Kolchak's gold

KOLEHAK’S WAR

“Westerners prefer to believe [Haim Tippelskirch told Bristow] that the Russian Revolution was decided in a few weeks of October and November nineteen seventeen. They think the Revolution was a simultaneous uprising of workers and peasants who revolted against czarism and the needless slaughter of the World War.

“It isn’t true.

“Czarism was already collapsing when Kerensky came to power in nineteen seventeen. The Bolshevik Revolution was not a triumph of workers and peasants; quite the reverse. It was a high-level coup in which the workers and peasants were betrayed, Marxist ideals were forgotten, and a Bolshevik dictatorship assumed power.

“The Russian proletariat never had a chance. And the nineteen seventeen Revolution was the beginning of a three years’ bloodbath which makes your American Civil War a minor skirmish by comparison. From nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty-one we were engaged in the bloodiest civil war of human history. Twenty-five million human beings died. Twenty-five million.”

The empire of the last Czar of all the Russias was the largest of all nations. It contained one-sixth of the world’s land area and was inhabited by 175 million people who spoke nearly two hundred dialects and languages. Until the mid-nineteenth century* the people of this land were absolute slaves, and the formal abolition of serfdom in 1861 did little to change their lives: they went right on being regarded as vermin and the only important change was that they now had to pay taxes.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, socialist thought swept through the cities. (It had little effect on the vast rural countryside; among the peasants and among their masters an indifference to violence and repression was ingrained.) There were strikes, there were demonstrations and appeals, there was the revolt of sailors and workmen in 1905; but there was no mass movement from hoi polloi and it was the liberal aristocrats, not the commoners, who agitated most stridently for reforms.

The first three years of the Great War were unspeakable on the Western Front but on the Russian Front they were worse.†

The Czar’s empire was an archaic fiefdom. Its military leadership was a proud and backward officer corps, a thoroughly lazy and corrupt general staff and a multilayered, absurdly parasitic bureaucracy. Its primary fighting strength was Russia’s Cossack horse cavalry; the Czar’s armies simply were not equipped to meet the modern German war machine.

Germans swept into the Russian breadbasket; by the end of 1916 hunger and suffering had infected the towns and cities, where Marxists fueled the common people’s bitter rage with propaganda that insisted the war was a plot by capitalist munitions cartels to slaughter millions for profit.

Revolutionary fury ramified through the cities of Imperial Russia. Rasputin was assassinated on the night of December 30, 1916-a warning of the coming uprising. Finally the awful food shortage in Petrograd brought out the riots of March 1917: and the Czar abdicated on March 18.

“It wasn’t a Bolshevik rising that forced Nicholas to abdicate, you know. The Bolshevik party had fewer than fifty thousand members. [When it came to power a few months later it still had only seventy-six thousand members.] In March it was the liberal republicans, many of them aristocrats who’d been exposed to Western progressive ideas; they took over, and it was orderly. The Duma [the provisional government of Prince Lvov] was very anti-Bolshevik. Its ambition was to elect representatives to a Constituent Assembly and create a constitutional government along Western lines.

“The Bolsheviks did not want any part of that. But they weren’t strong enough to dispute the Duma, until everyone began to see that Prince Lvov wasn’t going to sign an immediate peace with the German invaders. Then things changed.”

Alexander Kerensky, the strongest member of Prince Lvov’s coalition, ordered a full-scale offensive against the Germans in July and this was what broke the back of the republican movement. The offensive collapsed, a blood-drenched disaster, and the defeat allowed the Bolsheviks to turn popular passion against the liberal coalition.

“Lenin’s promise was simple and very appealing: he promised peace.

“Lenin said, ‘The revolutionary idea becomes a force when it grips the masses.’ But that was not it, you know. What gripped the masses-you saw it everywhere in Russia-was the promise of peace. The Bolshevik opportunists dashed right in. They seized the factories and consolidated their revolutionary soviets. Even in our village they were throwing up placards and slogans.

“In Saint Petersburg there was a palace coup. It wasn’t a revolution, it was a ruthless coup-Lenin’s junta unseated the Duma, that was all there was to it. That was November of nineteen seventeen. Kerensky had to flee the country disguised as a sailor.

“Lenin was the dictator of the Bolshevik Party. He wanted to be dictator of the empire, but that took three years.

“In the beginning he did two things-he confiscated all private property and he made a tender of peace to the German Kaiser.”

The Duma’s elections [to form a Constituent Assembly] were scheduled for November 25 and communications in Russia were too slow to enable Lenin to cancel them. They took place, and the non-Communist liberals won by a landslide: they took nearly 60 percent of the more than forty million votes cast in what was, and still is, the only free election ever held in Russia. (The Bolsheviks garnered only some 29 percent of the vote, even on their peace platform, and the bourgeois and conservative parties accounted for the rest.)

“Lenin had lost at the polls but it didn’t stop him. The elected representatives arrived in Saint Petersburg-Lenin was calling it Petrograd by then-and a few hundred of Lenin’s shock troops sealed off the palace. The representatives never got inside and the Assembly never was called to order. Of course we never heard about this until much later.”

Denied their elected place in government, those who opposed the Bolsheviks took up arms. Thus, in January 1918, began the Russian Civil War.

On December 3, 1917, the Red regime signed a temporary cease-fire agreement with the Germans.

For the Western Allies it was a bad time for Russia to defect from the war effort: it meant Germany’s eastern divisions now could be thrown into combat in the trenches against the Allies on the west.

Infuriated, the Allies sought to undermine Lenin’s government by infiltration and sabotage and by lending aid to anti-Bolshevik military movements that sprang up in Poland, in Finland, and within Russia itself, where Lenin’s enemies were forming coalitions under the banner of “White Russia” (a term coined mainly to offer a simple contrast with “Red”; it had little to do with the geographic origins of the movement).

“I have studied this for many years. I think Lenin really wanted to stabilize relations with the West. But he had great danger at home. Only by carrying out the promise of peace could he remain in power. ‘Peace’ was the one promise he could not afford to break.

“One can’t help but observe that this Communist Party, which came to power on its pledge of peace, has been responsible for the brutal massacres of more human beings than any other political organization in history, the Nazi Party included.”

The truce continued but a permanent peace had yet to be signed. Lenin delayed as long as he could: to placate the Western Allies and to salvage what he could from the impending negotiations with the Kaiser’s representatives.

But anti-Bolshevik pressure finally forced Lenin to sign.

Germany’s demands were voracious. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, was a horrible blow to Russia. Germany took away nearly half her industries, a third of her population and a quarter of her territory.

The cost of the peace was so harsh that indignation flared up once again and White Russian units everywhere were mobbed with volunteers.

“Whole regiments were defecting en masse to the Whites. They felt Lenin had betrayed the Motherland at Brest-Litovsk.

“The peasants rallied to the White banner because of Lenin’s confiscation of private property. The peasants had never wanted communism, you know. What they wanted was ownership of the land. That was precisely what the Reds denied them. Serfdom was the same whether your master was an aristocrat or the State.”

Military resistance against the Reds flickered into existence all over Russia. It had no central leadership and no governmental structure; at first it was partisan warfare and recruiting contests, with both sides hastily daubing the giant Cyrillic characters of their slogans on walls and barracks.

Then for a while it became more orderly: traditional warfare, great armies drawn up against one another on vast battlefields. The Whites were encouraged significantly by the victory of Mannerheim, who defeated the Reds in Finland, and by the victories of Marshall Pilsudski’s hard-riding Polish cavalry against Trotsky’s ill-supplied and ill-organized Red infantry.

But in 1918 as the Whites spread their enthusiastic forces across a great part of Russia’s acreage, no fewer than nineteen separate White Russian governments came into being in different areas, each claiming legitimate franchise from the deposed Czar. From the very beginning it was this lack of central organization which threatened to destroy the anti-Bolshevik movement in the Civil War.

On the night of July 16, 1918, in a large manor house in the Ural Mountain village of Ekaterinburg, occurred the murder* of the Imperial family: the Czar, the Czarina, the Czarevitch, four grand Duchesses and four servants. Lenin did not want the Whites to have a live figurehead to rally round.

At the same time there was a battle fought at the city of Kazan on the Volga. The White forces won-and captured the city, which unbeknownst to the Reds was the repository of the monetary reserves of the Imperial government.

The gold and treasure had been transferred to Kazan to avoid its falling into German hands in Petrograd. According to most sources its value was estimated at 1,150,500,000 rubles; it was composed of platinum, stock securities, miscellaneous valuables and approximately five hundred tons of gold bullion, each ingot stamped with the Imperial seal.

It may well have been the greatest tonnage of raw gold men have ever moved in one shipment. When the city of Kazan fell into White Russian hands the treasure was loaded onto a train after several episodes reminiscent more of comic than of grand opera (a Red counterattack, misdirected reinforcements, the arrival of a pack of bickering White bureaucrats, the dispatching of confused plain-language telegraph inquiries that were intercepted but not understood by the Reds). Finally the gold train was taken away by members of the [anti-Bolshevik] West Siberian Commissariat. This group seems to have obtained the gold merely because it sent a more numerous delegation than any of the others.

The gold was shipped to the city of Omsk and was parked on a siding in the marshaling yards; it was placed under guard by a flimsy detachment of White Army troops. Before long, everyone-White and Red alike-knew it was there. But neither side seemed to attach very great importance to it and it stayed in the marshaling yards aboard its weather-beaten goods wagons for the next four months without incident. In the meantime both sides suffered for lack of funds.

Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak was born in 1874 the son of a Russian army officer. Why he decided on a naval career was a mystery to his family but-oddly, in the light of forthcoming events-Aleksandr Kolchak became a first-rate naval officer.

During the war against the Central Powers he commanded the Black Sea Fleet. His crews regarded him as a compassionate man; they were among the few who did not mutiny during the March 1917 naval revolts. Kolchak was also courageous (he had led several bold forays of exploration into the Arctic) and even efficient (he had been a key reorganizer of the Russian navy after its catastrophic defeat by the Japanese at Tsushima, a decade earlier).

In June 1917 the revolutionaries finally took control of his Black Sea Fleet. They demanded that Kolchak disarm his officers and surrender his sword to them. He expressed his contempt for these demands by tossing his sword over the side into the waters of Odessa harbor and stalking ashore. None of the revolutionaries had nerve enough to stop him.

Kolchak was diminutive and birdlike: impatient, pale, nervous in his quick movements. He always dressed impeccably and shaved with care. His small round head was dominated by a great curved prow of a nose which separated a pair of grey eyes of ferocious and penetrating brilliance. Precise, cold, mercurial, aloof.

In 1918 he was a vice admiral without a command. Toward the end of that year he made his way to Tokyo in order to offer his services to the British Royal Navy in whatever capacity they might see fit to employ him usefully, whether against the Germans or against the Bolsheviks. But the British hadn’t much use for him and Kolchak languished as a near-charity case in a second-class Tokyo hotel: alert and energetic, but without purpose, he simmered in stunted hope for a reprieve from boredom. He did not drink very much but he came to know the pleasures of narcotic drugs and was known to use the stimulant cocaine; General Pierre Janin later insisted Kolchak was an addict.

