Kolchak's Gold

“I suppose it wasn’t later than half-past two or three o’clock but there was an early-gathering winter gloom and one had the impression the Admiral was in a hurry to get back across the river before dark. We all stood around in our long winter coats and listened to him talk. He made very little effort to be civil. He lambasted his generals, none of whom was present—he blamed the losses on them, he said now it was up to us in the lines to hold out as long as we could. He had already ordered the civilian populace to flee the city but it was much too late for most of that, there wasn’t any transport for them because the Admiral had requisitioned every horse and of course every train.

“He asked our battalion commander how many able-bodied we had in the lines. We had I think a shade more than four hundred. Then the Admiral smiled and asked, ‘And how many of them are on our side?’ Some of us laughed; the battalion commander only said, ‘I hope most of them, sir.’ He was rather gallant, our commander—an old-line Czarist professional soldier. He was killed the next day.

“The Admiral said it was likely to freeze hard within twenty-four hours but it was going to take several days to evacuate Omsk. He confessed he had been urged by some of the bureaucrats to negotiate for a cease-fire with the Bolsheviks, to spare the city from destruction. Then he said—I remember the words—he said, ‘A decision must be made.’ He said it to the face of our lowly battalion commander as if he were putting the decision up to him.

“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 thi

“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.