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make a night of it. From national dances, the band now switched to jazz and soon the floor was crowded with the élite of Baku; officers and officials and their girls, Party Members and the big men of the oil world. They danced with more enthusiasm than skill. Up to a year or two before jazz, or ‘dzhaz’, as it was called, had been frowned on as bourgeois stuff.Now suddenly, by one of those sudden, unaccountable changes of line which form such a bewildering feature of Soviet conduct, it had become the height of Soviet culture. Indeed in Moscow a State Dzhaz Band had been formed, whose leader, it was rumoured, drew a higher salary than Stalin himself. Obedient to the Party line, the chief citizens of Baku, Russians, Tartars, Jews, Georgians and Armenians, clasping their peroxided companions to them, shuffled solemnly round to the strains of ‘I ain’t nobody’s baby’ rendered with considerable feeling by a Tartar band, which presently broke into a swing version of the ‘Internationale’. The women, though for the most part drably dressed, all wore painted nails and a great deal of lipstick. This, too, was evidently a sign of culture.
    Thinking it over as I retired to bed for the second time, I wondered whether the Soviet Government did not perhaps regard such things as jazz, lipstick and red nail varnish as aphrodisiacs and had not encouraged them in the hope of putting up the birth-rate and thus increasing the nation’s war potential. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
    Next morning I set out to see what I could of Baku. It was a pleasant enough town, well-laid-out avenues of trees gave a grateful shade. The streets were thronged with a motley crowd of different racial types and outside the shops the same queues as in Moscow waited patiently for their turn to choose from a rather poorer selection of goods at rather higher prices. Like that of most Soviet towns, its population had risen sharply since the Revolution, and there was the usual housing shortage. To the south, in the direction of the main oilfield, a whole suburb of square white tenements had sprung into being, but many of the oil workers were still housed in tumble-down shacks and cabins.
    Side by side with the modern Russian city and rapidly being squeezed out of existence by it, is the old Persian town which Tsar Alexander I captured from the Shah of Persia in 1806. Its mosques and minarets and flat-roofed houses of pale, sun-baked, clay bricks reminded me that I was already on the fringes of Asia, as did also a string of camels encountered on its outskirts.
    On one of the desolate red hills that overlook the town I found a memorial to the British troops killed in the fighting against the Bolshevikstwenty years before, an episode in our military history which few English people any longer remember. But the Soviet authorities have never ceased to do everything they could to keep alive the memory of Allied intervention, and while I was in Baku elaborate preparations were being made for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the death of the Twenty-six Commissars of Baku, said to have been shot after they had been taken prisoner by the British.
    I have always heard that the twenty-seventh Commissar (who somehow escaped) was no less a personage than Anastasi Mikoyan, today a prominent member of the Politbureau. Meeting him at official parties, I could not help wondering, as he pressed on us delicious wines ‘from my little place in the Caucasus’, whether this elegant Asiatic statesman still bore us any ill-will. Looking at his fierce, handsome, inscrutable face above the well-cut, high-necked, silk shirt, smiling so amiably at a visiting British celebrity, I felt that he almost certainly did.
    Amongst the local inhabitants, on the other hand, both here and elsewhere in the Caucasus, there were a number who retained pleasant enough memories of the British occupation and of the short-lived independent states of Georgia, Azerbaijan and