The gaze below the peaked cap reflected calm intelligence. Adrian had a spirited face with refined, symmetrical features, sporting a delicate handlebar mustache.
The First World War broke out finding Adrian Sokolov as a young officer at the 1st Don Cossack Division, stationed in Zamość, Poland. The vanguard of the Russian Empire took the full onslaught of the Austro-Hungarian armies. Dubbed 'The Great War,' its course furthered Adrian Sokolov's rise to excellence. War was his element—a selfless, heroic fight for God, Czar and Country.
In May, 1915, he received the Order of St. George, Fourth Class, “for exceptional bravery under enemy fire, having repelled a series of vicious attacks by overwhelming forces, leading a counter-attack which forced the enemy to flee, and capturing an artillery battery with over 100 prisoners,” according to the citation.
The battle near Łódź had also earned him his first wound, a piece of shrapnel that had gone through his leg.
The only other available photo showed him beaming proudly upon his return from hospital, the white St. George's cross pinned to his chest. Sans the peaked cap, his fair hair was styled in a short, straight cut.
Before the end of the war, Adrian Sokolov had also been decorated with the Order of St. Vladimir (1915) and the Order of St. Anne Third Class with Swords (1916), and promoted to Yesaul, which was equivalent to Captain.
No doubt he had entertained dreams of Russia's imminent triumph. Against the Axis powers, it was Russian Empire that had borne the brunt of human losses, suffering five million casualties. But despite its heavy sacrifice on the altar of victory, Russia would not share the glory it had brought closer for the Allied cause.
Exhausted by the hardship of trench warfare, the Russian peasant soldiers had fallen easy prey to German agents spreading communist propaganda. Morale plunged. Then, the first days of March, 1917, conveyed news of a revolution back in St. Petersburg. Kerensky's hypocritical claims to continue the war effort belied further degradation instilled in the army. The socialist reforms carried out by the Provisional Government on the battlefield destroyed all rank respect. As authority broke down, the soldiers mutinied en masse against their officers, fueled by enemy leaflets urging them to “fight for their rights” with pacifist fervor. Crazed mobs lynched anyone who opposed them. The Imperial Russian Army had ceased to exist.
At the same time, the German High Command delivered a killer blow with the last roll of the dice. Allocating 50 million Reichsmarks for a second revolution in Russia, the Germans financed an exiled Marxist by the name of Ulyanov, who would later become widely known as Lenin.
Lenin's mission: to wreak havoc, taking Russia out of the war.
The Bolsheviks arrived in St. Petersburg and instigated a coup in October. After seizing power, they clung onto it by using widespread terror, turning a world war into a civil one and drowning Russia in blood.
With the Army disbanded, Yesaul Adrian Sokolov returned from the ruined battlefront, escaping murderous armed gangs of ex-soldiers on his way to St. Petersburg. Days after he had reached the city, the newly-formed Cheka issued a death warrant against him on the ground of his “belonging to the vermin class of reactionary officers, and a having Cossack background perilous to the People's Revolution.”
Facing arrest and subsequent murder, Adrian had no choice but to flee down South, to his homeland. To his younger brother.
Before his eyes, the Bolsheviks were annihilating everything he had loved and fought for.
No God. No Czar. No Country.
Europe's most prospering and cultural empire had fallen to the depths of savage barbarism and slavery unseen since the times of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Thousands of like-minded patriots trickled South to form an army, steadfast in their resolve to save Russia from the Red plague. On the banks of the great River Don they began their Way of the Cross. The cream of the crop among the generals stood shoulder to shoulder with young cadets. Theirs was a struggle full of suffering as they trekked through the icy steppes. Outnumbered, under-supplied, clashing with the invading Bolshevik hordes, they managed to rescue the functional core of a future military organization.
Adrian enlisted as an ordinary private, but rose to the rank of colonel by 1919. His uncanny intellect, tactical nous and dedication shone as he served in the Counter-Intelligence Branch of the Don Army's General Staff.
