Kolchak's Gold (13 page)

“After the first few days it was as if our minds had begun to thaw out, along with our bodies. We began to think. For the first time in our recent memory we began to conjure with the possibility that we might survive beyond the next few hours. We began to suggest plans.

“All my instincts cried out for one thing: that I put this unspeakable horror behind me, get away from Russia, from Asia, from what I considered to be quite literally Satan's Hell on earth.

“Different voices spoke to my brother. His guilt was the overriding influence inside him. He felt we were obliged to stay, to suffer—and to acknowledge our Judaism.

“That week in the mountain farm was a different kind of crucible from the one we had just escaped but in its way it was even more affecting. The more we talked, the more each of us became obsessed with his own chosen route to exoneration. For that was what we really sought, you know: an escape from guilt, a means of erasing our sins. I believe now that my brother was far more mature than I. I did not realize it was impossible to escape from yourself; somehow he had made the discovery, but he was unable to persuade me.

“We did not quarrel violently; there was no violence left in either of us. But the gap was not to be bridged, it only grew wider with every hour.

“In the light of what happened years later, I have wondered frequently—which of us was Cain, which Abel.

“We separated there in the mountains above Lake Baikal. It was after the great blizzard. My brother and I embraced and I watched him set off to the north, toward Irkutsk. I know we both wept. I picked up my homemade knapsack and went away to the south. I never saw Maxim again.

“I heard from him, in the years between the wars. We exchanged a few letters—not many. Of course he may have sent more than I received; the Soviet authorities tend to confiscate the letters that Jews write to people outside the Soviet Union. Later on, during the Second War, I came to know what befell him in the Ukraine because I went there from Palestine on a mission for the organization which employed me in Jerusalem. But I never saw my brother; I only learned about him from others who knew him. He had become a leader in the village—a Jewish leader, you know; a respected elder by that time, the nineteen forties. He made every possible sacrifice for the Jews in his town. That was his penance.

“Mine took a different form but I suppose it served the same purposes of the heart. I made my way into Mongolia and went from farm to farm. In the spring I joined up with a Tatar caravan. Curiously now I recall only the beauties of those months—the glorious sunsets, the beauty of the steppes in the springtime when the grass was green and long, and we would travel through miles of crocuses, violets, buttercups. The simoons carried dust across the summer, I recall.

“It was August when I reached Harbin. I took a job there for a while, interpreting for a merchant at meetings with Russians. Then I made my way to the coast of China.

“I was quite a long time at sea. I took jobs on passenger liners—first on coastal runs with a Japanese line, then with one of the small British lines that ran ships out of Hong Kong into the Indian Ocean. I made a few ocean crossings to San Francisco. I began to hear about the Zionists and Palestine—the promises the British had made there.

“I visited Palestine first in nineteen twenty-two, I believe it was—we were going up through the Suez to Constantinople on a cruise ship. I was assistant purser. I settled in Jerusalem in nineteen twenty-four; it has been my home ever since.

“As for the gold, it remained buried in that iron mine for more than twenty years before the Nazis came and took it away.”

*
An incomplete manuscript from the New Jersey files of Harris Bristow. For continuity's sake the editors have added, within brackets, summaries of those events which Bristow undoubtedly would have covered had he been able to finish the work. This survey, which runs hardly fifty manuscript pages in length, is not even a “rough draft” in the usual sense; rather, it is a skeleton—an outline for a book, upon which Harris Bristow intended to build tenfold.

As Bristow instructed, much of Haim Tippelskirch's narrative has been included. The Tippelskirch remarks are set off within quotation marks. Other factual material from the Tippelskirch interviews, where it could be confirmed by secondary sources, has been included in the editors' bracketed summaries and in the occasional footnotes.—Ed.

*
One assumes Harris Bristow had plans to expand his summary of pre-twentieth-century Russian history; it has been the editors' decision, however, to add no material not clearly needed for an understanding of the text.—Ed.

†
Russian dead numbered 4,000,000 in 1914–1917. Compare casualties of the Western Allies for the entire war through the end of 1918: Great Britain, 950,000 killed; France, 1,400,000 killed; United States, 115,600 killed (more than half of them by Spanish Influenza).—Ed.

*
Several students of the subject insist there is room to believe the bodies, jewels and blood that were found at Ekaterinburg were planted fakes and that the royal family was spirited away alive by sympathetic conspirators. But no real proof has been offered.
(From Bristow's notes.)

*
The Bolshevik government had moved the national capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918.—Ed.

*
The Russian tendency to infect every organized activity with a terminal case of bureaucracy is not a creation of the Communists; it is a traditional Russian disease and was partly responsible for the lethargic ineffectualness of the White armies.
(From Bristow's notes.)

