When Japanese funds dried up Semyonov simply went on raids, robbing banks and Chinese merchants, but mostly the Japanese always seemed ready to replenish his coffers. He used his fleet of nine armoured trains, captured from the tsarist Russian army, to patrol and control a lengthy section of line around his base. These trains were given deliberately awesome but rather puerile names, such as The Merciless, The Terrible and The Destroyer, which was the most formidable, shielded by steel plate and eighteen inches of reinforced concrete and equipped with four mounted cannons and numerous machine guns.
Kalmykov, who based himself further east around Khabarovsk, had become the leader of the Ussuri Cossacks after murdering the legitimate heir to that position. Graves was even harsher in his estimate of Kalmykov than of Semyonov: ‘He was the worst scoundrel I ever saw or heard of . . . Kalmykov murdered with his own hands, where Semyonov ordered others to kill, and therein lies the difference between Kalmykov and Semyonov.’13 He terrorized the local population and held up trains almost at will.
The Americans hated the murderous Cossacks, not least because they could do nothing to lessen their barbarity. The dislike was mutual. Kalmykov took to throwing dead horses from his trains at American encampments in the vain expectation they would stay away because of the stench. The Americans were prevented from launching attacks on the Cossacks by their terms of engagement, which were supposed to be simply to protect the Czechs and the Vladivostok booty. Consequently, they suffered these indignities without retaliation. Moreover, when the Americans tried to persuade the Japanese to clamp down on the two Cossack generals, they were told that this was out of the question as it would be interfering in Russian affairs. In his memoirs, Graves was unequivocal that supporting the Cossack generals had been a massive mistake: ‘It should be remembered that Semyonov and Kalmykov were brigands and murderers. They had no character which would deter them from committing any kind of offence.’ The two men’s main activity was to disrupt the railway, which their sponsors, the Japanese, were supposed to protect: ‘Within their areas of operation, Semyonov in the Trans-Baikal and Kalmykov around Khabarovsk, these two men routinely interrupted traffic on the railway, harassed Allied railway engineers, held up trains, hijacked weapon shipments and other valuable goods destined for the Omsk government [the Whites’ unified headquarters], and pursued brutal anti-partisan activities against local populations, even where no partisan forces were present.’14
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the cruel and murderous activities of these two renegade commanders, who had the support of the eventual leader of the Whites, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. (A measure of the bloodthirstiness of the Whites is revealed by the experience of my father, Boris Kougoulsky. A former army officer who deserted and fled to Odessa after the Revolution, he visited White headquarters in Ekaterinadar (now Krasnodar) in 1918 as a potential recruit, but was deterred when he was shown men hanging from every telegraph pole along the road, some of whom had their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths. His old commander, Colonel Livitsky, who had invited him there for a week told him: ‘They are all Communists, they tried to take over one of our ships and we stopped them.’ My father, who hated the Bolsheviks with a passion to the end of his days, nevertheless was disgusted at these men’s treatment and found himself being moved by the courage of the remaining prisoners who cussed loudly at their executioners, but showed no sign of fear, despite knowing their imminent fate. He refused to sign up, returning to Odessa, fortunately for me, and later fled to Marseilles and Paris.) Indeed, this sort of behaviour was also noted by Graves, who wrote: ‘The general belief is that a mere statement that a man is a Bolshevik is enough to cause him to disappear.’15
Semyonov, who boasted that he could not sleep at night if he had not killed someone that day, set up a series of killing stations where his enemies were taken daily for execution and on one day in August 1919 a trainload of 350 prisoners were machine-gunned at one of these stations. At the end of the war, US Army Intelligence estimated that Semyonov was responsible for 30,000 executions in that year alone. Kalmykov was less prolific, but even less discriminating. He is reckoned to have killed at least 1,500 people without trial, and, most notoriously, he murdered two members of the Swedish Red Cross and stole their aid money. According to one historian, Kalmykov ‘boasted that killing never became monotonous to him because he varied his execution methods’16.
