by Sam Eastland
“Yes …”
“Who are you?” demanded the voice.
“Who are you?” asked Melekov.
“This is Vladimir Leonovich Poskrebyshev. I am calling from the Kremlin with a message for somebody named Melekov. Do you know him?”
“I am him.”
“Well, as of this moment, Comrade Melekov, you are the temporary commandant of the Borodok Labor Camp.”
Melekov felt his heart clench, like a little half-inflated balloon grasped in the hand of an angry child. “Commandant?”
“Temporary Commandant,” Poskrebyshev corrected him. “Although, the way things work, it might be years before Dalstroy finds a replacement.”
“When do I begin?”
“You have already begun! The appointment is effective immediately. Congratulations. Long live the Motherland.”
“Long live-” Melekov began.
But Poskrebyshev had already hung up.
Melekov replaced the phone receiver. Silence had fallen once more upon the room. He placed the chair upright and sat down again at the desk. His desk. Slowly, he laid his hands flat upon the surface. With fingers spread, Melekov stretched out his arms and slid his palms across the wood, as if to anchor himself to the world.
There was a heavy knocking on the door.
Melekov waited for someone to do something and moments passed before he realized that the someone should be him. “Come in!” he shouted.
Gramotin stuck his head into the room. “What are you doing in here?”
“I am the new commandant.”
“The hell you are,” said Gramotin.
Melekov nodded towards the phone. “Go ahead. Call the Kremlin. Ask them.”
Nervously, Gramotin licked his lips. He realized Melekov must be telling the truth, for the simple reason that Melekov lacked the imagination, not to mention the audacity, to conjure a lie of such proportions. “All right,” said Gramotin, “then I suppose you’d better tell me what I’m to do with the body of our former commandant.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the freezer.”
Melekov thought for a second. “Put him in a barrel. Ship him out.”
Gramotin could not help but be impressed. “You cold-blooded bastard,” he said.
Melekov ignored the compliment. “And when you’re finished,” he continued, “you can take the rest of the day off.”
Gramotin nodded respectfully. This might work out after all, he thought.
“What was it like out there?” asked Melekov.
“Out where?”
“In the forest of Krasnagolyana. They say that place is haunted. You were out on your own a long time. Did you see anything?”
“Nothing at all, Commandant.”
A retired middle-school biology teacher was fishing for carp with a bamboo pole off a bridge over the Novokislaevsk River north of Moscow. No sooner had he begun when he snagged his hook on the bottom and had to cut the line. He tied on a new hook and, a few minutes later, snagged that one as well. When the same thing happened a third time, the teacher swore magnificently, threw down the pole, and waded out into the lazy current, determined to retrieve his lost hooks.
As he reached down into the murky water, his fingers swept through the weeds and brushed against the soft pulpiness of rotten wood. It was only when his fingers touched the buttons of a coat that he realized that he had in fact been touching hair and the skin of a decomposing face.
The teacher staggered backwards out of the stream and stood dripping on the bank, wondering what to do next. He knew he ought to call the police and let them see to it, but as a teacher of biology, he was curious to see for himself what he had only read about in books. After looking around to make sure he was alone, he waded back into the water and wrestled the body up onto the bank. Streams of dirty water poured from the dead man’s pockets, sleeves, and trouser legs.
The corpse was that of a man who appeared to have been lying in the water quite some time. His skin had turned a washed-out grayish white and his eyes had seemingly flattened out and sunk back into the skull. He was wearing a heavy black coat with wide lapels.
Crouching over the body, the professor grasped the man’s jaw, opened the mouth, and looked inside. Then he fetched a little stick, got down on his hands and knees, and poked around in the man’s ears. He touched the dead man’s eye and pinched his cheek and flexed all the joints of his fingers.
His curiosity now satisfied, the teacher ran off to find a telephone and call the police, but not before he had retrieved his hooks from where they had snagged in the man’s clothing.
Police identified the man as Vojislav Kornfeld, a known NKVD assassin. His body was taken to a morgue on Lominadze Street, where the doctor on duty found no signs of injury to the body. No trauma. No defensive wounds. No poison detected in his system. Although water was present in his lungs, the absence of lactic acid in his blood seemed to rule out drowning.
The cause of death was listed as “undetermined.”
Further inquiries by the Moscow police yielded no results.
After six weeks, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a vacant lot behind the abandoned Skobelev hotel.
On a bright winter’s morning at the Borodok railhead, a shipment of fifteen tons of lumber from the Valley of Krasnagolyana was loaded onto flatbeds, headed for the west. Included in the shipment were a dozen oil barrels stenciled in bright green letters with the name DALSTROY.
Packed into one of these barrels was former Camp Commandant Klenovkin, hands folded on his chest and knees drawn up to his chin. Jostled by the movement of the train, Klenovkin’s hair waved back and forth like seaweed in the tide of preserving fluid. Sealed in the darkness of that iron womb, the expression on his face was almost peaceful.