Kolchak’s constant visits to the British Embassy brought him to the attention of the British Military Representative in Siberia, Major General Sir Alfred Knox.

There was none of the robust bearded-warrior quality of Russian ruthlessness about Kolchak and possibly this endeared him to Sir Alfred. The British general listened with interest to the diminutive admiral’s views on the conflict in Russia. Kolchak impressed the British general to the extent that Sir Alfred went away insisting that Kolchak was the great White hope.

[The Whites themselves at this time had incredibly few anxieties about their chaotic lack of organization, but the Allies-particularly the British-were desperate in their insistence that the Whites produce a single leader upon whom the Allies could rely for coordination, command and liaison.]

The Allies finally got what they wanted. An English major general, supported by Czech and Japanese and French and American officials, succeeded in imposing upon Russia a one-man government in the person of Admiral Aleksandr V. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias.

“I do not believe that [General Sir Alfred] Knox reckoned on Kolchak’s temperamental character. The Admiral was undoubtedly on his best behavior in those early days, but he had an erratic and violent temper. Much later, when we were aboard his train, I remember that the Admiral’s desk had to be resupplied every morning with pens and inkwells and that sort of thing, because during the course of a day’s business he would fly into at least one rage in which he would smash everything breakable he could lay his hands on.

“He had what you would have to call an intransigent sense of principle, but he was filled with unstable energies. I’m convinced he was honest, but he was weak; he was determined but rather adolescent-he would react to bad news with an almost catatonic frown, like a child’s-solemn and innocent. He really was uncontrollably neurotic. And I had the feeling he was always inclined to be persuaded by the last person who talked to him.”

Kolchak traveled with a retinue that included several personal servants and his mistress, whose husband was one of Kolchak’s officers. [Kolchak’s wife and children were safely ensconsed in Paris for the duration.]

Kolchak was undoubtedly a man of naivete and excesses. But he saw through to the realities of the Civil War to the extent that he quickly realized the uselessness of the Whites’ strategy of evasive harassment. His armies were soloists who could not harmonize; they had Lenin outgunned, outmanned and outsupplied, yet they had made virtually no progress toward Moscow.*

Unfortunately Kolchak’s early efforts to set this right were undermined by his own command structure. His government, of which he was “supreme ruler,” had little actual military control. The Allies had imposed upon White Russia a commander in chief of armed forces in the person of General Pierre Janin, the ranking member of the French Military Commission. Janin took his orders from Paris.

The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia was commanded by Major General William S. Graves, who stayed in Vladivostok almost the whole time and, under orders from President Woodrow Wilson, refused to intervene in Russian internal affairs except by using his troops to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway. General Sir Alfred Knox, having installed Kolchak, seemed to feel his responsibility had been met and he made no apparent effort to help clarify the command structure between Janin and Kolchak. Janin himself was a gruff soldier who spoke poor Russian and was as inept at strategy as he was expert in tactics.

“Admiral Kolchak was a liberal. It was not through his own design that he found himself put in a position of dictatorship. I felt he regarded it as an enigmatic position-he never seemed to decide how to handle it. He lacked a tyrant’s personality, the despotic inclinations; he never seemed to realize the extent of the powers that had been given to him.

“He didn’t have the ruthlessness or force of will to make subordinates submit to his demands, and he had no effective means of contact with the ordinary people-he was a remote sort of man, he had no public personality, he spoke at gatherings only with great awkward discomfort.

“Many of our generals in the field were characterized by a suicidal and hysterical incompetence. When they made decisions that were obviously wrong, the Admiral would let them have their way until it got too late, when inevitably he would relieve them of command with utmost regret and then replace them with equally incompetent generals who were additionally handicapped by their total ignorance of the field situation.

“He never knew whom to trust. He believed everyone and no one. He had altogether the wrong political philosophy for the circumstances. As an example, one of his first acts in office was to call for a National Assembly to be freely elected as soon as the war ended. Naturally this incensed most of his officers, who regarded such ideas as useless democratic political euphemisms, mysterious to soldiers of more cynical persuasions. Many of the officers wanted to restore the monarchy and he bowed to their wishes and dropped his proposal instead of ordering them to quit disputing him.”

He was burdened impossibly from the very beginning with a staff of more than nine hundred* beautifully tailored and extraordinarily dishonest subordinates, most of them completely unfit for military duties. White officers and politicians engaged in incredible profiteering schemes and speculations. There was a black market in trains: whole trains were stolen, their contents sold in back alleys. Kolchak’s Northern Force at gunpoint stole shipments of supplies earmarked for his Western Force. Officers couldn’t be bothered to feed or clothe their men; staples and military medical supplies were sold at incredible prices.

Kolchak was aware of the corruption in which he was engulfed: He appointed several investigatory commissions, but none of them produced any results. No officers, regardless how guilty or incompetent, ever got fired. The moody Admiral seemed to feel there was no point in dismissing the corrupt because the vacancies would only be refilled by men equally corrupt: there was no other kind.

What is remarkable is that for the first months of his tenure Kolchak enjoyed as much support as he did. Nearly all the bickering factions seemed willing to pay him lip service if not real loyalty. Perhaps he was so well accepted because people found it easier to confirm credentials than to assess character; at any rate he gave the White Russian movement the appearance of a central authority and for a while, in spite of everything, that was enough to elevate morale and produce a string of White military victories.

Kolchak had established his government in Omsk, a dreary city of vast gloomy state buildings on the barren plains of western Siberia. It had the flavor of a frontier camp, laid out along exact 200-meter square blocks with wide streets and single-story frame houses painted vivid hues. The city lay about two miles behind the railway marshaling yards, on the right bank of the wide Irtysh River, and was surrounded by a huge farm area of dairies and grain. In normal times it was a four-day train journey from Omsk northwest to Moscow.

The houses here were widely separated. Each had its pigsty or chicken coop, its stable or cow corral, its courtyard and cart shed. The big public buildings were Byzantine brick. There were a few cobblestone streets at the center but most thoroughfares were unpaved impacted dirt, powder-dusty in dry weather and muddy in wet. The wooden sidewalks were bordered by deep gutters and in the springtime each house pumped its cesspool out into these gutters so that the smell throughout Omsk was indescribable.

It was anything but a sophisticated capital. Yet for a brief time there was a spirit of elegance. Czarist officers in their grey greatcoats marched the walkways in polished boots; Kolchak’s own officers made splendid visions in their white uniforms with purple epaulets, their leather heels clicking on the marble floors of the state buildings. The city flapped with the banners of the new government: Kolchak’s colors were white and green and the banners were ubiquitous.

“My brother and I were subalterns together. We were assigned to foot companies guarding the railway yards at first-this was before the Czech Legion came. I remember the first time we saw the Admiral. He came with the French General, Janin, to review us. Our Captain at that time was a brute called Grigorenkov, a Muscovite. He saluted the reviewing officers with colonial violence. (Once, later on, I remember Grigorenkov actually groveling on his knees to kiss the boots of a superior officer when he was reprimanded. But of course when he returned to the battalion he cursed and kicked the subordinates there, myself included. I suppose that got it out of his system. Cringing and brutalizing are equal parts of the Russian character, I should say. We were always burdened with the kind of vermin who leap from your feet to your throat. Have you read Alexander Werth? He has the audacity to insist the Russians are a fundamentally unaggressive people!)

“I recall that walking along with General Janin, the Admiral could not get in step. It seemed to unnerve them both. I confess I always thought of General Janin as a thoroughly poisonous man, although I did not know him really at all and have no basis for that belief. We were being inspected in barracks and he hurried right along-his flapping greatcoat made the oil lamps flicker. He scowled a great deal and kept rubbing the back of his neck with his swagger stick. As for the Admiral, I was struck by what a small man he was. He had a watchful, alien sort of impassivity-it discouraged one from speculating, from inquiry. Certainly he had none of that, what you call charisma.

“Not too far away from me he stopped and asked one of my men a question. I did not hear it, but I heard the reply from the soldier. The Admiral must have asked something about our rations and the soldier had the temerity to complain there was not enough to eat.

“I heard the Admiral’s reply. He said, ‘Hungry dogs bite well.’ It was rather sad really, because I don’t believe he meant that; it was expected of him to say something like that, you see. Our company was in no fit shape at that or any other time for real fighting. The favorite joke around the barracks was that we should invite the enemy in and let them laugh themselves to death.”

“It is late enough in my life that I can admit this now. My brother and I were officers only because we were somewhat educated men, we did not ‘look Jewish,’ and we had falsified our backgrounds and our names. Our village in the Ukraine had been overrun by waves of Germans and Russians and Czechs. We had a great fervor to survive, Maxim and I. It shamed us both, unspeakably, but we took Russian names and pretended to be kulaks who had joined the White Army because the Reds had confiscated our farm.

“The Whites were as anti-Semitic as the Reds, of course. They were all Russians, weren’t they? The Whites tended to blame Jews for bolshevism. A few Red leaders were Jews, that’s true, but after a while the Whites were convincing themselves that Lenin himself was Jewish-a canard to which I imagine Lenin would have been the first to take offense, since anti-Semitism was no small part of his nature. At any rate the Whites persuaded themselves that all Jews were Bolsheviks, and the terror of pogroms-particularly the massacres by Cossacks-went on and on, on both sides.

“Some of the Admiral’s own people were particularly vile in that respect. You know of course about the rumors that spread after the assassinations of the royal family-that the Czar had been murdered by Jews. Even General Knox believed those rumors, he reported them as fact to London. And at Ekaterinburg some White Cossacks butchered thousands of Jews in reprisal after the Romanovs were killed there. But the Admiral himself was rather indifferent, I think. Certainly he wasn’t visibly anti-Semitic.

“In any case they did not know we were Jews, my brother and I. In those days no one had much documentation and you were taken to be what you claimed to be.

“There were five of us, brothers, in my family. Three had been killed-two by the Germans, the youngest (he was sixteen) by the Bolsheviks. My brother and I, you see, had made a pact to survive. Nothing else mattered.”

After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Germans moved swiftly into the ceded territories. German troops occupied much of the Ukraine and this penetration was the cause of the remarkable odyssey of the Czech Legion.

“I think there were about fifty thousand Czech partisans. They had wanted to free Czechoslovakia from the rule of the Austrian Empire, but they were fighting in the eastern Ukraine when the treaty was signed, and the German occupation cut them off from their homeland.

“They retreated slowly and in good order into the Ural Mountains. For a brief period the Czechs found themselves at war against both Austria and the Bolsheviks; and since they had these enemies in common with the White Russians it was not surprising they joined forces.

“But then there was the Armistice of November eleven, nineteen eighteen, and the Legion was no longer at war with Austria. The Legionnaires were no longer pariahs. They were citizens of a new free state, they had a homeland to which they could go, and they wanted to go to it.

