‘When the trains stop, that will be the end,’ said Lenin; but, somehow, the trains ran. Although the Trans-Siberian’s last through-run, Vladivostok to Petrograd was in February 1918, the various sections operated fitfully, controlled first by one side and then the other – but still they ran.
Then there were the Czech Legions, who played a leading part in the history of Siberia’s revolutionary years, and here was photographic documentation. After the Bolsheviks signed peace terms at Brest-Litovsk, in the winter of 1917–18, there was the question of repatriating 50,000 of them, all well-equipped. The rest of the Allied forces had withdrawn from the Russian–German front. President Masaryk counted on Allied support to obtain a return of Slovakia and other provinces formerly crushed under Austro-Hungarian rule. It was therefore agreed that his armies should be withdrawn from Russia to fight on the Western front. But the Ukraine was blocked by German troops, thus there was no way out except north through Siberia and Vladivostok. In the spring, the exodus began: but as the Legions flooded into Siberia, suspicions and incidents multiplied. The Bolsheviks feared they were to be used as a spearhead of an Allied invasion of Siberia; the Czechs doubted the Bolsheviks would allow them to leave with all their equipment and arms intact. They violated Soviet terms by secreting arms and, at last, bloodshed broke out and some of them were arrested, while an order went out to the Red Commissars that any Czech found with arms was to be shot. The Legions imagined their German enemies were behind this and they promptly formed into bands of guerrilla fighters, joining with the White partisans. It was now that they seized rolling stock, converting the trains to broneviki, using them as spearhead of an attack, or for fighting rear-guard actions. Most celebrated among them was the Little Orlik – or Eaglet, and now I saw photographs of it in action, racing across the snows, its gun-turrets blazing.
The Czech Legions, fighting their way out of Siberia to regain their homeland, at last liberated from Austrian domination, had a clear view of issues. They no longer wished to be embroiled with either side, Red or White; they wished to return home and, at last, anyone who hindered them was an enemy. Their esprit de corps was the outstanding factor in their survival and this sense of brotherhood was the same spirit which had sustained their ancestors, the Hussite Brethren. Troops addressed their officers as Brother General, Brother Captain. There was discipline, but no protocol. The particular quality of ingenuity displayed by the Czech legions became famous throughout Siberia. Although they arrived from the Western front well-equipped, they knew how to turn the simplest assets to advantage, in contrast to the feckless extravagance of Kolchak’s men, or the stoic endurance of the Red troops who, for some while, fought on with little or no equipment or food.
It was the Czechs who first plated the railway carriages with rough iron sheeting, thus converting them into armoured cars. And there was something almost housewifely, thrifty and cosy, in the manner in which they converted the box-cars – teplushki – that became their barracks (forty men to a car), into snug quarters. Here, during the latter part of the campaigns, they painted flowery or symbolic designs on each car, achieved curtains, hot water and, above all, devised heating systems.
To the homeless, half frozen, starving bands of refugees that wandered hopelessly across the land, displaced local villagers or the hunted bourgeoisie, escaped from Russian cities, such teplushki seemed paradise. In the desolate forest clearings, they might come on a siding where a string of such box-cars glowed with warmth, oil-lamps and the flicker of stoves, where men stirred cauldrons of soup . . . All Paradise was there. But no flaming swords barred the entrance. The Czechs responded generously to the miseries around them.
At one point, these Legions controlled most of the rail, from Penza to Baïkal, supporting the counter-revolutionaries all along the way; they even seized control of the gold reserves of the Bolshevik Government, which had placed them for safety at Kazan. The situation must have seemed hopeless to the impoverished and encircled Bolsheviks. Beyond Baïkal power then lay in the hands of another enemy, the Japanese-supported Ataman Semenov, that flamboyant and sinister individual who for some while contrived to be in the good graces of the Allied Command. He was of mixed Russian and Mongolian blood and had proposed to raise a Buriat-Mongol regiment, a plan to which the harassed Provisional Government of 1917 had agreed. Thus, the moment of the Revolution and Siberian campaigns found him in Trans-Baïkalia, commanding a rather small force but looting and feathering his own nest vigorously. His headquarters were over the frontier, in Manchuria, at the crucial junction of the Trans-Sib and Chinese-Eastern line, where he lived dissolutely, in considerable style.
