"Let us turn our faces towards Asia," exhorted Lenin when the long-awaited
revolution in Europe failed to materialize. "The East will help us conquer the
West." Peter Hopkirk's book tells for the first time the story of the Bolshevik
attempt to set the East ablaze with the heady new gospel of Marxism. Lenin's
dream was to liberate the whole of Asia, but his starting point was British
India. A shadowy undeclared war followed. Among the players in this new Great
Game were British spies, Communist revolutionaries, Muslim visionaries, and
Chinese warlords--as well as a White Russian baron who roasted his Bolshevik
captives alive. Here is an extraordinary