“The Czechs asked for passage home along the Trans-Siberian Railway but the White Russians insisted that such aid would have to be paid for. The required payment was in the form of indentured service: the Whites offered rail transport, and the Allies offered to grant diplomatic recognition to the new Czechoslovak free state, if the Czech Legion agreed to remain in Russia for the time being and fight the Reds. I believe that General Knox suggested that the Czechs could get home merely by eliminating the Red armies that stood between them and Czechoslovakia.

“As a military unit the Czech Legion was probably the best fighting force to do combat on either side in the Russian Civil War. They were as ruthless as Cossacks, as well organized as Germans, as up-to-date as any army in the world. And their motivation for fighting was stronger and more clear-cut than most others’: victory was their ticket home.”

[For a few months the Legion fought spectacularly in front-line battles throughout the western Urals. But then Admiral Kolchak consolidated his command at Omsk.]

“The Admiral distrusted the Czech Legionnaires and their General, Syrovy; they were not Russians, and he felt it would be unwise to rely on an army which at the first opportunity would simply stop fighting and go home. So he withdrew them from the front lines and assigned them to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway, pending their evacuation to Czechoslovakia.”

By the spring of 1919 the Legion had moved east as far as Omsk and had begun to disperse its units along the railway eastward. Some of the Czechs thought of seeking their own way home by way of Vladivostok, but inadvertently the Japanese prevented it by encouraging their Tatar warlords to interfere with railway operations along the easternmost 2,000 miles of track. The Japanese felt Kolchak should be kept weak because otherwise he would challenge their territorial ambitions in the Far East.

It was the depredations of the Atamans that convinced the Czechs that the railway really did need their services. [If the Atamans succeeded in interrupting traffic it meant the remainder of the Legion would never get out of Siberia.] So the 40,000 Legionnaires stayed, most of them unhappy about it, and-with token American assistance-provided the only real defense of thousands of miles of fragile rails.

[By early 1919 the Bolsheviks were in an almost impossible trap. They were surrounded.

[To the south of Moscow, Denikin, with his Cossacks-supported by Allied units of White troops led by British, French and Italian officers and noncommissioned officers-had moved into positions previously occupied by the Germans. On the west stood Yudenitch with his mixed assemblage of White Russians, Poles, Germans and Letts. On the east, in Siberia, the Reds faced swift advances by Kolchak’s big White Army: his Cossacks, his Czech Legionnaires and the small forces of Allied powers. To the far north-Murmansk and Archangel-access to the vital seaports was denied to the Bolsheviks by British, French and American Expeditionary Forces.

[And in the northwest stood Mannerheim at the Finnish border: Smirnova danced at the Petrograd Conservatoire while White Russian guns muttered within earshot. The battle lines were drawn less than twenty miles from the city.

[The area controlled by the Reds had shrunk to a circle around Moscow about seven hundred miles in diameter. It was a fraction of the nation. Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and particularly the Poles, led by their pianist Prime Minister Paderewski, were in open revolt against Lenin’s regime. The Whites now held the lion’s share of the world’s largest nation, an immense territory with a periphery of ten thousand miles. They had conquered the Don, the Kuban, the outer provinces at all compass points; Kolchak controlled all of Siberia except for the Japanese areas and Kolchak’s forces were as far along the road to Moscow as Perm. The slogan of the day was “Na Moskva!”-“To Moscow!”

[The Bolshevik Revolution was at the edge of collapse. It hung by its claws, bottled up in the center of Russia, and Lenin knew the Revolution would be destroyed irrevocably unless the Reds could reconquer a good portion of the nation by autumn.]

Somehow the Revolution tottered into February, then March, then April without falling. That it survived its own blunders and atrocities is far more remarkable than its having survived the attacks of its enemies. Russian industry suffered particularly under the heel of the new soviets. The workers had assumed power but lacked the managerial ability to go with it. They voted themselves shorter hours and 200 percent raises in pay. In the new “communist workers’ paradises” the workers’ soviets made all managerial decisions and this meant that a worker, regardless of his offense, could not be dismissed or degraded, nor a new man hired or promoted, without the approval of the workers’ council. Inevitably the soviets upheld the workers against the administrations. And every time a vote was required, the entire work force of the factory was called out to an assembly, which meant shutting down the plant. Inevitably, the productivity of Russian industry under workers’ control dropped to a pathetic fraction of its former output. Yet somehow the new Red nation stumbled on.

Rumor and appearance were as important as reality to the minds of the people. Slogans were daubed on every available wall in Red-controlled areas. In White areas there were enthusiastic war maps in the shop windows, and photographs of the Czar. Incited by rumor more than dedication, whole platoons-even companies-went over to the opposing side and within hours would find themselves facing their former comrades on the battlefield. Rapidly the Civil War tore families apart. No one trusted anyone; chaos replaced order in vast areas of the countryside. Everyone was forced to pick a side-or be shot for treason.

[Along the endless track of the Trans-Siberian these factors were more disheartening than anywhere else.*]

“The Admiral’s government assigned each village a quota of conscripts or volunteers to serve in his army. If the quota was met voluntarily, eventually the Reds would arrive in the village and when they learned that the village’s men were in the White armies the Reds would raze the village to the ground and massacre the inhabitants. If the quota was not met, on the other hand, White generals would send our Cossacks out on area sweeps to punish those villages which had failed to meet the army’s levy, and the Cossacks would slaughter the entire village.

“These conscription squads and punitive expeditions were far more responsible than the Reds for the rise of partisan bands. Siberia came to be filled with bands of Socialist revolutionaries, monarchists, partisans and ordinary bandits. The Reds were willing to try recruiting them; the White Russians took them all to be Bolsheviks. It was one small difference, but it hardly meant anything.

“You saw these vicious recruiting practices done by both sides equally. The issues of the war were of little importance to most of us, particularly those outside the cities. The Bolshevik insurrection had been almost exclusively urban and the Civil War was always a war between two minorities. Neither side enjoyed any support except what it could command by extortion, threat of force, or benefit of hate and reaction (that is, if the Reds wiped out your village you would probably join the Whites, and vice versa).”

When Kolchak began to look as if he might win after all, many of the Siberian Atamans made belated overtures to him. The warlords wanted to be on the winning side because in that place and at that time it was probable that being on the losing side would lead to a firing squad. (British pressure on Japan to modulate the Atamans’ brigandage also had an effect.) Nevertheless no one-Red or White-trusted the warlords; and the Czech Legionnaires kept their posts along the Trans-Siberian. Kolchak’s principle source of supply was the British, who during the campaign delivered to him the contents of seventy-nine shiploads of war materiel from Vladivostok and the northern ports; keeping the railway open was vital.

By April 1919 the Whites had everything in their favor and the Allies happily felt that it was only a matter of weeks, a few months at most, before the Red menace was annihilated permanently. The membrane of Bolshevik control was so fragile that it was hard to comprehend why it wasn’t already ruptured.

Victory was in sight for Aleksandr Kolchak. No one could credit a reversal at this point; the Whites were just too strong.

No one could credit it. But it happened.

In April 1919 Kolchak’s lines, spread too thin and supported poorly by supply lines that were too long, staggered to a halt in the Urals.

Now the war went into a state of deadlock which was to the Reds’ advantage. The Whites were scattered across two vast continents without adequate communication and their only means of achieving a juncture of forces was to destroy the Bolshevik center. Until that happened the Whites could not coordinate their efforts and it left the Reds free to deal with each White force in turn-a tactic which Trotsky made splendid use of, rushing from front to front in the armored train that was his headquarters.

“For more than a month I can remember fighting there in that awful frozen muck. We were toe-to-toe in the mountains, neither side giving ground, each attack foundering on the insensate resistance of the enemy’s defenses. Our troops would march wearily to the front, herded by Cossack warders who ran swords through those who moved too reluctantly toward the battle. There were many who froze, or went out of the lines with frostbite and trenchfoot.

“There was no real net change up there until the fourteenth of May. Trotsky’s counterattack. It was sudden and ferocious. We were thrown into complete panic.

“By the middle of June we had lost every foot of ground we’d taken during the past six months.”

[At the same time Wrangel fell back in the south, Denikin couldn’t reinforce him sufficiently to prevent the retreat, and the Kuban fell to the Reds.]

“When the Reds captured our officers they would nail their epaulets to their shoulders with six-centimeter spikes. It was an awful retreat. The Admiral’s slogan, ‘To Moscow!’ disappeared from the posters and marquees, and I suppose that part of the world which had watched all this began to realize that those posters would never be displayed again.”

[July 1919:] The Reds infiltrated the small high passes of the Urals and swung around behind the Whites to take them from the rear. A sudden thaw had turned the frozen canyons into quagmires but the Red drive continued, and the haphazard White defense was as fatuous in execution as it was in design.

At this point the British ceased their deliveries of aid to Kolchak. They gave him up as a lost cause-which he was, of course, as soon as they gave up supporting him.

Three rivers crossed the paths of the retreating Whites between the mountain battlefields and Kolchak’s capital at Omsk: the Tobol, the Ishim and the Irtysh. Within the next several weeks the White armies would make a stand at each of them.

In military terms the falling back of Kolchak’s regiments could be called a retreat only with some serious abuse of that word. Desertions, disease and death by combat had squandered his front-line forces; Kolchak’s generals presided over a flimsy holding action with an army whose strength had been reduced to fifty thousand men and the only accurate term to describe their brief defense of the Tobol and their panic-stricken rush to get across it is “rout.”

Everything had splintered. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias, was the leader of a “government” that was a mere cohesion of weakness and exhaustion and terror; no longer did it have the slightest hope of survival.

“The officers tried to encourage recruiting by publicizing Red atrocities on shop posters, but it only scared people off. You saw money lose value by the hour-goods were scarce and there was a rush to buy things-portable valuables. People moved through the dark alleys looking for black-market contacts. You saw the deserters crowd past with their sullen faces and muffled starving people huddling in the doorways.

“Finally the Admiral gave orders to retrench the rear guard-many of them unwilling or unfit to fight-in defensive positions along the Ishim River, some one hundred miles west of Omsk. My brother and I went out with them. Somehow we held, we fought back the Third and Fifth Red armies.

“In the meantime we understood that the Admiral had pumped a little confidence into his people and they had ‘recruited’ enough replacements to start planning a counterattack, intended to drive the Bolsheviks right back into the mountains.

“But before that, we had a respite. There was no overt agreement that I ever heard of, but both sides suspended the fighting for the harvest season. Russia would starve without her crops. The soldiers went home to reap the harvest, and we held the lines with token forces.

“We lay in the trenches for nearly a month above the Ishim, waiting for them, and waiting for the Cossacks to herd our own armies back to us.”

