The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov

by Carl Douglass

  He gave her a wide grin showing his large healthy teeth—another strong reason to want to be with him. She had long ago learned that good teeth meant good general health, strength, and endurance.

  “It is a bargain, Princess,” he said and reached out to her.

  This was the moment of truth. She decided not to hesitate but leaned in to embrace him without reservation. He kissed her soundly. Later that evening, she moved into his tent, which was five times the size of the one she had been occupying; and light years more comfortable. Despite there being no sort of ceremony, Alexandra Abramovna Tarasova-Yusupov Bradshaw became a “trigamist” enthusiastically.

  Vladimir gave Alexandra a brace of ivory handled pistols and a fine newly introduced Italian Cei-Rigotti gas-operated, selective-fire, repeating carbine, with a 20-round magazine as a wedding gift.

  “So, you will always be safe,” he said.

  “Thank you, Vlad,” she said, “I can’t think of sweeter gift.”

  They both laughed at the nuanced humor.

  Vlad—no one else in the entire army called him Vlad—added, “Another interesting change in the times, Dear Alexandra. Now learn to use it well.”

  She did, and quickly learned its drawbacks: frequent jams and erratic shooting. She knew better than to complain. She was probably the best armed soldier in the entire White Army.

  Kappel’s army was in no shape to face a determined and disciplined Bolshevik army at this point. As the Reds drew ever closer, Gen. Kappel made the decisive decision to begin the long march to Novonikolaevsk and the safety of an agreeable populace and a well-fortified military garrison commanded by the most important official in the anti-Bolshevik armed forces, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who headed the entire eastern front of the civil war and constituted the leadership of the provisional Russian government with its capital in frigid Siberia.

  The march from the mountainous area east of Vladivostok to the oblast capital and railhead took an arduous six weeks owing to the rough terrain, the physics of moving a cumbersome and inexperienced army, and the need to proceed in secrecy. In Irkutsk, Gen. Kappel and his army commandeered the Transsiberian train and routed it for Novonikolaevsk [later renamed Novosibirsk].

  Alexandra lived up to Vladimir’s hopes and expectations when he gave her full charge of the logistics of the railway trip. The Red Army was unaware of White’s presence in Irkutsk; so, boarding onto the cramped train proceeded as quickly as possible during wartime. The passenger portion of the train had to be modified to change it to entirely third-class to accommodate the large number of men and their equipment. Cattle cars served to transport the horses, feed animals, and crates of provisions. Like all soldiers throughout history, the enlisted men griped good-naturedly at the bossy woman who had Gen. Kappel’s ear. For that reason alone, no one ventured a real complaint or even a comment about the favoritism she enjoyed; but they all recognized that she was performing a crucial service.

  The train lumbered out of the Irkutsk station at the tedious speed of twenty miles-per-hour and took more than four weeks to reach the capital of Siberia owing to poorly constructed railroad facilities, inclement weather, and occasional attacks by small units of Bolshevik bandits who were easily repelled but interfered with progress nonetheless. The enlisted men in the third-class carriages with their cargoes of arms and supplies were crammed into the available spaces and were rather severely uncomfortable. After a while, the men developed a Russian fatalistic patience, and realized that complaining was not going to make the journey faster or less uncomfortable. Senior officers–including Alexandra and her general–fared considerably better. For her it was interesting and exciting to see the wild and foreign countryside move slowly past.

  Arrival in Novonikolaevsk was gratifying and satisfying. The masses of properly uniformed, well-fed, healthy appearing soldiers, and the absence of cripples, rushing ambulances, and thousand-yard-stares heartened the train passengers. There was a sense of order and stability such as they had enjoyed in their home cities under the tzar’s empire. Gen. Kappel left for headquarters and found out that Gen. Kolchak had already departed for the southern front and that he had taken nearly sixty percent of the troops, including all the seasoned warriors. He returned to where his senior officers and Alexandra were waiting.

  “We have a problem,” he said.

  “Just one?” Col. Davidoff commented wryly. “Things are looking up.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  UNSUNG HEROES

  “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

  —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

  O great priestess, do not be angry with me; I am going. I shall not fail the roll-call of the shadows.

  —Euripides, Medea. Translated by C.A.E. Luschnig

  Grand Duke Marshal Nikolai Sergeyovich Siberia Military Academy, Novonikolaevsk, Siberia, May 20, 1913

  The grim news that the new arrivals would constitute the bulk of the White Army in the Far East and Siberia and that the other troops available would come from military science students, Cossacks, republican bourgeois liberals, social democrats who had no military experience, right-wing Russian Orthodox noviates, hiero-monks [priest-monks], ordinary Novonikolaevsk citizens who were champions of tzarism, pro-monarchists of any kind of kingly class, reactionaries, elderly retired imperial soldiers and sailors, deserters from the Bolshevik side, and forced conscripts from among the local men.

