draw us apart. We were very close in age-I was one year his elder-and we had always been as inseparable as twins. Of the two of us he had always been the more sober-minded, he had been a very deliberate and serious child where I tended more toward the pragmatic and expedient. I suppose it’s true he had a more profoundly developed moral sense than I, but the difference had never been very marked-as I’ve said, we had together made our pact to survive however we could. And regardless of all the horrors we experienced, I think we always felt our most unforgivable sin was our denial of our Semitism. From this grew all our other guilts, you see; it was the cause of everything.
“And as our days grew steadily more appalling we began to react differently, as I said. My own defense was to withdraw-I simply went into the kind of catatonic state you sometimes experience when you’ve gone too long without sleep and you see everything as if it were at a distance and without reality. I lost my initiative after a while; I just drifted with things. Fortunately by that time we were under the Admiral’s protection. Otherwise I surely should have died quickly. I had lost most of my will.
“Maxim on the other hand had toughened. This is hard to describe because I don’t mean to suggest he became ruthless or hard. It was a very moral kind of thing with him. It was as if he realized all this was punishment for his great sin, and he had decided to face up to it and accept the challenge because it was his obligation and responsibility. And so he not only endured the hardships, he became a leader among us.
“This change in him flowered visibly at this time when we were clearing the branch railway. For the first time you would see him organizing the entire effort, giving orders to the locomotive driver and all the colonels and majors among us. He was far beneath them in rank but he had this resolve, you know, and all the rest of us had lost our own wills as if a drain plug had been pulled. Maxim did that job alone, really. He carried it all on his shoulders. The rest obeyed him without question.
“One of the staff brigadiers had discovered on a map that there was an abandoned iron-mine shaft along the siding. That was what we were aiming for. When we reached it we went back to the train and spent the next twelve hours bringing the gold wagons along the siding to the point below the mouth of the shaft where they had dumped the ore carts in the old days. From here we had to manhandle the treasure up into the shaft. We did that with winches and block-and-tackle hoists which we powered from the steam locomotives.
“Once the plats had been lifted to the mouth of the tunnel we had to carry the gold deep into the mountain, and Maxim organized a train of horse-drawn ore carts which carried a good deal of it inside. But the horses were in terrible condition and the last of them was spent before we had completed the task. And everyone was dismayed, particularly the Admiral, until Maxim started in to do the animals’ job, putting his shoulder to one of the carts and heaving it up into the tunnel.
“We were all defeatist about this mad scheme. Those mine shafts are all constructed with a slight upgrade going in, you know. They are designed to bring heavy-laden carts
“We weren’t equipped with proper miners’ lamps, of course. Candles kept blowing out and half the time we worked in a frozen darkness or near darkness. The tunnel was perhaps four hundred yards deep and we were packing the treasure into the tributary shafts that sprouted off to either side. Some of them were in a state of collapse and the rest threatened to cave in on us at any time. We didn’t spare the time to shore anything up. There were no materials for that anyhow. The forests were frozen so solid they would turn the blade of an axe, or shatter it. Inside the mine, of course, it was not quite so cold-the earth insulated it quite well. Some of us were reluctant to leave it in spite of the fetid stale air and the claustrophobic fears we all had.
“The Admiral planned to return in the summer for the gold. He kept saying it was vital if the White forces were ever to recapture Russia. I don’t think any of us cared who ruled Russia, by then. It was only Maxim who kept us going.
“Men dropped in their tracks from the labor of moving the treasure up those rails. We had already suffered so much-our constitutions were too far gone, these exertions wiped men out by the scores. I have no idea how many bodies we left up that ravine and around the mouth of the mine. I doubt more than forty of us returned to the main line of the railway after we had secured the gold inside the mine and closed the mine to seal it in. We-one of the brigadiers, that is, an officer who had had some engineering experience-placed a great number of demolition charges inside the tunnel and collapsed a good part of the mountain over it when we left. We were quite some distance down the track when it exploded but I have never heard such an earsplitting noise in my life. My ears rang for days afterward.
“We had been holding up traffic on the line for at least four and a half days. The refugees on foot were beginning to straggle past. We got aboard the Admiral’s train and set off down the railway on, I believe, the last day of the year. We made quite good time for the next two or three days because there was nothing on the track ahead of us. Then we began to come upon trains that had broken down and been abandoned on the track, and we had to jack them up one at a time and push them aside before we could proceed. There was a terrible blizzard on the first of January, I recall, but the generals seemed happy about it because it would obliterate all the signs that we had left along the cleared branch line where we had hidden the Admiral’s treasury.
“On January the second we were ambushed by a band of partisans who had thrown roadblocks across the track. Maxim and I had remaining under our command some eighteen soldiers and since we were the lowest- ranking people on the Admiral’s train we were sent out to do battle with these partisans.
“Mercifully I cannot remember those few hours in much detail. I recall our mission was to drive the partisans back far enough for our people to clear the tracks so that the train could proceed; as soon as the train began to move, that was to be our signal to return to it and get aboard. The Admiral’s remaining Cossacks-there was a small squadron of them, perhaps twenty-five or thirty and their horses-the Cossacks went out with us but they were so exposed on horseback that the partisan machine guns cut them to ribbons.
“Our foot soldiers clung to the ground and we moved from rock to rock trying to push the partisans back. We did manage to gain enough time for the track to be cleared, but I have no real recollection of how we did it. In the end I do know that when Maxim and I ran for the moving train we had only three followers.
“I almost didn’t make it; Maxim had to reach out from the train and pull me on board. I had taken an insignificant wound in the thigh but it had made running difficult.
“As the train picked up speed I was at one of the gunports and I cannot ever forget the sight of a wounded Cossack who was trying to get to his feet in the midst of the carnage where his squadron had been slaughtered by the machine guns. The man was up to his knees in blood. The partisan machine guns were still firing as we pulled away. The Cossack was hit again and screamed soundlessly before he fell.”
[In December 1919 Kiev fell to the Reds. Within a month the Allies lifted their blockade of Bolshevik Russia. They wanted to trade; the war was over as far as they were concerned and they were willing to deal with the victors.
[The war was not in fact over. General Denikin was still putting up strong resistance in Rostov: his Don Cossacks, with Wrangel’s infantry, defeated Budenny’s Red assault along the Don and briefly there was room for hope that the White cause was not dead.]
Early in January the Admiral was still struggling through the terrible Siberian winter en route to Irkutsk where he planned to set up his new capital. But ahead of his arrival, on January 4, revolt broke out in Irkutsk and after several days of vicious streetfighting the Kolchak sympathizers fled the city and abandoned it to the mobs.
Apprised of this fact by Czech dispatch riders, Kolchak stopped three hundred miles west of Irkutsk on January 7 and made his final command decision: he submitted his resignation.
Officially he passed the mantle of Supreme Ruler of All the Russias to General Denikin; Kolchak signed a formal instrument which was then forwarded to Denikin via Vladivostok and took months to reach the Crimea, where Denikin accepted the hollow throne.
There was nowhere to go but Irkutsk and Kolchak proceeded there with the remnants of his staff; the seven trains with which he had started were diminished to two. Behind him with a ragtag miscellany of troops General Kappel held out for a few more weeks in a hopeless rearguard action which only served to delay the advancing Reds
