“He didn’t have the ruthlessness or force of will to make subordinates submit to his demands, and he had no effective means of contact with the ordinary people-he was a remote sort of man, he had no public personality, he spoke at gatherings only with great awkward discomfort.
“Many of our generals in the field were characterized by a suicidal and hysterical incompetence. When they made decisions that were obviously wrong, the Admiral would let them have their way until it got too late, when inevitably he would relieve them of command with utmost regret and then replace them with equally incompetent generals who were additionally handicapped by their total ignorance of the field situation.
“He never knew whom to trust. He believed everyone and no one. He had altogether the wrong political philosophy for the circumstances. As an example, one of his first acts in office was to call for a National Assembly to be freely elected as soon as the war ended. Naturally this incensed most of his officers, who regarded such ideas as useless democratic political euphemisms, mysterious to soldiers of more cynical persuasions. Many of the officers wanted to restore the monarchy and he bowed to their wishes and dropped his proposal instead of ordering them to quit disputing him.”
He was burdened impossibly from the very beginning with a staff of more than nine hundred* beautifully tailored and extraordinarily dishonest subordinates, most of them completely unfit for military duties. White officers and politicians engaged in incredible profiteering schemes and speculations. There was a black market in trains: whole trains were stolen, their contents sold in back alleys. Kolchak’s Northern Force at gunpoint stole shipments of supplies earmarked for his Western Force. Officers couldn’t be bothered to feed or clothe their men; staples and military medical supplies were sold at incredible prices.
Kolchak was aware of the corruption in which he was engulfed: He appointed several investigatory commissions, but none of them produced any results. No officers, regardless how guilty or incompetent, ever got fired. The moody Admiral seemed to feel there was no point in dismissing the corrupt because the vacancies would only be refilled by men equally corrupt: there was no other kind.
What is remarkable is that for the first months of his tenure Kolchak enjoyed as much support as he did. Nearly all the bickering factions seemed willing to pay him lip service if not real loyalty. Perhaps he was so well accepted because people found it easier to confirm credentials than to assess character; at any rate he gave the White Russian movement the appearance of a central authority and for a while, in spite of everything, that was enough to elevate morale and produce a string of White military victories.
Kolchak had established his government in Omsk, a dreary city of vast gloomy state buildings on the barren plains of western Siberia. It had the flavor of a frontier camp, laid out along exact 200-meter square blocks with wide streets and single-story frame houses painted vivid hues. The city lay about two miles behind the railway marshaling yards, on the right bank of the wide Irtysh River, and was surrounded by a huge farm area of dairies and grain. In normal times it was a four-day train journey from Omsk northwest to Moscow.
The houses here were widely separated. Each had its pigsty or chicken coop, its stable or cow corral, its courtyard and cart shed. The big public buildings were Byzantine brick. There were a few cobblestone streets at the center but most thoroughfares were unpaved impacted dirt, powder-dusty in dry weather and muddy in wet. The wooden sidewalks were bordered by deep gutters and in the springtime each house pumped its cesspool out into these gutters so that the smell throughout Omsk was indescribable.
It was anything but a sophisticated capital. Yet for a brief time there was a spirit of elegance. Czarist officers in their grey greatcoats marched the walkways in polished boots; Kolchak’s own officers made splendid visions in their white uniforms with purple epaulets, their leather heels clicking on the marble floors of the state buildings. The city flapped with the banners of the new government: Kolchak’s colors were white and green and the banners were ubiquitous.
“My brother and I were subalterns together. We were assigned to foot companies guarding the railway yards at first-this was before the Czech Legion came. I remember the first time we saw the Admiral. He came with the French General, Janin, to review us. Our Captain at that time was a brute called Grigorenkov, a Muscovite. He saluted the reviewing officers with colonial violence. (Once, later on, I remember Grigorenkov actually groveling on his knees to kiss the boots of a superior officer when he was reprimanded. But of course when he returned to the battalion he cursed and kicked the subordinates there, myself included. I suppose that got it out of his system. Cringing and brutalizing are equal parts of the Russian character, I should say. We were always burdened with the kind of vermin who leap from your feet to your throat. Have you read Alexander Werth? He has the audacity to insist the Russians are a fundamentally unaggressive people!)
“I recall that walking along with General Janin, the Admiral could not get in step. It seemed to unnerve them both. I confess I always thought of General Janin as a thoroughly poisonous man, although I did not know him really at all and have no basis for that belief. We were being inspected in barracks and he hurried right along-his flapping greatcoat made the oil lamps flicker. He scowled a great deal and kept rubbing the back of his neck with his swagger stick. As for the Admiral, I was struck by what a small man he was. He had a watchful, alien sort of impassivity-it discouraged one from speculating, from inquiry. Certainly he had none of that, what you call charisma.
“Not too far away from me he stopped and asked one of my men a question. I did not hear it, but I heard the reply from the soldier. The Admiral must have asked something about our rations and the soldier had the temerity to complain there was not enough to eat.
“I heard the Admiral’s reply. He said, ‘Hungry dogs bite well.’ It was rather sad really, because I don’t believe he meant that; it was expected of him to say something like that, you see. Our company was in no fit shape at that or any other time for real fighting. The favorite joke around the barracks was that we should invite the enemy in and let them laugh themselves to death.”
“It is late enough in my life that I can admit this now. My brother and I were officers only because we were somewhat educated men, we did not ‘look Jewish,’ and we had falsified our backgrounds and our names. Our village in the Ukraine had been overrun by waves of Germans and Russians and Czechs. We had a great fervor to survive, Maxim and I. It shamed us both, unspeakably, but we took Russian names and pretended to be kulaks who had joined the White Army because the Reds had confiscated our farm.
“The Whites were as anti-Semitic as the Reds, of course. They were all Russians, weren’t they? The Whites tended to blame Jews for bolshevism. A few Red leaders were Jews, that’s true, but after a while the Whites were convincing themselves that Lenin himself was Jewish-a canard to which I imagine Lenin would have been the first to take offense, since anti-Semitism was no small part of his nature. At any rate the Whites persuaded themselves that all Jews were Bolsheviks, and the terror of pogroms-particularly the massacres by Cossacks-went on and on, on both sides.
“Some of the Admiral’s own people were particularly vile in that respect. You know of course about the rumors that spread after the assassinations of the royal family-that the Czar had been murdered by Jews. Even General Knox believed those rumors, he reported them as fact to London. And at Ekaterinburg some White Cossacks butchered thousands of Jews in reprisal after the Romanovs were killed there. But the Admiral himself was rather indifferent, I think. Certainly he wasn’t visibly anti-Semitic.