Colin Simpson Looks At

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Colin Simpson Looks At The Soviet Union

If you are a reader-in-bed you would be well advised to buy the traveller’s compact edition of Colin Simpson’s Take Me To Russia. The War and Peace-sized, armchair edition is heavy enough to brain you or wind you should it accidentally slip from your hands.

rHIS is Australia’s favourite travel writer’s most ambitious project et, with 500 pages, appendices, index, 12 photographs and a potted practical ■avel information section, printed n green paper.

It is, in fact, quite a fantastic ook, but for all its bounty it may ot altogether please the average impson reader in that a large wad f it is not devoted to travel and its delights at all, but to the history f the Russian people and what makes icm what they are—Communists.

It is not, in fact, until the reader reaches the penultimate section— Soviet Central Asia—on page 355 that the old Simpson has very much chance to emerge.

Those who were brought up on the James Elroy Flecker legends of the Golden Road to Samarkand, as I was, might wish he had surfaced sooner because in the smallest section of his book is a tantalising glimpse of a land little written about in our age and still seldom visited by Westerners.

Land Of Romance This vast area of country, on the ■‘other side” of the Himalayas, stretch ing as far west as the Caspian Sea and east to China, through which the caravans from Baghdad rolled along the Old Silk Road to meet, in Samarkand, those from Cathay in the days BC, is one of the romance areas of the world.

Here, although the Soviet brand of get-up-and-go has been superimposed by way of the collective farm, the factory, the Opera House and the university, men—a mish-mash of them, Mongol, Turk, Persian or Indian—retain more of their in dividuality than in the rest of the

Ussr.

In this land of violent and ancient history, of alternating bright colours and dun desert, of fascinating ruins built by the rulers of the past along side the biggest cotton-harvester factory in Asia, the Russians have got one of the most extraordinary potential tourist bonanzas in the world.

But if the author is correct, they seem little concerned with this, bent

as they are in projecting the Soviet image in the shape of bigger and better factories rather than dazzling tourists with the picturesque remains of ancient architecture with which they had no part.

Mausoleums, minarets and mosques that were part of a culture foreign to the present rulers have been allowed to crumble away and fall into decay, although restoration work on some of the ruined mosques and domes of Samarkand is going on—but as a painfully slow business.

In his central Asian peregrinations, Colin Simpson visited Bukhara, Samarkand, Dushanbe (formerly Stalinabad), and Alma-Ata —a wholly Soviet city built since 1929 in the centre of an apple-growing district in the Tien Shan Mountains that sep arate the USSR from China.

Ridiculous Restrictions He and the reader leave feeling that more time could profitably be spent wandering there—if free from the often ridiculous restrictions im posed by the authorities through their ever-present Intourist watchdogs.

Not that the author has nothing good to say about Intourist. To the contrary, it is, he says, difficult, if not impossible, to travel in Russia with out a guide who speaks the language.

The guides are not there, as some times alleged, to keep an eye on you.

Nor is it forbidden to go anywhere without a guide, but those who try it find that even the simple business of ordering a meal or asking direc tions can be virtually impossible.

Russia is, nonetheless, full of things that cannot be done, by citizens as well as visitors, and as most of these seem utterly senseless to Westerners this is a frustrating aspect of all Soviet travel.

The best part of the body of this book is its descriptions of how ordinary Soviet citizens live, and its most interesting chapter is that which

Colin Simpson.

begins on page 297 and is called “The Two Moralities; Soviets and Sex.

As most of Western moral laws are based on the Christian religion, it comes as something of a shock to find that this huge nation, which is in a state of Established Paganism, has a code of moral ethics that has not been seen in our society since Victoria went to her grave.

There is no nightclub in Moscow, the Soviet’s biggest city; there are virtually no bars; no paperbacks with covers showing violence and sex; no pornography no prostitution. In dividuals are Puritan in outlook and behaviour, the early practices of free love and divorce for the asking hav ing hardly outlasted the Revolu tionary period. They were said to breed “individualism” and were scrapped because they “didn’t work.”

Communism aims to channel into the work of building Soviet society energies that, in the Western world, dissipate themselves in pleasure and self-indulgence.

In Soviet eyes our society is decadent and to the author’s view this Soviet morality is Communism’s second-front against which our own defences are not in good order.

Although many will find the long build-up of Russian history to the Revolution somewhat exhausting, a great deal of effort has gone into this book—far too much to be rewarded with a corny title like Take Me To Russia (as a follow-up to the author’s more recent numbers, Meet Me In Spain and Wake Up In Europe).

Since the übiquitous John Gunther had cornered all titles beginning with Inside —it is difficult to know what sort of title a book of this sort could be given; but something less Polly annaish than the one it has could

surely be found.-

-JT.

(TAKE ME TO RUSSIA. Angus and Robertson Ltd. 45/-.)