Among the White Russian commanders fighting alongside, rather than with him, was the fanatic Baltic Baron, General von Ungern Sternberg, whose reputation for cruelty, as I remembered the Traveller saying, equalled that of the Ataman. But with this difference: while the Ataman indulged purely personal sadistic fancies, the Baron’s fury was inspired by a sort of mystical fervour, a belief in his divine mission to cleanse the world of the Soviet Anti-Christ. Together, these two terrible men raged about Siberia and the Outer Mongolian border country, joining forces with the White armies against the common enemy.
As I hung over records of these Siberian campaigns, it seemed the warm, lemon-scented air of a Mediterranean evening fanned round me again; the brown wooden show cases, the old photographs and ragged banners of the Red Army faded, and I was on the veranda of a Corsican hotel, where, in the golden afterglow, I listened to the Traveller (or was it Aunt Eudoxia?) telling of Ungern Sternberg’s belief in divination by the Tarot cards. He had been deeply involved in the shadowy world of Asiatic necromancy, often guided by the prophecies of lama and shaman. The manner and hour of his death being foretold, he showed a fatalistic disregard for his own life or that of anyone else. Wearing Chinese robes over his uniform, his heavy Russian army epaulets attached, he stalked – death in person – about the Mongolian city of Urga, or Ulan Bator as it is today, revolver in hand, executing his prisoners horribly, consulting various oracles in the scarlet and gold temples that flowered in the wastes, ticking off the days of life or carnage, left to him.
This extraordinary character had always interested me; he was the stuff of the Teutonic knights and dreamed of founding a military-monastic order which would expunge the last Communist from the face of the earth. He boasted that his family sprang from Attila’s Huns and had, throughout the centuries, continued in the way of violence. He maintained discipline among his troops with ruthless efficiency, just as he suppressed cholera epidemics, or any others which threatened, by shooting all the victims. This bizarre man contracted an equally curious marriage, allying his arrogant Baltic-noble’s blood with that of a daughter of Yuan-Shi-Kai (then President and Dictator of China), thus identifying himself even closer with the Asiatic hinterland that fostered his legend. He dreamed of a Buriat-Mongol Empire on the borders of Siberia – perhaps to overlap and control Siberian territory – and ranted of Buddhist prophecies, the Apocalypse, Karma, and Satanic communism which would precede the final destruction of mankind. In the name of a saviour he played on his undoubted powers of second sight, assuming god-like status among the superstitious soldiery. But when, at last, crossing into Soviet-held territory at the head of eleven thousand cavalry, he fell into a trap and was beaten, all this mystic ballast was destroyed by the methodic procedure of a Soviet military court. The Baron’s ravings were coldly cut short; deflated, he listened stonily to his death sentence. He had known it would come for so long. In June 1921 he was shot – it is said, on the exact date predicted by the necromancers.
His fellow adventurer the Ataman Semenov also met his end, if not his deserts, at a Soviet military court. He was less dedicated than Sternberg, except in the matters of slaughter. Rapacious and ferocious, he enjoyed combining the business of battle with the pleasures of looting and indulging his sadistic whims. To ensure that the massacres he so frequently organized should not begin to pall on his troops, he allow
ed them to choose the manner of each day’s executions. It lessened the monotony when the population of whole villages were successively put to the sword, poisoned, hanged, or burnt alive. It lessened opposition too.
But it was unfortunate such a man was counted as an ally by the Allied Command; though to the Japanese (in whose pay he was, since they had designs on Manchuria and reckoned on his aid) his methods seemed quite in order. As a mark of especial esteem they allowed him to paint the Imperial Japanese emblem of the Rising Sun on the railway carriages he used. As this brigand steamed furiously about Eastern Siberia he was accompanied, or followed, by his dread ‘Independent Brigade’, a guerrilla band largely made up of Mongols and Buriats, and which numbered only about two hundred Russians – White Russians, who still hoped the monster they followed fought to restore the Monarchy to Holy Russia.
