Kolchak's Gold

Somehow the Revolution tottered into February, then March, then April without falling. That it survived its own blunders and atrocities is far more remarkable than its having survived the attacks of its enemies. Russian industry suffered particularly under the heel of the new soviets. The workers had assumed power but lacked the managerial ability to go with it. They voted themselves shorter hours and 200 percent raises in pay. In the new “communist workers’ paradises” the workers’ soviets made all managerial decisions and this meant that a worker, regardless of his offense, could not be dismissed or degraded, nor a new man hired or promoted, without the approval of the workers’ council. Inevitably the soviets upheld the workers against the administrations. And every time a vote was required, the entire work force of the factory was called out to an assembly, which meant shutting down the plant. Inevitably, the productivity of Russian industry under workers’ control dropped to a pathetic fraction of its former output. Yet somehow the new Red nation stumbled on.

Rumor and appearance were as important as reality to the minds of the people. Slogans were daubed on every available wall in Red-controlled areas. In White areas there were enthusiastic war maps in the shop windows, and photographs of the Czar. Incited by rumor more than dedication, whole platoons—even companies—went over to the opposing side and within hours would find themselves facing their former comrades on the battlefield. Rapidly the Civil War tore families apart. No one trusted anyone; chaos replaced order in vast areas of the countryside. Everyone was forced to pick a side—or be shot for treason.

[Along the endless track of the Trans-Siberian these factors were more disheartening than anywhere else.*]

“The Admiral’s government assigned each village a quota of conscripts or volunteers to serve in his army. If the quota was met voluntarily, eventually the Reds would arrive in the village and when they learned that the village’s men were in the White armies the Reds would raze the village to the ground and massacre the inhabitants. If the quota was not met, on the other hand, White generals would send our Cossacks out on area sweeps to punish those villages which had failed to meet the army’s levy, and the Cossacks would slaughter the entire village.

“These conscription squads and punitive expeditions were far more responsible than the Reds for the rise of partisan bands. Siberia came to be filled with bands of Socialist revolutionaries, monarchists, partisans and ordinary bandits. The Reds were willing to try recruiting them; the White Russians took them all to be Bolsheviks. It was one small difference, but it hardly meant anything.

“You saw these vicious recruiting practices done by both sides equally. The issues of the war were of little importance to most of us, particularly those outside the cities. The Bolshevik insurrection had been almost exclusively urban and the Civil War was always a war between two minorities. Neither side enjoyed any support except what it could command by extortion, threat of force, or benefit of hate and reaction (that is, if the Reds wiped out your village you would probably join the Whites, and vice versa).”

When Kolchak began to look as if he might win after all, many of the Siberian Atamans made belated overtures to him. The warlords wanted to be on the wi

By April 1919 the Whites had everything in their favor and the Allies happily felt that it was only a matter of weeks, a few months at most, before the Red menace was a

Victory was in sight for Aleksandr Kolchak. No one could credit a reversal at this point; the Whites were just too strong.

No one could credit it. But it happened.

7.

THE WHITE RUSSIAN DEBACLE

In April 1919 Kolchak’s lines, spread too thin and supported poorly by supply lines that were too long, staggered to a halt in the Urals.

Now the war went into a state of deadlock which was to the Reds’ advantage. The Whites were scattered across two vast continents without adequate communication and their only means of achieving a juncture of forces was to destroy the Bolshevik center. Until that happened the Whites could not coordinate their efforts and it left the Reds free to deal with each White force in turn—a tactic which Trotsky made splendid use of, rushing from front to front in the armored train that was his headquarters.

“For more than a month I can remember fighting there in that awful frozen muck. We were toe-to-toe in the mountains, neither side giving ground, each attack foundering on the insensate resistance of the enemy’s defenses. Our troops would march wearily to the front, herded by Cossack warders who ran swords through those who moved too reluctantly toward the battle. There were many who froze, or went out of the lines with frostbite and trenchfoot.

“There was no real net change up there until the fourteenth of May. Trotsky’s counterattack. It was sudden and ferocious. We were thrown into complete panic.

“By the middle of June we had lost every foot of ground we’d taken during the past six months.”

[At the same time Wrangel fell back in the south, Denikin couldn’t reinforce him sufficiently to prevent the retreat, and the Kuban fell to the Reds.]

“When the Reds captured our officers they would nail their epaulets to their shoulders with six-centimeter spikes. It was an awful retreat. The Admiral’s slogan, ‘To Moscow!,’ disappeared from the posters and marquees, and I suppose that part of the world which had watched all this began to realize that those posters would never be displayed again.”

[July 1919:] The Reds infiltrated the small high passes of the Urals and swung around behind the Whites to take them from the rear. A sudden thaw had turned the frozen canyons into quagmires but the Red drive continued, and the haphazard White defense was as fatuous in execution as it was in design.

At this point the British ceased their deliveries of aid to Kolchak. They gave him up as a lost cause—which he was, of course, as soon as they gave up supporting him.

Three rivers crossed the paths of the retreating Whites between the mountain battlefields and Kolchak’s capital at Omsk: the Tobol, the Ishim and the Irtysh. Within the next several weeks the White armies would make a stand at each of them.

In military terms the falling back of Kolchak’s regiments could be called a retreat only with some serious abuse of that word. Desertions, disease and death by combat had squandered his front-line forces; Kolchak’s generals presided over a flimsy holding action with an army whose strength had been reduced to fifty thousand men and the only accurate term to describe their brief defense of the Tobol and their panic-stricken rush to get across it is “rout.”

Everything had splintered. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias, was the leader of a “government” that was a mere cohesion of weakness and exhaustion and terror; no longer did it have the slightest hope of survival.

“The officers tried to encourage recruiting by publicizing Red atrocities on shop posters, but it only scared people off. You saw money lose value by the hour—goods were scarce and there was a rush to buy things—portable valuables. People moved through the dark alleys looking for black-market contacts. You saw the deserters crowd past with their sullen faces and muffled starving people huddling in the doorways.