One week later, Klenovkin’s barrel arrived at the Center for Medical Studies of Sverdlovsk University, where it was immediately assigned to a newly arrived medical intern for use as a cadaver. Having collected the barrel from the shipping department, the intern loaded it onto a handcart and proudly wheeled it across to the laboratory where he and his classmates would soon begin dissections. He even took the long way around, so that everyone could see. The barrel was heavier than he’d expected. By the time he reached a deserted courtyard on the outskirts of the campus, the intern needed a rest. Propping the handcart against a wall, he lit himself a cigarette and sat down on an empty concrete platform, placed there many years ago for a statue which never arrived.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN SIBERIA
The struggle for domination in Siberia during and after the Russian Revolution is one of the bloodiest and most confusing chapters of military history. At the height of the struggle, more than twenty-four separate governments had been established between the Ural Mountains, which mark the western border of Siberia, and Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. This was not merely a fight between Bolsheviks (Reds) and anti-Bolshevik (White) Russian forces. It also involved troops sent from the United States, Britain, France, and Japan, all of whom saw heavy fighting, in some cases against the very people they had been sent to protect.
Central to this conflict was the role played by the Czechoslovakian Legion, whose extraordinary journey across the entire length of Russia is not only inspiring but almost incredible.
What were Czechs and Slovaks doing in Siberia, thousands of miles from their native country? The answer is that prior to 1919 they didn’t have a country. Instead, Czechs and Slovaks represented only two of dozens of different ethnicities which made up the Habsburg Empire, also sometimes called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since these were the largest and most dominant nationalities.
The Habsburg Empire had been founded back in 1526, and had, for generations, served as a barricade of Christianity against the Muslim countries to the south and east. At the height of its powers in the sixteenth century, the Habsburg Empire controlled a large portion of Europe.
By 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, the empire
was in serious decline. It was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, a member of Habsburg royalty, that would propel the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a conflict which it would not survive. By the time the guns of the Great War ceased firing, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the ties which bound together the many countries of the Habsburgs had been permanently severed, and their empire ceased to exist.
One of the new countries to emerge from this collapse was Czechoslovakia, which existed from 1919 until 1993, when it divided into two separate nations, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
In 1914, although many Czechs and Slovaks wanted independence from Austria-Hungary, the chances of achieving this must have seemed remote. The First World War gave them the chance they had been waiting for. As subjects of Austria-Hungary, they were expected to fight under the banner of the Habsburgs, joining with Germany and Turkey in an alliance which became known as the Central Powers.
Knowing that their only hope of independence was the defeat of the very country for which they were expected to fight, many Czechs and Slovaks chose instead to take up arms against Austria-Hungary. The result of this was the Czechoslovakian Legion, whose soldiers fought alongside not only the Russians but also the French and the Italians.
It is, however, for the exploits of those Czechs and Slovaks fighting among the Russians that the Czechoslovakian Legion is best known.
Although the Russian Tsar Nicholas II did not encourage their independence, many Czech and Slovak soldiers chose to desert from the Austro-Hungarian army in order to fight for the Russians. Another source of manpower came from those Czech and Slovak troops who had been taken prisoner by the Russians and opted to serve in the Russian army. A third group was made up of men who, although they lived within the boundaries of Russia, felt themselves to be ethnically Czech or Slovak.
After the March Revolution of 1917, when the Tsar officially stepped down from power, the interim government of Alexander Kerensky proved to be more sympathetic to the cause of Czechoslovakian independence.
Up until this time, Czechs and Slovaks serving in the Russian army had not been formed into a single fighting force. With Kerensky’s approval, and thanks to the efforts of two men who would go on to become leaders of the Czechoslovakian movement for independence, Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes, the Czechoslovakian Legion was founded in the spring of 1917.
In October of that year, following the Soviet government’s “Decree of Peace,” the legion found itself in a serious predicament. Having taken up arms against the Habsburg Empire, they could not return to their homeland, since the Central Powers had not yet been defeated. To make matters worse, the well-trained, heavily armed Czech Legion was now perceived as a threat by both the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers.
Unwilling to abandon the cause of Czechoslovakian independence, Masaryk suggested that the Czech Legion now be placed under the nominal command of the French army, which was still heavily engaged against Germany, the dominant partner in the Central Powers alliance.
This transfer of command was accomplished in December 1917, but that was by no means the end of difficulties for the legion. The greatest problem was one of geography. How were more than thirty thousand men of the Czechoslovakian Legion supposed to get from Russia to France? The two countries were separated by their archrival, Germany.
It was then that the Czech Legion made the monumental decision to travel not west towards France but east, across the entire length of Russia, to the port of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. From there, they would board ships that would take them to France, halfway round the world, so that they could continue the fight against the Central Powers.
Meanwhile, faced with the threat of renewed attacks, the Bolsheviks signed a peace accord with the Germans, known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in March of 1918. This treaty was both costly and humiliating to the Russians, and gave rise to the independence of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), as well as Finland and Ukraine. Czechs and Slovaks watched these developments with renewed hopes that their own independence might also be close at hand.
