Kolchak's Gold (27 page)

The Crimean War of 1854–1855—British and French fighting for the Turkish cause—put Sebastopol under cannon fire again and for eleven months the city heroically resisted. In 1914 the Turks attacked yet again, their navy shelling the city. After Kolchak's collapse in 1920 Sebastopol was Wrangel's headquarters and had to withstand the onslaught of Red armies while the White Russians made their last stand; and then came the Germans in 1941.

Such a city has a character and a spirit. I was trying to find these things. I knew the dry facts, the dates and the numbers and the details of record; I did not yet know the people. This was what Zandor pretended not to understand when he complained of the insignificance of the persons I chose to interview.

I went back to the car and asked Timoshenko to drive me to the archives.

Zandor had made an appointment for me that night with a retired navy commander who told me very little and conformed religiously to the party line. I left early and Timoshenko and I drove slowly through a swarm of sailors who were coming ashore from a ship that had just docked. We stopped at a nightclub where the music was loud and the crowd raucous; we drank for half an hour, Timoshenko in very good cheer. It was past ten when I returned to the hotel.

When I opened a drawer to get a clean folded shirt to lay out for the morning I discovered someone had searched the room. The things in the drawers had been crumpled by hands that had pawed quickly through. Someone had made a quick but thorough search. Oddly my notes themselves seemed to have been undisturbed. Probably those who had been sent to search the place were not considered sufficiently literate in English to understand anything they might find in my writings. In fact it was probable that they hadn't really expected to find anything. I took it to be a message from Zandor—punctuation to his earlier warnings.

There was more, in the morning when I went outside to wait for Timoshenko. The man in the car could have been waiting to pick someone up and the man at the shop window could have been looking for a gift to buy his wife but I didn't think they were.

That day in the captured German files I found a document which confirmed everything I had assembled thus far about Kolchak's gold. I can recall it exactly; it is imprinted on my brain.

C
ERTIFIED
T
RUE
C
OPY

Ministry of Transport & Communication

Railway Department—City of Chelyabinsk

12 April 1944

Certificate Number S.D.C. 4/1628

This clearance certifies that the goods wagons Numbers 1708, 1765, 1900, 2171, 2177, 2509, 2510, 2518, 2523, 2834 have been reserved by this Ministry for the transport of State Properties to Lugansk, and that by Authority of the Supreme Soviet these wagons must be cleared with utmost priority and dispatch at all points of transit.

—F. G. Grizodubov

Director, Railway Department (stamp)

It was a forgery of course. But a good one. I saw no physical evidence to indicate it wasn't genuine; it was only the fact that it appeared in the German files rather than the Russian ones. It was a copy; the original had disappeared with the train. From its location in the files I knew something else as well: it was in one of the von Geyr folders dated November 1943 and it wasn't there by mistake; therefore the Germans had created the forgery well in advance of the need for it.

It was not the final clue I needed. But it was the last link. It gave me the date and the route; I needed only one more fact.

Getting that fact was going to be harder than I had anticipated: Zandor had made it harder. The detail I needed was to be found in a large stack of documents which Zandor could only think trivial. Railway schedules to Zandor were on a par with café menus.

By now I had managed to reassure myself that the Zandor interview had had a silver lining: I convinced myself it demonstrated they didn't have any idea I was looking for the gold—that they didn't even know of the gold's existence, let alone my interest in it. I won't take the trouble to spell out the chain of reasoning by which I came to that conclusion; at best it was rationalization. In any case I allowed myself to see no reason to abandon my pursuit of the treasure. The only problem was to misdirect Zandor's attention.

There was no way to get the answer without looking at that stack of railway schedules. I couldn't hide the fact that I was looking at them. The best I could do was sandwich the file number into the middle of a list of varied requests for all kinds of transport and supply records, so as to suggest I was analyzing the enormous job the Russians had done to supply their armies in the south (while Hitler let his troops starve to death). I even made awed remarks—along those exact lines—to the woman at the desk. I hoped my friend at the corner table overheard me.

I left the archives that day in a disoriented daze—half euphoric and half terrified. I had done something for which—by Soviet standards—I could be shot.

Timoshenko was sensitive to the vibrations. “You have found what you were looking for, yes?”

“I guess I did,” I confessed; and he beamed and insisted we have a drink to celebrate.

The drink became several drinks and we were both in high cheer that evening. But the hangover set in at about the time I returned to the hotel. I began to tremble when I pulled the three tightly rolled documents out of the sleeve of my jacket. They weren't notes of mine. They were original documents and I had stolen them from the archives, rolling them like straws and sliding them up my sleeve like a cheap gambler hiding aces.

