Kolchak's gold

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.

In this hard-lying snow the fugitive line moved slowly and without end and the frozen air created a clear separation of sounds, the crunch of frosted boots and the crisp rattle of horse gear, the grind of cartwheels and squeak of frozen leather. Pots clattered and hoofs thudded the packed snow as if wrapped in muffling cloths, but there were no voices-none-and along the hundreds of miles of march a million exhalations of breath hung clouded in the air, freezing quickly and visibly into brittle puffs of mist that shattered and shifted and clouded their clothing like tiny hailstones.

Even among the still-organized units there was no military supply service left. The soldiers requisitioned food at gunpoint. On the trains the passengers burned anything flammable: candles were worth the price of a life-for their heat, not their light.

Every few days the booran-the high wind that came with the Siberian blizzard- whipped across the steppes and blew dry fine powder-snow which could choke a man and blind him. The deep winter slaughtered them by thousands: by hundreds of thousands. They marched obliviously through the snow, sliding on the slippery flesh of corpses underfoot. The trakt was a macabre putrefaction of rubble and derelict human remains.

By mid-December Kolchak’s seven trains had passed down most of the length of the column and he had left some three hundred evacuation trains behind him. Nearly all of them froze, broke down, or were derailed by partisans. Each had to be pried off the tracks so that following trains could proceed.

The dead capsized trains became shelters for refugees who lived in them and burnt all their wood and then moved on again, clinging to passing sledges and carts or walking.

At rare intervals a passing train would toss food to the refugees. But hundreds were trampled to death in the rush to claim it.

The news reached Kolchak that Red cavalry had interdicted the track only a few hundred miles behind him. Trains back there were cut off and the Communists were methodically butchering the passengers, burning the hospital trains with the sick and injured still inside them. Thousands of passengers were clubbed to death because the Reds wanted to save ammunition.

Toward the end of December the Red Army behind them was capturing a dozen trains a day and those who could escape the trains took to the mountains south of the railway to avoid capture. By now less than one tenth of the railway’s rolling stock was usable. Kolchak forced his staff officers out into the gales to gather snow for his engine boilers because the pumps of railway water towers had congealed in the cold. Morphine and all other medical supplies ran out. Axes would not cut frozen trees; farmhouses and barns were chopped down to fuel the Admiral’s locomotives. Each depot was stripped and razed for food and fuel but there was not enough; each of the old convict stations became a graveyard and the unburied dead lay along the tracks in mountains. On December 14 the Reds entered Novonikolayevsk and found in the buildings and streets of the city the corpses of thirty-five thousand men, women and children.* At Taiga they counted more then fifty thousand dead.

Because of the war-still being fought in the Ukraine and elsewhere throughout Russia-the harvest had been minimal (despite the informal harvest-season truce) and in this horrible winter of 1919–1920 millions-literally millions-died of disease, famine and cold. They were not battlefield casualties but nevertheless it was the war that killed them.

In the meantime the retreat stumbled on. Beyond the frozen Ob and Yenisey rivers the terrain began to crumple and heave. It was the boundary of the central Siberian uplands; the Sayan Mountains formed a high barrier along the Mongolian borders and long ridges shouldered out far into the steppes. The Kuznets, Siberia’s rich iron and coal region, was timbered and jagged: Mount Piramida, eleven thousand feet high, loomed just south of the Trans-Siberian tracks.

Somewhere in this district, Aleksandr Kolchak played out his penultimate gamble.