In one of his reports to the Commander-in-Chief, Adrian Constantinovich wrote:
“The areas liberated from the Bolsheviks present horrifying, unnerving scenes. It requires special composure to detail the entire scope of the brutality which has taken place. The crimes perpetrated by the Reds cannot be grasped. What I have myself witnessed inspecting the Taganrog district is at odds with every notion of human morality. The Bolshevik methods practiced everywhere include mass executions, hostage-taking and torture that knows no bounds in its maniacal sadism.
“A ravine outside the town of Taganrog is filled with corpses. The estimated number is 2,000 bodies, shot by the Cheka. At the local metallurgy factory, no fewer than 50 people were burned alive in a blast furnace; their remains have been discovered in the slag pot. Workers have testified, confirming that the atrocities were carried out by Red commissars.
“In the nearby hamlets, residents were tortured and killed in groups of 30, 40 and 50. The victims included men and women of varying ages, the youngest being 14. They were either beaten to death, stabbed with bayonets, slashed, impaled, or shot with rifles or machine guns. Most died in great agony, having had their eyes gouged, tongues torn out, jaws crushed, hands and feet severed or skulls smashed open. The victims were either killed in their homes, dragged outside to the streets for public execution or taken to the steppe, often forced to strip naked. At least 8 peasants were buried alive. The homes were subsequently looted and burned down. Almost all of the women and girls had been raped before being murdered. The tormentors cut off men's genitals and women's breasts. In his church, an old priest was disemboweled and hanged by his own entrails. Disfigured beyond recognition, some corpses were subjected to further abuse and fed to dogs and pigs which scattered the remains across the steppe.”
The blood-curdling account was ever more painful to read with the realization that such atrocities hardly differed across the entire country, from Estonia to the Far East, from St. Petersburg to Azerbaijan, wherever the Red Army and the Cheka appeared. Terror was the nature of the Bolshevik rule, and its foundation. The bestial frenzy intensified in any town or village as the Bolsheviks captured it or retreated, leaving death and gore in their wake.
It was this infernal swarm that overran the country with its reign of terror. Forced to withdraw, the depleted, bleeding ranks of the White warriors edged towards the sea. But even after their tragic exodus, the war was far from over.
13
THE TREES HAD NO bark. That was the most striking detail about the photos from 1933. The famine was so great that the villagers had eaten it all. Stocked away in Soviet barns, the grain was rotting, protected by Red Army guards, while people dropped dead from starvation.
The mercenary Bolshevik forces—comprising Latvian and Chinese cutthroats—had finished butchering the Russian South by 1926. At varying rates, from fifty to a few hundred people killed each day in every town and village, the massacre had reached five million dead. If the surviving population had hoped that their hell would soon end, they would learn that this was just the beginning. The Soviets had merely laid the preliminary groundwork. Next, they would conduct their grand economic policy: the formation of 'collective farming,' or kolkhoz.
Under the Soviet system of planned economy, each village was tasked with supplying the state with a quota of grain—an impossible figure, set too high by the communist planners on purpose. Failure to deliver on the unachievable plan resulted in accusations of sabotage. The black-listed village would then be cordoned off by the punitive Red Army squads, and all food, livestock and possessions confiscated, all trade banned. The villagers, having already given
up their harvest which had been deemed insufficient, were doomed to harrowing death.
The strongest, most capable men among the alleged population of 'saboteurs' were arrested and either gruesomely killed on counter-revolutionary charges or sent to the gulags in Siberia, with many dying en route. The rest remained immured in their villages, and those who broke through the cordons were hunted down and brought back. From each village, the corpses were driven out and thrown into pits which became mass graves. Sometimes, the bodies weren't quite dead yet, but not for long.
Starvation had been used as a form of capital punishment in ancient times—and reinvented in the twentieth century as an instrument of genocide.
The practice became so widespread that the artificial famine wiped out almost ten million people across the Don, Kuban, North Caucasus and Ukraine.
The survivors were forced to sign up for slave labor at the state-owned kolkhoz farms.
By the grace of God, Grigory Sokolov had managed to survive.
