Kolchak's Gold (11 page)

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.