First Russia, Then Tibet: Travels Through a Changing World

By Robert Byron

Over the course of several months during 1931 and 1932, Robert Byron journeyed to three countries teetering on the brink of change. In Russia, which was stricken by famine, Lenin had just died, Stalin's dictatorship was in its infancy and the Great Terror was yet to begin. Having taken the first commercial flight to India, which took a week, Byron was thrown into the tumultuous last years of the British Raj. Gandhi was imprisoned while rioting and clashes between Hindus and Muslims had become commonplace. Finally Byron entered Tibet, the forbidden country. Exploring the Land of Snows, he saw Tibet as it was when the then Dalai Lama was still ensconced in the Potala Palace, twenty years before China's invasion. Blending classic travel writing with passionate observations on the deeper political and social issues of the time, Byron writes with uncanny prescience of the eventual horrors of the Soviet Union and the downfall of the Raj. As a piece of travel literature, "First Russia, Then Tibet" is compelling and beautifully-written. As a portrait of these countries in the 1930s, it is invaluable.
Ultimately, it illuminates the constant quest for meaning that underscored Robert Byron's life and travels.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1848854242
• ISBN13: 9781848854246
• Release Date: January 2011
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Travel Read from a Dynamic Era

First Russia, Then Tibet" is a travel book written in 1933 by Robert Byron. It is the second book that I have read by this author where he recounts his adventures abroad. Byron was never a tourist or holidaymaker. He traveled for knowledge, understanding, and as he phrased it in one book, simply "to see and know." The choice of Russia and Tibet as the subjects of this book was to understand the difference and similarities between two very disparate nations and cultures. The difference he focused on was industrialization and attempts to overcome historical forces. Both Russia and Tibet, in this context, make sense as places that were in significant transition while also attempting to hold onto a past, either through nostalgia or simple societal need. Industrialization was perhaps the catalyst and hope for early Soviet Russia, particularly in light of starving populations, wide geographic distances, and the paradox of a leadership that wanted to make its mark on the world stage while also becoming insular. Arriving in Russia just 15 years after the October Revolution, Byron visited this society at a unique time in history, especially as this fell between the two world wars. There is hope here, as well as ideological fervor, worry, and a growing realization that one Tsar had replaced another, albeit with different banners and goals. Although a superb photographer, Byron was first and foremost a writer. And this skill comes across in his depictions of day-to-day Russian life. He has great empathy for the many people he encounters in his travels. This is certainly true of the Russians and Byron navigates everyone from petty bureaucrats, supercilious minders, cooks, conductors, scholars, and ordinary folk making their way in the world. The Revolution was still near at hand. Moving about the country Byron saw many famous cities. There was even a hair-raising visit to the cellar in Leningrad where Rasputin was poisoned, shot, escaped, pursued, and eventually gunned down. This episode was then followed by a chapter that was more sublime wherein he visited various churches and cathedrals that were in Veliki Novgorod. Some of these date back to the 900s. He describes these in such detail that the reader is transported. You can picture the paintings of the saints and martyrs. Later walking through the snow in a forest of birch, Byron may have been describing a sort of Russian heaven. Coming from an affluent background this comes across as Byron prepares for a journey to Tibet. There were many legal and diplomatic aspects of crossing borders and frontiers. Despite mountains and ravines the area of Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal, China, and India was a scene of various dangers and tensions. Byron pulled a lot of strings with various lords, ladies, generals, and ambassadors to travel to Tibet. But you learn quickly that the real power lies in the hands of various ADCs, or aides-de-camp. Thus Byron and his small party are granted travel permits. The airplane flight to India is an adventure book unto itself and worthy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. From Calcutta the road to Tibet becomes more and more arduous and the transportation more primitive. Not allowed to visit Lhasa, Byron ultimately arrives at a British trade outpost in a small city called Gyantse. Here he is hosted by various British officers and local Tibetan officials. A keen observer of architecture, landscape, and people, Tibet offers Byron dramatic examples of all three. Despite frustrations at not being allowed to enter Lhasa, Byron soon learns that what he seeks is all around him. Towns are built around fortified monasteries and vice-versa. There is an interlinked symbiosis between the landscape, people, and religion that has a good deal to do with survival in so harsh a land. The mountains, Byron notes, are so out-of-scale to any other experience that they seem intent on destroying you simply by their sheer size. Yet the people remain undaunted before mute gods and rumbling mounta

Excellent travel memoir in the style of Newby and Hopkirk

I first dismissed Robert Byron's book ''First Russia, then Tibet" because it came across as an anti-Soviet diatribe. I picked it up again because a good friend, whose opinion I respect, said that it was good. On a second reading Byron was less prejudiced than I had at first thought, and I realized that what I had thought was right-wing blinkers was in fact a fine aesthetic sensitivity. He also understands that one of the most important things for a travel writer is to observe people and not just places. He describes Russia shortly after Lenin's death.I thought at first that he was there as a political observer but I was a lot more sympathetic when it became clear that he was really interested in the art and architecture. You end up with an interesting picture of Russia just after Lenin's death, and just before Stalin's crackdown.The second two thirds of the book are more interesting, though. He recounts the first commercial flight from Britain to India, which takes all of a week. He then retells a short journey into Tibet, something as forbidden then as it is now. What really stands out is how he describes how everyone looks and lives, be they a Maharajah or Tibetan peasant. You can literally feel and smell the rigors of travel in a place that has not progressed much beyond medieval technology. He does not judge anyone although he is ultimately very sympathetic to the Tibetans' rejection of the modern world. You get the sense that he could have been very scathing about the attitude of the British colonials to the locals, but instead chooses to say nice things about those colonizers who did make the effort to meet the natives on their own terms. One note: the description of a dinner at the governor's house in Darjeeling is one of the funniest passages that I have ever read. Byron's deadpan style is perfect to describe a minor incident in a place where nothing ever happens. It reminds me of the game of cricket in "England, their England". His descriptions of his travel companions, and the fact that they are often more reluctant than he, are gently witty, and turned back on himself. I would recommend this to people who liked "A short walk in the Hindu Kush", or who read Peter Hopkirk's books on exploration and espionage in Central Asia in the last century.