Kolchak's Gold (20 page)

I hadn't meant to get into such detailed explanations of my working methods; I have mentioned this only because it has an important bearing on what was to happen within a matter of weeks.

The Soviets had assigned an Intourist guide to me in Moscow; this guide was relieved of my charge upon my departure for Kiev on February 19. Whether I was watched by agents aboard the internal flight I have no idea. I was picked up by a new Intourist guide in Kiev, a pleasant young man who spoke a fair grade of English. He insisted on practicing it although my Russian was considerably better than his English.

It was not a particularly severe winter in European Russia although I suppose out in Siberia it must have been as miserable as it always is there. A great deal of snow covered the city of Kiev—more than I'd seen in Moscow, oddly—but it wasn't terribly cold and I had four or five sunny days in Kiev.

The War History Archives of the Federal Republic are housed in what used to be a large Byzantine church near the center of the city; I spent my days there and it must have bored my Intourist companion to tears. He never complained; he was well disciplined. As in Moscow, I arrived with several specific requests for documents and a study of these documents led me in turn to others. The people of Kiev are characteristically less formal and hidebound than those of the north and I found I had less difficulty and delay than I'd experienced in the Moscow archives. I was waited on with reasonable efficiency. A Communist Party functionary named Gorokov had to check each individual request of mine against a vast list of document numbers in a bound typed volume he had brought with him from Leningrad; evidently the State had gone to considerable expense in my case and I wasn't sure whether I should be flattered by it or irritated by their caution. In several cases he refused to let me look at documents which could have been of no conceivable harm to Soviet prestige, reputation or security. But apparently the numbered documents listed in Gorokov's book were coded according to their security classifications and Gorokov went religiously by his list.

I found quite a lot of good material in Kiev but very little of it is worth describing here; I have to repeat that my mission was Sebastopol, not gold.

Official policy was to guard Soviet records far more zealously than German ones. The Russians had captured trainloads of Nazi documents just as the Western Allies had; but the Soviets classified very few of their captured German documents—only those that had some bearing on the Hitler-Stalin pact, on political matters, and on events and people whose existence has been erased from the official version of history by the revisionists. Both in Kiev and in Sebastopol I actually
saw
far more German records than Russian ones. (Partly this was because their defensively brutal pride compelled the Germans to itemize their atrocities for posterity. The Nazi war records are a staggering exercise in self-incrimination. The Russians are not reluctant to expose this.)

I was given all but
carte blanche
with the Nazi documents. I suspect the same access would be available to any historian, whether Russian or Western, but I was the first Western one to get into those archives at all. My circumstances were unique; that is important.
*

I won't stop to specify the clues I found in Kiev. They were indirect in any case; they mainly told me what I should look for in Sebastopol. There were strong indications of what I might find there and it was exciting to anticipate but I did not hurry my other researches on that account. I stayed in Kiev until I had what I wanted—or as much of it as my
apparatchik
overseer, Gorokov, would permit me to see. It was February 26 before I departed by air for Sebastopol.

I am writing now of events that took place only six or seven weeks ago and they are fresh in my mind. The twenty-sixth was a Monday; I had spent the previous day in my Kiev hotel making separate envelopes for my triple-copy notes, mailing one set and preparing the second set for delivery to the American consulate (where I dropped them off Monday morning on my way to the airport). My young Intourist guide remained in Kiev. I didn't see Gorokov at the airport or on the plane. I arrived in Sebastopol in midafternoon and was met at the OVIR turnstile by a stout man who greeted me with a grin that revealed a chrome-hued tooth, trilby hat lifted high above his head.

He was my new Intourist “assistant”; his name was Timoshenko and I was to get to know him rather well in the next few weeks. His mournful smile showed that he wanted to be liked; he had unkempt grey eyebrows and the distressed air of a shy nervous man who tended to see every little disturbance as a major calamity. He spoke Russian with a strong Georgian accent and his voice had the effect on my ears of a nasty child's fingernails scraping a blackboard. From hairline to toes he was a peasant but he was conceited about his vocabulary; self-educated, I learned—a compulsive reader. He had ploughed his way stubbornly through whole libraries, often understanding only a fraction of what he read. He had the habit of ending every other sentence with
“Da?”
which, in a Russian, is the same as an American's annoying tendency to sprinkle every clause with a “You know?”

When I first met Timoshenko I found him forbidding. He was a large man and he wore an ankle-length black-leather coat with vast lapels into which his round chin was sunk. (It was a dyed German officer's greatcoat, lovingly preserved ever since the war.) In his coat and his round hat he looked like one of those Grade-B thugs in spy movies who devote their scenes to bouncing the Good Guys off walls. I soon learned better; he was anything but intimidating. There was an ingratiating likability to him, his eagerness to be friendly, his enthusiasms for scenery and history (his parochial version of it) and books. Of course he knew I was a writer; it made him both diffident and fawning at first. After only a few hours he had become confident of me and was not deterred from digging an elbow into my ribs to make a sly point about a passing girl.

On my own home ground I wouldn't have given him a second glance; I'd have thought him a boor. But here, in spite of my international and somewhat cosmopolitan background, I felt isolated and faintly fearful: I was in a place that was not only foreign but vaguely threatening. Timoshenko's cheerful open offer of friendship—especially after the cool courtesy of my previous Intourist guides—was a welcome human contact. I clutched at it gratefully. In a very short time I became fond of Timoshenko. I hope my recent actions will not have discredited him with the organization in which he is an indentured servant; nothing that has happened was Timoshenko's fault.

Sebastopol is a modern city, a phoenix upon the ashes of its total destruction in the war. It has a nearly Scandinavian flavor; it is no longer the city my mother lived in. I arrived in a grey drizzle but a warm breeze tousled the air, coming in off the Black Sea, and there were no traces of snow; the climate there is quite temperate. Timoshenko had a car assigned to him for use in chauffeuring me around—a squat ugly Volga sedan—and he drove me around the jaws of the harbor, pointing out sights. I made it clear I was more interested in what had stood there twenty-five years ago than in the modern egg-crate structures which stood there now; but Timoshenko wasn't much help in that respect since he had not lived in Sebastopol before or during the war. His knowledge of local history was limited to gossip, salacious ribaldry and his memorized guidebook spiel. At one point he gave me a ten-minute lecture on the climactic battle at the Russian strong-point of the Grand Redan.
*

My visa allowed me five weeks in Sebastopol. I had hoped for more time but I was fortunate to get that much. Timoshenko settled me in a small modern hostelry not far from the embankment. My room was on the ground floor and my door was within full view of the registry desk where a formidable woman—or several identically formidable women in shifts—kept a vigilant and rather forbidding watch on my comings and goings. Undoubtedly this particular room had been assigned to me for that reason. There was no way to leave it undetected; the window gave access to an air shaft. There was a view only of a cinderblock wall six feet away. It was a depressing habitation, too reminiscent of a prison; but I had very little time to brood about that and none to complain. The room itself was comfortable enough—square, stark, unrelieved by any decorations other than the colorful eiderdown on the bed; but they had provided me with a writing desk and lamp, a sufficient wardrobe and even an attached bathroom. By Crimean standards it was a luxury accommodation.

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.