Here in the Museum’s Archives I studied the faces of these Siberian freebooters: Sternberg as pale-eyed and fanatic-looking as the Traveller had described him; the fleshy Ataman, with heavily moustached muzzle like some nightmare beast of prey. Here were finer faces, peaceful in death, or flash-lit, tensed – in some underground hide-out of an illicit printing press. Red partisans and White; local heroes or villains; a firing squad, victims and executioners. Bodies piled dead on a snowy battle field beside a wrecked section of the Trans-Siberian, the crows circling overhead, as lonely in these vast skies as the dead in the vast steppes below. Here was a women’s Army battalion, exalted Amazons, padded in their sheepskins till they looked like spherical toys toddling to battle; but there was nothing playful in the arms they carried with such assurance. Here was a fiery politico, though his appearance, seated at a desk and wearing pince-nez, was not inspiring. Here were the dark, strange faces of men from Turkestan, Inner Mongolia or the Caucasus, who had found their way north and joined the battle. This was heroic Siberia as I had heard it described by the Traveller. Would my search at last end here – a fleeting glimpse on a shadowy picture, rather than a name on a tombstone or a recounted memory?
Now a cold, tight-lipped face stares out – austerity personified, Admiral Kolchak, briefly the self-appointed Supreme Ruler of the White Government, and part of the Siberian legend. How an Admiral of the Russian fleet came to be in command of White Army forces in Siberia is too complicated a story to tell here. Suffice it to say that the Admiral assumed power from entirely disinterested motives of patriotism – to save Russia, he believed, but never for personal aggrandizement. He never succeeded in winning the whole-hearted support he had hoped, either of the Russian people or the Allied Command. He was out of touch with the former, while the latter held back from committing themselves to interior Russian political issues. Did the Admiral really represent the country as a whole? Could it be that the Bolsheviks were more representative? The Czechs settled the matter by handing him over to the local Soviets and he was shot at Irkutsk, one February night in 1920, his body, disappearing beneath a hole in the ice.
•
I was keeping the Dekabrist souvenirs in the Museum for a last treat: they were something I had been waiting to see most of my life and now, confronted by the pathetic relics, I felt tears come to my eyes. There were no overtones of horror here – no branding irons, no chains; but there were some pieces of delicately wrought iron, bracelets and rings made by Bestoujev from the prisoners’ fetters, when at last they were removed. The wives had clamoured for these romantic keepsakes, and some wore their ‘Dekabrist wedding rings’ till they died.
When, in 1830, the Dekabrists were moved to new quarters at Petrovsky Zavod the Tzar’s spiteful rage was apparent. He had authorized the architect’s plans; but there were no windows. In the obscurity of these icy rooms (the prison was on the edge of a swamp) their life continued. They read by sitting at the doors opening into the corridors; there was a debating society and a music society; they held chess contests, and in the short summers, cultivated flowers and vegetables (and were the first to produce tomatoes there). Children were born; the beautiful Anny Mouravieva died, and was buried beside the prison stockade. Such milestones marked the slow passage of time.
Nine years later the hard core of the Dekabrists was released. Their new place of residence, as ‘free Siberian settlers’ (for they could never go home), was allotted to them by the authorities in St. Petersburg in an apparently haphazard manner, no doubt by indicating a spot on a map, some remote village, or wretched little town, or even a Buriat trading encampment as it sometimes turned out to be. Then their true sentence of exile began; there was no more of that comradeship that had sustained them for so long. They were forbidden to move from their allotted places. Their children could not attend school, being listed as serfs. They were even deprived of the right to a patronymic. Thus the son of Prince Sergei Wolkonsky was merely inscribed as Sergieyiev.
The new, ‘free’ life closed round the Dekabrists like further prison walls. Yet gradually, these proscribed men whose heroic aura dazzled the Siberians, were becoming the country’s aristocracy, forming a centre of cultivation new to Siberia. ‘Our princes,’ said the Siberians, welcoming those who now lived among them.
