Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  On the assumption that my possessions (and especially my notes) were subject to constant search, I was keeping all gold-related jottings on my person; after I began to find more significant clues to the gold story I actually took to slipping them inside the pillowcase at night.

  The gold episode was a completely new discovery, never even hinted at in anything that had ever been published. When a writer comes across such a discovery he lives in professional dread from the moment of discovery to the moment of publication, lest by plagiarism or by pure coincidence someone else should happen to publish it first. I didn’t want the Soviets to know about my investigations into the story of the gold because I didn’t want Pravda or the Soviet Historical Association to publish it ahead of me. Admittedly this was a far-fetched anxiety. I can’t really excuse it except by reasoning that I must have had a subconscious awareness that there was a remote chance I might actually stumble across clues that would reveal the whereabouts of the gold; that such knowledge could be very dangerous to me if the Russians learned I had it; that therefore it was best to drop no hints at all. Whether I actually felt that way I don’t really know; it makes sense retrospectively but that doesn’t prove much. I don’t pretend to understand why I did all the things I did; in the end all I can do is report them as they happened.

  Timoshenko took me to a tourist restaurant for dinner; we were entertained by a troupe of folk dancers. I joined him for a chilled glass of vodka but I demurred when he made it clear enough that he had a drinking contest in mind. I let him get mildly potted by himself. We were surrounded by visitors—mostly vacationing Muscovites, drawn south by the mild winter climate of the Black Sea. I found myself seeking a familiar face in the crowd—Gorokov’s—but I didn’t spot it; I had to assume if I was still under surveillance they must have brought in a new man. (In fact I never saw Gorokov again.)

  I retired to the hotel as early as I could and prepared my notes for the next day’s assault on the Military Archives. My plan was to work solidly for three weeks or so in the museum-library and then devote the rest of my visit to interviews with veterans of the siege. I had posted notices to the city’s two newspapers, through State channels; I hoped the responses would begin to come in before my three weeks’ paperwork was completed. On a job like this you need only make contact with a few veterans—a dozen or so—and they in turn will give you more names and references; it can easily pyramid like a chain letter and once the door has been opened the job is much easier than one might expect. People are delighted to talk about their experiences.

  Timoshenko lived in a flat not far away. He collected me at seven forty-five in the morning and we were on the museum doorstep precisely on the dot of eight. It was a cool sunny morning and I spent it near a window in the reading room with two young women delivering cartons of dusty documents to my table. By half-past eight I had the company of four or five other patrons—sometimes there were students; quite a few old men used the place and after the first couple of days it was obvious the number of readers in the library was a direct function of the weather outside. When it rained the place got crowded.

  Timoshenko did not watch over my shoulder. He would drop me at eight and arrange to pick me up at four when the museum closed; I was on my own for lunch. Although there were cafés in the neighborhood I soon took to bringing a cold lunch and a flask of coffee with me so that I didn’t have to interrupt the precious hours of work.

  From a researcher’s point of view the Military Archives were a treasure of dreams. The Russians had carefully preserved every scrap of paper relating to the siege. Candid snapshots, railway timetables, propaganda leaflets, even restaurant menus with penciled dates on them to show the progression of the siege—with more and more items being scratched off as time went by until there were no more menus. The Germans at the last had taken out an incredible volume of material in the evacuations—that was the material I had already seen in Washington and London—but a great mass of it had been left behind nevertheless. Some of it had been abandoned by fleeing Germans, and other bodies of documents had been captured by the Russians along with the Germans who had them in their possession at the time when the Red onslaught overran and swallowed whole rear-guard regiments.

  I had taken the better part of eighteen months to go through a similar volume of material in the West; I had three weeks to do it here. There were the usual bureaucratic delays—it was a middle-aged woman at the desk, an employee of the museum, who now had a spiral-bound list of document numbers from Moscow in which she had to look up the classification of each request of mine before she could release it to my table or deny me access to it.

  It goes without saying I became very shortly a victim of backaches, headaches and blurred vision. The concentration of work unnerved me and I came to dread that hard wooden chair each morning. With dinner I took three or four straight chilled vodkas. The first few nights Timoshenko took me out on the town after dinner but soon I was too exhausted for that; at any rate I was trying to keep ahead of my notes and sometimes the work in my hotel room kept me up well into the small hours. Once, at three in the morning, I emerged from my room and limped toward the front door to go outside for a breath of air but the stern woman at the desk shook her head mutely at me and I returned chastened to the room; from then on I had to satisfy myself with five minutes’ pacing back and forth around the bed at irregular intervals to keep my bones and muscles from cramping into irrevocable knots.

  Toward the end of the first week I learned I was under surveillance. It took that long because they worked it in relays and I didn’t see the same faces all the time. There were at least three of them, possibly others as well. I can’t say exactly what put me onto them. Perhaps it was the fact that they made a point of not looking at me. Most Russians tended to stare at me out of curiosity. By my clothes and hair, perhaps by my face and carriage, I was obviously a foreigner; they didn’t get many Westerners in Sebastopol and I was studied with great interest by most people. These fellows only shot covert glances at me when they thought I wasn’t looking at them. By the beginning of the second week I knew who they were and I knew at least one of them would always be in the reading room while I was working there.