After his separation from Adrian, he had spent several years moving from one location to another, never settling in a single village for too long, always cautious. He made sure he wouldn't be identified as the young Cossack cadet whose hard-working, middle-class parents had been killed by the Cheka.
He had kept their photos, which had to be hidden at all times. Any vestige of a long-gone normal life was punishable. There was one photo of Grigory and Adrian as children, dressed in silk shirts, celebrating Easter at a hearty dinner, an icon of the Savior on the wall behind them. By the 1930s, Grigory had become gaunt from malnourishment. Having any extra food apart from that given by the communist tormentors would get him shot, as would a silk shirt, religious practice, or any indication that he was brother to Adrian. His own photo, catching him in the crowd during a visit by a Bolshevik propagandist, showed an emaciated figure wearing shabby clothes and a craggy beard, eyes sunken yet bright.
Finally he married a Cossack girl named Callista, orphaned after all of her relatives had been transported to NKVD concentration camps in the Arctic. Grigory's firstborn died within a few weeks. Their next child, Nastasia, baptized in great secrecy, would be the grandmother of Constantine and Eugene.
Grigory succumbed to the kolkhoz thraldom as the only way to feed himself and his family. Grinding away in the Soviet crop fields from dawn to dusk left little chance of mounting resistance.
In 1942, when the Wehrmacht troops marched in, the Red Army gave up the Don without a fight. The Bolsheviks took flight, paving the way for German occupation.
But at least Grigory Sokolov no longer had to hide his icon of Christ.
14
THE 14TH PANZER DIVISION rolled into Novocherkassk, trying to engage the Red Army formations which had already abandoned the city in haste. The Luftwaffe pursued the departing Soviet columns unsuccessfully.
The unimpeded suddenness of the German arrival across the Russian South was staggering. Apparently, only the NKVD had anticipated it, taking active measures. In every town, all the inmates of NKVD prisons had been led out of their cells and shot. The killings had taken place in the prison courtyards and basements, the hundreds of corpses piled together and smothered in quicklime. As a parting gift to the populace, the NKVD had blown up grain elevators and the water supply.
Cowardly, the Reds had retreated with death in their wake, and their return would be marked with a new wave of terror, Grigory knew. Life under the Nazis was harsh, brutal at times, but the communists were certain to put a fatal end to it.
After the defeat at Stalingrad, it became obvious that the days of German Army Group A were numbered. By 1943, the occupied towns were rife with Soviet spies secretly preparing lists for the oncoming extermination squads. Those who had violated Communist dogma, whether attending the re-opened churches, or selling their produce in the flourishing market, would not be spared.
Grigory had to save his family, and he was not alone in this decision. As the Soviets pinned the Germans back, poised to reclaim the South, around 100,000 Cossack refugees set out from their homes, seeking salvation in the West.
Instead, they would find their Calvary.
The long procession stretched for many kilometers. Bullock carts wheeled off supplies and belongings, with children sat atop the baggage. Men and women trudged alongside on foot and horseback. The column's path lay across the frozen Sea of Azov. Sighting the refugees, Soviet aircraft bombed the brittle sea ice.
The Red Army's motorized units were catching up.
During their tough journey, the Cossacks passed through their native steppe, evacuating via Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland and Czechoslovakia until they reached a temporary harbor in north-eastern Italy. Only 35,000 made it there alive.
Tolmezzo, the province of Udine: the site of the Cossack encampment where Adrian finally located Grigory. Having escaped the Gestapo and the Red partisans in the Balkans, Adrian had obtained false ID papers but still carried his legitimate Yugoslav passport. In the chaos of the German retreat and Soviet attack, he had learned of the great Cossack migration in Europe, and tracked it down.
The Sokolov reunion occurred just as the Third Reich crumbled in its death throes.
The catastrophic war had drawn to a close. The thousands of Cossack families dreamed of rebuilding their lives away from hell.
It was not to be.
