To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  That question about the presence of foreign troops in Siberia became all the more embarrassing as the Kolchak regime disintegrated. Kolchak’s high point was in the spring of 1919, when his three armies had advanced to a maximum of 250 miles. The Whites had taken Perm soon after the coup, but then faced with the vast emptiness that could not be covered in winter, their advance was stalled. In the meantime, however, Kolchak’s supply lines were disintegrating and his support base dwindling. The vast supplies sent to Vladivostok were not reaching him as the Trans-Siberian was all too easy to ambush. Partisans and the Reds, too, were both attacking the line wherever they could. According to Figes, ‘The partisans’ destruction of miles of track and their constant ambushes of trains virtually halted the transportation of vital supplies along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Kolchak’s armies for much of the offensive.’27 Even Kolchak’s supposed allies, the two evil Cossack generals Semyonov and Kalmykov, expended more energy attacking and plundering trains than in furthering the White cause. The trains that did get through unscathed only managed to do so at great cost of bribes, which had to be paid to railway workers and bandits alike. Much of the equipment fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks, prompting Leon Trotsky to display his sense of humour by telegraphing Knox to express his gratitude. According to Graves, ‘One hundred thousand men clothed, armed and equipped by the British had joined the anti-Kolchak forces by December 1919 and the Bolsheviks wired General Knox thanking him for supplying clothing and equipment for the Soviet forces.’28

  Trotsky was, in fact, running the war from an armoured train, the real-life version, of course, of the terrifying Commissar Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago, the book based on Boris Pasternak’s experiences in Siberia. In two and a half years, from the summer of 1918, Trotsky made no fewer than thirty-six trips, totalling precisely 65,660 miles (he was a bit of a trainspotter and kept a detailed record), many of them on the Trans-Siberian, in a well-equipped armoured train that became his headquarters and a rallying point for the Red Army. The train of the Predrevoyensovie – Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council (Trotsky’s title) – was part armoured train, part car carrier and part office, from which Trotsky ran the civil war. Although its contents and make-up changed over time, the train always included ‘a secretariat, a printing press, a telegraph station, a radio station, an electric-power station, a library, a garage and a bath’.29 It was so heavy that it needed two locomotives to haul it and later it was split into two.

  In his carriage Trotsky ‘received those who brought reports, held conferences with local military and civil authorities, studied telegraphic despatches, dictated orders and articles’.30 When the train stopped, Trotsky would then use the motor cars carried on the train, which were heavily protected by machine-gunners, to drive to the front line or to local army barracks. He reported how his visits galvanized local support and boosted morale for several weeks afterwards: ‘The work of the train was all bound up with the building-up of the army, with its education, its administration, and its supply.’31 The train was a mobile support base for units which were scattered, at one point, across sixteen different battle zones. Not only did it carry a good supply of equipment, such as boots, underwear, leather jackets, medicaments, machine guns, field glasses, maps, watches and all sorts of gifts, but also, according to Trotsky, ‘we always had in reserve a few zealous communists to fill in the breaches [and] a hundred or so of good fighting men . . . They all wore leather uniforms, which always make men look heavily imposing.’32

  Trotsky was in constant communication with Moscow through the telegraph wires, sending out demands for supplies and battle orders, and he boasted that ‘We could receive radio messages from the Eiffel Tower, from Nauen [a major German transmission station west of Berlin], and from other stations, thirteen in all, with Moscow, of course, foremost.’33 Thanks to this technically advanced feature, the train received constant news about events in the rest of the world, which were conveyed to the passengers through a train newspaper.