  After that it took two or three more days before I realized they were not there so much to keep an eye on me—although I’m sure they did keep watch, to make sure I didn’t purloin any records; their main purpose was to find out what I was looking at, or looking for. It was a slipup on the part of one of the girls on the desk which gave that part of it away. I turned in a batch of documents, picked up the new batch and returned to my table; and as I sat down I happened to glance back toward the desk and the girl was handing a man the sheaf of papers I’d just turned in to her. He took them back to his table and went through them quickly, occasionally jotting something in a pocket note pad by his elbow.

  Usually they were more circumspect than that. At no other time did I see the documents turned over to a new reader but on occasion I would glance around the room and see a folder I’d read the same day on the table in front of one of the men whose faces I’d come to recognize.

  It was a bit of a charade; once one of them even smiled at me in a shrugging helpless way as if to say he knew it was silly but what could he do, he had his orders. I don’t imagine there was anything sinister in it; in a way it was a kind of courtesy they were doing me. I was a distinguished guest and it simply wouldn’t do to have some snarling KGB thug wrench the documents out of my hand and go riffling obviously through them to see what I had found. The effect was the same but they were trying to be polite about it. The result was a sort of comic pantomime in which we all knew what was going on but none of us said a word about it. Such are the devices of diplomacy.

  I should have been more good-humored about it but I was engaged in what I thought of as a minor duplicity—I was still doing everything I could to mask my interest in Kolchak’s gold—and the surveillance meant I had to use even more caution in selecting the documents I
wanted to see.

  I did my best to deceive them while still managing to look at all the documents I thought might be relevant to the gold affair. I would sandwich a request for a potentially gold-related document into a multiple request for a whole group of documents, all very similar but the others being of no significance to me or to the gold. Thus if I wanted to look at one of von Geyr’s latest letters on the subject of the gold, I would request an entire folder of von Geyr’s reports. Twice I made a point of smudging thumbprints on documents that had nothing to do with gold.

  Steadily I formed a picture of the events east of Kiev that had been precipitated by the Krausser dispatch in 1942. I put the new facts together with those from the American and British archives; together they confirmed and expanded what Haim Tippelskirch had told me in Tel Aviv. His aged ramblings had been vehemently querulous and I’d been tempted to discount much of what he’d said (partly because even Haim admitted a lot of it was hearsay); but everything I’d learned since then only added proof to his story.

  Details were missing. Some of the evidences were mildly contradictory but that was only to be expected. There was still work to do; but by the end of my second week in Sebastopol I knew how and when the Germans had removed the gold from Kolchak’s iron mine and brought it west across southern Siberia into Russia; I had enough clues to make a shrewd guess at what had happened to it after that, and for the first time I saw that it might be possible to find out exactly how it had disappeared—and where.

  * The Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Volny Sov. Soyuza is the Communist Party’s massive and monumental official history of the war. It was published during the Khrushchev regime and is characterized by a distressing number of bald-faced, self-serving lies and distortions. Still, it is the best basic source on World War II in Russia. Elsewhere in his notes, Bristow indicates he had studied the Istoriya at length, and that part of his purpose in Russia was to confirm from the primary field sources some of the statements he thought suspect in the Istoriya.—Ed.

  * It is obvious that the Soviets regarded Bristow as a test case. This explains why he was kept under such close supervision and surveillance. Spy fiction to the contrary, most visitors to the USSR are not shadowed and tailed twenty-four hours a day. Not even the KGB has that much manpower.—Ed.

  * A battle that took place in 1855 during the Crimean War. Mention “Sebastopol” today to a university history class and it is still that nineteenth-century siege that comes to mind, even though it was insignificant by comparison with that of World War II. It was partly to rectify this imbalance of geo-historical perspective that Bristow was writing his book on the 1942–1943 Crimean campaign and the siege which literally destroyed the city of Sebastopol.—Ed.

  Timoshenko had very kindly offered to make regular visits to the offices of the two Sebastopol newspapers to see if my notices in them had brought in any responses. After my first ten days in the city I had accumulated a little stack of letters—seven or eight, of which about half had come from addresses in the city and the others from outlying villages.

  On Friday evening* Timoshenko drove me to my first meeting and we talked for several hours with a sixty-eight-year-old retired Red Army major who had participated in the final weeks of the decisive Russian counteroffensive that had driven the Germans out of the Crimea. His anecdotes were useful, he had a good wry sense of humor, and he gave me the names and addresses of three fellow veterans in the Sebastopol area. I counted it a well spent evening.

  Saturday we went quickly from one interview to a second to a third; and a telephone call at lunchtime established a fourth meeting for me, after dinner, with one of the retired captains whose name I had obtained only the previous day.

  It was a full day and I gained a good deal of information, particularly from one factory foreman who had driven a tank in the war. He was one of those people who had a fascinating memory for the kind of detail a writer is avid to have.

