Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  So the assistance was withdrawn, and White Russia collapsed; and in Siberia, in the end, the only surviving beneficiaries were of course the Cossacks.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.

  “Our commander answered in a very calm way. ‘It does no service to put that in the passive voice, Excellency.’

  “And the Admiral drew himself up. I think he had needed that from someone, from anyone. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I must make the decision.’

  “Somewhere inside his rigid exterior I think an emotion had been provoked. Pride—perhaps he had forgotten it up to that moment. He was so accustomed to having officers toady up to him. When he left, he seemed far more resolved.”

  With the Reds a thousand yards from his last defensive trenches, Kolchak tried to negotiate for a cease-fire; when that failed he offered
to surrender.

  But the Reds had victory in their nostrils and refused to accept his surrender. The word came down: “The Reds don’t take prisoners.” The Bolshevik armies meant to destroy the Whites, utterly.

  There was no choice but to run.

  10.

  RETREAT FROM OMSK

  “In the city the local Bolshevik sympathizers grew more daring by the hour. I saw it soon afterward. Dead Czarists lay in street doorways while refugees rushed past carrying their few belongings toward the rumor of an eastbound train.

  “On the night of November ninth the temperature dropped well below freezing. By sunrise it had stopped snowing and the thermometer was still dropping. The river was frozen solid by midnight of the ninth; by noon on the tenth General Dietrichs decided the ice was thick enough to support the weight of our foot soldiers.

  “I believe we were the first company of foot to be withdrawn from the lines and sent across the river to the city. It was no special favor to us.

  “Our company had been decimated, really—of the two hundred we had started with, there were forty of us left. My brother came with me because his own company was nonexistent, it had been absorbed into another unit. I had eleven left in my own platoon.

  “It was snowing lightly when we pulled out of our entrenchments. Enemy soldiers made a confused flitter through the falling snow west of us—they must have been as close to us as two hundred yards. The men who replaced us in the trenches had been withdrawn from other line companies; we were spreading the line thinner and thinner, you see, trying to cover the withdrawals. Most of the firing was rifles and machine guns, there wasn’t much artillery—the visibility wasn’t good enough for the spotters. As we pulled out they were beginning to put mortar into our trenches, though.

  “I think we were guinea pigs. Particularly my brother and I. In spite of the food shortages we were still big strapping men—I must have weighed a good fifteen stone even then. We were sent out, as much as anything else, to test the ice—to make sure it would bear our weight.

  “Because of our fear it seemed to take forever but I suppose it didn’t really take more than half an hour to reach the eastern bank of the river. No one fell through the ice, it was quite solid. We made our way into the city.

  “At some point it stopped snowing, because I recall it was not snowing when we marched into Omsk. The streets stank of battle debris—the Reds had been lobbing seventy-five millimeter across the river for two or three days. Buildings had collapsed. Shells had made ruins of some walls. Here and there you’d see a three-sided room standing open to the street like a stage set, curiously undisturbed with the furniture intact. Trees had been stripped of their branches and the street surfaces were cratered by the artillery. That morning it was accentuated by its silence. There was a kind of slow grey smoke that kept rolling through the streets and it made no sound at all. It stank of cordite and death, you know. There was one interruption I can recall—we came across a soldier who was wasting a lot of ammunition trying to shoot down a portrait of the Czar that hung above a bar in one of the cafés that had been half destroyed.

  “We went along to Government House but we found nothing but smoke hanging in the halls there, so we made our way through the refugee crowds down toward the marshaling yards below the city.

  “I have never seen such a crush of people. We lost half our party in the crowd—most of them chose never to rejoin us. My brother and I were the highest ranking officers left in the group by the time we reached the yards.

  “I forget how we found out what the real situation was. I know there were as many versions as there were mouths. But somehow we learned that the Czechs and General Janin’s home-guard troops had gone ahead down the railway to clear it, and the Admiral with his retinue had commandeered seven trains on which they intended to flee the city.

  “By this time you could hear the Red guns again they had resumed shelling our trenches and the city.

  “There was a train pulling out when we got there. I think some of the Allied missions were on board it. They must have been jammed in at least twenty-five to the compartment. The engine wheels kept screeching on the cold rails—it took a long time to get moving and I think it ran down quite a few refugees who couldn’t get off the tracks.”

  The evacuations were hampered by railroad men who sold seat space at huge prices to the wealthy, some of whom bought entire compartments merely for space enough to carry away their valuable possessions. In South Russia, under similar circumstances, General Wrangel discouraged this profiteering by sending his Cossack Guards into the trains to throw the rich off and smash their harps and commodes and crystal and even pianos, and by hanging the profiteers publicly on the spot. But in Siberia Kolchak took no effective action and the transportation black market continued to flourish right up to the end.

