When he set the cup down he cleared his throat. “I’m surprised Nicole would have told you that.”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean to betray a confidence.”
“It isn’t that. It only means she trusts you-more completely than I have known her to trust anyone in a long time. Nicole is … brilliant in many ways of course, a remarkable woman. But she can be very vulnerable and she knows this. That she chooses to trust you-I hope you will take that as the great compliment it is.”
“I do.”
He studied me before he nodded his head; then he said, “The gold train. Yes, I was with it. Up to the very end.” He went on appraising me, sizing me up; impulse wrestled with caution on his face, and finally won. “It should be told, I suppose.
He reached for his cane: balanced it on the floor between his knees and rested both hands over the curved handle. He leaned forward and nodded toward my recorder and I obeyed, switching it on, testing the levels.
“The treasure was only gold in part. The largest part to be sure. I have never forgotten the count we made. There were five thousand two hundred and thirteen wooden boxes containing gold bars. I believe the value of that bullion was stated at the time as being six hundred and fifty million rubles. In addition there were some sixteen hundred bags that contained securities and other valuables-one hundred million paper Romanovs, nearly four hundred millions in platinum, and what one could call a miscellany of state treasure. This was the entire treasury of Imperial Russia-the Czar’s liquid reserves. The total value at that time was very close to one billion one hundred and fifty million rubles. In your dollars of that time this represented approximately nine hundred and fifty million, but some of the securities would be valueless today of course. The platinum and gold alone, however, would today be worth nearly two billion dollars on the world market.”
He tapped his chest. “I have made an amateur study of the gold market in my retirement. But you do not need to have a sophisticated knowledge of international monetary exchange to understand what this much raw wealth could do to the economy of nations if it were suddenly to appear.”
I said, “Not much likelihood of that, is there?”
His smile this time was edged with irony. “Herr Bristow, do
“Not for an absolute fact, no. The published histories conflict. One suggests the Czech Legion got it, another insists Kolchak handed it over to the Bolsheviks. One of them even says the partisans mined a bridge over the Angara and the whole train went to the bottom of the river. But it seems obvious it ended up in Lenin’s hands. They’ve got those underground vaults in the Urals.…”
“They do, yes, and those vaults contain great quantities of gold. But not the Imperial Treasury.”
I felt the first tingling of excitement. “Then what happened to it?”
“A great many things happened to it, Herr Bristow, but so far as I know, the entire treasure remains intact to this day-hidden.
“I will tell you about it-as much of it as I know.” He settled back now and let the cane lean against the chair; he spoke with self-assured candor and quiet composure.
“On the seventh day of February, nineteen-twenty,” he began, “I did not die.”
KOLEHAK’S WAR
“Westerners prefer to believe [Haim Tippelskirch told Bristow] that the Russian Revolution was decided in a few weeks of October and November nineteen seventeen. They think the Revolution was a simultaneous uprising of workers and peasants who revolted against czarism and the needless slaughter of the World War.
“It isn’t true.
“Czarism was already collapsing when Kerensky came to power in nineteen seventeen. The Bolshevik Revolution was not a triumph of workers and peasants; quite the reverse. It was a high-level coup in which the workers and peasants were betrayed, Marxist ideals were forgotten, and a Bolshevik dictatorship assumed power.
“The Russian proletariat never had a chance. And the nineteen seventeen Revolution was the beginning of a three years’ bloodbath which makes your American Civil War a minor skirmish by comparison. From nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty-one we were engaged in the bloodiest civil war of human history. Twenty-five million human beings died.
The empire of the last Czar of all the Russias was the largest of all nations. It contained one-sixth of the world’s land area and was inhabited by 175 million people who spoke nearly two hundred dialects and languages. Until the mid-nineteenth century* the people of this land were absolute slaves, and the formal abolition of serfdom in 1861 did little to change their lives: they went right on being regarded as vermin and the only important change was that they now had to pay taxes.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, socialist thought swept through the cities. (It had little effect on the vast rural countryside; among the peasants and among their masters an indifference to violence and repression was ingrained.) There were strikes, there were demonstrations and appeals, there was the revolt of sailors and workmen in 1905; but there was no mass movement from
The first three years of the Great War were unspeakable on the Western Front but on the Russian Front they were worse.†
The Czar’s empire was an archaic fiefdom. Its military leadership was a proud and backward officer corps, a thoroughly lazy and corrupt general staff and a multilayered, absurdly parasitic bureaucracy. Its primary fighting strength was Russia’s Cossack horse cavalry; the Czar’s armies simply were not equipped to meet the modern German war machine.
Germans swept into the Russian breadbasket; by the end of 1916 hunger and suffering had infected the towns and cities, where Marxists fueled the common people’s bitter rage with propaganda that insisted the war was a plot by capitalist munitions cartels to slaughter millions for profit.
Revolutionary fury ramified through the cities of Imperial Russia. Rasputin was assassinated on the night of December 30, 1916-a warning of the coming uprising. Finally the awful food shortage in Petrograd brought out the riots of March 1917: and the Czar abdicated on March 18.
“It wasn’t a Bolshevik rising that forced Nicholas to abdicate, you know. The Bolshevik party had fewer than fifty thousand members. [When it came to power a few months later it still had only seventy-six thousand members.] In March it was the liberal republicans, many of them aristocrats who’d been exposed to Western progressive ideas; they took over, and it was orderly. The Duma [the provisional government of Prince Lvov] was very anti-Bolshevik. Its ambition was to elect representatives to a Constituent Assembly and create a constitutional government along Western lines.
“The Bolsheviks did not want any part of that. But they weren’t strong enough to dispute the Duma, until everyone began to see that Prince Lvov wasn’t going to sign an immediate peace with the German invaders. Then things changed.”
Alexander Kerensky, the strongest member of Prince Lvov’s coalition, ordered a full-scale offensive against the Germans in July and this was what broke the back of the republican movement. The offensive collapsed, a blood-drenched disaster, and the defeat allowed the Bolsheviks to turn popular passion against the liberal coalition.
“Lenin’s promise was simple and very appealing: he promised peace.
“Lenin said, ‘The revolutionary idea becomes a force when it grips the masses.’ But that was not it, you