  I had arranged by telegraph two Sunday meetings with correspondents from nearby towns. Timoshenko collected me very early in the chill morning and we drove out of the city at an hour when it was still necessary to use headlights.

  Timoshenko participated in all those interviews—mostly as a silent observer; now and then he would offer a question and sometimes it was a question that made sense. I’m sure he had orders not to let me out of his sight. But he was a genial companion. So far as I know, he wasn’t armed; and I’m quite certain his masters had not told him to eavesdrop on my interviews for purposes of censoring them. He didn’t have the sensitivity for that—although I suppose it is possible he had some sort of miniature transmitting device or recorder hidden away somewhere in his bulky clothing.

  In any case I wasn’t inhibited by his presence. In those interviews I had no secrets; I’d resolved to play the game by the host country’s rules.

  Anyhow I expected no information on the subject of the gold to come out of these interviews. These people were all Russians; presumably the Russians had known nothing at all about the gold episode or the German attempt to spirit the treasure out of the country.

  My first Sunday interview was something of a washout. He was an old man who ran a dairy farm about fifteen miles from the edge of the city. He had served seven years in the army—most of them as a cook in a regimental field mess. He was proud to be a veteran and, although he didn’t seem overly indoctrinated with Communist notions, he was nevertheless a flag-waver at heart and his rambling reminiscences were all designed to laud the heroism of Russian soldiers and the glory of the motherland. He lacked the anecdotal spirit and a sense of detail; he told me far more than I wanted to know about the operation of a field kitchen; his recounting of his only real battle experiences—emergencies when every warm body available had been pressed into rifle service against German attacks—was so subjective it was useless, and had the unmistakable flavor of habitual repetition and embellishment.

  Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been disappointed. You expect bad interviews and bad interview subjects. You listen to them, you thank them kindly and you go home. Maybe you use one or two lines of the material they gave you. It’s all part of the job and I’d been prepared for a much poorer average than I’d obtained thus far; one dud out of six is much better than usual. But I couldn’t help chafing because my time was so limited and I couldn’t afford to waste it on fruitless trips and courtesies.

  We left as soon as possible but not before the old farmer had insisted on feeding us a hearty lunch heavily lubricated with dark ale. Timoshenko must have consumed at least half a gallon of it and his driving was noticeably less precise when we started down the road toward our second rendezvous. Once he almost ran into a farm cart that was wobbling down the road on enormous solid wooden wheels.

  We only had twenty miles to go but Timoshenko interrupted the journey twice to get out and relieve himself by the side of the road.

  He was in boisterous high spirits but I clung to the handholds inside the car and winced in terror at his misjudgment of curves and his lead-footed recklessness.

  By the mercy of his Slavic gods he delivered us intact into the village of Bykovskiy, not too many miles above Yalta. My appointment was with a man called Vassily Bukov whose letter to me in care of Gazeta Sebastopol identified him as a postal official who had served in wartime as batman and orderly to General Tyulenev, who had commanded the Trans-Caucasus front against the Germans in 1942-1943. I had high hopes for the interview; a general’s batman is as good as a prime minister’s butler for providing the kind of human glimpses of key leaders that can make the difference between a dull story and an exciting one.

  I had made the appointment by telegram and it had been confirmed the same way; I had suggested the time and Bukov’s reply had named the place—his flat in a communal boardinghouse on the square opposite the railway station in Bykovskiy.

  We had no trouble finding the place although when he attempted to park the car Timoshenko bumped right up onto the curb and threw a scare into tw
o small boys who were playing there.

  Bukov had been watching for our arrival. He greeted us at the main entrance—introduced himself, shook hands and led us upstairs to his bed-sitting room. He looked about forty-five but he must have been at least fifty to have served in the army beginning in 1941, as he said he had. A spare man, ascetic features, short grey hair shaped into a widow’s peak. He wore a high-neck sweater and a pair of slacks that seemed much better tailored than most Russian clothes. He would not have been out of place in the same costume on the Riviera: he had the appearance of self-confidence and self-assuredness that you would expect of a tycoon or an aristocrat. My expectations began to drop the moment I set eyes on him. He looked the type who would stick to formal history and refuse to reveal any personal touches about the general whom he had served.

  Bukov waved us to chairs. His room was archaically spacious, a Czarist anachronism of heavy carved moldings and a stone hearth on which a wood fire blazed. The furniture was old, steady, simple; with its row of windows and its high ceiling the room seemed underfurnished. He had no carpet and there was only one table which evidently he used for dining; it was near the back corner where there was a small stove and sink. An old desk with many scars squatted beside the corner window opposite. The panes allowed a good view of the rolling farm country that began immediately behind the boardinghouse.

  The first hour was desultory; the conversation was the ordinary thing—he asked me about myself and my work, he gave a shorthand sort of self-summation (lifelong bachelor, son of a tailor, not much of a reader but a great lover of music—he had a Gramophone and a surprising collection of recordings and his radio looked first-rate and expensive) and he asked me how I was enjoying my visit to the Crimea. The only remarkable thing I noticed was that he did not ask me very many questions about America.