This is a very interesting book about a geographical area that was and still is sort of a powderkeg best left alone. Of course, as current politics shows us that cannot happen due to the area's strategic position. World powers keep stirring up mayhem in this highly unstable area.

Although focus is on attempts of Bolsheviks to bring the revolution to the East - East being nearest to the what was then Tsarist Russia taken by Bolsheviks - Hopkirk draws a very vivid picture of Bolsheviks, Tsarist Whites, British, China, Afghanistan and other forces - local or international fighting to keep their foothold in the area during the 1910-1920's periods and not holding up in any way - massacres of thousands are common thing and it seems that power cannot be obtained or retaken without enormous price in human life.

Highly recommended, writers style is excellent and you wont be able to put down the book until you get to the very last page. ( )

NA

This is the book that introduced me to Peter Hopkirk. "Setting the East ablaze", like other Hopkirk books I have since read, read like an adventure story rather than a dry history.

Following the Russian Revolution, Asia was seen as the next domino to fall to the Communists. This led to men with ties to various political theories trying to get the jump on each other, popping up in small, remote villages and displaying derring do wherever possible.

We know the result of all this but "Setting the East ablaze" admirably sets out who was who and what they did. ( )

“Setting the East Ablaze” (1984) is another book by Peter Hopkirk, and could well have been called The Great Game, part 2 (even though it was written before his book, The Great Game). It deals with the arrival of Bolshevism in Central Asia, and the renewed threat to British India. Tashkent features prominently, as the initially chaotic Bolshevist base from where both Samarkand and Bukhara were subdued, as well as the subversive strategy against British India was conducted. Equally thrilling book, which reads like another adventure story, with occasional sidetrips to Mongolia and Chinese Kashgar. ( )

Hopkirk's special expertise is the history of that not very well known, but hugely significant, territory of Western China and Central Asia. Hopkirk tells the story in this and two previous books, of how Britain, China and Russia fought for control and influence over this region, most often using the tools of espionage, but from time to time with the use of armed bands and armies. This is not, however, a dry history of events, but a gathering of tales of extraordinary individual adventures and sympathetic portraits of places and peoples who are still in large part very much under the control of foreign powers. For the sake of understanding some of the earlier history of Western involvement in Afghanistan this book is invaluable, but it actually succeeds at every level. This is history written so vividly that it could be the front page headlines of todays newspaper's (as indeed it was then and still is now). Highly recommended. ( )