A few days later, the Political Center yielded power to a Bolshevik Committee, even though the Red Army itself was still several days away. But with White forces in retreat rapidly drawing near, “siege law” was declared by the Committee in Irkutsk on February 2, land mines laid in the ice on the Angara River, and ammunition and other military stores cached in the taiga for renewed guerrilla warfare if Irkutsk could not be held. The Bolsheviks had meanwhile been interrogating Kolchak closely for over two weeks, but toward dawn on February 7, to prevent his rescue, he was executed by a firing squad on an embankment of the river and pushed through a hole in the ice.
The White Army, however, bypassed Irkutsk and retreated into Eastern Siberia. The Czechs promptly negotiated an unmolested retreat of their own, in exchange for the gold reserve; and on March 5, the Red Army entered the city and had all of Central Siberia in its grasp.
Most of the Allies were hastily evacuated from Vladivostok by ship, including the Americans, who sailed away in April, leaving two hundred dead behind. After their departure, the Japanese (who had their own long-term agenda) increased their forces across the border in Manchuria to 200,000 men, and occupied northern Sakhalin Island and much of the Siberian Pacific Coast. A Bolshevik atrocity furnished the excuse. On March 25, 1920, the Japanese garrison and all Japanese civilians at Nikolayevsk were massacred on the orders of a partisan leader and his chief of staff and mistress, Nina Lebedeva, a 25-year-old Communist who liked to dress up in dark red leather and gallop about on her charger armed to the teeth. Before Japanese reinforcements arrived, they also burned the town to the ground. Both were later executed by other partisans for these brutal acts, but the Japanese seized upon the incident to justify their new occupation force. Indeed, had the massacre not occurred, another would probably have been contrived. In early 1920, for example, the Japanese had warned everyone in Khabarovsk that it would be dangerous to remain once they withdrew. To prove it, they secretly armed a band of two thousand Chinese brigands (the Japanese were on excellent terms with Manchurian warlords) who were to pillage the city as soon as they left.
The situation in Eastern Siberia, however, was unquestionably chaotic, and early in April 1920 the foundations were laid for a sort of buffer state between the Bolsheviks and the Japanese. This was known as the Far Eastern Republic, which gradually asserted its authority over most of the territory between Lake Baikal and the Pacific Coast. Despite its superficial resemblance to an independent democratic state, the new republic was actually supervised by the Far Eastern Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee, and its “People’s Revolutionary Army” was composed of Red Army units commanded by Major Robert Eikhe, formerly of the Red Fifth Army and later Party Secretary for Siberia. Semyonov, based in Chita, continued to plunder the Transbaikal for a few more months, but Chita fell to the Far Eastern Republic on October 22, and he escaped to Manchuria in an airplane. By November 1920, when the Crimean army of Peter Wrangel (Denikin’s successor) was also being crushed, most of Eastern Siberia had come under Far Eastern Republic control.
One final, bizarre attempt to establish a White enclave occurred when one of Semyonov’s bloodiest lieutenants, a Baltic noble named Roman Ungern-Sternberg, took about a thousand cavalry in early October 1920 south into Outer Mongolia; claiming descent from Genghis Khan, he rallied the Mongols around him and drove out the hated Chinese. Flushed with this success, he married an obscure princess of the Chinese imperial house and declared himself heir to the Chinese throne and the living Buddha. In this exalted incarnation, Ungern-Sternberg indulged in a reign of terror over the population, but was pursued by the Red Army, defeated on July 7, 1921, and abandoned by his own Mongol troops in the desert to die. The Reds picked him up and he was shot at Nikolayevsk on September 15. A pro-Soviet government was set up at Ulan Bator, which became the capital of the Mongolian People’s Republic, a Soviet satellite state. General Diterikhs, who had escaped to Vladivostok and tried to revive it as a counterrevolutionary beachhead, was also defeated in February 1922, bringing to an ignominious end the last of the White campaigns.
In October 1922, the Japanese withdrew; Soviet troops entered Vladivostok on the 25th; and on November 14, the Far Eastern Republic was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
The isolated northern front in European Russia had gone the way of the rest. Although the Whites had managed to raise a force of about fifty thousand men divided between Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, they posed little threat to the Soviets, and after the Allies abandoned them in October 1919, they were doomed. The Red Army began an offensive up the northern Dvina in February 1920, took Arkhangelsk on the 21st, and a month later trapped and annihilated the remaining White division defending Murmansk.
When the last Allied battalion had set sail from Arkhangelsk, an American lieutenant wrote: “Not a soldier knew, no, not even vaguely, why he had fought, or where he was going now, or why his comrades were left behind beneath the wooden crosses.”686
In Siberia, pockets of resistance here and there remained. There was skirmishing between Reds and Whites in Kamchatka until 1922, and Soviet power was not firmly established on the Chukchi Peninsula or in the province of Yakutsk until 1923. In that year the Whites were also expelled from the Commander Islands, where (like Bering almost two centuries before) they had dug foxholes for themselves in the hard and barren sand.
One of those who participated in the Russian Civil War in the Far East was Vselvolod Sibirtsev, whose accelerated career and dramatic fate were not untypical of many of his compatriots, although notable in our story for its all-Siberian stamp. The grandson of a Decembrist and the son of a member of the People’s Will, he had studied economics in St. Petersburg, joined the Social Democratic Party in 1913, and had fought in 1917 on the Western Front. As a Bolshevik he had also agitated among the troops, before taking part in the October coup in Petrograd. A few months later, he was sent to Vladivostok on a Party assignment, but in June was arrested and imprisoned by the Czechs. Six months later he escaped, edited an underground Bolshevik newspaper, fought the Whites as a partisan in the mountains of the Far East, and was subsequently appointed military commissar of the garrison in Vladivostok in 1919. But the wheels of fate kept turning, and on April 4, 1920, he was captured by the Japanese and burned alive in the firebox of a locomotive near Muravyov-Amursky station. At the time of his death, he was twenty-seven years old.
“In all our centuries,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “from the first Rurik on, had there ever been a period of such cruelties and so much killing as during the post-October Civil War?”687 The Civil War was the iron forge in which the outlines of the new Soviet state were given their preliminary form.
16
THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP
At the end of the Civil War the Bolsheviks faced the awesome task of reconstituting a country covering a sixth of the land surface of the globe. The old bureaucracy was gone; industry was paralyzed; and the transportation system was in a state of complete collapse. There were no manpower or material reserves on which to draw for building a new nation, and few remaining professionals of acceptable ideological stripe. In Siberia, agriculture had been wrecked, mines abandoned, roads and railways destroyed. At least 56,000 peasant homesteads had been laid waste.
Lenin’s “War Communism,” established in 1918, had intensified after the victories over Kolchak and Denikin early in 1920, in a vain attempt to wrench the whole economy toward a Communist system of production and distribution. His methods had guaranteed the Red Army its supplies, but in other respects the nationalization of land and industry, the ban on private trade, the establishment of universal compulsory labor, and the requisitioning of grain had embittered virtually every stratum of the nation. “The onrush of revolutionary events,” one participant later recalled, “changed our social relations to such an extent that we considered it best to nationalize absolutely everything, from the biggest factories down to the last hairdressing shop run by one hairdresser owning a clipper and two razors, or down to the last carrot in a grocery store. Roadblocks and checkpoints were put up everywhere so that no one could get through with food. Everyone was put on government rations.”688