  Kolchak had no such sophisticated back-up. He was ultimately defeated not only by his own incompetence and the strength of the Red Army, but also the sheer logistics of trying to take over such a vast nation backed by just one thin railway line. The Reds had the whole of European Russia behind them. It would have taken a far greater leader, with much more local support, to sweep through Russia; and many before and after him, such as Napoleon and Hitler, similarly failed. The hopes in early 1919 that an all-out White assault from the four points of the compass would triumph over the Reds proved unrealistic and soon began to unravel. As Kolchak met fierce resistance when he headed west, the other White attacks started to disintegrate, hampered by the failure of the various forces to communicate with one another and co-ordinate their efforts. They were riven by fighting factions and politics, since they ranged from left-wing supporters of Kerensky to traditional supporters of absolute monarchy, who sought to avenge the murder of the royal family. By the end of March 1919 Allied forces had been driven out of Ukraine. The following month they started withdrawing from Central Asia and soon the various assaults in Transcaucasia, Baku and Archangelsk petered out. Kolchak was soon left on his own. Nevertheless, the civil war was still raging across Russia and it was not until the autumn that the issue was no longer in doubt. By then Kolchak was already in retreat.

  The whole idea of a White counter-revolution spearheaded from Siberia was to prove utterly unrealistic and delusional, dreamt up by optimistic armchair generals and politicians thousands of miles away from the theatre of war. Numerous promises had been broken. At one point the British had committed themselves to support Kolchak ‘up to any figure necessary’, but dumping lots of expensive equipment in Vladivostok could not make up for the lack of boots on the ground. In truth, the British and the other Allies could never had mustered sufficient numbers from their war-weary forces to mount a serious offensive via Vladivostok. Their soldiers were not only sick of war, but many had left-wing leanings and consequently would have baulked at taking up arms against the Bolsheviks on a mission to overthrow the Revolution. The railway, in any case, was far too vulnerable and long to be used as a supply line to wage war in European Russia. It was, indeed, the lack of men rather than money that was to prove decisive.

  By July the Red Army was heading along the Trans-Siberian, having recaptured Perm and Yekaterinburg. The writing was on the wall. Panic set in at Omsk, where the Whites were regrouping and waves of refugees, fleeing the Reds’ advance, were arriving in droves. Yet all would not have been lost had the Whites been better organized. According to Fleming, ‘The Red Army’s spearheads were weak, over-extended and largely dependent on the railway.’34 However, Kolchak’s forces were in disarray and he was not in a position to take advantage of the Reds’ weakness. Supplies were running out as the Trans-Siberian had stopped functioning westwards. Kolchak decided to flee in a fleet of seven trains, one of which carried the hoard of the tsar’s gold,35 whose worth was variously estimated between £50 million and £80 million, that he had foolishly been sitting on for more than a year despite his government’s shortage of money, which meant that soldiers went unpaid and lacked supplies; even the railway workers had not received their wages, which was to make Kolchak’s escape eastwards more difficult.

  With barely a fight the Reds took over Omsk on 14 November 1919, almost precisely a year after Kolchak’s declaration of becoming Supreme Leader and just a few hours after his retinue had left. The White leaders, more intent on saving their skins than fighting for the cause, had departed hastily and left behind a veritable cornucopia in the city. The Bolsheviks found enough equipment to keep them going for months, including 2,000 machine guns, one million rifles, three million shells, sixteen armoured trains as well as 1,000 American-made armoured trucks. They captured 35,000 troops, including 1,000 officers, and found enough uniforms to clothe 30,000 men, a measure of the White officials’ preference for storing equipment to sell at a profit, rather than distributing it to the troops. />
  While the Trans-Siberian had already seen terrible instances of human suffering and cruelty during the war, those that ensued during the retreat would be far more horrific. The retreat was an ugly, bloody episode that resulted in thousands of deaths and untold human suffering in the face of extreme callousness from the military on all sides. As the line was now double-tracked throughout and there was no traffic heading westwards, the southern rails became the slow line and the northern ones, normally used by Moscow-bound trains, the fast reserved for the likes of Kolchak and his retinue, which included many of the officers’ wives and Kolchak’s mistress, Anna Timireva. In reality ‘fast’ was a misnomer since progress even for those with priority was painfully slow, given the condition of the railway, the war damage and the shortage of coal. On the other track a tragedy was unfolding as thousands of panic-stricken refugees sought to flee from the advancing Reds. The trains moved slowly, if at all, given the lack of fuel, and once steam could no longer be produced, the locomotives became paralysed as pipes froze and snapped in the cold. Pumps at watering stations ran out and passengers had to form human chains to fill the boiler with snow, a laborious and slow process. Food and fuel to keep warm were scarce. Even those with money could not buy supplies as the Omsk paper currency was no longer accepted by the local peasants, who only wanted coins or valuables.