By mid-1919 the Siberian railway towns had become training camps for Kolchak’s armies. Recruits and conscripts were assembled in them; the market squares were used for drilling and training, the storehouses for billeting them and equipping them with uniforms and arms. As soon as they had received a minimum of training and equipment these troops were thrown right into the lines in the Urals. In the meantime the Czech Legionnaires and a handful of American soldiers provided sentry cadres for the protection of the towns and the railroad itself, the prime umbilical: the only source of supply, and the only escape to the East.

Past the Urals the track extends four thousand miles east across the steppes to Vladivostok. In many places the rails dwindle away in both directions in a perfectly straight line as far as a man can see. For many long stretches there is but a single line of tracks; opposing traffic must pull off on sidings and await the passage of a priority train. Part of the line-mostly in the west, from Irkutsk through Omsk-had been double-tracked in substantial sections but was still insufficient for the traffic engendered by modern warfare and the support it required.

The Trans-Siberian had a poor roadbed; the ballast tended to spread and sag, and the tracks with it. Workmen had to be constantly at work with spiking hammers to tighten loose rails against the floating ties. The spring thaw almost always meant the line had to be closed down for more than a month for repairs.

Stopping the transport of an entire continent was merely a matter of blowing up a few yards of track or putting a torch to one of the thousands of small wooden bridges that dotted the line. Guarding the track against such depredations by partisans and bandits was the job of the Czech Legion; repairing the tracks was the job of labor battalions of conscripts-old men, women, adolescents too small or too young to bear rifles. These unfortunates were herded at gunpoint along the length of the Trans-Siberian to work until they dropped, keeping the roadbed in fragile repair.

The long Siberian winters were hell for railroad men. Sometimes the big 2-8-2 snowplow locomotives were not sufficient to clear the track of blizzard falls of drifted snow. Locked switches had to be thawed with pitch fires and torches. To get started from a standing stop each engine was equipped with a sandbox that could be opened to scatter sand under the driving wheels. At all times the engine fireboxes had to be kept alight and the boilers had to be kept in water; if the fire went out the pipes would burst from freezing and if the water ran out the mechanism would melt.

That the railway kept operating as long as it did was nearly miraculous. In the end, inevitably, it was destined to collapse.

“It was a war that divorced men from the restraints of decency. Massacres, tortures, rapes and atrocities were the rule and it soon became tiresome to object to these things on moral grounds because that would be like objecting to the force of gravity. They were simply the conditions of life, and life was the cheapest thing in Russia.

“Nevertheless the depravity of the Siberian Atamans stood out. These Atamans were Tatar Khans with little private armies of rural Cossacks. They were independent bandits, like the Mexican road agents of fifty years ago, but the war in Siberia made great opportunities for them and they became very powerful in their little fiefdoms. In a way they were the inbred dregs of the descendants of the Mongol hordes, the last of the petty heirs to the empire of Genghis Khan. They had been allowed to run wild in Siberia for centuries, beyond the reach of civilization.

“I remember one of them. Ataman [Grigory M.] Semenev [warlord of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks]. He operated west of Lake Baikal, mainly as a bandit but at least he professed to be an anti-Bolshevik bandit and therefore he received support from both the British and the Japanese, who apparently felt he could be useful in helping them get control of Manchuria and eastern Siberia. The Japanese were terribly ambitious out there.

“These Atamans and their Cossacks would loot towns and trains. That was their occupation, looting. They found ready markets for their spoils in places like Harbin and Chita.

“Early on, when the Admiral signed an order that was supposed to force the Atamans off the line, the Japanese informed him very coolly that the warlords were under Imperial Japanese protection. The Allies tried to change the Japanese minds, but that had no effect-it was only the Czech Legionnaires who kept the Atamans from seizing complete control over the entire eastern two thousand miles of the railway.”

It was the broneviki that gave the warlords their awful strength. The broneviki-armored trains-were not a Siberian invention but the Atamans had carried their development as machines of destruction to a new extreme. Even the massive locomotives of these menacing juggernauts were encased in 3-centimeter armor plate. The barrack and stable cars for the Cossacks, machine-gun cars with slitted traverse ports, turreted swivel-gun platform cars and armored flatcars for the chain-drive lorries and command cars and motorcycles were armored with incredible thicknesses of steel.

The broneviki could be stopped by derailment and they couldn’t travel faster than about fifteen miles per hour because the roadbeds were uncertain and they were excessively heavy trains. Nevertheless they were the scourge of Asia. When the rumor of an armored train rumbled into a railway town the citizenry would gather up its portables and leave instantly. Those who remained were exposed to the sight of the grinding black behemoth scraping to a ponderous halt with a hissing sigh of brake shoes; gunports slamming open; rifles thrusting out through armored slits; artillery swiveling in its turrets; machine guns running their muzzles out their slits and traversing the town with wicked deliberation; stable-car ramps slamming down and Cossack cavalry thundering forward, sabers high.

Service aboard the broneviki was not unlike penal servitude and not many volunteered for it. Except for the Cossacks most of the troops were impressed forcibly by the warlords and for the least offense were whipped to death. Only the Cossacks served by choice.

“Ideology meant nothing to the Siberian Cossacks. Fighting was their way of life and its object was the opportunity for looting.

“You saw them in their karakul hats, festooned with sabers and ancient Krenk rifles, and they were terrifying to look at. But unlike their western Cossack counterparts in Russia, and the Ukraine, they were nearly useless in modern combat since one or two properly positioned machine guns could cut them to ribbons-they had no tactics to counter that, they were very primitive. The water-cooled machine guns of the Czech Legion held them at bay. Nothing else did-certainly no moral scruple. If any human tribe of our century can be said to be utterly without redemptive qualities-other than horsemanship and physical courage-it is the Siberian Cossacks. Those stanitsa villages where they were raised on the steppes were breeding grounds for every conceivable depravity.

“If they had been too long without women-a couple of days or more-they would lasso adolescent boys and bring them along to camp at the neck end of ropes tied to their wooden saddles. They would subject them to homosexual gang-rapes and then slaughter them with sabers and hack off the victims’ genitals and leave them pendant in their mouths. If the Cossacks had been too long without action (a day or more) they would get bored and would practice their long-range marksmanship on whatever moved within eyesight, whether it be wolf, woman or infant.”

On August 19, 1919, Ataman Semenev’s Cossacks captured a train in the Trans-Baikal. When they learned it was a White Russian prisoner-of-war train the Cossacks were incensed: no booty. The fifty carloads of Red prisoners were slaughtered to the last man by Cossack sabers. Three thousand dead.

Ataman Rozanov in the Far East-a Kolchak supporter-rounded up whole village populations as hostages and whenever one of his own men was killed he would kill ten of the hostages. Later in history this extortionate technique would be put to use by the Nazis but it is useful to note that Hitler did not invent it.

The Allied Expeditionary Forces which had landed in Vladivostok to support White Russia’s efforts were exposed to these Cossack bestialities at closer range than were most Russians, let alone other outlanders. It was in large part the revulsion experienced by men like General Knox and the American General Graves which, as much as any battlefield reverses, encouraged the Allies to pull out of Russia. They no longer wanted any part of the Russians-White or Red. To their Western minds it was no longer possible to extend assistance to any nation regardless of leadership so long as it fostered (or even permitted) the existence of beings as verminous as Grigory Semenev and his Cossacks.

So the assistance was withdrawn, and White Russia collapsed; and in Siberia, in the end, the only surviving beneficiaries were of course the Cossacks.

“Our soldiers went from house to house in Omsk, that September, begging for food. I think all the livestock disappeared almost overnight. On the streets you saw orphans who’d starved to death and old people frozen dead on the boardwalks. The soldiers’ wives were prostituting themselves for the price of half a loaf of bread. Everywhere you saw wagons abandoned in the mud of the streets, it was up to the axles. So nothing moved in the streets, they were all stoppered that way. Half the stores in the city were looted empty.

“Epidemics infested every overcrowded building in the city. The sick overflowed the public buildings and hospital trains; in the hospitals, reserved for the war-injured, men lay three to a bed and the floors were carpeted with half-dead bodies.

“You saw Jews in gabardines and threadbare frock coats trading their last possessions for food. A silver samovar for two eggs, some ornate lamp for a few slices of bread. Some of those Jews had come from far away-I think some even came from Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they’d got through the lines somehow. The Reds were purging again you know, there were new pogroms up there and everybody was trying to get out.

“You have to remember everyone in Asia lived briefly and wretchedly in those days. It wasn’t just the war, although that made it much worse. There is such a thing as being worked to death-literally worked to death-and also there is such a thing as being too impecunious to survive. My brother Maxim and I had no money but we had learned to degrade ourselves by toadying to our superior officers and somehow we didn’t starve. We were desperately hungry but we didn’t starve. We stole, yes.

“Our job at this time was to guard the horses. You see we all knew there would be a retreat and we needed draft animals, there weren’t enough trains. But the starving people wanted to kill the army horses and eat them. We had to fight them off. In the morality of the time, Maxim and I felt we had honored ourselves because we never killed anyone who tried to steal a horse. We only sent them away. But I’m sure some of them starved to death because of us. You can’t live with that knowledge and remain sane. We became insane, of course. No more so than anyone else around us, but insane just the same. You were insane or you were dead.”

Those few with possessions and money stayed in the taverns, stayed drunk, stayed oblivious. The debauched gaiety in the cafes made an unspeakable contrast to the horror all around it.

Rumors from the front were increasingly despairing. But if the appearance was bad, the reality was even worse. In October the Reds rolled over Kolchak’s holding forces and marched into Petropavlovsk with nothing much left to restrain them from moving right on into Kolchak’s capital.

Kolchak’s armies, dressed in rags, fell back as far as the Irtysh, just two miles west of the city. Here they stopped. The Irtysh had refused to freeze, there were no boats of any size, and the railway bridge had floated away.* The White armies could not march across the river and so they had to remain where they were and prepare to fight with their backs to the river.

“We had been in the front lines a good part of that summer before they had rotated us back to Omsk to guard the horses. Then I think it was early November that they sent our two companies of infantry back across the Irtysh in rowboats, a squad at a time. It took all day to get three hundred men across. We took up positions facing the west and waited for the Bolsheviks.

“It snowed every day, at least a little, but during the afternoons it would warm up a little. The river never froze hard. Everyone said such a mild autumn meant a terrible winter ahead. It turned out they were right, you know. But in November the river wouldn’t freeze and there was some panic in the lines about what we would do if the Reds fell upon us. We knew they had several full-size armies around Petropavlovsk and by this time I think we were down to something like thirty thousand men in the lines.”

[On November 8, two Red armies marched down the plains toward the river-a hundred thousand men or more. The Fifth Red Army made a direct advance on the Irtysh while the Third moved obliquely past its rear to prevent retreat to the south.]

“You could hear their guns, bombarding our tiny rearguard out on the plains. At night you could see the greenish German-made flares they used.”

[Normally by the end of October the river would have frozen. But it was still loose ice, floating floes, on November 9. That morning, displaying some of the courage for which he was noted, Kolchak made his way across the Irtysh in a steam river-tug, accompanied by a handful of aides including General Janin.* Twice the tug was rammed by heavy ice rolling downstream on the swift current; once it almost broached.]