*
The material in this section is needed for an understanding of the whole. This chapter was to be written after Harris Bristow gathered more details concerning the battles fought at this time. (No military engagements have been fleshed out in the existing manuscript, which was intended as a skeletal working structure by the author. The book, as planned, was to include detailed coverage of all significant individuals and engagements.) The editors have assembled the material in this chapter from Harris Bristow's work notes and, to some extent, have adapted parts of the material rather freely from his earlier book,
The Civil War in Russia:
1918–1921, New York, 1962.—Ed.

*
In Siberia the war was fought solely along the railway. Go a hundred miles to either side of the line of track and you would find relative peace; go two hundred and you would find remarkable disinterest in the war; go three hundred and you could find people who didn't even know there was a war on.
(From Bristow's notes.)

*
Most Siberian river bridges, like those at Omsk and Irkutsk, were floating bridges which were removed from service before the winter freeze-up to prevent their being destroyed by grinding ice movements on the rivers. Temporary sand roadbeds were constructed on the thick ice for winter rail installation. After the spring thaw the bridges were replaced; to do so earlier would have been senseless. The Siberian rivers are very wide: The Irtysh at Omsk is more than a mile wide and during the spring floods can become as wide as ten miles, flooding entire valleys.
(From Bristow's notes.)

*
After the first few months Janin had received instructions from Paris to obey Kolchak's orders, with certain restrictions; he was free, for instance, to pull out at any time. Oddly, however, he remained loyal to the lost cause longer than most Russians did.—Ed.

*
According to most sources there were 750,000 civilians and approximately 500,000 men in uniform, of whom most were deserters from both sides.—Ed.

*
By the following April another thirty thousand had died of typhus in this small city alone.
(From Bristow's notes.)

*
At this time—late December 1919—probably three-fifths of the refugees had died; half a million humans struggled on, with the Reds at their heels.—Ed.

M
y conversations with Haim Tippelskirch were nearly six weeks in duration. He had the rambling tendencies of age, and sometimes the querulousness. But perhaps he was aware of the hungry cells that were consuming his life; he kept repeating to me his desire to get it all said. If he had been a Catholic it would have been his final confession before asking for last rites, I think.

There were several evenings when he hardly touched on the subject of the Civil War—evenings when he talked of pre-war life in the Ukraine, of his village and his family; or of events between the wars, or his fifty years in Palestine, or the Second World War. His mind was remarkably retentive and he had a gifted analytical memory.

Clearly he had resolved to be candid with me from the outset—largely because he trusted Nikki and he saw that she trusted me—but for the first ten days his habits were stronger than his resolve. He had decided he would tell me only what it was good for me to know, and so he censored himself and spoke with an air of rueful formality.

He began at the end, with his memoir of the gold—how, why and where Kolchak had hidden it. The first time he told me the story it was related in impersonal terms, as if he and his brother had been observers there. Yet the subject of the gold was a constant source of excitement to him.

At that time I felt occasional impatience with him; I had less interest in the gold than he had. I'm a historian, not a treasure-hunter. The disposition of the Czar's treasury was a matter of academic interest; I was more concerned with the human truth of the events. Nearly a hundred million people have died in the conflicts of the Russian twentieth century
*
and I had become obsessed with seeking the causes of that serial armageddon. Perhaps it was hazy reasoning to study cruelty in terms of numbers—the Russians had been involved in more bloodshed than any other people on earth but they hadn't systematized it the way the Nazis did, nor did they put to use the technology for destruction which the United States employed on Dresden and Hiroshima and the Indochina villages. But more than any other modern nation, Russia had indulged in an unparalleled and nearly unbroken succession of mass human obliterations—sometimes aggressive but often as purely self-destructive as a rabid animal which, finding nothing else to attack, turns upon itself in a foaming fury and tears itself to bloody pieces.

I wanted to find the roots of that. I had reached a point where I was compelled to go beyond the idea of history-as-source material; history—the human record—was beginning to look like a substance with shape and motive and direction. I never took a Leninist view of History as an Entity to be worshiped and lied for; but as I probed the Russian century I began to take a Freudian view of it: I began to think it might be possible, by analyzing the causes of Russian behavior and gaining an insight into the contemporary Russian psyche, to predict the direction of future events.

This wasn't an intellectual game. It was an earnest pursuit. I arrived at it slowly and in retrospect I'm sure Nikki had a lot to do with it. We talked incessantly: most of it was light and frivolous but there were times when we sat together in the room or the cafés of Tel Aviv and discussed ideas. Ideas had more reality in that setting; you had a sense of living in the center of things, there was none of that blasé insulation against hard truths which you get in the States. Israel lives always under the poised threat of a suspended axe and it heightens the reality of pleasures, the savor of simple things, the intensity of everything. In that atmosphere it is still possible to discuss the ultimate questions of good and evil without feeling ludicrous.