French General, Janin, to review us. Our Captain at that time was a brute called Grigorenkov, a Muscovite. He saluted the reviewing officers with colonial violence. (Once, later on, I remember Grigorenkov actually groveling on his knees to kiss the boots of a superior officer when he was reprimanded. But of course when he returned to the battalion he cursed and kicked the subordinates there, myself included. I suppose that got it out of his system. Cringing and brutalizing are equal parts of the Russian character, I should say. We were always burdened with the kind of vermin who leap from your feet to your throat. Have you read Alexander Werth? He has the audacity to insist the Russians are a fundamentally unaggressive people!)
“I recall that walking along with General Janin, the Admiral could not get in step. It seemed to unnerve them both. I confess I always thought of General Janin as a thoroughly poisonous man, although I did not know him really at all and have no basis for that belief. We were being inspected in barracks and he hurried right along-his flapping greatcoat made the oil lamps flicker. He scowled a great deal and kept rubbing the back of his neck with his swagger stick. As for the Admiral, I was struck by what a small man he was. He had a watchful, alien sort of impassivity-it discouraged one from speculating, from inquiry. Certainly he had none of that, what you call
“Not too far away from me he stopped and asked one of my men a question. I did not hear it, but I heard the reply from the soldier. The Admiral must have asked something about our rations and the soldier had the temerity to complain there was not enough to eat.
“I heard the Admiral’s reply. He said, ‘Hungry dogs bite well.’ It was rather sad really, because I don’t believe he meant that; it was expected of him to say something like that, you see. Our company was in no fit shape at that or any other time for real fighting. The favorite joke around the barracks was that we should invite the enemy in and let them laugh themselves to death.”
“It is late enough in my life that I can admit this now. My brother and I were officers only because we were somewhat educated men, we did not ‘look Jewish,’ and we had falsified our backgrounds and our names. Our village in the Ukraine had been overrun by waves of Germans and Russians and Czechs. We had a great fervor to survive, Maxim and I. It shamed us both, unspeakably, but we took Russian names and pretended to be
“The Whites were as anti-Semitic as the Reds, of course. They were all Russians, weren’t they? The Whites tended to blame Jews for bolshevism. A few Red leaders were Jews, that’s true, but after a while the Whites were convincing themselves that Lenin himself was Jewish-a canard to which I imagine Lenin would have been the first to take offense, since anti-Semitism was no small part of his nature. At any rate the Whites persuaded themselves that all Jews were Bolsheviks, and the terror of pogroms-particularly the massacres by Cossacks-went on and on, on both sides.
“Some of the Admiral’s own people were particularly vile in that respect. You know of course about the rumors that spread after the assassinations of the royal family-that the Czar had been murdered by Jews. Even General Knox believed those rumors, he reported them as fact to London. And at Ekaterinburg some White Cossacks butchered thousands of Jews in reprisal after the Romanovs were killed there. But the Admiral himself was rather indifferent, I think. Certainly he wasn’t visibly anti-Semitic.
“In any case they did not know we were Jews, my brother and I. In those days no one had much documentation and you were taken to be what you claimed to be.
“There were five of us, brothers, in my family. Three had been killed-two by the Germans, the youngest (he was sixteen) by the Bolsheviks. My brother and I, you see, had made a pact to survive. Nothing else mattered.”
After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Germans moved swiftly into the ceded territories. German troops occupied much of the Ukraine and this penetration was the cause of the remarkable odyssey of the Czech Legion.
“I think there were about fifty thousand Czech partisans. They had wanted to free Czechoslovakia from the rule of the Austrian Empire, but they were fighting in the eastern Ukraine when the treaty was signed, and the German occupation cut them off from their homeland.
“They retreated slowly and in good order into the Ural Mountains. For a brief period the Czechs found themselves at war against both Austria and the Bolsheviks; and since they had these enemies in common with the White Russians it was not surprising they joined forces.
“But then there was the Armistice of November eleven, nineteen eighteen, and the Legion was no longer at war with Austria. The Legionnaires were no longer pariahs. They were citizens of a new free state, they had a homeland to which they could go, and they wanted to go to it.
“The Czechs asked for passage home along the Trans-Siberian Railway but the White Russians insisted that such aid would have to be paid for. The required payment was in the form of indentured service: the Whites offered rail transport, and the Allies offered to grant diplomatic recognition to the new Czechoslovak free state,
“As a military unit the Czech Legion was probably the best fighting force to do combat on either side in the Russian Civil War. They were as ruthless as Cossacks, as well organized as Germans, as up-to-date as any army in the world. And their motivation for fighting was stronger and more clear-cut than most others’: victory was their ticket home.”
[For a few months the Legion fought spectacularly in front-line battles throughout the western Urals. But then Admiral Kolchak consolidated his command at Omsk.]
“The Admiral distrusted the Czech Legionnaires and their General, Syrovy; they were not Russians, and he felt it would be unwise to rely on an army which at the first opportunity would simply stop fighting and go home. So he withdrew them from the front lines and assigned them to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway, pending their evacuation to Czechoslovakia.”
By the spring of 1919 the Legion had moved east as far as Omsk and had begun to disperse its units along the railway eastward. Some of the Czechs thought of seeking their own way home by way of Vladivostok, but inadvertently the Japanese prevented it by encouraging their Tatar warlords to interfere with railway operations along the easternmost 2,000 miles of track. The Japanese felt Kolchak should be kept weak because otherwise he would challenge their territorial ambitions in the Far East.
It was the depredations of the Atamans that convinced the Czechs that the railway really did need their services. [If the Atamans succeeded in interrupting traffic it meant the remainder of the Legion would never get out of Siberia.] So the 40,000 Legionnaires stayed, most of them unhappy about it, and-with token American assistance-provided the only real defense of thousands of miles of fragile rails.
[By early 1919 the Bolsheviks were in an almost impossible trap. They were surrounded.
[To the south of Moscow, Denikin, with his Cossacks-supported by Allied units of White troops led by British, French and Italian officers and noncommissioned officers-had moved into positions previously occupied by the Germans. On the west stood Yudenitch with his mixed assemblage of White Russians, Poles, Germans and Letts. On the east, in Siberia, the Reds faced swift advances by Kolchak’s big White Army: his Cossacks, his Czech Legionnaires and the small forces of Allied powers. To the far north-Murmansk and Archangel-access to the vital seaports was denied to the Bolsheviks by British, French and American Expeditionary Forces.
[And in the northwest stood Mannerheim at the Finnish border: Smirnova danced at the Petrograd Conservatoire while White Russian guns muttered within earshot. The battle lines were drawn less than twenty miles from the city.
[The area controlled by the Reds had shrunk to a circle around Moscow about seven hundred miles in diameter. It was a fraction of the nation. Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and particularly the Poles, led by their pianist Prime Minister Paderewski, were in open revolt against Lenin’s regime. The Whites now held the lion’s share of the world’s largest nation, an immense territory with a periphery of ten thousand miles. They had