At this point, the Bolsheviks were as anxious to be rid of the Czech Legion as the legion was anxious to leave Russia. With permission from Stalin to travel unhindered to Vladivostok, the legion set out on its historic trek. For this, they followed the path of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, not only because it represented the most direct route across the country but also because the legion obtained access to trains.
In spite of Stalin’s permission, as the journey progressed, the legion encountered many difficulties from local governments demanding bribes in order to allow the legion to proceed through their territory. Partly as a result of this, by the time the first Czechoslovakians reached Vladivostok in May of 1918, the legion was spread out over literally thousands of miles between Vladivostok and the city of Penza, far to the west.
This dangerous situation was made even worse by an event which occurred on May 14, 1918, in the city of Chelyabinsk. An eastbound train loaded with Czechoslovakian Legionnaires found itself opposite a train filled with Hungarian troops heading west. These Hungarians were former POWs on their way home, having been released as part of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
To the Hungarians, these Czechoslovakians were nothing more than traitors to the Habsburg Empire. Amid a torrent of verbal abuse hurled between the two trains one Hungarian threw an iron bar at the Czechs, killing a man in the process.
The Czechs, who were not only armed but constituted a much larger force than the Hungarians, responded by attacking the Hungarians’ train and lynching the man who had thrown the iron bar. They then stormed through Chelyabinsk and freed a number of Czechs who were being held prisoner there, having been arrested by the local soviet for taking part in the attack.
The response from Moscow was swift. The diplomatic council representing Czechoslovakians, the Czech National Council, was ordered by Leon Trotsky, then Commissar of Foreign Affairs, to lay down its guns and surrender.
Realizing that this would be tantamount to suicide, the Czechs refused. In spite of Masaryk’s plea for it to remain neutral, the legion renamed itself the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army, vowed to fight through to Vladivostok, and continued with the journey.
Most regional governments were no match for the Czechs and their armored train convoys, but they encountered increasingly fierce resistance at Irkutsk. Farther to the east, Czech trains were involved in heavy fighting around Khabarovsk.
Czechs who had already reached the safety of Vladivostok stood ready to come to the assistance of their comrades, but were confused by contradictory reports about the clashes taking place, in some cases only forty miles away, and by Masaryk’s continued demands that all Czechoslovakians remain neutral.
This confusion was resolved when, on June 28, 1918, the Czechs learned that weapons being sent west by Bolsheviks in Vladivostok were being used against their countrymen. The Czechs immediately overwhelmed the Vladivostok Bolsheviks and, on July 11, headed west to help their friends, using a spur of the Trans-Siberian Railroad which travels through China and is known as the Chinese Eastern Railway.
Caught between Czech troops advancing from both directions was the city of Ekaterinburg. Unknown to the Czech Legion at the time, the Tsar and his family were being held prisoner in Ekaterinburg, in the house of a merchant named Ipatiev.
Fearing that the Czechs would liberate Nicholas II, the order was given to execute the Tsar. The executions were carried out on the night of July 17, 1918. The bodies were then doused with acid and buried in a nearby forest, where they remained hidden for most of the twentieth century. In 1991, they were finally exhumed and identified using DNA from surviving members of the Romanov bloodline, including Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II.
Meanwhile, Czechoslovakian troops under the command of General Gaida succeeded in opening up the Trans-Siberian Railroad all the way from Vladivostok to Kazan, clearing the way for
the remaining Czechoslovakians to reach the safety of the coast.
Elsewhere in the world, the odyssey of the Czechoslovakians had not gone unnoticed. Impressed by their phenomenal accomplishments, the governments of Britain, France, and the United States urged the Czechoslovakians to remain in Russia and continue fighting the Bolsheviks.
All of these countries eventually dispatched expeditionary forces to Russia on what was optimistically referred to as a peacekeeping mission but was, in reality, designed to offer assistance in the event that the Reds could be overthrown by an uprising of anti-Bolshevik soldiers. With troops stationed near Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, as well as in the arctic port of Archangel in the west, the U.S. and British governments failed to agree on whether to remain neutral or to intervene in the Revolution and thereby, if successful, to inspire Russians to continue the war against Germany.
In spite of the urgings of world leaders such as Woodrow Wilson to remain neutral, local Allied commanders promised assistance to the Czechoslovakians. In most cases, this assistance never materialized, although British, French, and American soldiers were drawn into other clashes with the Reds, and with disastrous results.
As the situation among the anti-Bolshevik forces grew more and more confused, the Reds were gathering strength.
On September 10, 1918, troops of the Red Guard, led by Leon Trotsky, launched an all-out attack on the Czechoslovakians. Meanwhile, far to the west, the dream of the Czechoslovakians was coming true at last. On October 28, 1918, with the end of the Great War less than a month away, the nation of Czechoslovakia was established.
The effect on those Czechoslovakians still trapped inside Russia was dramatic. On that same day, disillusioned by Allied promises of help in combating the Bolsheviks, Czechoslovakian soldiers under the command of Colonel Josef Svec mutinied. Despondent over the loss of his command, Svec committed suicide. Other mutinies soon followed. On October 20, the Fourth Czech Division refused an order to attack Red troops. On the 24th, the entire First Regiment of that division revolted against its commander.