These two were the worst, but not the only, White war criminals. General Boris Annenkov, for example, who led a group known as the Semipalatinsk Cossacks, massacred 2,200 Jews in a pogrom in Yekaterinburg in July 1919. The Cossacks, of course, claimed that they were merely responding to similar massacres in the Red Terror, but that hardly justifies their action. Kolchak was directly implicated in his own reign of terror. Desperate to enlist as many local Siberian peasants as possible, his officers went to villages to pressgang any men of the right age. If they hid, the local older men were tortured and killed: ‘Some were beaten so badly that their blood splattered on the walls. Others had their arms broken and their teeth knocked out . . . some were partially hanged and then let down . . . After being tortured in this fashion, the old men in these villages were then shot to death, generally feet first and then up along the rest of the body. Sometimes six or more bullets were used to kill one victim.’17 Sergei Rosanov, Kolchak’s commander in the Far East, instructed his men to kill every tenth person in a village whose inhabitants refused to reveal the location of partisan leaders. Rosanov later went on a killing spree in Vladivostok, murdering at least 500 people in the dying days of the Kolchak regime. As Fleming elegantly sums up the various massacres and outrages on both sides, ‘All one can say is that the pot was black, and so was the kettle.’18 Indeed, the Allied support for these war criminals would prove to be counter-productive. General Graves felt that local people realized that it was the presence of foreign troops that allowed these murderous Cossacks a free rein and that made them far more sympathetic to the Reds: ‘The acts of these Cossacks and other Kolchak leaders under the protection of foreign troops were the greatest asset to Bolshevism that could have been devised by man.’19
The various Allied forces arrived during the summer of 1918 and created a chaotic situation in Vladivostok, where military men in all kinds of uniform milled around, unclear of their role. The British sent an almost farcically ill-suited group, the Middlesex Regiment,20 led by the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, Colonel John Ward, an active trade unionist, who, interestingly, had been the founder and first general secretary of the wonderfully named Navvies, Bricklayers’ Labourers and General Labourers’ Union. According to Peter Fleming the regiment was ‘composed of men graded B1 (i.e., unfit for active service in a theatre of war) and this imperialist spearhead was affectionately known as the “Hernia Battalion”.’21 Moreover, sent hastily from nearby Hong Kong, they arrived in early August without basic necessary equipment, such as tents or mosquito nets, a serious omission in the Siberian summer, and with black fur coats and hats to use in the winter, not a sensible choice for fighting in the snow – although, of course, they were not supposed to fight, but merely to help the Czechs, whatever that meant.
With the arrival of the Americans in September, responsibility for guarding the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian was divided between the Americans and the Japanese, since the Czechs, supported by various White groups, controlled all the section west of Lake Baikal. By this time the resourceful Czechs had overthrown the local Soviets and the Japanese were well established, having ousted the Communists from their stronghold around Khabarovsk. The Trans-Siberian Railway, therefore, was now entirely in Allied hands. The American forces were concentrated at the Eastern end on the Ussuri Railway, and also given the task of guarding the Suchan coal mines west of Vladivostok, which supplied much of the railway, and the rest of the line remained in Czech hands.
By the time these Allied forces had assembled in Siberia, the situation in Europe had changed radically with the Germans on the run a
nd clearly heading for defeat. Now President Wilson was even less keen on the US troops becoming involved in any military action, which left poor Graves bemused, his dynamited eggshells even more fragile, given he had no clear remit on what precisely he was supposed to be doing; he decided on a policy of non-intervention which at times infuriated the other Allied forces. He disappointed the Japanese, as he adamantly refused to submit to their command, and the relationship between the two main forces was fraught with tension. When the Armistice was announced in November 1918 the situation became even more complicated, as Admiral Kolchak, who had been sponsored by the British, was persuaded to support a coup d’état in Omsk, at the western end of the line, 4,000 miles from Vladivostok. Rather strangely, as conspiracy theorists have subsequently pointed out, the takeover was announced by Kolchak just after the Middlesex battalion and General Alfred Knox, the head of the British Military Mission in Russia, arrived in the town. Knox was a Russia expert who had been the military attaché in Petrograd and a fervent anti-Communist who had previously gone to Tokyo to meet Kolchak and enlist him in the Intervention. Knox had form, too, in terms of political interference, having worked to try to overthrow the Kerensky regime, and he had actively supported various White senior figures. The fact that Kolchak’s action took place a week after the Armistice suggests, too, that there was British involvement in the decision. A second battalion of British troops, the 1st/9th Hampshires,22 arrived in Omsk soon after the coup, as did the advance guard of a Canadian force; however, the rest of what was to have been 5,000 men were never sent by Ottawa because the Canadian government was worried about their discipline, which had deteriorated markedly after the Armistice. That episode, showing that there was no appetite for another war, demonstrates precisely why the Czechs never received the mass support they had desperately sought.
The different attitudes to the Kolchak coup by the various forces brought together to fight the Bolsheviks and maintain the operation of the Trans-Siberian revealed its weakness and instability. While the British welcomed the coup, the American soldiers were largely unhappy about it and Graves noted that the very presence of US troops seemed to signal support for a regime that was autocratic and unpopular among local people. The Czechs were unequivocally opposed to it and became deeply resentful. They disliked Kolchak’s extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic politics, as they were largely sympathetic to the left-wing socialist revolutionaries, who were a mix of democratic socialists and Bolshevik sympathizers rather than communists, and had been their main allies during much of the battle over the Trans-Siberian. The summer months had been the high point of Czech control of the railway, when they had still been optimistic about being relieved by the Allies. Their force of 40,000 men scattered along the line would never be enough to hold on to 4,500 miles of railway in the long term and they had started to lose ground in the weeks running up to the Kolchak coup. As it dawned on the Czechs that no one was coming over the hill to rescue them, they refused to fight the Bolsheviks in Kolchak’s name, and they began preparations to head eastwards and go home. Kolchak dismissed the Czechs as insignificant and was rude to their leaders, foolishly failing to realize that he owed them huge respect for having taken over the Trans-Siberian, and set about raising a big enough army to head for Moscow. He would come to regret his haughty dismissal of the Czechs.
