“Well authenticated reports justify the statement,” General Graves cabled the War Department during an on-the-spot assessment of the situation at Omsk in July and August 1919, “that officers are leaving the troops and fleeing to the rear, staff officers preceding line officers in this flight, soldiers are throwing away their arms and ammunition and in some cases their heavy clothing so as to enable them to move more rapidly to the rear. I have been unable to discover any enthusiasm for the Kolchak Government.”678
Kolchak desperately appealed for popular support with hollow promises of democracy, while Diterikhs (something of a religious fanatic) organized semi-medieval orders of “warrior-knights” and a detachment of priests to face the enemy with crosses and banners in a Holy Crusade. But by early November, Diterikhs had concluded that Omsk could not be held. Kolchak replaced him with a more optimistic underling – to no avail. Two Red regiments dashed across the ice and on November 14 caught the garrison at Omsk by surprise. Some thirty thousand demoralized White soldiers surrendered, as Kolchak’s army completely collapsed.
Partisan bands converged with ever more bold and devastating attacks on supply lines, depots, and strategic junctions, and in some areas no train could move at night. At times, whole stretches of the track fell into the hands of insurgents; toward the end of the year the countryside was largely in partisan hands.
The Allies were helpless to prevent the precipitate retreat. They had sent no troops to the front in the winter of 1918-19, and although some thought was given to the formation of an Anglo-Russian brigade in Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1919, Allied intervention had not been massive or resolute enough to carry the day. Nor, at the end of World War I, were there resources enough to have prevailed. “I would rather leave Russia Bolshevik than see Britain bankrupt,” Lloyd George told Churchill curtly, when the latter called for reinforcements.679 And Churchill, in his own inimitable way, summed up the denouement. “The snows of winter war had whitened five-sixths of Red Russia,” he wrote in The Aftermath, “but the springtime of Peace, for all others a blessing, was soon to melt it all again.”680
One by one the White armies were turned back. By the winter of 1919-20 Denikin’s drive toward Moscow had been reversed, Yudenich checked short of Petrograd, Kolchak’s armies smashed. Even as they were reconquering Siberia, other Red divisions were repossessing territory ceded under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to the Central Powers – the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Under the strain, Kolchak’s own intermittent self-control gave way. In a confrontation with one general, he ranted, raved, “broke several pencils and an inkpot”681; General Janin reported that he showed symptoms of drug addiction, had become “emaciated, worn out, and haggard,” and was a mass of nervous tics: “Suddenly he stops speaking, jerks his neck back while twisting it a little and, as he closes his eyes, becomes rigid... I am told that on Sunday he broke four glasses at a meal.”682
In Siberia, the great frozen rivers became highways to the Red advance. A planned defense of the Ob (400 miles east of Omsk) proved impossible to mount; Novonikolayevsk fell on December 14, and regiments attempting to reform behind the Ob at Tomsk “simply disintegrated through mass desertion.”683 Farther east on the Yenisey, Krasnoyarsk was in revolt, and after the insurgents took control of it in early January 1920, the White Army could no longer retreat by rail. Three days later, on January 7, the Reds entered the city, and now had more than 100,000 White prisoners in their hands. Farther east, the railway and the roads beside the railway were clogged with the exhausted, the starving, the dying, and the dead.
Only that part of the army’s remnant now under the command of General Vasily Kappel held together and, abandoning their trains, in a five-week retreat – or “Ice March,” as it came to be called – fought their way past partisan bands toward Lake Baikal. On January 26, Kappel himself succumbed to frostbite and pneumonia.
Meanwhile, after the Red Army had entered Omsk on November 14, Kolchak’s government had fled toward Irkutsk, but Kolchak’s effort to join his ministers there was stalled by his decision to attach thirty-six freight cars laden with the Imperial Gold Reserve (including seven full of platinum, silver, and jewels) to his train. The competition for use of the line was tremendous. The Czechs had filled their own trains with valuables and commodities, and numerous White generals at Omsk, Novonikolayevsk, and other centers had appropriated trains for themselves. In the general confusion, factions fought over coal supplies, telephones, and other facilities, in terror that the approaching Red armies would overtake them in their flight. Once again the Czechs, who had maintained their discipline, took matters into their own hands. To keep their own trains ahead of the rest, they confined everyone else to the down-line and cleared the up-line for themselves. By December 18, 180 trains had fallen to the Reds. Thousands of White soldiers were being captured daily; desertion was almost universal; typhus swept the ranks. Soldier and civilian alike mingled in one miserable river of humanity that streamed beside the railway along the old Siberian Trakt. From time to time, “the dead were thrown along the tracks to rot and contaminate the district,” reported one eyewitness. “Every station was a graveyard, with hundreds and in many places thousands of unburied dead.” 684 When Red troops crossed the Ob in mid-December 1919, they found more than thirty thousand bodies strewn through the ruins of Novonikolayevsk.
Kolchak’s trains made slow progress, as others given priority accumulated up ahead. At Krasnoyarsk, reached on December 17, his convoy was stalled for almost a week. Kolchak telegraphed Semyonov in code to halt the Czech withdrawal at all costs, if necessary by the demolition of bridges and tunnels, but the Czechs decoded the message, and trapped Kolchak’s trains for two weeks west of Irkutsk. Then on January 4, 1920, seeing there was no help for him, Kolchak abdicated as “Supreme Ruler” in favor of General Denikin and appointed Semyonov commander of all Russian armed forces in Eastern Siberia. He stepped into a second-class car emblazoned with the flags of the Allied powers, formally placed himself under Allied protection, and proceeded to Irkutsk under a Czech guard. As soon as he arrived on January 15, the guard was withdrawn on the orders of General Janin, and Kolchak calmly remarked: “This means that the Allies have betrayed me.”685 He was turned over to the “Political Center” – a Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik coalition which had briefly assumed authority in Irkutsk – and the gold reserve was shuttled into a blind alley surrounded by barbed wire. The railway siding leading to it was torn up, a round-the-clock guard was posted, and ball bearings removed from the wheels of the train cars.