Fitzroy Maclean (1911-1996) is best known as being the inspiration for the James Bond character after writing about his adventures in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Balkans before and during World War II. He returned to the region twenty years later when he was commissioned by the Sunday Times to write a travelogue of the Soviet Union, eventually published as ‘Back to Bokhara’. He paints a rather rosy picture of the situation, whether it is to not ruffle any feathers or because of the sharp contrast to late 1930′s when he last was there. By the late 1950′s USSR is undergoing de-Stalinization, a relative opening (the ‘thaw’), and economic growth on a huge scale. This is reflected in the Alma-Ata he details, with construction of new buildings, facilities like Medeo and a champagne factory!
Alma Ata is magnificently situated. Immediately behind it – an immensely dramatic backdrop – rise the snow-capped mountains of the Tien Shan, or the Mountains of Heaven, the great mountain barrier which divides Russian Central Asia from Chinese Turkestan. The town itself, originally laid out by the Russians eighty or a hundred years ago, is made up of broad avenues of elms and poplars running at right angles to each other. Even before the War, at the time of my last visit, there were already as good many new buildings and now there are even more: blocks of flats, department stores, an opera, a university and an imposing new Government building. but the green avenues of tall trees are still there, and there are still enough of the old brightly painted stucco bungalows left, blue and white, pun and white, yellow and white, for the town not to have lost its pleasantly bucolic character…What Alma Ata never has possessed, and despite the restrained orientalism of some of its new buildings, I think never will, is anything at all Eastern in its make up. It always has been and alwayswill be a Russian town. View full article »
