Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  “Libraries and official archives,” I said. “I didn’t know of any other sources then. It takes time to learn one’s way around, in my craft.”

  “In any craft.” He hobbled to a chair with wooden arms, settled into it and bent forward to pour the tea. “Do you take sugar? Cream?”

  “No thank you.”

  I didn’t rush him with questions; I’ve learned they tend to close up on you if you do that. He knew what I was there for. I let him do it his way.

  He indicated my portable cassette recorder. “Do you always use that?”

  “When I can. It reduces the possibility of misquoting.”

  He stared briefly at the machine. Recorders frighten some people. I said, “I won’t switch it on if you prefer.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Please yourself.” He had a curiously engaging smile; it was a bit absent and never quite complete but there was a tremendous warmth in it.

  He handed me the tea. The cup rattled on the saucer. He sat back and sipped his own, regarding me over the rim of his cup. “I confess you took me by surprise. From your book and your recent letters I took you to be an older man. What does a young American have to do with these events in Asia of so long ago? Are you Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Of Russian parentage then?”

  “My mother came from the Ukraine.”

  “As did I,” he murmured.

  “I’ve always had the feeling that we in the West need to know more about these things,” I volunteered. “Americans know nothing of the Russian Civil War. Nothing at all. Most of them never heard of it.”

  “Perhaps that’s just as well, isn’t it?”

  “Those who do not learn from history——”

  “Yes yes. I know all that. But the fact that you teach them this history is no warrant they’ll learn from it.”

  “I only want to give them the opportunity. They can’t make a choice if they don’t know any facts.”

  “Which facts? What do you expect this to prove?”

  It was hard to answer; really I had no grand purpose. “I enjoy the act of discovery,” I said lamely. “Possibly my books don’t do much more than entertain, but the readers do learn something. What they do with this knowledge isn’t up to me.”

  He wasn’t particularly pleased with that. “This land where we are right now,” he said. “During the First World War this was Turkish territory. History shows us that the British promised Palestine to both the Jews and the Arabs, at different times, in return for Jewish and Arab help in capturing it from the Turks. So the British captured it from the Turks and now the Jews live on it and the Arabs want to take it. The fault is England’s. The English know their history, they know this. Has it helped us?”

  “It provides you with a scapegoat,” I said; and we both laughed at that.

  “I have lived most of my life in Palestine,” he said abruptly. “I came here in nineteen twenty-four.”

  “That long ago?”

  “I’m something of a pioneer.” He was proud of it. But it was an endearing pride, not at all arrogant. He stabbed a finger in the general direction of my book on top of the case; the pointing finger was frail and avian. “That war of yours drove me here. But I suppose I can be thankful for that much. Although I can think of very little else to feel kindly toward, in that war.”

  “It must have been horrible.”

  “The cost,” he murmured. I noticed that his hand was shaking. He noticed that I noticed; he hid his hand in his lap.

  I thought it was the right time to press gently. “I understand you were with Admiral Kolchak’s gold train at the end.”

  He looked up with dignified astonishment. At first he did not reply; he covered his confusion by drinking tea. 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. Gott in Himmel, if it had been told forty years ago my brother might still be alive.” An abrupt nod of decision. “I shall tell you, then. There are no longer any secrets worth keeping.”

  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 you know what happened to the Czar’s Imperial Treasury?”

  “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*

  1.

  BACKGROUND TO A CIVIL 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 begin
ning 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. Twenty-five million.”

  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 hoi polloi and it was the liberal aristocrats, not the commoners, who agitated most stridently for reforms.

  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 know. What gripped the masses—you saw it everywhere in Russia—was the promise of peace. The Bolshevik opportunists dashed right in. They seized the factories and consolidated their revolutionary soviets. Even in our village they were throwing up placards and slogans.

  “In Saint Petersburg there was a palace coup. It wasn’t a revolution, it was a ruthless coup—Lenin’s junta unseated the Duma, that was all there was to it. That was November of nineteen seventeen. Kerensky had to flee the country disguised as a sailor.

  “Lenin was the dictator of the Bolshevik Party. He wanted to be dictator of the empire, but that took three years.

  “In the beginning he did two things—he confiscated all private property and he made a tender of peace to the German Kaiser.”

  The Duma’s elections [to form a Constituent Assembly] were scheduled for November 25 and communications in Russia were too slow to enable Lenin to cancel them. They took place, and the non-Communist liberals won by a landslide: they took nearly 60 percent of the more than forty million votes cast in what was, and still is, the only free election ever held in Russia. (The Bolsheviks garnered only some 29 percent of the vote, even on their peace platform, and the bourgeois and conservative parties accounted for the rest.)