In May 1945, avoiding Italian partisans, the human mass of refugees—joined by groups of other Russsian DPs, White émigrés and former Ostarbeiters who had trickled to Tolmezzo—moved to Austria. A choice was made to surrender themselves to the war's victors, the British.
The snaking mountain roads led them to the picturesque Austrian town of Lienz.
They camped in the valley of Drava, a roiling river flowing through the land of East Tyrol that had become the UK occupation zone.
The sun-drenched alpine meadows conveyed a sense of freedom. Freedom from the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, at last.
The spring air filled with the scent of blooming roses and the chirping of birds. Salvation.
“Christ is Risen!”
It was Easter. Russian Orthodox priests held a prayer service celebrating the Resurrection.
Surrounded by the British, the refugees awaited their fate.
It had already been predetermined in Yalta. On the other side of the Drava, the Soviet SMERSH squads were standing by, prepared for the handover.
As dawn broke on the first day of June, the Cossacks realized they had been betrayed.
The British soldiers invaded the camp. Tanks moved in. Empty trucks idled at the gates.
Translators called out the announcement of repatriation.
Desperate screams echoed across the valley. The Cossack men clasped their hands, shielding their families. They would rather die than fall back into Stalin's clutches.
In the melee, some broke free and ran only to be scythed down by machine-gun fire.
Batons swinging, the soldiers beat the rest, pushing the defenseless crowd towards the trucks like cattle. A priest held his crucifix up in the air, but it was knocked out of his hands. A motherjumped with her baby into the raging Drava, both dying as they crashed against the rocks.
The beating went on for days as the trucks shuttled the bloodied victims away. Bayonets stabbed. Rifles cracked, killing off the wounded.
Two thousand were killed in Lienz, shot or clubbed to death. Violently, all the Cossacks had been loaded in and driven off for transfer to the Soviets. Tens of thousands would die later.
Operation Keelhaul, the last crime of a finished war, got underway.
15
ADRIAN CONSTANTINOVICH SOKOLOV, OFFICER of the Imperial Russian Army, hero of the Great War and exiled foreign national, died at the hands of the NKVD near Graz.
His soul parted with his mutilated body after prolonged torture.
From his corpse, the marauding killers had expropriated everything they could take: shoes, wallet, clothes, wristwatch and wedding ring.
At some poin
t during the interrogation, they had hammered needles under his fingernails.
The rest of the Sokolov family was shipped to the Soviet Union and processed through NKVD prisons. All three were incriminated of anti-Soviet activity, condemning them to ten years of slave labor in the Soviet concentration camps. No judge or jury, not even a mockery of a trial, no right to appeal.
Grigory ended up in Siblag, a Siberian gulag cluster numbering three million prisoners. His initial ten-year sentence was revised in 1948 and extended to twenty-five years.
Callista, his wife, was sent to Ozerlag, a camp in the wasteland near the Mongolian border.
Their twelve-year-old daughter, Nastasia, was taken away to a gulag in Norilsk, north of the Arctic Circle. Under the Soviet penal system, her age did not qualify as a mitigating factor.
Both Callista and Nastasia served the full prison term until 1955. Even Stalin's death allowed them no pardon. The gulag had transformed them into sick, broken, toothless women, each looking much older than her years, the eyes forever showing deep-rooted fear.
Grigory did not survive the twenty-five years until his release. At Siblag he had no name. A former human, reduced to a number like the beast of burden that they had turned him into, felling trees in the taiga. A-389.
During work in freezing conditions on a January day in 1952, under unclear circumstances suggesting attempted escape, a camp guard shot A-389 dead.
The young guard's name was V. I. Bystrykh.
16
CONSTANTINE RUBBED THE BRIDGE of his nose, closing his blood-shot eyes for a few seconds. He had reconstructed a vivid picture, weaving it from the threads of the personnel records, photos, reports, letters, eyewitness accounts and official documents presented in the dossier. The multitude of facts shedding light on the Sokolov family history revealed it as one full of struggle and suffering. The truth brought liberating knowledge alongside burdening pain. In particular, the top-secret footage filmed by the British at Lienz left a haunting impression.
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