.TWELVE SECRETS OF THE CAUCASUS By Essad Bey
A certain swaggering cynicism about Essad Bey's telling of l'ietive Secrets of the Caucasus (Nash and Grayson, 15s.) seems true to. type : the author has the Georgian tempera- inent with 'its charm, insouciance, flexibility. Whether the stories are exaggerated or not hardly matters : Essad Bey paints for us a lively and unforgettable scene of forgotten tribes, strange customs, and the habits of the Bolsheviks. Ills account of a " hold-up '! in Tiflis in which M. Stalin figured is most dramatic. Bombs were thrown by a young loan at a lorry containing a consignment of a million roubles as it was passing in front of the Viceroy's house in the busy capital. Cossacks defended the lorry, but the young man threw another bomb, scattering troops and police, and made away with the money bags. Fifty dead men lay in the main street of. Tiflis. The young man was M. Stalin. He sent the notes to Lenin in Paris, and they were all changed except one, which the police recognized as stolen. The individual who had attempted to negotiate the stolen note is stated by the author to have been one of the most important Ministers of the Soviet Union.
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