Nevertheless, the Allies were initially optimistic. And not without cause. Kolchak successfully created a well-equipped army of nearly 250,000 men, as weapons and equipment from the vast surpluses in Allied arsenals poured in. Over the next twelve months, an estimated 97,000 tons of supplies would arrive by ship, including 600,000 rifles, 346 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 6,831 machine guns; 192 field guns, plus hand grenades and other explosives originally designed to annihilate the Germans in the west. The French sent advisers to Omsk, a token Italian force took up posts at Krasnoyarsk, and British officers trained Siberian recruits. Poles, Romanians, and others maintained some kind of military presence in the semblance of a united front. Protection of the Trans-Siberian from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal was assigned by Allied accord to America and Japan. American forces were concentrated in the Vladivostok and South Ussuri regions, and stationed at intervals along a 100-mile stretch between Verkhneudinsk (present-day Ulan Ude) and Mysovsk. The Japanese took charge of other sectors to the east, either with their own soldiers or with mercenaries raised by the Cossack warlords in their pay. The Czechs, no longer stateless men (the new Czechoslovak Republic, with Masaryk as president, had been born on October 28), declined to fight further as a vanguard and accepted the duty of guarding the Trans-Siberian between Omsk and Irkutsk. Exhausted by months of combat and resentful of the Allied failure to bring their own forces (not just advisers) to the front, they saw no point in further sacrifices, especially since Kolchak had surrounded himself with decadent reactionaries with whom the Czechs (most of them Socialists) felt no accord. Yet however Russian Kolchak’s fighting units actually were, they could not escape the impression of being a mercenary force, as driven home by the refrain of a popular Siberian song: “Uniform, British; boot, French; bayonet, Japanese; ruler, Omsk.”659 Nor would the British allow Kolchak to forget to whom he was most beholden for his power. General Knox reminded him at the moment of his greatest success: “Every round of rifle ammunition fired on the front has been of British manufacture, conveyed to Vladivostok in British ships and delivered at Omsk by British guards.”660
In December 1918, the army’s northern wing caught the Reds by surprise and captured the key town of Perm, northwest of the Urals. Maintaining the initiative, it went on to take the vital Perm-Vyatka Railway intact, along with 30,000 prisoners, 260 locomotives, 4,000 railway trucks, 50 heavy guns, ten armored cars, and much other booty besides. Strategically, Perm created the possibility of linking up with the White and British forces in Arkhangelsk for an advance on Petrograd. In the spring, Kolchak took Ufa, made a drive toward the Volga, cut off Turkestan from Soviet Russia, and inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army. At the same time, in the south, General Anton Denikin was pushing from the Don toward the center of Russia, and General Nikolai Yudenich was approaching Petrograd from the northwest. By May, much of North Russia was under White control, and Denikin’s Cossacks had advanced on a broad front to within 200 miles of Moscow. In the Civil War, both sides knew they were approaching the moment of truth. Lenin was convinced that unless the Urals could be retaken before winter, the revolution would be crushed. And Kolchak similarly declared: “Within a year one of two things will have happened; either the Constituent Assembly will have met in Moscow or I shall be dead.”661
In retrospect, the odds were not in Kolchak’s favor. The Whites failed to establish a common, coordinated military strategy, and their four fronts – South Russia, Western Siberia, North Russia, and the Baltic – were all so distant from one another that it was said that practically no place on the globe was more inaccessible than Kolchak’s forward line. The compact and central position of the Reds, however, made it possible for them to shift their forces rapidly from one front to another and deal with each in turn. Moreover, although the size of Kolchak’s army and the territory under his nominal rule had continued to grow, his effective authority had not, for Eastern Siberia was largely dominated by the Japanese and two cutthroat Cossacks in their employ: Grigory Semyonov and Ivan Kalmykov.
Born in the Transbaikal of Russian-Buryat parentage, Semyonov had fought in the Caucasus in 1916, earning the St. George’s Cross for valor, and was subsequently commissioned by the Provisional Government to recruit a special detachment of Buryats for the Eastern Front. When the Bolsheviks took power, he established a base for himself in Manchuria with the small army he had managed to raise. Beginning in January 1918, he started to carry out cross-border raids, but made little headway until the Czechs put the Bolsheviks to flight. Meanwhile, the British and the French in succession had put him on their payroll, but the Japanese outbid them both, and he soon became their creature and the chief instrument of their policy in the war. After Chita fell to his band, he rapidly extended his jurisdiction over much of the Transbaikal. Along the line of the Trans-Siberian, he patrolled his fiefdom in armored railway cars (bearing names like The Merciless and The Destroyer) equipped with machine guns and light artillery and made semi-impregnable (in emulation of the trains of the Czechs) with steel plate and reinforced concrete.
Although as a cavalryman he had once shown courage and dash, Semyonov had grown into a most dreadful man. One American colonel described him as “of medium height, with square, broad shoulders, and an enormous head from which gleam two clear brilliant eyes that rather belong to an animal than a man. The whole pose is at first suspicious, alert, determined, like a tiger ready to spring, to rend and tear.”662 Lavishly funded (he was paid up to $152,000 a month by the Japanese), and with anti-Bolshevism as an excuse to do as he pleased, he fostered an atmosphere, wrote an eyewitness, “of laziness, rodomontade, alcohol, lucrative requisitions, dirty money and the killing of the innocent.”663 He robbed banks, pillaged villages, plundered passing trains for supplies, and on one occasion allowed a subordinate to shoot ten boxcars full of prisoners just to show that “shootings can be carried out on Sunday as well as any other day.”664 By his own admission, he couldn’t sleep at night unless he had killed someone during the day. About all that could be said in his favor was that (unlike a number of other White officers) he refrained from Jewish pogroms, apparently out of deference to his Jewish mistress, “a very pretty woman with huge black eyes.”665
Ivan Kalmykov, Semyonov’s no less bloody compatriot, had served with him in the Caucasus and on his mission for the Provisional Government to the Far East. When the Japanese moved north from Vladivostok in August 1918, Kalmykov had gone with them, setting up his own headquarters under their protection in Khabarovsk. By the end of the intervention he was reported to have shot without trial at least four thousand people. Inclined to pose with his hand thrust into his tunic in imitation of Napoleon, his myrmidons all wore on their sleeves the letter “K” superimposed absurdly on a heraldic shield.