“The Admiral wore a belted fur-lined coat of grey leather; its fur hem hung around his boots, almost scraping the ground, and he looked as if the boat trip across the river had soaked him to the skin.

“We were in a dugout we were using for battalion headquarters. The Admiral came down from what passed for army HQ-it was just upriver a few hundred meters from us. He came with four or five officers. The whole time he was with us he did all the talking, none of his aides spoke a word. General Janin only stood watching. He kept flicking his trouser thigh with his quirt.

“All the battalion combat officers were assembled and it was quite crowded in the dugout-fifteen of us, perhaps eighteen. The enemy was not far away. I remember just as the Admiral opened his mouth to speak, we heard a mortar fire. You know what an old tennis ball sounds like when it bounces? It was like that, the noise. One of our own mortars, I think.

“There was a growing rattle of rifles off to the northeast-some advances by the Bolsheviks, but most of it was indiscriminate shooting of a very poor standard. Our soldiers tended to fire several rounds at intervals just so they could warm their hands on the hot barrels of their rifles.

“I suppose it wasn’t later than half-past two or three o’clock but there was an early-gathering winter gloom and one had the impression the Admiral was in a hurry to get back across the river before dark. We all stood around in our long winter coats and listened to him talk. He made very little effort to be civil. He lambasted his generals, none of whom was present-he blamed the losses on them, he said now it was up to us in the lines to hold out as long as we could. He had already ordered the civilian populace to flee the city but it was much too late for most of that, there wasn’t any transport for them because the Admiral had requisitioned every horse and of course every train.

“He asked our battalion commander how many able-bodied we had in the lines. We had I think a shade more than four hundred. Then the Admiral smiled and asked, ‘And how many of them are on our side?’ Some of us laughed; the battalion commander only said, ‘I hope most of them, sir.’ He was rather gallant, our commander-an old-line Czarist professional soldier. He was killed the next day.

“The Admiral said it was likely to freeze hard within twenty-four hours but it was going to take several days to evacuate Omsk. He confessed he had been urged by some of the bureaucrats to negotiate for a cease-fire with the Bolsheviks, to spare the city from destruction. Then he said-I remember the words-he said, ‘A decision must be made.’ He said it to the face of our lowly battalion commander as if he were putting the decision up to him.

“Our commander answered in a very calm way. ‘It does no service to put that in the passive voice, Excellency.’

“And the Admiral drew himself up. I think he had needed that from someone, from anyone. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I must make the decision.’

“Somewhere inside his rigid exterior I think an emotion had been provoked. Pride-perhaps he had forgotten it up to that moment. He was so accustomed to having officers toady up to him. When he left, he seemed far more resolved.”

With the Reds a thousand yards from his last defensive trenches, Kolchak tried to negotiate for a cease-fire; when that failed he offered to surrender.

But the Reds had victory in their nostrils and refused to accept his surrender. The word came down: “The Reds don’t take prisoners.” The Bolshevik armies meant to destroy the Whites, utterly.

There was no choice but to run.

“In the city the local Bolshevik sympathizers grew more daring by the hour. I saw it soon afterward. Dead Czarists lay in street doorways while refugees rushed past carrying their few belongings toward the rumor of an eastbound train.

“On the night of November ninth the temperature dropped well below freezing. By sunrise it had stopped snowing and the thermometer was still dropping. The river was frozen solid by midnight of the ninth; by noon on the tenth General Dietrichs decided the ice was thick enough to support the weight of our foot soldiers.

“I believe we were the first company of foot to be withdrawn from the lines and sent across the river to the city. It was no special favor to us.

“Our company had been decimated, really-of the two hundred we had started with, there were forty of us left. My brother came with me because his own company was nonexistent, it had been absorbed into another unit. I had eleven left in my own platoon.

“It was snowing lightly when we pulled out of our entrenchments. Enemy soldiers made a confused flitter through the falling snow west of us-they must have been as close to us as two hundred yards. The men who replaced us in the trenches had been withdrawn from other line companies; we were spreading the line thinner and thinner, you see, trying to cover the withdrawals. Most of the firing was rifles and machine guns, there wasn’t much artillery-the visibility wasn’t good enough for the spotters. As we pulled out they were beginning to put mortar into our trenches, though.

“I think we were guinea pigs. Particularly my brother and I. In spite of the food shortages we were still big strapping men-I must have weighed a good fifteen stone even then. We were sent out, as much as anything else, to test the ice-to make sure it would bear our weight.

“Because of our fear it seemed to take forever but I suppose it didn’t really take more than half an hour to reach the eastern bank of the river. No one fell through the ice, it was quite solid. We made our way into the city.

“At some point it stopped snowing, because I recall it was not snowing when we marched into Omsk. The streets stank of battle debris-the Reds had been lobbing seventy-five millimeter across the river for two or three days. Buildings had collapsed. Shells had made ruins of some walls. Here and there you’d see a three-sided room standing open to the street like a stage set, curiously undisturbed with the furniture intact. Trees had been stripped of their branches and the street surfaces were cratered by the artillery. That morning it was accentuated by its silence. There was a kind of slow grey smoke that kept rolling through the streets and it made no sound at all. It stank of cordite and death, you know. There was one interruption I can recall-we came across a soldier who was wasting a lot of ammunition trying to shoot down a portrait of the Czar that hung above a bar in one of the cafes that had been half destroyed.

“We went along to Government House but we found nothing but smoke hanging in the halls there, so we made our way through the refugee crowds down toward the marshaling yards below the city.

“I have never seen such a crush of people. We lost half our party in the crowd-most of them chose never to rejoin us. My brother and I were the highest ranking officers left in the group by the time we reached the yards.

“I forget how we found out what the real situation was. I know there were as many versions as there were mouths. But somehow we learned that the Czechs and General Janin’s home-guard troops had gone ahead down the railway to clear it, and the Admiral with his retinue had commandeered seven trains on which they intended to flee the city.

“By this time you could hear the Red guns again they had resumed shelling our trenches and the city.

“There was a train pulling out when we got there. I think some of the Allied missions were on board it. They must have been jammed in at least twenty-five to the compartment. The engine wheels kept screeching on the cold rails-it took a long time to get moving and I think it ran down quite a few refugees who couldn’t get off the tracks.”

The evacuations were hampered by railroad men who sold seat space at huge prices to the wealthy, some of whom bought entire compartments merely for space enough to carry away their valuable possessions. In South Russia, under similar circumstances, General Wrangel discouraged this profiteering by sending his Cossack Guards into the trains to throw the rich off and smash their harps and commodes and crystal and even pianos, and by hanging the profiteers publicly on the spot. But in Siberia Kolchak took no effective action and the transportation black market continued to flourish right up to the end.

Crowds bayed in panic in the railroad yards. Kolchak watched the trains depart and his tongue must have been bitter with acid. He stayed, nearly to the last; he was a naval officer and seemed to have some sense of duty to the ship of state that was sinking under him.

By now the roads leading east out of Omsk were jammed night and day with wagons, carriages, sleighs, sledges, donkeys, camels, oxen, men and women and children. Whole regiments of deserters were among the refugees and there was no hope of reorganizing them to defend the rear. The dead lay a hundred to the mile along the tracks, rotting and contaminating the road. The refugees were like army ants, plundering every farm and peasant house, stripping every vermin-ridden corpse. Kolchak witnessed this macabre ritual of lemming-like flight and. was seen to weep openly.

“On the morning of November fourteenth-one does not forget such a date-we were under almost continuous artillery bombardment from the far bank of the river. Somewhere General Kappel had recruited a number of Cossack squadrons and you saw them galloping across the snow toward the river on their wiry Siberian horses. I imagine they must have been wiped out within twelve hours.

“General Kappel had withdrawn all the Czech soldiers from the yards and the Admiral was looking for a trustworthy small unit to perform a special service. I suppose ours was one of the few groups of soldiers that remained together that morning-it was mainly because my brother and I had developed somewhat ruthless means of insuring that our men did not starve. There was a slight esprit de corps left among our remaining men and we did stay together much longer than other units. One can take no pride in that, in view of the cost to our integrity. At any rate one of the Admiral’s aides chanced upon us in the throng and my brother and I were ordered to report to the Admiral at once.

“He was on the observation vestibule of his train in company with his mistress, Madame Timireva. She was a striking woman, full-bosomed and dark-haired. She had kind eyes.

“The Admiral must have been out among his followers all night. A great deal of heavy snow was matted in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t shaved.

“I don’t think he recognized us as men he had ever met before. We saluted and I told him an officer had told us to report to him-we had twenty-five soldiers still at our command.

“The Admiral pointed out a train adjacent to his own, on the next siding. It was one of those armored trains, not a bronevik but a train with armor-plated goods wagons. He told us the contents were of great importance and our unit was to guard it with our lives. We would be provided with machine guns and food; all we had to do was get aboard that train and never leave it.

“Of course it was the national treasury. The gold train, the Czar’s reserves. Maxim and I were placed in command of it. At all times we were to place our train immediately behind the Admiral’s.

“The Red artillery was shooting in greater volume all the time, but it was still only pot-luck fire-they hadn’t got spotters across to our side of the river yet, General Kappel had prevented them crossing. But everyone could see it was a matter of hours at most. It was just past noon, I think, when our trains moved out. We were among the last trains there, and of course the last to leave Omsk.”

The Fifth Red Army entered the ruins of Omsk on November 14, 1919-the same day Kolchak left.

The trakt was the old overland trail that travelers had used for centuries. In most places it ran alongside the rails of the Trans-Siberian.

Down this road the refugees poured in terror with their valises and parcels, in what is perhaps history’s most bizarre and massive single-line retreat: at least 1,250,000 men, women and children fled east from Omsk that November:* east into thousands of Siberian miles, their destination unclear even to themselves.

Tatars in their sashes and pantaloons, bearded Jews in worn-out black coats, foreign soldiers in puttees, Orthodox priests in their robes, deserters in assorted uniforms, Russian aristocrats in shredded finery, Chinese with their hands muffed inside the sleeves of their quilted jackets, women in mud-caked heavy skirts, kulaks in farmer corduroys, Cossacks in long heavy coats, children in rags.…

There was a thaw on November 18–19 and along the trakt the huge ungainly peasant carts mired down to their hubs and blocked the road every few hundred meters. The tide broke, swirled around them, came together again like water in a flash flood. People lay jammed on the roofs of railroad cars; people competed savagely for scraps of food and fodder.

Kolchak’s seven trains had been almost the last to leave Omsk but once out of the city Kolchak felt no compulsion to continue acting as rearguard for the avalanche of refugees he had triggered. He began to make remarks to his staff officers that the one million pounds of gold bullion aboard the twenty-eight armored goods wagons of the treasury train were a “sacred trust” and must be safeguarded at all costs because without these funds there would be no hope for a rebirth of the White movement. With this rationale as his justification he ordered the tracks cleared ahead of him so that his trains could pass through to the front of the line of march.