Both the Wolkonskys and Troubetskoys were fortunate, being placed at Irkutsk, where they lived in some style, their establishment at last numbering twenty-five servants. These two families presided over local society, and invitations to their musical soirées were much coveted. When the Princess Marie attended a concert or the theatre (although still listed officially as the Criminal Wolkonskaya), she was given such a tumultuous welcome that at last the Governor-General was obliged to forbid the wives of Dekabrists appearing at public functions.
In 1849, another band of persecuted liberals, ‘the Petrashevsky’ came this way, Dostoievsky among them. They were an intellectual and scientific élite, while the Dekabrists had been largely a military aristocracy. But they were linked by their ideals, and a living chain was forged that white winter’s day when the wives of the ‘freed’ Dekabrists rallied to them at a stopping place outside Tomsk. The women went alone, for their husbands were proscribed from an encounter which would have been construed as a political manifestation. But the wives contrived to be there, waiting by the snowy trakt with food, warm clothing and books, and by their presence they transmitted something of the courage that had sustained them when they had first passed that way.
•
‘Don’t you want to see where the Wolkonskys lived?’ asked Olga Maximova, and she led me to a quiet backwater in the old part of the city where streets of ornate little wooden dwellings had not yet been destroyed and were dug snugly into the earth, half buried below the wooden pavings. All the houses hereabouts date from before the great fire which ravaged Irkutsk in 1879. Afterwards building in wood was forbidden, being replaced by stone; though the fire was so fierce that it devoured many stone buildings too. The Wolkonsky house, which appeared to be portioned out in tenement-like flats, was large and two-storeyed, of the usual weathered grey timber, with the typical fretted decorations round the windows, and doors. A high stockade lay between it and the little street running beside a small square or plot of unkempt bushes and tall old trees. Beyond rose the graceful white belfry of an old church – now a warehouse for government publications. The Wolkonsky stockade was pierced by a wide arched gate, giving on to a courtyard with out-houses and stables. Beside the gate, facing the square, was a little bench, the usual street bench that is an immemorial part of the Russian scene, seeming to demand a Chekhov dialogue or one of those tangled monologues in which Dostoievsky characters luxuriate.
It was very quiet here in this unfrequented quarter, and suddenly I knew that this would be the right place to meet the Serbian bomb expert – if he would come – if my letter ever reached him – if I could contrive to post it unperceived. The historic associations of the house would provide me with a good reason for mooning about there; I could sit on a bench without exciting curiosity, it seemed; and so could anyone who came there to meet me.
I was still weighing u
p these possibilities as Olga Maximova led me down other quiet streets of low wooden houses, and stopped before one of more importance, of weathered grey wood, similar to that of the Wolkonskys. This was where the Troubetskoys had lived; it too was now inhabited by several families, but was far more dilapidated, and an overpowering odour hung about it from a near-by plant for salting fish. There was a project of turning it into a Dekabrist museum, said Olga Maximova. I hoped the salting works would be removed elsewhere, for it was destructive to nostalgic reveries.
That night, pleading letters to write, I went up to bed early and composed the fatal missive; brief and to the point and yet a cry from the heart, I thought as I sealed it; and then I wondered if it was not all a mistake . . . I heard again the Traveller’s smoky tones quoting Browning. Where the apple reddens never pry . . . But the fruit of my longings had never reddened: my curiosity remained as sharp and green as ever.
CHAPTER XXVII
All next day I went about with the letter in my handbag (best not leave it about my room) and wondered when I would find a suitable place to post it unobserved. I knew better than to put it in the hotel mail box or be seen by Olga Maximova posting letters elsewhere. She would of course have offered, and expected, to take charge of them for me, and been very much surprised to see one addressed in Russian. I was still carrying the letter in my bag that evening when we set out to attend a Mongolian wrestling contest held at a near-by youth club. Olga Maximova looked resigned when I opted for wrestling rather than a concert by pupils of the Irkutsk Conservatoire, but she went along with good grace; it was at least an example of contemporary life, even if not a cultural manifestation.
Journey Into the Mind's Eye Page 40
