Kolchak's Gold (9 page)

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.

9.

THE COLLAPSE

“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 cafés 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.