Nikolai Tolstoy’s books The Minister and the Massacres and The Secret Betrayal: 1944-1947. Also, Nicholas Bethell’s The Last Secret.] For fans of John Buchan’s novels, Hopkirk says that On Secret Service East of Constantinople is the “true story” which lies behind Buchan’s novel Greenmantle. Readers of On Secret Service East of Constantinople may want to read next, The Spy Who Disappeared, by Reginald Teague-Jones…along with Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze. These writers give a reader so many “ends of golden strings,” that to follow them all, would take many months, and the reading of a good many books! Hopkirk is a good writer, whatever he is writing about.

⭐This is another of Peter Hopkirk’s wonderful books about Central Asia, mostly dealing with players in the Great Game. This volume takes up the story after World War One, when the Bolsheviks decided they would attempt to the keep the provinces of Tsarist Russia intact and part of the Soviet Union, all in the name of anti-imperialism. There were also various Chinese, Turkic, and British forces at work in the power void which resulted in Central Asia after the collapse of the Russian Empire.Like other Hopkirk books, this is not dry history, but a series of compelling portraits of individual players in the intrigues of the time. These include the “Mad Baron”, von Ungern-Sternberg, a White Russian who thought he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, and attempted to recreate the latter’s Empire in an orgy of murder and destruction. There is also the British super-spy Bailey, who survived for months behind Bolshevik lines as they actively pursued him. At one point he assumed the disguise of an Albanian (correctly assuming that there would likely be no one in Central Asia to check his linguistic bona fides), became a Soviet agent, and was given as one of his tasks gathering information about the British spy Bailey. Another character was Enver Pasha, the cosmopolitan former Ottoman leader, who tried to create a pan-Turkic state in central Asia, to stretch from Anatolia to Chinese Turkestan.An excellent book.

⭐In this follow up to The Great Game we again find Russia, Britain, and others struggling for mastery of Central Asia. I loved every moment of this book. It is a gem. A history of things hidden from most people in the West but which have had a profound influence on current events. Fact is truly more incredible than fiction, especially the adventures of Col. Bailey.

⭐Hopkirk is a mater story teller. Anyone who cares about how Afghanistan and the surrounding countries ended up the way they did must read The Great Game–Hopkirk’s gripping description of the battle between Russia and England for control of Central Asia–a hint: they both lost.This volume picks up the story with the Russian Revolution. Again, Hopkirk does an excellent job of out lining the players, the global politics, and how it all impacted on this traditional “crossroads of the world”. Here, the focus is on Lenin, and Russia’s (successful) attempt to claim/re-claim Central asia as its own.My criticisim is that the story is not nearly as gripping as a story as was the Great Game. There are superb vignettes, but the overall narrative is simply not as good.However, if you want to know why Russia was willing to dvote a decade (1980 to 1990) to its war in Afghanistan, which set the stage for the Taliban and Al Queda, then I know of no better book.

⭐With the East truly ablaze these days I am grateful to British historical fiction author Antoine Vanner (“Britannia’s Reach,” “Britannia’s Wolf”) for introducing me to the works of Peter Hopkirk. While not written in chronological order, this book could be considered the third of a trilogy of works by Hopkirk that provide a very thorough, historically sound, yet highly readable introduction to the “Great Game” of territorial rivalry between Britain (ever concerned for the future of India, the jewel in the crown of the British empire) and Imperial and later Soviet Russia over influence in central Asia. One cannot hope to understand current events and passions in this region without at least an introduction to this history of Western intervention in the region.

⭐The closing chapters of the “Great Game” are told here with great panache and not a little quiet pride in the players of this remarkable story. Ian Fleming’s brother does appear alongside the people who safeguarded British interests in India. The stories of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler appear in context alongside some other equally brutal would be game changers. A particularly evil Wite Russian who enabled the rape, murder and torture of those thousands of innocents he encountered certainly helps us to understand where Putin came from in the modern age.A remarkable book in it’s own right but even more impressive when read as part of a series of Peter Hopkins books dealing with India and Russia, an exceptional read I have to say.

⭐Peter Hopkirk is a master of the history of Central Asia and nobody better tells the story of those explorers, spies, adventurers, madmen and conquerors who roamed that part of the world.1918: As the Russian Revolution takes place and the Soviets come to power, the Great Game between Britain and Russia is about to resume for the control of India throughout the first part of the 20th century, unfolding into events that have shaped today’s world.Thrilling read!

⭐Loved this book because I enjoy the Twentieth Century as a period and the Russian Revolutionary period In particular.The book highlights some little explored areas of the Central Asian experience of the Revolution and how UK sought to disrupt as much as possibleSome amazing individual stories burst from its pages.Well written and well worth reading

⭐At times it was necessary to remind ones self this was reality and not a spy novel.A well written and fascinating account of intrigue, skullduggery and barbarism in a part of the world still in the grip of despots and tyrants.This and the Great Game by the same author I thoroughly recommend to those interested in the detail of this place and time.

⭐Although not quite reaching the heights of The Great Game by the same author, this is a highly readable and entertaining account of the machinations of Russia and Britain in Central Asia during the inter-war years. There are some very well drawn portraits of the colourful characters who made the most of the chaos of the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik revolution: cunning Borodin, bloodthirsty Baron Ungern Sternberg, daring Enver Pasha, plucky Colonel Bailey, ‘Big Horse’ Ma, the Chinese Muslim warlord. Combined with a brisk narrative that crackles along, it makes for a great read.For anyone interested in Xinjiang (Sinkiang, Chinese/Eastern Turkestan) this is also an interesting book and underlines why China is so sensitive about the region today.

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