Setting the East Ablaze: On Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia - Softcover

Hopkirk, Peter

4.21

907 ratings by Goodreads

9780192851666: Setting the East Ablaze: On Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192851667 ISBN 13: 9780192851666

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1986

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

As the European revolution failed to materialize, Lenin decreed, `Let us turn our faces towards Asia. The East will help us to conquer the West.'

Pieced together from secret reports and eye-witness memoirs, this is the first book to tell the story of the Bolshevik attempt to spread Marxism throughout Asia and its frustration by British Indian intelligence agents. An extraordinary story of the intrigue and treachery of the Great Game, its key
players include Chinese warlords, Muslim visionaries, and a White Russian baron who roasted his Communist captives alive.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Amid the sand and rock of Central Asia, Russia and England spent much of the 19th century playing what historians have come to call the Great Game: the struggle for control over transcontinental routes from Europe to the Far East. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Lenin continued to press Russian--now Soviet--claims to faraway, fabled places such as Samarkand and Hotan. The intrigues of his agents and their British counterparts, swashbucklers all, could come from a modern spy novel, and they make for fascinating reading in Peter Hopkirk's vivid account.

From the Publisher:

6 1.5-hour cassettes

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.