Kolchak's Gold

“On the morning of November fourteenth—one does not forget such a date—we were under almost continuous artillery bombardment from the far bank of the river. Somewhere General Kappel had recruited a number of Cossack squadrons and you saw them galloping across the snow toward the river on their wiry Siberian horses. I imagine they must have been wiped out within twelve hours.

“General Kappel had withdrawn all the Czech soldiers from the yards and the Admiral was looking for a trustworthy small unit to perform a special service. I suppose ours was one of the few groups of soldiers that remained together that morning—it was mainly because my brother and I had developed somewhat ruthless means of insuring that our men did not starve. There was a slight esprit de corps left among our remaining men and we did stay together much longer than other units. One can take no pride in that, in view of the cost to our integrity. At any rate one of the Admiral’s aides chanced upon us in the throng and my brother and I were ordered to report to the Admiral at once.

“He was on the observation vestibule of his train in company with his mistress, Madame Timireva. She was a striking woman, full-bosomed and dark-haired. She had kind eyes.

“The Admiral must have been out among his followers all night. A great deal of heavy snow was matted in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t shaved.

“I don’t think he recognized us as men he had ever met before. We saluted and I told him an officer had told us to report to him—we had twenty-five soldiers still at our command.

“The Admiral pointed out a train adjacent to his own, on the next siding. It was one of those armored trains, not a bronevik but a train with armor-plated goods wagons. He told us the contents were of great importance and our unit was to guard it with our lives. We would be provided with machine guns and food; all we had to do was get aboard that train and never leave it.

“Of course it was the national treasury. The gold train, the Czar’s reserves. Maxim and I were placed in command of it. At all times we were to place our train immediately behind the Admiral’s.

“The Red artillery was shooting in greater volume all the time, but it was still only pot-luck fire—they hadn’t got spotters across to our side of the river yet, General Kappel had prevented them crossing. But everyone could see it was a matter of hours at most. It was just past noon, I think, when our trains moved out. We were among the last trains there, and of course the last to leave Omsk.”

The Fifth Red Army entered the ruins of Omsk on November 14, 1919—the same day Kolchak left.

11.

INFERNO

The trakt was the old overland trail that travelers had used for centuries. In most places it ran alongside the rails of the Trans-Siberian.

Down this road the refugees poured in terror with their valises and parcels, in what is perhaps history’s most bizarre and massive single-line retreat: at least 1,250,000 men, women and children fled east from Omsk that November:* east into thousands of Siberian miles, their destination unclear even to themselves.

Tatars in their sashes and pantaloons, bearded Jews in worn-out black coats, foreign soldiers in puttees, Orthodox priests in their robes, deserters in assorted uniforms, Russian aristocrats in shredded finery, Chinese with their hands muffed inside the sleeves of their quilted jackets, women in mud-caked heavy skirts, kulaks in farmer corduroys, Cossacks in long heavy coats, children in rags.…

There was a thaw on November 18–19 and along the trakt the huge ungainly peasant carts mired down to their hubs and blocked the road every few hundred meters. The tide broke, swirled around them, came together again like water in a flash flood. People lay jammed on the roofs of railroad cars; people competed savagely for scraps of food and fodder.

Kolchak’s seven trains had been almost the last to leave Omsk but once out of the city Kolchak felt no compulsion to continue acting as rearguard for the avalanche of refugees he had triggered. He began to make remarks to his staff officers that the one million pounds of gold bullion aboard the twenty-eight armored goods wagons of the treasury train were a “sacred trust” and must be safeguarded at all costs because without these funds there would be no hope for a rebirth of the White movement. With this rationale as his justification he ordered the tracks cleared ahead of him so that his trains could pass through to the front of the line of march.

It was not easy. That it was done at all is flabbergasting. Kolchak’s officers had to threaten to shoot stationmasters dead on the spot before they could get the seven trains shunted through. The sidings in every hamlet became jammed chaotically with refugee and hospital trains that had been pushed off the main line to allow passage for Kolchak and his gold. Nevertheless, traffic jams held them up for days in some places. The confusion was augmented by the Allied Expeditionary Forces which were scrambling for transport ahead of him, so that Kolchak kept being held up by them—mainly by the Czechs, who were passing their own trains down the line ahead of Kolchak’s. Meanwhile on the sidings, in the stalled trains, hundreds lay dead—starved or frozen or diseased.

Kolchak had taken a decision to retreat as far as Irkutsk and set up a new capital there. Irkutsk was the midway point along the Siberian Railway—approximately equidistant between Omsk and Vladivostok. It lay at the head of the great inland sea of Lake Baikal on the Mongolian border. Here he would reorganize his forces, he said; he would prepare for a long war. The Reds could not take Irkutsk because if they marched that far they would be at the precarious end of a supply line so easily interdicted that they wouldn’t dare try an attack. At the same time the move would put Kolchak that much nearer his own principal base of supply at Vladivostok; and the gold treasury would be dipped into in order to keep the flow of incoming supply alive. Once the Allies saw him stabilize the White government at Irkutsk they would climb back onto the bandwagon; he was confident of that, the Allies hated the Bolsheviks.

But two thousand miles of Siberian winter lay between Omsk and Irkutsk. And Kolchak’s trains were making a bare fifteen miles a day.

In the chaos of Kolchak’s wake any man who could command a few followers, a machine gun and a handful of rifles was a government to himself. In every town and village there were lawlessness and riots, looting, marauding, fires, massacres.

Through the month of November the temperatures kept dropping until it became so cold that vodka froze solid in its bottles.

It was the coldest Siberian winter in fifty years. By December the thermometer had dropped to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit and Cossacks were found frozen to death in the saddle. Thousands lost limbs and even genitals to frostbite. Corpses froze solid in less than thirty minutes (and for sanitary reasons it was desirable that there be no thaw in the weather). To fall asleep was to freeze to death.

In their initial flight from Omsk or points west these refugees had put on as many clothes as possible, one on top of another, and this saved some of them; the rest stuffed their shirts with moss and hay to ward off frost. Many had rags tied around their feet. The sick died, untended where they fell; cholera and smallpox epidemics raged; thousands of people broke out with the livid red pellets of the spotted fever, typhus.

Along the trakt the dead were stripped of their boots and coats. The corpses were heaped in patternless mounds—human bodies treated less carefully than cordwood; but then they were of less value. Everywhere the dying writhed, chrysalis-like, ignored by the hundreds of thousands who went past them in empty-eyed hopelessness. Driven beyond human endurance this mass of doomed souls trudged endlessly through Siberia with their frozen wounds and starving bellies, slipping on the ram-packed dry snow that squeaked under their boots, maggots in their wounds, lice in their clothes and hair. The infinite featureless horizon daunted whatever spirits they had left; their legs shuffled and flopped in a loose unintended mockery of drunken dances.