I have a strong suspicion that Russia does not really know what she is up to in Chinese Central Asia

It is natural in human beings to fear the unknown and, fearing it, to overestimate its power, as well as its will, to harm. Anyone who works behind the scenes is de facto assumed to be working, with abnormal efficiency, on some deep laid plan. This may be so with Russia; but in the Soviet Union plans, however deep-laid, have to a tendency to produce results surprising to all concerned, and a policy directed by highly centralized, half trained bureaucracy and developing in the territory of a foreign Power may be less darkly potent than its cloak of secrecy suggests. I have a strong suspicion that Russia does not really know what she is up to in Chinese Central Asia, and that her activities there are guided, to an even greater extent that Japan's activities in North China and Mongolia, by opportunism  

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 263