It was not easy. That it was done at all is flabbergasting. Kolchak’s officers had to threaten to shoot stationmasters dead on the spot before they could get the seven trains shunted through. The sidings in every hamlet became jammed chaotically with refugee and hospital trains that had been pushed off the main line to allow passage for Kolchak and his gold. Nevertheless, traffic jams held them up for days in some places. The confusion was augmented by the Allied Expeditionary Forces which were scrambling for transport ahead of him, so that Kolchak kept being held up by them-mainly by the Czechs, who were passing their own trains down the line ahead of Kolchak’s. Meanwhile on the sidings, in the stalled trains, hundreds lay dead-starved or frozen or diseased.

Kolchak had taken a decision to retreat as far as Irkutsk and set up a new capital there. Irkutsk was the midway point along the Siberian Railway-approximately equidistant between Omsk and Vladivostok. It lay at the head of the great inland sea of Lake Baikal on the Mongolian border. Here he would reorganize his forces, he said; he would prepare for a long war. The Reds could not take Irkutsk because if they marched that far they would be at the precarious end of a supply line so easily interdicted that they wouldn’t dare try an attack. At the same time the move would put Kolchak that much nearer his own principal base of supply at Vladivostok; and the gold treasury would be dipped into in order to keep the flow of incoming supply alive. Once the Allies saw him stabilize the White government at Irkutsk they would climb back onto the bandwagon; he was confident of that, the Allies hated the Bolsheviks.

But two thousand miles of Siberian winter lay between Omsk and Irkutsk. And Kolchak’s trains were making a bare fifteen miles a day.

In the chaos of Kolchak’s wake any man who could command a few followers, a machine gun and a handful of rifles was a government to himself. In every town and village there were lawlessness and riots, looting, marauding, fires, massacres.

Through the month of November the temperatures kept dropping until it became so cold that vodka froze solid in its bottles.

It was the coldest Siberian winter in fifty years. By December the thermometer had dropped to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit and Cossacks were found frozen to death in the saddle. Thousands lost limbs and even genitals to frostbite. Corpses froze solid in less than thirty minutes (and for sanitary reasons it was desirable that there be no thaw in the weather). To fall asleep was to freeze to death.

In their initial flight from Omsk or points west these refugees had put on as many clothes as possible, one on top of another, and this saved some of them; the rest stuffed their shirts with moss and hay to ward off frost. Many had rags tied around their feet. The sick died, untended where they fell; cholera and smallpox epidemics raged; thousands of people broke out with the livid red pellets of the spotted fever, typhus.

Along the trakt the dead were stripped of their boots and coats. The corpses were heaped in patternless mounds-human bodies treated less carefully than cordwood; but then they were of less value. Everywhere the dying writhed, chrysalis-like, ignored by the hundreds of thousands who went past them in empty-eyed hopelessness. Driven beyond human endurance this mass of doomed souls trudged endlessly through Siberia with their frozen wounds and starving bellies, slipping on the ram-packed dry snow that squeaked under their boots, maggots in their wounds, lice in their clothes and hair. The infinite featureless horizon daunted whatever spirits they had left; their legs shuffled and flopped in a loose unintended mockery of drunken dances.

In this hard-lying snow the fugitive line moved slowly and without end and the frozen air created a clear separation of sounds, the crunch of frosted boots and the crisp rattle of horse gear, the grind of cartwheels and squeak of frozen leather. Pots clattered and hoofs thudded the packed snow as if wrapped in muffling cloths, but there were no voices-none-and along the hundreds of miles of march a million exhalations of breath hung clouded in the air, freezing quickly and visibly into brittle puffs of mist that shattered and shifted and clouded their clothing like tiny hailstones.

Even among the still-organized units there was no military supply service left. The soldiers requisitioned food at gunpoint. On the trains the passengers burned anything flammable: candles were worth the price of a life-for their heat, not their light.

Every few days the booran-the high wind that came with the Siberian blizzard-whipped across the steppes and blew dry fine powder-snow which could choke a man and blind him. The deep winter slaughtered them by thousands: by hundreds of thousands. They marched obliviously through the snow, sliding on the slippery flesh of corpses underfoot. The trakt was a macabre putrefaction of rubble and derelict human remains.

By mid-December Kolchak’s seven trains had passed down most of the length of the column and he had left some three hundred evacuation trains behind him. Nearly all of them froze, broke down, or were derailed by partisans. Each had to be pried off the tracks so that following trains could proceed.

The dead capsized trains became shelters for refugees who lived in them and burnt all their wood and then moved on again, clinging to passing sledges and carts or walking.

At rare intervals a passing train would toss food to the refugees. But hundreds were trampled to death in the rush to claim it.

The news reached Kolchak that Red cavalry had interdicted the track only a few hundred miles behind him. Trains back there were cut off and the Communists were methodically butchering the passengers, burning the hospital trains with the sick and injured still inside them. Thousands of passengers were clubbed to death because the Reds wanted to save ammunition.

Toward the end of December the Red Army behind them was capturing a dozen trains a day and those who could escape the trains took to the mountains south of the railway to avoid capture. By now less than one tenth of the railway’s rolling stock was usable. Kolchak forced his staff officers out into the gales to gather snow for his engine boilers because the pumps of railway water towers had congealed in the cold. Morphine and all other medical supplies ran out. Axes would not cut frozen trees; farmhouses and barns were chopped down to fuel the Admiral’s locomotives. Each depot was stripped and razed for food and fuel but there was not enough; each of the old convict stations became a graveyard and the unburied dead lay along the tracks in mountains. On December 14 the Reds entered Novonikolayevsk and found in the buildings and streets of the city the corpses of thirty-five thousand men, women and children.* At Taiga they counted more then fifty thousand dead.

Because of the war-still being fought in the Ukraine and elsewhere throughout Russia-the harvest had been minimal (despite the informal harvest-season truce) and in this horrible winter of 1919–1920 millions-literally millions-died of disease, famine and cold. They were not battlefield casualties but nevertheless it was the war that killed them.

In the meantime the retreat stumbled on. Beyond the frozen Ob and Yenisey rivers the terrain began to crumple and heave. It was the boundary of the central Siberian uplands; the Sayan Mountains formed a high barrier along the Mongolian borders and long ridges shouldered out far into the steppes. The Kuznets, Siberia’s rich iron and coal region, was timbered and jagged: Mount Piramida, eleven thousand feet high, loomed just south of the Trans-Siberian tracks.

Somewhere in this district, Aleksandr Kolchak played out his penultimate gamble.

“Twice around Christmas our locomotive had run out of fuel and the boilers had frozen and burst. The third time it happened we were in the Kuznets, I think it must have been two or three days after Christmas. We uncoupled the locomotive and concocted some sort of cable truss with which we heaved and jacked and tipped the locomotive off the rails, and then the Admiral’s train reversed into us and we were coupled onto the caboose of his train. But we were too heavy and his locomotives-he had two of them in tandem on his train-only slipped their wheels on the tracks. You see, we were on the upgrade there, it was miles and miles of two or three percent grade. Even putting sand on the rails didn’t help. Our train was simply too heavy. The gold itself weighed five hundred tons-one million pounds that is-and there was all that armor plate, we had twenty-eight armored goods wagons filled with treasure. It simply wouldn’t budge.

“Our detachment-my brother’s and mine-was still manning the gold train, of course. We were not alone there, the Admiral had assigned several of his officers and their staffs to us. The gold was the most important thing in his existence then and of course he wasn’t going to trust it to two dozen worn-out soldiers like ourselves. We were knee-deep in colonels and brigadiers and it was a curious arrangement because officially my brother and I-subalterns in rank, you know-were in charge there but we had more high-ranking officers than enlisted men on our train. Naturally none of them took orders from us. But we were all in the same hopeless situation and there was very little friction-the officers were as terrified as our enlisted troops, no one had the strength to be abrasive.

“All the officers on the Admiral’s staff kept vying for assignment to our train. There were a number of reasons. We were always the first to receive food and firewood, for instance. The Admiral meant to insure that we stayed in good fighting health in case we had to defend the train against an attack. Then too there was the fact that our train wasn’t overcrowded. The gold weighed so much that it hadn’t been possible to jam people into every available space. There was elbow room-each of the goods wagons had only part of its space filled with treasure, there was a good deal of empty space because of the weight. And also everyone knew that if any train got through it would be ours, so that everyone wanted to be part of it. There were squadrons of Cossacks aboard the trains in front of us and behind us and their sole assignment was to prevent our own people from climbing on board this train. I have no idea how many were murdered by those Cossacks; it must have been hundreds at least.

“When we were stalled that final time in the Kuznets the Admiral called a conference-the ranking people on his staff. My brother and I were not privy to it of course, but afterward it was easy to see what they had decided. I don’t know whose idea it was-I doubt it was the Admiral’s, he was too jealous of the treasure, he wouldn’t have volunteered to part with it. But someone-or some group-must have convinced him that it simply wasn’t possible to go on carrying it with us. We were still a thousand kilometers short of Irkutsk.

“At this time we had progressed ahead of the vanguard of the refugee column on the trakt. I suppose it must have been two or three days behind us. We did not know then, of course, how many of them had perished.* But in spite of our special treatment we had lost several lives even among our own small privileged company and we couldn’t believe that those poor wretched beings had much chance of survival in the open.

“I don’t excuse our actions; it was a time when you chose between your charitable impulses and your need for personal survival. You can debate the philosophical consequences of such a decision endlessly in hindsight, and God has witnessed the guilt with which all of us who survived must have struggled without cease. But you didn’t think about such things then. You didn’t think at all. You existed from moment to moment, you armored yourself with indifference to everyone’s suffering but your own. If there was privilege or advantage to be had, you siezed it or you perished.

“In a way the ones who died had an advantage-at least they were spared the unavoidable torture of guilt that goes with the knowledge that through no virtue of your own you’ve lived through hell simply because you happen not to have died in it, and that your survival has been achieved at a cost of hundreds or thousands of the lives of your fellow men.

“I think the only thing that has prevented me from committing suicide many times since then has been the rationalization that they would have died whether or not I had survived. The Civil War and the awful winter were disasters as arbitrary as hurricanes; I had not caused them to happen. Yet so often this sounds to me like the echo of the voice of some SS beast from the Second War who answers all accusations with the cry that ‘I am not responsible!’ In some way, you see, I am responsible-I’m responsible to every human being who died as a result of my existence. I must be called to answer for them. But how in the sight of God does a man do this?

“To return to what we were talking about-the gold train, yes. When we stalled in the Kuznets.

“The burnt-out locomotive lay on its side at right angles to the tracks where we had pushed it over. There were trains stalled behind us, I suppose for hundreds of kilometers-I don’t know how many trains were left. There must have been at least forty or fifty. We were holding them all up. The track ahead of us was clear, however. There were perhaps two dozen trains ahead of us-the Czechs and some others. They were well on their way to Irkutsk by then.