  Never one to use euphemisms or to shade the truth, Gen. Kappel put the situation into perspective succinctly, “We cannot fight a war with such rabble as our army. In order even to conduct holding actions, we will have to obtain more conscripts from among the healthy young locals and do our best to train them and to give them military discipline. We will keep a hawk’s eye on the Bolshis; so, we can be ready when they come to take our city. I am not inclined to sacrifice my army in some foolish ‘fight-to-the-death-for-honor’ last stand. We will fight; we will retreat; we will attack as partisans; and when it becomes necessary, we will leave for the South and join forces to keep our cause alive.”

  Alexandra and the rest of the seasoned soldiers were relieved to know that their commander was a pragmatist as well as a fine and sensible commander. His short speech won him dedicated followers.

  Lake Baikal, Russia, January, 1913

  The situation was worse than even Gen. Kappel’s initial assessment indicated. It was barely two weeks before the first skirmishes with the Reds began in the outskirts of Novonikolaevsk. As inadequately trained and equipped as they were, the hastily organized defenders of Novonikolaevsk acquitted themselves well enough to allow the general and his staff the chance to plan and prepare for a major tactical retreat. All hope evaporated when Czechoslovak Legions stranded in Siberia by the new Bolshevik government, refused to continue what they deemed to be a hopeless defensive position. Kappel and his staff and their newly organized White Army of Siberia held on until late October. The Red Army gained serious ground throughout the month, and Kappel was forced to close ranks again and again until the physical defenses of Novonikolaevsk became so insufficient that no one was surprised when the orders came down for the entire army to retreat to the South in the dead blackness of a misty freezing night.

  Thus began what came to be known as the Great Siberian Ice March. Kappel’s army retreated to the East then South following the Transsiberian railway towards frozen Lake Baikal with the Red Army in relentless pursuit. The old and weak perished from exposure, frostbite, pneumonia, and inadequate rations, during the three-month trek. The last night–January the twentieth–Kappel had Alexandra and the kitchen crew prepare one final feast. Hunters brought in a wide assortment of meat garnered from the fauna found near the marge of the great lake—reindeer, white tailed deer, elk, moose, musk deer, Siberian roe, wild boar, moose, lynx, wolverine, and wolves. They were not loathe even to harvest polecats, ground squirrels, and handfuls of nasty bite-sized voles.

&n
bsp; Alexandra and her Spartan kitchen crew brought out the huge cooking pots and pans, the last remains of her cache of fresh–now frozen–vegetables, and all her spices to make a stew fit for the tzar’s family. Scouts reported that the Reds had made camp less than ten miles from the White Army encampment on the edge of the lake. Every movement was calculated for maximum efficiency. Every cooking short-cut that could be taken was employed, and the result was a marvelous eclectic boost for the morale of the nearly defeated White Army.

  The quartermaster considered it to be divine providence that allowed the exhausted, frozen, and starving, army to have one last and wonderful meal. Alexandra was queen for the day. It could not last, of course; by midnight, the scouts reported that a significant force of Reds had advanced ahead of the main army to within two miles of the White Army enjoying its last meal.

  A whisper order from Gen. Kappel roused the Whites to calm and determined action. They abandoned everything except the tzar’s gold and the battle supplies necessary for a last stand and began a forced march across the frozen lake towards Irkutsk and Ulan-ude, Mongolia, capital of the Buryat Autonomous Republic. Their goal was once part of the vast Mongolian empire and that hope for safety was over five hundred kilometers away. Thirty thousand soldiers, their wives and camp followers, and support staff, marched onto the ice where the temperature was below -60°F; and a harsh biting wind amplified the misery. The Whites had scarcely gotten onto the lake before the Reds were upon them. The freezing Whites fought a rear-guard action punctuated with lethal skirmishes and increasingly difficult forward marches. The wounded, dead, and dying, were left to freeze on the surface of the ice.

