Kolchak's Gold (8 page)

[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.

6.

THE EARLY TRIUMPHS: VICTORY IN SIGHT
*

[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 matériel 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.

7.

THE WHITE RUSSIAN DEBACLE

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.”

8.

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY AND THE ATAMANS

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.