Both men were a law unto themselves and Semyonov, established at the junction of the Chinese Eastern and Amur railways, had a large, independent fighting force, controlled most of the Transbaikal, and could, if he wished, sever Kolchak’s eastern supply lines at will. This he periodically did at the behest of the Japanese, who had a vested interest in anarchy. “The last thing they wanted,” notes one historian, “was a strong, stable Russian administration in Siberia” that could eventually challenge their own designs on Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Far Eastern coast.666 Their whole plan, in addition to stirring up nationalist hatred for the Russians among the Buryats, was to create such chaos through Semyonov, Kalmykov, and others that Japanese soldiers would be called upon to assure law and order in just those areas they sought to acquire. But in the end they overplayed their hand: by helping to make impossible a White triumph in Siberia, they inadvertently brought about a Soviet victory.
Perhaps if Kolchak had proved an outstanding leader, there might have been some hope for his cause. But no one could say exactly what that cause was. “He possessed,” wrote Churchill, “neither the authority of the Imperial autocracy nor of the Revolution.”667 Kolchak was completely without the requisite knowledge or experience to direct a land campaign, and his mostly young and inexperienced general staff was almost as incompetent as he in this respect. None of his corps or division commanders had been pre-revolutionary generals, and only a few were genuinely qualified for the commands they held. Never more than a remote figurehead to his population and even his troops, it was “one of the oddities of the anti-Bolshevik movement,” one historian remarks, “that it should have been led by an admiral without a fleet, head of a government in a town 3500 miles from the nearest port.”668
Military issues aside, it was imperative for Kolchak to establish a viable political administration that could win the support of the people whose territory he ruled. Otherwise, he could not but appear as the Allies’ pawn.
But Kolchak inspired so little confidence even among wealthy Siberians – his natural constituency – that they gave him little help. Donations came, one minister exclaimed, “like milk from a billy goat.”669 Widespread corruption also reduced many of the front-line units to a state of near destitution. “The soldiers were dressed very badly,” wrote a Russian naval officer whose gunboat was supporting a bridgehead on the Kama River in the spring of 1919, “some were literally in rags. Only a few had boots, the majority were wearing bast shoes or had sacking wrapped around their feet. Some of them had bags sewn together in lieu of uniforms.”670 Many carried their munitions over their shoulders in potato sacks.
Meanwhile, among the people at large, the mercenary activities of White officers gave the partisan movement ever-increasing strength. There had been no partisans to speak of in the Selenga River Valley, for example, until Semyonov, in December 1919, sent five hundred Cossacks and about two thousand Mongols on ponies and camels into the area, where they carried on an orgy of violence and absconded with four thousand sledloads of loot of all types, much of it to stock a chain of retail stores Semyonov owned in Chita. Another White general, searching for partisans and weapons, upon entering a village would shoot every fifth male, regardless of age, and burn every home, if a list of resident partisans was not promptly produced.
Anyone left or right was automatically labeled a “Bolshevik,” and one American official wrote in alarm from Omsk: “All over Siberia there is an orgy of arrest without charges; of execution without even the pretense of trial; and of confiscation without color of authority.... Fear – panic fear – has seized everyone. Men suspect each other and live in constant terror that some spy or enemy will cry ‘Bolshevik’ and condemn them to instant death.”671 The entire White movement was also rank with anti-Semitism, and pogroms, persecutions, and other atrocities followed in the wake of all its armies. Some two thousand Jews were killed in Yekaterinburg, for example, in July 1919. The propaganda term “Jewish Bolshevism” (later adopted by Hitler) was also coined by the Whites, who had inherited the idea of the “revolutionary Jew” from people like Plehve in the tsar’s last government. Kolchak himself was not immune. Frustrated at America’s relative neutrality, he accused the troops under Graves’s command of being “Jewish emigrants” and “the offscourings of the American Army.”672 Meanwhile, partisan bands hostile to Kolchak behind White lines had grown so numerous that by July 1919 the spread of red dots used to show uprisings on the staff maps was “beginning to look like advanced spotted fever.”673 Even in Vladivostok, an American officer recalled, “the Russian officers were frightened to death that their own men would murder them.”674 To venture out into the city at night was “as safe as going to sleep in the mouth of a cannon.... Each morning found some new victims of the growing discontent lying butchered in the alley or the gutter where all who saw could understand.”675 When the victim was a Russian officer, it was customary to find, among other cruelties, that a long spike had been driven into his body through each star on the epaulettes he wore.
A comparable state of affairs obtained even in the field. “You could never tell who was who. One day a farmer would be selling you cabbages at your camp and the next day he would be leading an attack on your positions. Or a band of them would come to town from the hills, hide their rifles in a straw sack just out of town, and then come in and hang around the camp for an hour or two, like disinterested peasants; and the first thing you knew they had all disappeared, recovered their arms and opened fire upon you.”676 Not that the Peasants’ Partisan Army, as it came to be called, was formidably equipped. Some were armed with old hunting rifles or unwieldy elephant guns, and their crudely made grenades – filled with dynamite, stones, and bolts – had to be lit with a match.
The Red regulars had also grown in force. Recovering from their shock at the Allied Intervention, the Bolsheviks had abandoned their plans to raise an army of volunteers and began a regular mobilization. Determined at first to increase the army from 330,000 to 1 million in a year, on October 4, 1918, Lenin had declared: “Now we need an army of three million. We can have it and we will have it.”677 And he did. The Red Army grew rapidly, improved as a fighting force, and at the beginning of May 1919 counterattacked and prevented a possible junction of Kolchak’s forces with those of Denikin to the south. Throughout the month of May, the Reds steadily rolled the Whites back from the Volga. On June 9, having crossed the Belaya River, they recaptured Ufa and Orenberg, and on July 1 also took Perm. Breaking through crumbling White defenses in the Urals, they marched on to Zlatoust and Yekaterinburg, which were gained by mid-month. Kolchak replaced Rudolph Gaida (commander of his army’s northern wing) with Mikhail Diterikhs, who advocated a swift retreat from the Urals so that the Whites could regroup on one of the riverbanks and make a stand.
But Kolchak’s young chief of staff, Dmitry Lebedev, instead opted for a complicated maneuver designed to envelop and destroy the Reds at Chelyabinsk. In this plan, the Reds would be allowed to issue unopposed from the Urals and occupy the West Siberian Plain around the town as the Whites outflanked them on the neighboring heights. But the disciplined training required to make the stratagem work was lacking among the raw and reluctant recruits brought forward to do it, and the Reds held firm. As a result, fifteen thousand Whites were taken prisoner, and the entire Urals industrial region was lost. In mid-August, the Reds crossed the Tobol River, pushed on to the Ishym 150 miles to the east, and were briefly driven back by Cossack cavalry. But on November 4 they regained their momentum and having reached the two rail crossings over the Irtysh River, began to close in on Omsk. It had taken the Red Army two and a half months to get from the Tobol to the Ishim, but from the Ishim to the Irtysh, less than two weeks. Where the Tatars had once been routed by Yermak and his successors almost three and a half centuries before, the Whites were biting the dust. There were mutinies and desertions on a tremendous scale, and tens of thousands of railway cars were clogged with refugees. The population of Omsk increased fivefold almost overnight with the beleaguered and forlorn.