Kolchak's Gold (10 page)

“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“I believe we were the first company of foot to be withdrawn from the lines and sent across the river to the city.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 The men who replaced us in the trenches had been withdrawn from other line companies; we were spreading the line thinner and thinner, you see, trying to cover the withdrawals.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.

It was not easy. That it was done at all is flabbergasting. Kolchak's officers had to threaten to shoot stationmasters dead on the spot before they could get the seven trains shunted through. The sidings in every hamlet became jammed chaotically with refugee and hospital trains that had been pushed off the main line to allow passage for Kolchak and his gold. Nevertheless, traffic jams held them up for days in some places. The confusion was augmented by the Allied Expeditionary Forces which were scrambling for transport ahead of him, so that Kolchak kept being held up by them—mainly by the Czechs, who were passing their own trains down the line ahead of Kolchak's. Meanwhile on the sidings, in the stalled trains, hundreds lay dead—starved or frozen or diseased.

Kolchak had taken a decision to retreat as far as Irkutsk and set up a new capital there. Irkutsk was the midway point along the Siberian Railway—approximately equidistant between Omsk and Vladivostok. It lay at the head of the great inland sea of Lake Baikal on the Mongolian border. Here he would reorganize his forces, he said; he would prepare for a long war. The Reds could not take Irkutsk because if they marched that far they would be at the precarious end of a supply line so easily interdicted that they wouldn't dare try an attack. At the same time the move would put Kolchak that much nearer his own principal base of supply at Vladivostok; and the gold treasury would be dipped into in order to keep the flow of incoming supply alive. Once the Allies saw him stabilize the White government at Irkutsk they would climb back onto the bandwagon; he was confident of that, the Allies hated the Bolsheviks.

But two thousand miles of Siberian winter lay between Omsk and Irkutsk. And Kolchak's trains were making a bare fifteen miles a day.

In the chaos of Kolchak's wake any man who could command a few followers, a machine gun and a handful of rifles was a government to himself. In every town and village there were lawlessness and riots, looting, marauding, fires, massacres.

Through the month of November the temperatures kept dropping until it became so cold that vodka froze solid in its bottles.

It was the coldest Siberian winter in fifty years. By December the thermometer had dropped to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit and Cossacks were found frozen to death in the saddle. Thousands lost limbs and even genitals to frostbite. Corpses froze solid in less than thirty minutes (and for sanitary reasons it was desirable that there be no thaw in the weather). To fall asleep was to freeze to death.

In their initial flight from Omsk or points west these refugees had put on as many clothes as possible, one on top of another, and this saved some of them; the rest stuffed their shirts with moss and hay to ward off frost. Many had rags tied around their feet. The sick died, untended where they fell; cholera and smallpox epidemics raged; thousands of people broke out with the livid red pellets of the spotted fever, typhus.

Along the
trakt
the dead were stripped of their boots and coats. The corpses were heaped in patternless mounds—human bodies treated less carefully than cordwood; but then they were of less value. Everywhere the dying writhed, chrysalis-like, ignored by the hundreds of thousands who went past them in empty-eyed hopelessness. Driven beyond human endurance this mass of doomed souls trudged endlessly through Siberia with their frozen wounds and starving bellies, slipping on the ram-packed dry snow that squeaked under their boots, maggots in their wounds, lice in their clothes and hair. The infinite featureless horizon daunted whatever spirits they had left; their legs shuffled and flopped in a loose unintended mockery of drunken dances.