“I cannot describe the ferocity of that winter. Of course I was not a native of Siberia but I was accustomed to the climate of the Ukraine which can be incredibly severe; but nothing like that. The tears would freeze to your eyelashes. Even inside their railway wagons the horses had great balls of ice on their hoofs. If you went outside the train for only a few minutes your coat would turn stiff as a board. If lubricating oil dripped from a locomotive it would form a strip you could pick up like a piece of stiff steel wire. And the blizzards, the gales … One simply cannot comprehend how any of the refugees afoot were able to survive at all. Yet thousands of them did, for a time at least.

“The train behind ours was filled mainly with high-ranking officers and privileged civilians-wealthy people and civil government administrators and some of the gentry. Now and then you saw ladies tottering about on their high heels when the air inside their stalled coaches became so oppressively close that they simply had to get out for a two-minute respite. And there were two squadrons of Cossacks riding the horse wagons of that train. They were Don Cossacks as I recall.

“The Admiral gave some orders and this train of which I speak was brought forward to the rear of our own train. Then with the Admiral’s tandem locomotives pulling at the front, and the uncoupled engine of this following train pushing us from the rear, we were able to make very slow headway up the grade. After about two hours we had covered some three kilometers in that fashion, and we came to a fork in the tracks where a branch line fed off into one of the ravines that made a groin into the higher mountains to the south of us. It was one of the rail sidings that led off to an iron-mining district.

“The frontmost locomotive of the Admiral’s train was detached here and ballasted with tons of sandbags which my troops were employed to pack on board it. Then the engine was switched onto the branch siding and began to clear the rails. In many places the drifts were as high as the locomotive smokestack and our men had to dig by hand. You could see, as the track was cleared away, that the line had not been used for quite some time-the tops of the rails were rusty.

“We had a bit of luck. There were no storms just then. The sun had come out in the morning and the ice cracked like rifle fire. The air was frozen so still that it was too easy not to notice how cold it was. You had to remember to keep batting your hands together and thrusting them under your armpits-even our fur-lined gloves were insufficient protection.

“In thirty-six hours we must have cleared nine or ten kilometers with the aid of the Admiral’s plow engine. We had six or seven casualties during the effort-one man broke his leg in a crevasse and I had two soldiers make a stretcher for him by putting their rifles through the sleeves of two coats, but I think the man froze to death on his way back to the train. Two or three men fell asleep in the snow and we would find their still-breathing remains, but they were too far gone with frostbite to do anything for them. You developed a bovine indifference to all their sufferings.

“As for my brother, fatigue and pain had become so much a part of his face by now that they almost seemed to add to the glory of it. He was a bigger man than even I. Rather clumsy muscles but a splendid body and he would move among the men, wearing his white papakha fur hat and an ankle-length greatcoat trimmed with fur that he had taken off a stalled train somewhere back along the line; at least it had been ankle-length at first, but I seem to recall that he had cut off part of its skirt to keep the snow and mud from weighing it down. But he was a magnificent sight, looming among us. We were all so exhausted and yet he seemed to go on and on-I never discovered where his strength came from.

“Maxim and I had developed differences-we found we reacted to all this in different ways, and it began to draw us apart. We were very close in age-I was one year his elder-and we had always been as inseparable as twins. Of the two of us he had always been the more sober-minded, he had been a very deliberate and serious child where I tended more toward the pragmatic and expedient. I suppose it’s true he had a more profoundly developed moral sense than I, but the difference had never been very marked-as I’ve said, we had together made our pact to survive however we could. And regardless of all the horrors we experienced, I think we always felt our most unforgivable sin was our denial of our Semitism. From this grew all our other guilts, you see; it was the cause of everything.

“And as our days grew steadily more appalling we began to react differently, as I said. My own defense was to withdraw-I simply went into the kind of catatonic state you sometimes experience when you’ve gone too long without sleep and you see everything as if it were at a distance and without reality. I lost my initiative after a while; I just drifted with things. Fortunately by that time we were under the Admiral’s protection. Otherwise I surely should have died quickly. I had lost most of my will.

“Maxim on the other hand had toughened. This is hard to describe because I don’t mean to suggest he became ruthless or hard. It was a very moral kind of thing with him. It was as if he realized all this was punishment for his great sin, and he had decided to face up to it and accept the challenge because it was his obligation and responsibility. And so he not only endured the hardships, he became a leader among us.

“This change in him flowered visibly at this time when we were clearing the branch railway. For the first time you would see him organizing the entire effort, giving orders to the locomotive driver and all the colonels and majors among us. He was far beneath them in rank but he had this resolve, you know, and all the rest of us had lost our own wills as if a drain plug had been pulled. Maxim did that job alone, really. He carried it all on his shoulders. The rest obeyed him without question.

“One of the staff brigadiers had discovered on a map that there was an abandoned iron-mine shaft along the siding. That was what we were aiming for. When we reached it we went back to the train and spent the next twelve hours bringing the gold wagons along the siding to the point below the mouth of the shaft where they had dumped the ore carts in the old days. From here we had to manhandle the treasure up into the shaft. We did that with winches and block-and-tackle hoists which we powered from the steam locomotives.

“Once the plats had been lifted to the mouth of the tunnel we had to carry the gold deep into the mountain, and Maxim organized a train of horse-drawn ore carts which carried a good deal of it inside. But the horses were in terrible condition and the last of them was spent before we had completed the task. And everyone was dismayed, particularly the Admiral, until Maxim started in to do the animals’ job, putting his shoulder to one of the carts and heaving it up into the tunnel.

“We were all defeatist about this mad scheme. Those mine shafts are all constructed with a slight upgrade going in, you know. They are designed to bring heavy-laden carts out, not in. The slope was against us, you see? But Maxim shamed all of us into following his lead. And it wasn’t on account of the gold; he had very little interest in the Czar’s bloody gold. It was this penance he was doing, this purgatory he saw himself in-and his pride, the need he had to accept this punishment like a man.

“We weren’t equipped with proper miners’ lamps, of course. Candles kept blowing out and half the time we worked in a frozen darkness or near darkness. The tunnel was perhaps four hundred yards deep and we were packing the treasure into the tributary shafts that sprouted off to either side. Some of them were in a state of collapse and the rest threatened to cave in on us at any time. We didn’t spare the time to shore anything up. There were no materials for that anyhow. The forests were frozen so solid they would turn the blade of an axe, or shatter it. Inside the mine, of course, it was not quite so cold-the earth insulated it quite well. Some of us were reluctant to leave it in spite of the fetid stale air and the claustrophobic fears we all had.

“The Admiral planned to return in the summer for the gold. He kept saying it was vital if the White forces were ever to recapture Russia. I don’t think any of us cared who ruled Russia, by then. It was only Maxim who kept us going.

“Men dropped in their tracks from the labor of moving the treasure up those rails. We had already suffered so much-our constitutions were too far gone, these exertions wiped men out by the scores. I have no idea how many bodies we left up that ravine and around the mouth of the mine. I doubt more than forty of us returned to the main line of the railway after we had secured the gold inside the mine and closed the mine to seal it in. We-one of the brigadiers, that is, an officer who had had some engineering experience-placed a great number of demolition charges inside the tunnel and collapsed a good part of the mountain over it when we left. We were quite some distance down the track when it exploded but I have never heard such an earsplitting noise in my life. My ears rang for days afterward.

“We had been holding up traffic on the line for at least four and a half days. The refugees on foot were beginning to straggle past. We got aboard the Admiral’s train and set off down the railway on, I believe, the last day of the year. We made quite good time for the next two or three days because there was nothing on the track ahead of us. Then we began to come upon trains that had broken down and been abandoned on the track, and we had to jack them up one at a time and push them aside before we could proceed. There was a terrible blizzard on the first of January, I recall, but the generals seemed happy about it because it would obliterate all the signs that we had left along the cleared branch line where we had hidden the Admiral’s treasury.

“On January the second we were ambushed by a band of partisans who had thrown roadblocks across the track. Maxim and I had remaining under our command some eighteen soldiers and since we were the lowest-ranking people on the Admiral’s train we were sent out to do battle with these partisans.

“Mercifully I cannot remember those few hours in much detail. I recall our mission was to drive the partisans back far enough for our people to clear the tracks so that the train could proceed; as soon as the train began to move, that was to be our signal to return to it and get aboard. The Admiral’s remaining Cossacks-there was a small squadron of them, perhaps twenty-five or thirty and their horses-the Cossacks went out with us but they were so exposed on horseback that the partisan machine guns cut them to ribbons.

“Our foot soldiers clung to the ground and we moved from rock to rock trying to push the partisans back. We did manage to gain enough time for the track to be cleared, but I have no real recollection of how we did it. In the end I do know that when Maxim and I ran for the moving train we had only three followers.

“I almost didn’t make it; Maxim had to reach out from the train and pull me on board. I had taken an insignificant wound in the thigh but it had made running difficult.

“As the train picked up speed I was at one of the gunports and I cannot ever forget the sight of a wounded Cossack who was trying to get to his feet in the midst of the carnage where his squadron had been slaughtered by the machine guns. The man was up to his knees in blood. The partisan machine guns were still firing as we pulled away. The Cossack was hit again and screamed soundlessly before he fell.”

[In December 1919 Kiev fell to the Reds. Within a month the Allies lifted their blockade of Bolshevik Russia. They wanted to trade; the war was over as far as they were concerned and they were willing to deal with the victors.

[The war was not in fact over. General Denikin was still putting up strong resistance in Rostov: his Don Cossacks, with Wrangel’s infantry, defeated Budenny’s Red assault along the Don and briefly there was room for hope that the White cause was not dead.]

Early in January the Admiral was still struggling through the terrible Siberian winter en route to Irkutsk where he planned to set up his new capital. But ahead of his arrival, on January 4, revolt broke out in Irkutsk and after several days of vicious streetfighting the Kolchak sympathizers fled the city and abandoned it to the mobs.

Apprised of this fact by Czech dispatch riders, Kolchak stopped three hundred miles west of Irkutsk on January 7 and made his final command decision: he submitted his resignation.

Officially he passed the mantle of Supreme Ruler of All the Russias to General Denikin; Kolchak signed a formal instrument which was then forwarded to Denikin via Vladivostok and took months to reach the Crimea, where Denikin accepted the hollow throne.

There was nowhere to go but Irkutsk and Kolchak proceeded there with the remnants of his staff; the seven trains with which he had started were diminished to two. Behind him with a ragtag miscellany of troops General Kappel held out for a few more weeks in a hopeless rearguard action which only served to delay the advancing Reds for a few days. When at the end of the month Kappel died of frostbite the last organized White Russian army in Siberia dispersed.