  Exhausted men and women marching dropped to the ice and froze there, scattering corpses in a macabre tableau marking the final throes of a once powerful army. Gen. Kappel and Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov pushed along arm-in-arm with her mostly holding him up as he began dying from pneumonia. They stopped for a brief rest, and she held his head in her lap. She could not caress him because her hands were frozen to the point that they were hardly better than clubs. He died before she could get him up and going again. She struggled to her feet, alternated putting one hand inside her parka to warm it in her armpit while holding her repeating rifle with the other and began to shuffle on club feet across the ice while unobstructed high velocity freezing winds turned her feet and lower legs into icicyles.

  She and four men continued to struggle towards the far edge of the lake. Then, the Red Army forward scout unit came out of the icy mists and began firing at them. Alexandra marshalled all her courage, strength, flexibility, and determination to turn and begin firing her Cei-Rigotti repeating carbine at the oncoming relentless rabble. She stood there unflinching with mist and gunsmoke swirling about her. She went through two 20-round magazines until the rifle jammed from overheating. She was defenseless. The world turned white.

  Both sides carried out atrocities. One journalist claimed that the Red Army received orders on how to behave by the Bolshevik government: “It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the Tsar’s army, from the Cadets and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle-classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White terror.... The reason given by the Bolshevik leaders for the Red terror was that conspirators could only be convinced that the Soviet Republic was powerful enough to be respected if it was able to punish its enemies, but nothing would convince these enemies except the fear of death, as all were persuaded that the Soviet Republic was falling. Given these circumstances, it is difficult to see what weapon the Communists could have used to get their will respected.”

  —Morgan Philips Price,

  My Three Revolutions, page 136, 1969

  EPILOGUE

  After the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.

  -Old Italian proverb

  Southern Edge of Lake Baikal, 250 km north of Irkutsk, Spring, 1914

  The corpses lay in full view to carrion eaters and any passers-by that might have had occasion to look out at the great lake throughout the remainder of the winter. The arctic winds blew constantly across the lake ensuring that no thawing would occur until the advent of Spring. Admiral Alexander Kolchak—now having the title of “Supreme Leader and Commander-in-Chief of All Russian Land and Sea Forces,” and his remaining White Army, reinforced by Czechoslovak Legions, passed through the area to keep ahead of the Reds and to find safe areas to mount ambushes.

  Adm. Kolchak ordered General lieutenant Prince Boris Yusupov to organize a graves registry unit to provide Christian burials for their slain comrades. Unfortunately for that endeavor, they were too late. As the hardened—but nonetheless horrified—soldiers watched in dreadful awe, the Spring thaw came early and swiftly. A great fissure opened up across the middle of the lake; and corpses, ammunition boxes, guns, swords, possessions of the men, their wives, and the camp followers slid silently into the open maw and disappeared to the bottom of the nearly one-mile deep lake. Boris had seen too much to be sad, but he did see the body of a woman who somehow—in his overactive imagination—reminded him of his long-ago wife as it was lost to the deep.

  The army left no marker and made no record. The identities and histories of the dead were lost with their bodies.

  Admiral Kolchak and his senior staff–including Prince Boris–were captured and executed by firing squad and dumped into an obscure river in January, 1920—the exact whereabouts unmarked and lost to history. Boris’s two sons died in pointless battles somewhere in Far Eastern Russia that same year and were buried in unmarked mass graves. Since victors write the history, nothing more is known of the once vibrant people who molder in obscurity.

  In March of 1921, after a lengthy period of being unable to communicate with Alexandra or to find out definitively whether or not she was alive, Kyle Dewit Herman Bradshaw filed for a declaration of death in the case of his wife–Alexandra Bradshaw–in the State Court of Victoria, Australia in order to obtain access to his wife’s presumably very valuable estate. For reasons unknown to later generations, after a protracted legal effort by Mr. Bradshaw, probate was denied in 1931. Bradshaw died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1934.

  There is no record of any of the issue of Kyle and Alexandra Bradshaw ever coming into any fortune—or any money at all, for that matter. Perhaps the records are inadequate; perhaps the three offspring made other decisions. There is no information. Searches by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of banking records in Russia, Australasia, and Europe were fruitless; and they lost interest in obtaining more facts once the well ran dry. From their interest, a rather odd thing occurred. Mormons are fond of forming “empty-nester” clubs. Several of the former missionaries who worked on the Victoria Archives Project told a historical fiction writer friend about their quest and asked him to produce a story about the “mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov Bradshaw. He agreed.

  Alexandra lived. She apparently became wealthy; but beyond that, who knows? And, maybe, it is better left alone to let her rest in peace. She remains the “Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov” of life and fiction.

  Konets {Russian}

  Jiéshù {Mandarin}

  Time to Shoot Through {Strine}

  The End {English}