Eastern Approaches
Front Book Cover
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| Author | Fitzroy Maclean |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | World War II, Travel literature |
| Genre | Autobiography |
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Publication date
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1949 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 550 |
| OCLC | 6486798 |
Eastern Approaches (1949) is an autobiographical account of the early career of Fitzroy Maclean. It is divided into three parts: his life as a junior diplomat in Moscow and his travels in the Soviet Union, especially the forbidden zones of Central Asia; his exploits in the British Army and SAS in the North Africa theatre of war; and his time with Josip Broz Tito and the Partisans in Yugoslavia.
Maclean was considered to be one of the inspirations for James Bond, and this book contains many of the elements: remote travel, the sybaritic delights of diplomatic life, violence and adventure. The American edition was titled Escape To Adventure, and was published a year later. All place names in this article use the spelling in the book.
Fresh out of Cambridge, Maclean joined the Foreign Office and spent a couple of years at the Paris embassy. He loved the pleasures of life in the French capital, but eventually longed for adventure. Against the advice of his friends (and to the delight of his London bosses), he requested a posting to Moscow, which he received right away; once there, he began to learn Russian. Travelling within the Soviet Union was frowned upon by the authorities, but Maclean managed to take several trips anyway.
In the spring of 1937, he took a trial trip, heading south from Moscow to Baku on the Caspian Sea. The Intourist official tried to dissuade him, but he found a ship to take him to Lenkoran (Lankaran, Azerbaijan), where he witnessed the deportation of several hundred Turko-Tartar peasants to Central Asia. Stuck there for a few days, he bargained for horses with which to explore the countryside, and was arrested by the NKVD cavalry near to the Persian border. He explained that he held diplomatic immunity, but his captors could not read his Soviet diplomatic pass. Eventually, as the only person literate in Russian, Maclean "read out, with considerable expression, and such improvements as occurred to me" the contents of his pass, and was set free. He took an 1856 paddle steamer back to Baku, and then a train on to Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia). British troops had supported the Democratic Republic after World War I, and Maclean sought out the British war cemetery, in the process discovering an English governess who had lived in the town since 1912. He caught a truck through the Caucasus mountains, via Mtzkhet (Mtskheta), the former capital of Georgia but by then merely a village, to Vladikavkaz (capital of North Ossetia), and then a train to Moscow.
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