  “Lenin had lost at the polls but it didn’t stop him. The elected representatives arrived in Saint Petersburg—Lenin was calling it Petrograd by then—and a few hundred of Lenin’s shock troops sealed off the palace. The representatives never got inside and the Assembly never was called to order. Of course we never heard about this until much later.”

  Denied their elected place in government, those who opposed the Bolsheviks took up arms. Thus, in January 1918, began the Russian Civil War.

  2.

  BREST-LITOVSK AND CIVIL WAR

  On December 3, 1917, the Red regime signed a temporary cease-fire agreement with the Germans.

  For the Western Allies it was a bad time for Russia to defect from the war effort: it meant Germany’s eastern divisions now could be thrown into combat in the trenches against the Allies on the west.

  Infuriated, the Allies sought to undermine Lenin’s government by infiltration and sabotage and by lending aid to anti-Bolshevik military movements that sprang up in Poland, in Finland, and within Russia itself, where Lenin’s enemies were forming coalitions under the banner of “White Russia” (a term coined mainly to offer a simple contrast with “Red”; it had little to do with the geographic origins of the movement).

  “I have studied this for many years. I think Lenin really wanted to stabilize relations with the West. But he had great danger at home. Only by carrying out the promise of peace could he remain in power. ‘Peace’ was the one promise he could not afford to break.

  “One can’t help but observe that this Communist Party, which came to power on its pledge of peace, has been responsible for the brutal massacres of more human beings than any other political organization in history, the Nazi Party included.”

  The truce continued but a permanent peace had yet to be signed. Lenin delayed as long as he could: to placate the Western Allies and to salvage what he could from the impending negotiations with the Kaiser’s representatives.

  But anti-Bolshevik pressure finally forced Lenin to sign.

  Germany’s demands were voracious. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, was a horrible blow to Russia. Germany took away nearly half her industries, a third of her population and a quarter of her territory.

  The cost of the peace was so harsh that indignation flared up once again and White Russian units everywhere were mobbed with volunteers.

  “Whole regiments were defecting en masse to the Whites. They felt Lenin had betrayed the Motherland at Brest-Litovsk.

  “The peasants rallied to the White banner because of Lenin’s confiscation of private property. The peasants had never wanted communism, you know. What they wanted was ownership of the land. That was precisely what the Reds denied them. Serfdom was the same whether your master was an aristocrat or the State.”

  Military resistance against the Reds flickered into existence all over Russia. It had no central leadership and no governmental structure; at first it was partisan warfare and recruiting contests, with both sides hastily daubing the giant Cyrillic characters of their slogans on walls and barracks.

  Then for a while it became more orderly: traditional warfare, great armies drawn up against one another on vast battlefields. The Whites were encouraged significantly by the victory of Mannerheim, who defeated the Reds in Finland, and by the victories of Marshall Pilsud
ski’s hard-riding Polish cavalry against Trotsky’s ill-supplied and ill-organized Red infantry.

  But in 1918 as the Whites spread their enthusiastic forces across a great part of Russia’s acreage, no fewer than nineteen separate White Russian governments came into being in different areas, each claiming legitimate franchise from the deposed Czar. From the very beginning it was this lack of central organization which threatened to destroy the anti-Bolshevik movement in the Civil War.

  3.

  THE CZAR’S TREASURE

  On the night of July 16, 1918, in a large manor house in the Ural Mountain village of Ekaterinburg, occurred the murder* of the Imperial family: the Czar, the Czarina, the Czarevitch, four grand Duchesses and four servants. Lenin did not want the Whites to have a live figurehead to rally round.

  At the same time there was a battle fought at the city of Kazan on the Volga. The White forces won—and captured the city, which unbeknownst to the Reds was the repository of the monetary reserves of the Imperial government.

  The gold and treasure had been transferred to Kazan to avoid its falling into German hands in Petrograd. According to most sources its value was estimated at 1,150,500,000 rubles; it was composed of platinum, stock securities, miscellaneous valuables and approximately five hundred tons of gold bullion, each ingot stamped with the Imperial seal.

  It may well have been the greatest tonnage of raw gold men have ever moved in one shipment. When the city of Kazan fell into White Russian hands the treasure was loaded onto a train after several episodes reminiscent more of comic than of grand opera (a Red counterattack, misdirected reinforcements, the arrival of a pack of bickering White bureaucrats, the dispatching of confused plain-language telegraph inquiries that were intercepted but not understood by the Reds). Finally the gold train was taken away by members of the [anti-Bolshevik] West Siberian Commissariat. This group seems to have obtained the gold merely because it sent a more numerous delegation than any of the others.