Hunted through Central Asia - Paul Nazaroff

Pavel (also known as "Paul") Nazaroff was the ringleader of a desperate plot to overthrow Bolshevik rule in Central Asia in 1918. He was betrayed to the Bolshevik secret police - the dreaded Cheka - who condemned him to death as "a known enemy of the proletariat".;A white Russian uprising stormed the prison in Tashkent where he was being held and he managed to escape, immediately going into hiding in order to avoid the Bolshevik's reprisals. He was put on the Cheka's wanted list as the most dangerous counter-revolutionary at large in Tashkent. And so began what he was later to describe as "a long and distant odyssey which would take me right across Central Asia, to the mysterious land of Tibet, and over the Himalayas to the plains of Hindustan".;On his journeys he was helped by the Kirghiz and the Sarts, Moslem peoples of Russia whose language and customs Nazaroff understood and respected. They too had no love for the Bolsheviks and were only too happy to come to the aid of the fugitive. At one point, Nazaroff is walled up in a Sart's dwelling for his own protection, and for many months he lived "the life of a hunted animal". He eventually came by false papers and passed himself off as an itinerant bee-merchant.;As the months passed, Nazaroff realized that the counter-revolutionary cause was a hopeless one, and that his only recourse was to attempt to cross the mountains into China. In the final stage of his adventure, he succeeds in giving both the Cheka and the Chinese border guards the slip, and make his way through China to Kashgar.