Unless they had seen me purloin the three papers—and they hadn't, or they'd have arrested me on the spot—they weren't likely ever to discover that they were missing. Railway schedules are not numbered individually. The same file number appears stamped at the top of every paper in the folder. With anything as commonplace as marshaling records they'd have had no reason to make a specific note of each sheet of paper. It was possible they had a notation of the total number of papers in the file but I doubted anyone would bother counting them—there had been at least five hundred in that file—and even if they did make a count they'd have no way of proving I was responsible for the discrepancy. Not if they didn't find the documents on me.

I unfolded a map and studied it, and studied the papers I'd stolen; and then I destroyed the three documents by flushing them down the toilet in tiny pieces.

With them went the last written record of the final hiding place of Kolchak's gold.

*
Rep. James Scheuer, Democrat of The Bronx, New York.—Ed.

THE NAZI SCHEME
*

1.

BETWEEN THE WARS

[From 1920 until 1944 the gold of the Czars rested undisturbed in its hiding place in the Siberian mountains. Speculations and conflicting reports to the contrary, it did not fall into the hands of partisans, Atamans, Reds, Whites, or the remnants of the Czech Legion. Buried under the rubble of its caved-in hiding place, it remained undiscovered and untouched while the world changed.]

In the decade that followed the Russian Civil War the Soviet state did not, as Marx would have had it, “wither away.” Instead it became ever more totalitarian after the ouster of Trotsky and the death of Lenin made room for the imposition of the absolute dictatorship of Josef Stalin.

The Communist state was threatened by “capitalist encirclement” and Stalin used that rationalization to justify the intimidation of the populace, the imposition of extreme propaganda measures and the infliction of the great purges which disposed of all suspected opposition to his despotic regime.

Vast numbers of the original Bolsheviks were forced to fabricate “confessions,” were tried publicly (but hardly fairly) and were brutally executed. Ten million persons were sent to the forced labor camps of the NKVD. The purges eliminated the entire Lenin Politburo, the entire old Bolshevik movement, and the entire leadership of the army, the state police, the trade unions and the Communist Central Committee. All of them were replaced with men whose sole qualification for office was their loyalty to the
vozhd
(roughly, the führer), Josef Stalin.

Because Stalin's purges weakened the Red Army and the nation disastrously by massacring most of their leadership, Stalin was not nearly ready for war when Munich came about.

But neither was Hitler. The Nazis wanted a guarantee of Soviet neutrality (in the event of a “dispute” between Germany and Poland) just as badly as Stalin wanted time to mobilize. As a result, on August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed to guarantee mutual nonaggression and divide eastern Europe into “spheres of influence” which placed Finland and the small Baltic states under Russian “protection.”

[In the meantime] the center of the universe was still Berlin. Foreign correspondents drank their days away at the Adlon Bar and occasionally went up along the Wilhelmstrasse to watch Hitler on the balcony review the troop lorries that rolled past. The dictator with his Chaplin mustache watched his thousands of mesmerized youths shout their
“Sieg Heils”
and spoke to them in his guttural hypnotic rant, rousing their apocalyptic fervor to a frenzy, preparing them in the moral twilight of the Third Reich for
Mitteleuropa's Götterdämmerung.
The accumulated sadistic malice of human history, which was to find expression in such souvenirs as the human-skin lampshades of Ilse Koch, made the world a clinic for the grotesque evil of the Nazi experiments in racial purification and mass death; and found its voice in the cloying martial sentimentality of the Horst Wessel Song.
*

Adolf Hitler's compelling voice inspired his brown-clothed followers to offer their lives in the service of the immortalizing nobility of Destiny. Hitler convinced Germany (as he had convinced himself) that he was of divine origin—that Providence rendered his pronouncements Infallible; that German honor and German glory demanded the Aryan world conquest; that the Fatherland's insidious enemies—the Communists, the Jews, those who had heaped upon Germany the ignominious betrayal of Versailles—must be crushed.

Of course the German mind was diseased. Of course the Nazi upheaval was an aberration—mankind throwing a tantrum. Of course Hitler was mad: a man whose most intense gratification derived from the ultimate act of obeisance—kneeling before a woman so that she could defecate and urinate upon him. Of course the deranged sycophantic parasites who surrounded Hitler fed on his weaknesses and influenced his bestialities. Of course the circumstances and conditions were “unique.” Yet: of the two nations, Russia and Germany, it was not Germany in which a small minority imposed its will on an unwilling population; it was not Germany in which, by apathy or outright partisan revolt, enormous segments of the population resisted the despotism of the regime; and it was Germany—not Russia—in which the committed successful revolution arose among the workers and trade unionists. The Nazis were the revolutionaries of the 1920s and their movement was fundamentally proletarian: a blind, nonintellectual will for change. Their revolution drove to the right, not the left—a fact overlooked by those who insist that revolution is always a function of the left—but nevertheless it was a populist movement and there was never any coherent resistance movement during Hitler's lifetime in power. Thus while Russia merely tolerated evil, Germany gave it active and undivided support—and one may argue that in the end there wasn't a penny's worth of difference: mere tolerance of evil is an evil in itself.
*