  There were equally terrible scenes on the Trakt, the old, much-neglected post road, which often ran parallel to the railway, on which a stream of bedraggled humanity, both soldiers and civilians, trudged slowly eastwards, on foot or on horseback. They were the poorest of the refugees, peasants with a few scrawny cattle, deserters, orphans and the destitute, who could not afford a rail ticket or whose train had given up the ghost: ‘The travellers on the Trakt looked up at the trains as shipwrecked men on a raft might look up at a passing liner, which they know will not stop to pick them up.’36

  The worst suffering was in the ‘typhus trains’. Once the epidemic broke out it sowed panic along the line. When a hospital train suspected of having typhus victims aboard arrived at a station, ‘the railway authorities did their utmost to pass them through without a halt, in total disregard of the occupants’ need for succour or supplies. Often a whole truckload of human beings, boycotted by their fellow travellers, perished.’37 Corpses were stripped and, becoming quickly frozen stiff, were piled like logs to be left for burial when the soil softened in the spring. Red troops entering Novonikolayevsk (Novosibirsk) found 30,000 dead alone. One estimate suggests that as many as a million people died in the exodus along the Trans-Siberian, the vast majority from typhus.

  While Kolchak managed to travel past these terrible scenes, it did not do him any good It was his failure to get on with the Czechs, who still controlled the Western sections of the line, that proved his undoing. A month into his journey, having reached Mariinsk, a mere 600 miles east of Omsk, Kolchak was instructed by a Czech officer – a mere second lieutenant in the transportation corps but acting on orders from his high command – to direct the Supreme Ruler’s trains on to the slow line. The Czechs, who ensured their own troops had access to the fast line, were becoming unpopular with local people as they headed east, and they wanted to publicly dissociate themselves from the deeply reviled Supreme Ruler. The fact that Kolchak needed seven trains, each so heavy they were hauled by two locomotives, whereas even the tsar had travelled in just one, and Trotsky two, did not help his cause. After stuttering forward at the rate of a few miles a day for a week, Kolchak then really blew it, sending a telegrammed instruction to Semyonov to block the Czech progress towards Vladivostok by blowing up tunnels and bridges in Transbaikalia. Quite apart from the fact that this was effectively a declaration of war on the Czechs, it was a kamikaze-style suggestion, since it would have prevented Kolchak from making any further progress eastwards. Worse, the instruction, though coded, was intercepted by the Czechs.

  After being held up at Nizhneudinsk, 300 miles short of Irkutsk for a couple of weeks, Kolchak’s coach was allowed to proceed eastwards, but gradually it became clear that all the stations were in the hands of partisans; eventually, too, the train drivers were replaced by men wearing red rosettes. It looked ominous for Kolchak, who remained guarded by Czechs, and so it proved. He was taken off the train and driven to Irkutsk, where he was handed over to the Bolsheviks, who had just gained control of the city. After being interrogated for three weeks and providing much fascinating insight for historians, he was supposed to be sent for trial in Moscow, but a brief counter-insurgency by the Whites led to fears that he would be captured. Instead he was hastily executed on the frozen waters of the Angara river and thrown into a hole created precisely for the easy disposal of bodies. His gold hoard fell into the hands of the Reds, too.

