Setting the East Ablaze: Lenins Dream of an Empire in Asia
Amid the sand and rock of Central Asia, Russia and England spent much of the 19th century  playing what historians have come to call the Great Game: the struggle for control over transcontinental  routes from Europe to the Far East. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Lenin continued to press  Russian--now Soviet--claims to faraway, fabled places such as Samarkand and Hotan. The intrigues of his  agents and their British counterparts, swashbucklers all, could come from a modern spy novel, and they  make for fascinating reading in Peter Hopkirk's vivid account.