for a few days. When at the end of the month Kappel died of frostbite the last organized White Russian army in Siberia dispersed.
Kolchak was interrogated in Irkutsk by partisan and socialist street leaders. For nearly a month he was beaten, starved and degraded by his captors. General Janin, who had reached safety a little farther down the railway past the Trans-Baikal tunnels, attempted to make a deal with the Red sympathizers in Irkutsk to exchange the Czarist gold reserves for the lives and freedom of the Admiral, the Czechs and the rest of the Allied personnel still in Siberia. Janin, however, did not know where the gold had been hidden-he had been on one of the trains ahead of Kolchak’s-and neither Janin’s emissaries nor the Reds were successful in forcing the Admiral to reveal the location of the treasure.
In their eagerness to capture Kolchak the Reds had ignored many of his top aides and these men rapidly flitted through the city and fled south, joining a growing throng of pedestrian refugees who were making their way around Irkutsk in an attempt to escape across the border into Mongolia.
The Red Army entered Irkutsk early in February aboard trains it had captured from stragglers among the White Russians. The army quickly took over the administration of all affairs in the city. Kolchak was brought before the commissars and sentenced to execution for treason.
Early on the morning of February 7, 1920, bundled in a heavy coat with a muffler wrapped around part of his face, Kolchak stood against a wall, pinned there by the headlights of two armored chain-drive lorries. It was a scene which has become a cliche throughout the world: he was offered a blindfold but refused it; he stared calmly into the gun muzzles, probably unable to see them very well because of the glare in his eyes. Witnesses said he looked relieved, almost grateful. He stood up quite straight and removed the muffler from his face, draping it carefully across his chest: a bedraggled little man trying to cover the nakedness of his failure with his remaining rags of dignified courage.
He was executed by a detail of five men armed with automatic pistols.
Later that day those eighty or ninety of his officers who had been captured with him were brought from their cells. By twos and threes they took the last short walk to the same bullet-chipped wall.
In February 1920 the Whites in Archangel broke up into packs of looting drunken mutineers. Most of the White forces in Murmansk fled into Finland and the rest capitulated to the Reds. By March, Denikin was once more in retreat in the south and the Soviets drove him back out of the Kuban. But millions continued to die in the names of causes that were already foregone conclusions. On November 15, 1920, when the last of Wrangel’s army was evacuated from the Crimea by the French navy, the Civil War officially ended; even then, scattered outbreaks of warfare continued well into the next two years. The famine of 1921, caused by the war, added to the casualty lists. It was not until 1922 that the Red Army finally took control of Siberia, marched into Vladivostok and evicted the Japanese.
In the meantime anarchy prevailed throughout Russia: casual brutalities, pogroms, massacres, speculation and corruption, mass drunkenness, murder for sport, suicides precipitated by disease and lice and despair.
When the White Russians lost, it was total. With savage malevolence the victors impressed upon them the consequences of defeat: the barbarous and vicious bestiality of reprisal, executions, revenge on a horrible scale. In the end the only single crime which distinguished the White Russians from the Red Russians was that they lost.
After Kolchak’s capture the spent remnants of his refugee column dispersed beyond Lake Baikal. Some managed to survive the trek to the Orient; most died, or joined up with bandit armies, or finally gave it up and joined the Reds.
Of the 1,250,000 who had begun the trek from Omsk, approximately 200,000 people survived as far as Irkutsk. Most of these fled Irkutsk ahead of the oncoming Red Army. They fled into a final nightmare: they tried to walk across the ice of Lake Baikal into the sanctuary of Mongolia.
Lake Baikal is a vast inland sea surrounded by craggy mountains 5,000 feet high. The lake is 400 miles long, some 50 miles wide at its center, and it is the deepest lake in the world-6,365 feet at the deepest point.
The refugees did not survive the crossing. A terrible blizzard caught them in the open on the lake. More than 150,000 people lay dead on the ice until summer melted it and they sank to the bottom. They are still there.
Somewhere in the Sayan Heights the gold of the Czars remained hidden. Of those who had helped bury it, and thus knew its location, nearly all had perished: the eighty executed with Kolchak, and the rest frozen to death on the flat windswept ice of Lake Baikal.
“Maxim and I survived it by happenstance. When the partisans took the Admiral off the command coach we remained with the train until nightfall. January the fifteenth, that was. It snowed early in the night. We walked down the roadbed in the direction of the lake.
“Someone-partisans or perhaps the Atamans-had blown one or two of the Trans-Baikal tunnels and the railway was blocked, there were no trains going out in either direction. We found a narrow foot-track at first light and made our way up into the hills in search of food. We still carried our sidearms. There was the risk of being set upon by bandit groups; we moved carefully but we kept moving because of the cold.
“Two days I think we walked. We came to a little mountain farm which had been abandoned, but not very long abandoned. It’s strange, I recall we shot some wild animal for food but I can’t remember what sort of animal it was, or which of us bagged it. We took shelter in the farmhouse and demolished half the barn for firewood; we stayed there at least a week, I think, burning clapboards from the barn and shooting game when we could. Some of our strength began to return.
“After the first few days it was as if our minds had begun to thaw out, along with our bodies. We began to think. For the first time in our recent memory we began to conjure with the possibility that we might survive beyond the next few hours. We began to suggest plans.
“All my instincts cried out for one thing: that I put this unspeakable horror behind me, get away from Russia, from Asia, from what I considered to be quite literally Satan’s Hell on earth.
“Different voices spoke to my brother. His guilt was the overriding influence inside him. He felt we were obliged to stay, to suffer-and to acknowledge our Judaism.
“That week in the mountain farm was a different kind of crucible from the one we had just escaped but in its way it was even more affecting. The more we talked, the more each of us became obsessed with his own chosen route to exoneration. For that was what we really sought, you know: an escape from guilt, a means of erasing our sins. I believe now that my brother was far more mature than I. I did not realize it was impossible to escape from yourself; somehow he had made the discovery, but he was unable to persuade me.
“We did not quarrel violently; there was no violence left in either of us. But the gap was not to be bridged, it only grew wider with every hour.
“In the light of what happened years later, I have wondered frequently-which of us was Cain, which Abel.
“We separated there in the mountains above Lake Baikal. It was after the great blizzard. My brother and I embraced and I watched him set off to the north, toward Irkutsk. I know we both wept. I picked up my homemade knapsack and went away to the south. I never saw Maxim again.
“I heard from him, in the years between the wars. We exchanged a few letters-not many. Of course he may have sent more than I received; the Soviet authorities tend to confiscate the letters that Jews write to people outside the Soviet Union. Later on, during the Second War, I came to know what befell him in the Ukraine because I went there from Palestine on a mission for the organization which employed me in Jerusalem. But I never saw my brother; I only learned about him from others who knew him. He had become a leader in the village-a Jewish leader, you know; a respected elder by that time, the nineteen forties. He made every possible sacrifice for the Jews in his town. That was his penance.
“Mine took a different form but I suppose it served the same purposes of the heart. I made my way into Mongolia and went from farm to farm. In the spring I joined up with a Tatar caravan. Curiously now I recall only the beauties of those months-the glorious sunsets, the beauty of the steppes in the springtime when the grass was green and long, and we would travel through miles of crocuses, violets, buttercups. The simoons carried dust across the summer, I recall.
“It was August when I reached Harbin. I took a job there for a while, interpreting for a merchant at meetings with Russians. Then I made my way to the coast of China.
“I was quite a long time at sea. I took jobs on passenger liners-first on coastal runs with a Japanese line, then with one of the small British lines that ran ships out of Hong Kong into the Indian Ocean. I made a few ocean