Kolchak, never one for modesty, called himself the Supreme Ruler of All the Russias, and proved to be a totally unsuitable candidate for high political office. One of his contemporaries described him as ‘neurotic, quick to lose his temper, [with] no idea of the hard realities of life . . . no plans of his own, no system, no will; like soft wax from which his advisers and intimates can fashion whatever they like’.23
The Allies may have been reluctant to support the Whites with troops, but they did not shy away from financial and material aid. In the first six months of 1919 Kolchak received enormous support from the Allies. Vladivostok again became a staging post for a remarkable flow of supplies. Figes lists it as ‘one million rifles, 15,000 machine guns, 700 field guns, 800 million rounds of ammunition, and clothing and equipment for half a million men’.24 Enough for a sizeable army, but through incompetence and corruption Kolchak never managed to make proper use of the Allies’ munificence
Kolchak’s worst failing was his knack of alienating much of his potential support. He and his officers strutted about in their epaulettes, expressing haughty contempt for the people around them and exhibiting exactly the same kind of arrogance that had led to the demise of the tsar. Siberia’s history meant it was not fertile ground for the Bolshevik cause, but nor did its people want the kind of oppressive regime that Kolchak seemed to offer. The peasants, in particular, hated him and joined the partisans fighting against the Whites – though not necessarily for the Reds – in droves. The Siberians in general had widely supported the socialist revolutionaries in elections, and they were dismayed by Kolchak’s arrogance and his brand of right-wing politics. They, too, proved to be reluctant recruits. Kolchak’s inability to mobilize the population contrasted with the Reds’ knack of attracting local people to their cause. He also failed to exploit the goodwill of the Allies, stupidly alienating the US forces by pouring out fatuous propaganda against their troops, one pro-Kolchak newspaper suggesting that they were all ‘Bolshevik Jews’, when most, in fact, came from the very goyish state of Illinois.
The harsh truth was that Kolchak was never going to deliver the hoped-for counter-revolution, because he was an incompetent commander leading a disparate group of mostly corrupt, self-interested and arrogant officers. Probably nothing is more revealing than the situation at Omsk, when Kolchak embarked on his main offensive towards Orenburg. He left behind a city in which 2,000 of his ‘staff’ officers spent leisurely days sitting in cafés or shuffling paper in offices to administer an army that at its peak had 100,000 men. Omsk, according to Fleming, ‘was an Augean stables, but it soon became obvious that Kolchak was no Hercules’.25 Corruption was endemic; vendettas flared up between different groups and revenge, in the form of murder and executions, was all too common. Nevertheless, there was still fun to be had: ‘Cafés, casinos and brothels worked around the clock.’ Kolchak also neglected his own men. When Graves travelled to Omsk in the summer of 1919 he came upon a trainload of Kolchak’s sick and wounded troops, perishing in wagons, seemingly abandoned on the line to their fate. ‘Many of these men were too ill to help themselves and there was only one nurse to five or six hundred men. We looked into the first boxcar and found two dead men and a third was dying, while a sick comrade held his head and tried to give him a drink of water.’26 Some of the men had crawled out of the wagons and lay on the ground, exhausted from the effort. Yet a few hundred yards away there was a ‘gay crowd’ of a thousand people enjoying a concert in a park.
The Trans-Siberian itself was in a poor state of repair, given its overuse and neglect during the war. Bridges, depots, water towers and other railway equipment had been wrecked by fighting and sabotage. Tunnels had been damaged, and rolling stock and locomotives had deteriorated due to the lack of routine maintenance. To remedy this, in January 1919 the Allies created a joint committee – the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement – to operate and maintain both the Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railway. The committee, composed of representatives of every nation with troops in Siberia, was well funded by the Allies. The main four countries – the United States, Japan, Britain and France – each contributed $5 million and undertook vast amounts of work to repair war and weather damage. The Technical Board that carried out the work was based at Harbin and headed by an American, John F. Stevens, and the division of responsibility for the sections of the railway was formalized. The Americans were responsible for around 500 miles and the Czechs all of the Western section, while the Japanese retained control of 2,300 miles, and the Chinese looked after the Chinese Eastern Railway with some Japanese oversight. All this suggested that the Allies expected to be in it for the long haul, although their intense
activity raised some big questions: given that the war in the west was over, and the Czechs whom they were supposed to be ‘protecting’ wanted to get back home, especially after the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, granted them statehood, what on earth were all of these occupying troops still doing in Siberia? And why were these foreigners running the railway? The explanation differed between the various parties in the Alliance. The Japanese, who refused to accept the authority of the Board over their military activities, continued to be involved in attacks on the local partisans who supported the Bolsheviks, while the Americans remained steadfastly – painfully even – neutral and argued that guarding the railway was their sole purpose. The Japanese also refused to withdraw from the Chinese Eastern Railway, even though the line was supposed to be the responsibility of the Chinese.
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