Kolchak's Gold

“Finally the Admiral gave orders to retrench the rear guard—many of them unwilling or unfit to fight—in defensive positions along the Ishim River, some one hundred miles west of Omsk. My brother and I went out with them. Somehow we held, we fought back the Third and Fifth Red armies.

“In the meantime we understood that the Admiral had pumped a little confidence into his people and they had ‘recruited’ enough replacements to start pla

“But before that, we had a respite. There was no overt agreement that I ever heard of, but both sides suspended the fighting for the harvest season. Russia would starve without her crops. The soldiers went home to reap the harvest, and we held the lines with token forces.

“We lay in the trenches for nearly a month above the Ishim, waiting for them, and waiting for the Cossacks to herd our own armies back to us.”

8.

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY AND THE ATAMANS

By mid-1919 the Siberian railway towns had become training camps for Kolchak’s armies. Recruits and conscripts were assembled in them; the market squares were used for drilling and training, the storehouses for billeting them and equipping them with uniforms and arms. As soon as they had received a minimum of training and equipment these troops were thrown right into the lines in the Urals. In the meantime the Czech Legio

Past the Urals the track extends four thousand miles east across the steppes to Vladivostok. In many places the rails dwindle away in both directions in a perfectly straight line as far as a man can see. For many long stretches there is but a single line of tracks; opposing traffic must pull off on sidings and await the passage of a priority train. Part of the line—mostly in the west, from Irkutsk through Omsk—had been double-tracked in substantial sections but was still insufficient for the traffic engendered by modern warfare and the support it required.

The Trans-Siberian had a poor roadbed; the ballast tended to spread and sag, and the tracks with it. Workmen had to be constantly at work with spiking hammers to tighten loose rails against the floating ties. The spring thaw almost always meant the line had to be closed down for more than a month for repairs.

Stopping the transport of an entire continent was merely a matter of blowing up a few yards of track or putting a torch to one of the thousands of small wooden bridges that dotted the line. Guarding the track against such depredations by partisans and bandits was the job of the Czech Legion; repairing the tracks was the job of labor battalions of conscripts—old men, women, adolescents too small or too young to bear rifles. These unfortunates were herded at gunpoint along the length of the Trans-Siberian to work until they dropped, keeping the roadbed in fragile repair.

The long Siberian winters were hell for railroad men. Sometimes the big 2-8-2 snowplow locomotives were not sufficient to clear the track of blizzard falls of drifted snow. Locked switches had to be thawed with pitch fires and torches. To get started from a standing stop each engine was equipped with a sandbox that could be opened to scatter sand under the driving wheels. At all times the engine fireboxes had to be kept alight and the boilers had to be kept in water; if the fire went out the pipes would burst from freezing and if the water ran out the mechanism would melt.

That the railway kept operating as long as it did was nearly miraculous. In the end, inevitably, it was destined to collapse.

“It was a war that divorced men from the restraints of decency. Massacres, tortures, rapes and atrocities were the rule and it soon became tiresome to object to these things on moral grounds because that would be like objecting to the force of gravity. They were simply the conditions of life, and life was the cheapest thing in Russia.

“Nevertheless the depravity of the Siberian Atamans stood out. These Atamans were Tatar Khans with little private armies of rural Cossacks. They were independent bandits, like the Mexican road agents of fifty years ago, but the war in Siberia made great opportunities for them and they became very powerful in their little fiefdoms. In a way they were the inbred dregs of the descendants of the Mongol hordes, the last of the petty heirs to the empire of Genghis Khan. They had been allowed to run wild in Siberia for centuries, beyond the reach of civilization.

“I remember one of them. Ataman [Grigory M.] Semenev [warlord of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks]. He operated west of Lake Baikal, mainly as a bandit but at least he professed to be an anti-Bolshevik bandit and therefore he received support from both the British and the Japanese, who apparently felt he could be useful in helping them get control of Manchuria and eastern Siberia. The Japanese were terribly ambitious out there.

“These Atamans and their Cossacks would loot towns and trains. That was their occupation, looting. They found ready markets for their spoils in places like Harbin and Chita.

“Early on, when the Admiral signed an order that was supposed to force the Atamans off the line, the Japanese informed him very coolly that the warlords were under Imperial Japanese protection. The Allies tried to change the Japanese minds, but that had no effect—it was only the Czech Legio

It was the broneviki that gave the warlords their awful strength. The broneviki—armored trains—were not a Siberian invention but the Atamans had carried their development as machines of destruction to a new extreme. Even the massive locomotives of these menacing juggernauts were encased in 3-centimeter armor plate. The barrack and stable cars for the Cossacks, machine-gun cars with slitted traverse ports, turreted swivel-gun platform cars and armored flatcars for the chain-drive lorries and command cars and motorcycles were armored with incredible thicknesses of steel.

The broneviki could be stopped by derailment and they couldn’t travel faster than about fifteen miles per hour because the roadbeds were uncertain and they were excessively heavy trains. Nevertheless they were the scourge of Asia. When the rumor of an armored train rumbled into a railway town the citizenry would gather up its portables and leave instantly. Those who remained were exposed to the sight of the grinding black behemoth scraping to a ponderous halt with a hissing sigh of brake shoes; gunports slamming open; rifles thrusting out through armored slits; artillery swiveling in its turrets; machine guns ru

Service aboard the broneviki was not unlike penal servitude and not many volunteered for it. Except for the Cossacks most of the troops were impressed forcibly by the warlords and for the least offense were whipped to death. Only the Cossacks served by choice.

“Ideology meant nothing to the Siberian Cossacks. Fighting was their way of life and its object was the opportunity for looting.

“You saw them in their karakul hats, festooned with sabers and ancient Krenk rifles, and they were terrifying to look at. But unlike their western Cossack counterparts in Russia, and the Ukraine, they were nearly useless in modern combat since one or two properly positioned machine guns could cut them to ribbons—they had no tactics to counter that, they were very primitive. The water-cooled machine guns of the Czech Legion held them at bay. Nothing else did—certainly no moral scruple. If any human tribe of our century can be said to be utterly without redemptive qualities—other than horsemanship and physical courage—it is the Siberian Cossacks. Those stanitsa villages where they were raised on the steppes were breeding grounds for every conceivable depravity.