Kolchak was interrogated in Irkutsk by partisan and socialist street leaders. For nearly a month he was beaten, starved and degraded by his captors. General Janin, who had reached safety a little farther down the railway past the Trans-Baikal tunnels, attempted to make a deal with the Red sympathizers in Irkutsk to exchange the Czarist gold reserves for the lives and freedom of the Admiral, the Czechs and the rest of the Allied personnel still in Siberia. Janin, however, did not know where the gold had been hidden-he had been on one of the trains ahead of Kolchak’s-and neither Janin’s emissaries nor the Reds were successful in forcing the Admiral to reveal the location of the treasure.

In their eagerness to capture Kolchak the Reds had ignored many of his top aides and these men rapidly flitted through the city and fled south, joining a growing throng of pedestrian refugees who were making their way around Irkutsk in an attempt to escape across the border into Mongolia.

The Red Army entered Irkutsk early in February aboard trains it had captured from stragglers among the White Russians. The army quickly took over the administration of all affairs in the city. Kolchak was brought before the commissars and sentenced to execution for treason.

Early on the morning of February 7, 1920, bundled in a heavy coat with a muffler wrapped around part of his face, Kolchak stood against a wall, pinned there by the headlights of two armored chain-drive lorries. It was a scene which has become a cliche throughout the world: he was offered a blindfold but refused it; he stared calmly into the gun muzzles, probably unable to see them very well because of the glare in his eyes. Witnesses said he looked relieved, almost grateful. He stood up quite straight and removed the muffler from his face, draping it carefully across his chest: a bedraggled little man trying to cover the nakedness of his failure with his remaining rags of dignified courage.

He was executed by a detail of five men armed with automatic pistols.

Later that day those eighty or ninety of his officers who had been captured with him were brought from their cells. By twos and threes they took the last short walk to the same bullet-chipped wall.

In February 1920 the Whites in Archangel broke up into packs of looting drunken mutineers. Most of the White forces in Murmansk fled into Finland and the rest capitulated to the Reds. By March, Denikin was once more in retreat in the south and the Soviets drove him back out of the Kuban. But millions continued to die in the names of causes that were already foregone conclusions. On November 15, 1920, when the last of Wrangel’s army was evacuated from the Crimea by the French navy, the Civil War officially ended; even then, scattered outbreaks of warfare continued well into the next two years. The famine of 1921, caused by the war, added to the casualty lists. It was not until 1922 that the Red Army finally took control of Siberia, marched into Vladivostok and evicted the Japanese.

In the meantime anarchy prevailed throughout Russia: casual brutalities, pogroms, massacres, speculation and corruption, mass drunkenness, murder for sport, suicides precipitated by disease and lice and despair.

When the White Russians lost, it was total. With savage malevolence the victors impressed upon them the consequences of defeat: the barbarous and vicious bestiality of reprisal, executions, revenge on a horrible scale. In the end the only single crime which distinguished the White Russians from the Red Russians was that they lost.

After Kolchak’s capture the spent remnants of his refugee column dispersed beyond Lake Baikal. Some managed to survive the trek to the Orient; most died, or joined up with bandit armies, or finally gave it up and joined the Reds.

Of the 1,250,000 who had begun the trek from Omsk, approximately 200,000 people survived as far as Irkutsk. Most of these fled Irkutsk ahead of the oncoming Red Army. They fled into a final nightmare: they tried to walk across the ice of Lake Baikal into the sanctuary of Mongolia.

Lake Baikal is a vast inland sea surrounded by craggy mountains 5,000 feet high. The lake is 400 miles long, some 50 miles wide at its center, and it is the deepest lake in the world-6,365 feet at the deepest point.

The refugees did not survive the crossing. A terrible blizzard caught them in the open on the lake. More than 150,000 people lay dead on the ice until summer melted it and they sank to the bottom. They are still there.

Somewhere in the Sayan Heights the gold of the Czars remained hidden. Of those who had helped bury it, and thus knew its location, nearly all had perished: the eighty executed with Kolchak, and the rest frozen to death on the flat windswept ice of Lake Baikal.

“Maxim and I survived it by happenstance. When the partisans took the Admiral off the command coach we remained with the train until nightfall. January the fifteenth, that was. It snowed early in the night. We walked down the roadbed in the direction of the lake.

“Someone-partisans or perhaps the Atamans-had blown one or two of the Trans-Baikal tunnels and the railway was blocked, there were no trains going out in either direction. We found a narrow foot-track at first light and made our way up into the hills in search of food. We still carried our sidearms. There was the risk of being set upon by bandit groups; we moved carefully but we kept moving because of the cold.

“Two days I think we walked. We came to a little mountain farm which had been abandoned, but not very long abandoned. It’s strange, I recall we shot some wild animal for food but I can’t remember what sort of animal it was, or which of us bagged it. We took shelter in the farmhouse and demolished half the barn for firewood; we stayed there at least a week, I think, burning clapboards from the barn and shooting game when we could. Some of our strength began to return.

“After the first few days it was as if our minds had begun to thaw out, along with our bodies. We began to think. For the first time in our recent memory we began to conjure with the possibility that we might survive beyond the next few hours. We began to suggest plans.

“All my instincts cried out for one thing: that I put this unspeakable horror behind me, get away from Russia, from Asia, from what I considered to be quite literally Satan’s Hell on earth.

“Different voices spoke to my brother. His guilt was the overriding influence inside him. He felt we were obliged to stay, to suffer-and to acknowledge our Judaism.

“That week in the mountain farm was a different kind of crucible from the one we had just escaped but in its way it was even more affecting. The more we talked, the more each of us became obsessed with his own chosen route to exoneration. For that was what we really sought, you know: an escape from guilt, a means of erasing our sins. I believe now that my brother was far more mature than I. I did not realize it was impossible to escape from yourself; somehow he had made the discovery, but he was unable to persuade me.

“We did not quarrel violently; there was no violence left in either of us. But the gap was not to be bridged, it only grew wider with every hour.

“In the light of what happened years later, I have wondered frequently-which of us was Cain, which Abel.

“We separated there in the mountains above Lake Baikal. It was after the great blizzard. My brother and I embraced and I watched him set off to the north, toward Irkutsk. I know we both wept. I picked up my homemade knapsack and went away to the south. I never saw Maxim again.

“I heard from him, in the years between the wars. We exchanged a few letters-not many. Of course he may have sent more than I received; the Soviet authorities tend to confiscate the letters that Jews write to people outside the Soviet Union. Later on, during the Second War, I came to know what befell him in the Ukraine because I went there from Palestine on a mission for the organization which employed me in Jerusalem. But I never saw my brother; I only learned about him from others who knew him. He had become a leader in the village-a Jewish leader, you know; a respected elder by that time, the nineteen forties. He made every possible sacrifice for the Jews in his town. That was his penance.

“Mine took a different form but I suppose it served the same purposes of the heart. I made my way into Mongolia and went from farm to farm. In the spring I joined up with a Tatar caravan. Curiously now I recall only the beauties of those months-the glorious sunsets, the beauty of the steppes in the springtime when the grass was green and long, and we would travel through miles of crocuses, violets, buttercups. The simoons carried dust across the summer, I recall.

“It was August when I reached Harbin. I took a job there for a while, interpreting for a merchant at meetings with Russians. Then I made my way to the coast of China.

“I was quite a long time at sea. I took jobs on passenger liners-first on coastal runs with a Japanese line, then with one of the small British lines that ran ships out of Hong Kong into the Indian Ocean. I made a few ocean crossings to San Francisco. I began to hear about the Zionists and Palestine-the promises the British had made there.

“I visited Palestine first in nineteen twenty-two, I believe it was-we were going up through the Suez to Constantinople on a cruise ship. I was assistant purser. I settled in Jerusalem in nineteen twenty-four; it has been my home ever since.

“As for the gold, it remained buried in that iron mine for more than twenty years before the Nazis came and took it away.”

* An incomplete manuscript from the New Jersey files of Harris Bristow. For continuity’s sake the editors have added, within brackets, summaries of those events which Bristow undoubtedly would have covered had he been able to finish the work. This survey, which runs hardly fifty manuscript pages in length, is not even a “rough draft” in the usual sense; rather, it is a skeleton-an outline for a book, upon which Harris Bristow intended to build tenfold.

As Bristow instructed, much of Haim Tippelskirch’s narrative has been included. The Tippelskirch remarks are set off within quotation marks. Other factual material from the Tippelskirch interviews, where it could be confirmed by secondary sources, has been included in the editors’ bracketed summaries and in the occasional footnotes.-Ed.

* One assumes Harris Bristow had plans to expand his summary of pre-twentieth-century Russian history; it has been the editors’ decision, however, to add no material not clearly needed for an understanding of the text.-Ed.

† Russian dead numbered 4,000,000 in 1914–1917. Compare casualties of the Western Allies for the entire war through the end of 1918: Great Britain, 950,000 killed; France, 1,400,000 killed; United States, 115,600 killed (more than half of them by Spanish Influenza).-Ed.

* Several students of the subject insist there is room to believe the bodies, jewels and blood that were found at Ekaterinburg were planted fakes and that the royal family was spirited away alive by sympathetic conspirators. But no real proof has been offered. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* The Bolshevik government had moved the national capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918.-Ed.

* The Russian tendency to infect every organized activity with a terminal case of bureaucracy is not a creation of the Communists; it is a traditional Russian disease and was partly responsible for the lethargic ineffectualness of the White armies. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* The material in this section is needed for an understanding of the whole. This chapter was to be written after Harris Bristow gathered more details concerning the battles fought at this time. (No military engagements have been fleshed out in the existing manuscript, which was intended as a skeletal working structure by the author. The book, as planned, was to include detailed coverage of all significant individuals and engagements.) The editors have assembled the material in this chapter from Harris Bristow’s work notes and, to some extent, have adapted parts of the material rather freely from his earlier book, The Civil War in Russia: 1918–1921, New York, 1962.-Ed.

* In Siberia the war was fought solely along the railway. Go a hundred miles to either side of the line of track and you would find relative peace; go two hundred and you would find remarkable disinterest in the war; go three hundred and you could find people who didn’t even know there was a war on. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* Most Siberian river bridges, like those at Omsk and Irkutsk, were floating bridges which were removed from service before the winter freeze-up to prevent their being destroyed by grinding ice movements on the rivers. Temporary sand roadbeds were constructed on the thick ice for winter rail installation. After the spring thaw the bridges were replaced; to do so earlier would have been senseless. The Siberian rivers are very wide: The Irtysh at Omsk is more than a mile wide and during the spring floods can become as wide as ten miles, flooding entire valleys. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* After the first few months Janin had received instructions from Paris to obey Kolchak’s orders, with certain restrictions; he was free, for instance, to pull out at any time. Oddly, however, he remained loyal to the lost cause longer than most Russians did.-Ed.

* According to most sources there were 750,000 civilians and approximately 500,000 men in uniform, of whom most were deserters from both sides.-Ed.

* By the following April another thirty thousand had died of typhus in this small city alone. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* At this time-late December 1919-probably three-fifths of the refugees had died; half a million humans struggled on, with the Reds at their heels.-Ed.