  Crowds bayed in panic in the railroad yards. Kolchak watched the trains depart and his tongue must have been bitter with acid. He stayed, nearly to the last; he was a naval officer and seemed to have some sense of duty to the ship of state that was sinking under him.

  By now the roads leading east out of Omsk were jammed night and day with wagons, carriages, sleighs, sledges, donkeys, camels, oxen, men and women and children. Whole regiments of deserters were among the refugees and there was no hope of reorganizing them to defend the rear. The dead lay a hundred to the mile along the tracks, rotting and contaminating the road. The refugees were like army ants, plundering every farm and peasant house, stripping every vermin-ridden corpse. Kolchak witnessed this macabre ritual of lemming-like flight and. was seen to weep openly.

  “On the morning of November fourteenth—one does not forget such a date—we were under almost continuous artillery bombardment from the far bank of the river. Somewhere General Kappel had recruited a number of Cossack squadrons and you saw them galloping across the snow toward the river on their wiry Siberian horses. I imagine they must have been wiped out within twelve hours.

  “General Kappel had withdrawn all the Czech soldiers from the yards and the Admiral was looking for a trustworthy small unit to perform a special service. I suppose ours was one of the few groups of soldiers that remained together that morning—it was mainly because my brother and I had developed somewhat ruthless means of insuring that our men did not starve. There was a slight esprit de corps left among our remaining men and we did stay together much longer than other units. One can take no pride in that, in view of the cost to our integrity. At any rate one of the Admiral’s aides chanced upon us in the throng and my brother and I were ordered to report to the Admiral at once.

  “He was on the observation vestibule of his train in company with his mistress, Madame Timireva. She was a striking woman, full-bosomed and dark-haired. She had kind eyes.

  “The Admiral must have been out among his followers all night. A great deal of heavy snow was matted in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t shaved.

  “I don’t think he recognized us as men he had ever met before. We saluted and I told him an officer had told us to report to him—we had twenty-five soldiers still at our command.

  “The Admiral pointed out a train adjacent to his own, on the next siding. It was one of those armored trains, not a bronevik but a train with armor-plated goods wagons. He told us the contents were of great importance and our unit was to guard it with our lives. We would be provided with machine guns and food; all we had to do was get aboard that train and never leave it.

  “Of course it was the national treasury. The gold train, the Czar’s reserves. Maxim and I were placed in command of it. At all times we were to place our train immediately behind the Admiral’s.

  “The Red artillery was shooting in greater volume all the time, but it was still only pot-luck fire—they hadn’t got spotters across to our side of the river yet, General Kappel had prevented them crossing. But everyone could see it was a matter of hours at most. It was just past noon, I think, when our trains moved out. We were among the last trains there, and of course the
last to leave Omsk.”

  The Fifth Red Army entered the ruins of Omsk on November 14, 1919—the same day Kolchak left.

  11.

  INFERNO

  The trakt was the old overland trail that travelers had used for centuries. In most places it ran alongside the rails of the Trans-Siberian.

  Down this road the refugees poured in terror with their valises and parcels, in what is perhaps history’s most bizarre and massive single-line retreat: at least 1,250,000 men, women and children fled east from Omsk that November:* east into thousands of Siberian miles, their destination unclear even to themselves.

  Tatars in their sashes and pantaloons, bearded Jews in worn-out black coats, foreign soldiers in puttees, Orthodox priests in their robes, deserters in assorted uniforms, Russian aristocrats in shredded finery, Chinese with their hands muffed inside the sleeves of their quilted jackets, women in mud-caked heavy skirts, kulaks in farmer corduroys, Cossacks in long heavy coats, children in rags.…

  There was a thaw on November 18–19 and along the trakt the huge ungainly peasant carts mired down to their hubs and blocked the road every few hundred meters. The tide broke, swirled around them, came together again like water in a flash flood. People lay jammed on the roofs of railroad cars; people competed savagely for scraps of food and fodder.

  Kolchak’s seven trains had been almost the last to leave Omsk but once out of the city Kolchak felt no compulsion to continue acting as rearguard for the avalanche of refugees he had triggered. He began to make remarks to his staff officers that the one million pounds of gold bullion aboard the twenty-eight armored goods wagons of the treasury train were a “sacred trust” and must be safeguarded at all costs because without these funds there would be no hope for a rebirth of the White movement. With this rationale as his justification he ordered the tracks cleared ahead of him so that his trains could pass through to the front of the line of march.