So the assistance was withdrawn, and White Russia collapsed; and in Siberia, in the end, the only surviving beneficiaries were of course the Cossacks.
“Our soldiers went from house to house in Omsk, that September, begging for food. I think all the livestock disappeared almost overnight. On the streets you saw orphans who’d starved to death and old people frozen dead on the boardwalks. The soldiers’ wives were prostituting themselves for the price of half a loaf of bread. Everywhere you saw wagons abandoned in the mud of the streets, it was up to the axles. So nothing moved in the streets, they were all stoppered that way. Half the stores in the city were looted empty.
“Epidemics infested every overcrowded building in the city. The sick overflowed the public buildings and hospital trains; in the hospitals, reserved for the war-injured, men lay three to a bed and the floors were carpeted with half-dead bodies.
“You saw Jews in gabardines and threadbare frock coats trading their last possessions for food. A silver samovar for two eggs, some ornate lamp for a few slices of bread. Some of those Jews had come from far away-I think some even came from Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they’d got through the lines somehow. The Reds were purging again you know, there were new pogroms up there and everybody was trying to get out.
“You have to remember everyone in Asia lived briefly and wretchedly in those days. It wasn’t just the war, although that made it much worse. There is such a thing as being worked to death-literally worked to death-and also there is such a thing as being too impecunious to survive. My brother Maxim and I had no money but we had learned to degrade ourselves by toadying to our superior officers and somehow we didn’t starve. We were desperately hungry but we didn’t starve. We stole, yes.
“Our job at this time was to guard the horses. You see we all knew there would be a retreat and we needed draft animals, there weren’t enough trains. But the starving people wanted to kill the army horses and eat them. We had to fight them off. In the morality of the time, Maxim and I felt we had honored ourselves because we never killed anyone who tried to steal a horse. We only sent them away. But I’m sure some of them starved to death because of us. You can’t live with that knowledge and remain sane. We became insane, of course. No more so than anyone else around us, but insane just the same. You were insane or you were dead.”
Those few with possessions and money stayed in the taverns, stayed drunk, stayed oblivious. The debauched gaiety in the cafes made an unspeakable contrast to the horror all around it.
Rumors from the front were increasingly despairing. But if the appearance was bad, the reality was even worse. In October the Reds rolled over Kolchak’s holding forces and marched into Petropavlovsk with nothing much left to restrain them from moving right on into Kolchak’s capital.
Kolchak’s armies, dressed in rags, fell back as far as the Irtysh, just two miles west of the city. Here they stopped. The Irtysh had refused to freeze, there were no boats of any size, and the railway bridge had floated away.* The White armies could not march across the river and so they had to remain where they were and prepare to fight with their backs to the river.
“We had been in the front lines a good part of that summer before they had rotated us back to Omsk to guard the horses. Then I think it was early November that they sent our two companies of infantry back across the Irtysh in rowboats, a squad at a time. It took all day to get three hundred men across. We took up positions facing the west and waited for the Bolsheviks.
“It snowed every day, at least a little, but during the afternoons it would warm up a little. The river never froze hard. Everyone said such a mild autumn meant a terrible winter ahead. It turned out they were right, you know. But in November the river wouldn’t freeze and there was some panic in the lines about what we would do if the Reds fell upon us. We knew they had several full-size armies around Petropavlovsk and by this time I think we were down to something like thirty thousand men in the lines.”
[On November 8, two Red armies marched down the plains toward the river-a hundred thousand men or more. The Fifth Red Army made a direct advance on the Irtysh while the Third moved obliquely past its rear to prevent retreat to the south.]
“You could hear their guns, bombarding our tiny rearguard out on the plains. At night you could see the greenish German-made flares they used.”
[Normally by the end of October the river would have frozen. But it was still loose ice, floating floes, on November 9. That morning, displaying some of the courage for which he was noted, Kolchak made his way across the Irtysh in a steam river-tug, accompanied by a handful of aides including General Janin.* Twice the tug was rammed by heavy ice rolling downstream on the swift current; once it almost broached.]
“The Admiral wore a belted fur-lined coat of grey leather; its fur hem hung around his boots, almost scraping the ground, and he looked as if the boat trip across the river had soaked him to the skin.
“We were in a dugout we were using for battalion headquarters. The Admiral came down from what passed for army HQ-it was just upriver a few hundred meters from us. He came with four or five officers. The whole time he was with us he did all the talking, none of his aides spoke a word. General Janin only stood watching. He kept flicking his trouser thigh with his quirt.
“All the battalion combat officers were assembled and it was quite crowded in the dugout-fifteen of us, perhaps eighteen. The enemy was not far away. I remember just as the Admiral opened his mouth to speak, we heard a mortar fire. You know what an old tennis ball sounds like when it bounces? It was like that, the noise. One of our own mortars, I think.
“There was a growing rattle of rifles off to the northeast-some advances by the Bolsheviks, but most of it was indiscriminate shooting of a very poor standard. Our soldiers tended to fire several rounds at intervals just so they could warm their hands on the hot barrels of their rifles.
“I suppose it wasn’t later than half-past two or three o’clock but there was an early-gathering winter gloom and one had the impression the Admiral was in a hurry to get back across the river before dark. We all stood around in our long winter coats and listened to him talk. He made very little effort to be civil. He lambasted his generals, none of whom was present-he blamed the losses on them, he said now it was up to us in the lines to hold out as long as we could. He had already ordered the civilian populace to flee the city but it was much too late for most of that, there wasn’t any transport for them because the Admiral had requisitioned every horse and of course every train.
“He asked our battalion commander how many able-bodied we had in the lines. We had I think a shade more than four hundred. Then the Admiral smiled and asked, ‘And how many of them are on our side?’ Some of us laughed; the battalion commander only said, ‘I hope most of them, sir.’ He was rather gallant, our commander-an old-line Czarist professional soldier. He was killed the next day.
“The Admiral said it was likely to freeze hard within twenty-four hours but it was going to take several days to evacuate Omsk. He confessed he had been urged by some of the bureaucrats to negotiate for a cease-fire with the Bolsheviks, to spare the city from destruction. Then he said-I remember the words-he said, ‘A decision must be made.’ He said it to the face of our lowly battalion commander as if he were putting the decision up to him.
“Our commander answered in a very calm way. ‘It does no service to put that in the passive voice, Excellency.’
“And the Admiral drew himself up. I think he had needed that from someone, from anyone. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I must make the decision.’