  The Allies realized that with the collapse of the Kolchak regime there was nothing to keep them in Siberia. Ironically, though, all except the Japanese left before the Czechs, whom they had supposed to be protecting. The British troops were apparently deeply upset at having to leave behind numerous dogs they had adopted during their stay, but the Americans, clearly more hot-blooded, had paid greater attention to the womenfolk than the local canines, and consequently took with them eighty wives, married en masse by the local American chaplain just before departure. At least the Hampshires on their return to Britain were given sixty-two days’ paid leave to compensate for the awful conditions they had endured. The British left by January, the Americans by April, but together they provided shipping for the Czechs, who numbered around 57,000, to leave by September.

  The Japanese, however, lingered. And lingered. They retained a small area around Vladivostok and later took over the southern half of the island of Sakhalin off the coast. In the south, the main White army, with little foreign support, fought a vain campaign against the Reds, gaining considerable territory at first. It was eventually beaten back 250 miles from Moscow and was finally defeated in Crimea in 1920. The other Allied forces had by then withdrawn, and eastern Siberia remained, therefore, the last part of Russia not directly under the control of what the Bolsheviks now called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Created a couple of months after Kolchak’s death, the republic was conceived by the Bolsheviks as a buffer state between the new communist state and the remaining territory held by the Japanese, creating a breathing space in an area ravaged by the war that would allow it to recover economically; its capital was initially at Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude) and later at Chita. The Far Eastern Republic was not actually run by the Bolsheviks, but rather by the remnants of the old democratic left groups; the area remained unstable, however, because the remaining White forces, concentrated in Vladivostok, still considered anything except right-wing dictatorship unacceptable.

  The fledgling republic had democratic ambitions, voting in a constitution based on the American model in January 1921, but it was a hopeless enterprise. In May there was a White coup, but when Semyonov arrived in Vladivostok to take over as commander-in-chief, the Japanese, who had backed the takeover, finally lost patience with him and sent him away, installing their own puppet leaders instead. Semyonov fled to Europe and then fought alongside the Japanese in the Second World War, but was captured by the Soviets in 1945 and was hanged the following year. His fellow murderous Cossack, Kalmykov, made the mistake in 1921 of fleeing to China, a bad choice given the raids he had carried out on Chinese citizens, and he was quickly killed.

  After the Allies left, the Japanese had remained on the pretext that they needed to protect Japanese residents in the area. This was the result of the Japanese having been victims of the worst attack on any of the Allied forces in March 1920. In Nikolaevsk, at the mouth of the Amur, Yakov Triapitsyn, a particularly violent anarchist vaguely allied to the Reds, massacred 700 Japanese soldiers and residents, as well as up to 6,000 local Russians in revenge for a failed Japanese attack. The massacre became a cause célèbre in Japan and enabled the troops to stay another two years.

  With the Japanese eventually leaving t
he country in the summer of 1922, panic swept the White Russian community. As the Red Army approached, thinly disguised as the army of the Far Eastern Republic, thousands of Russians fled abroad to escape the new regime. These troops retook Vladivostok on 25 October 1922, effectively bringing the Russian Civil War to a close and the Far Eastern Republic was quickly absorbed by Soviet Russia. Japan retained the formerly Russian northern half of Sakhalin Island until 1925, ostensibly as compensation for the massacre at Nikolaevsk. All in all the Japanese lost just under 1,500 men in Siberia, far more than the rest of the Allies put together and more than had been killed in the First World War.

  The civil war had left the Trans-Siberian in a terrible state. The partisans had destroyed more than 800 bridges, and as the various Allied troops departed, the railway had been badly neglected. Fleming, as ever, found the words to describe its fallen state, transformed from a remarkable engineering triumph and source of national pride to a scene of tragedy and despair: ‘Nobody could deny that the Trans-Siberian Railway had a certain greatness, a certain exotic nobility of conception, a touch almost of Jules Verne. Now, less than twenty years after its completion, this main artery of progress, this symbol of Imperial vigour and vision had lost its purpose and its dignity. The proud railway had become a Via Dolorosa, a long narrow stage on which countless tragedies were enacted . . . misery and squalor and cowardice, pain and fear and cold, carrion and excrement.’38