Mission to Tashkent

Mission to Tashkent is a memoir by British spy, explorer, and botanist Frederick Marshman Bailey. The book recounts Bailey's adventures in Turkestan between 1918 and 1920, during which he initially gathered intelligence on Bolshevik intentions as an official representative of the British government before continuing his work as a covert agent. One of the primary objectives of Bailey's mission was to collect information on those resisting British rule in Afghanistan and India, as well as to persuade the Bolsheviks to either continue their war against Germany or, at the very least, refrain from aiding the Central Powers.

Due to the threats posed by Bolshevik persecution, Bailey lost the manuscript at least four times, each time rewriting it from memory. Although the book was written in the 1920s, British government restrictions delayed its publication until 1946. For the 1992 edition published by Oxford University Press, historian Peter Hopkirk, author of Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia, wrote the introduction and afterword. In 1999, The Folio Society in London released a deluxe edition, which included many of Bailey's own photographs along with a revised introduction and afterword by Hopkirk, who called Bailey "an absolutely first class man".