† Russian dead numbered 4,000,000 in 1914–1917. Compare casualties of the Western Allies for the entire war through the end of 1918: Great Britain, 950,000 killed; France, 1,400,000 killed; United States, 115,600 killed (more than half of them by Spanish Influenza).-Ed.
* Several students of the subject insist there is room to believe the bodies, jewels and blood that were found at Ekaterinburg were planted fakes and that the royal family was spirited away alive by sympathetic conspirators. But no real proof has been offered. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* The Bolshevik government had moved the national capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918.-Ed.
* The Russian tendency to infect every organized activity with a terminal case of bureaucracy is not a creation of the Communists; it is a traditional Russian disease and was partly responsible for the lethargic ineffectualness of the White armies. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* The material in this section is needed for an understanding of the whole. This chapter was to be written after Harris Bristow gathered more details concerning the battles fought at this time. (No military engagements have been fleshed out in the existing manuscript, which was intended as a skeletal working structure by the author. The book, as planned, was to include detailed coverage of all significant individuals and engagements.) The editors have assembled the material in this chapter from Harris Bristow’s work notes and, to some extent, have adapted parts of the material rather freely from his earlier book, The Civil War in Russia: 1918–1921, New York, 1962.-Ed.
* In Siberia the war was fought solely along the railway. Go a hundred miles to either side of the line of track and you would find relative peace; go two hundred and you would find remarkable disinterest in the war; go three hundred and you could find people who didn’t even know there was a war on. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* Most Siberian river bridges, like those at Omsk and Irkutsk, were floating bridges which were removed from service before the winter freeze-up to prevent their being destroyed by grinding ice movements on the rivers. Temporary sand roadbeds were constructed on the thick ice for winter rail installation. After the spring thaw the bridges were replaced; to do so earlier would have been senseless. The Siberian rivers are very wide: The Irtysh at Omsk is more than a mile wide and during the spring floods can become as wide as ten miles, flooding entire valleys. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* After the first few months Janin had received instructions from Paris to obey Kolchak’s orders, with certain restrictions; he was free, for instance, to pull out at any time. Oddly, however, he remained loyal to the lost cause longer than most Russians did.-Ed.
* According to most sources there were 750,000 civilians and approximately 500,000 men in uniform, of whom most were deserters from both sides.-Ed.
* By the following April another thirty thousand had died of typhus in this small city alone. (From Bristow’s notes.)
* At this time-late December 1919-probably three-fifths of the refugees had died; half a million humans struggled on, with the Reds at their heels.-Ed.
PART II
4
My conversations with Haim Tippelskirch were nearly six weeks in duration. He had the rambling tendencies of age, and sometimes the querulousness. But perhaps he was aware of the hungry cells that were consuming his life; he kept repeating to me his desire to get it all said. If he had been a Catholic it would have been his final confession before asking for last rites, I think.
There were several evenings when he hardly touched on the subject of the Civil War-evenings when he talked of pre-war life in the Ukraine, of his village and his family; or of events between the wars, or his fifty years in Palestine, or the Second World War. His mind was remarkably retentive and he had a gifted analytical memory.
Clearly he had resolved to be candid with me from the outset-largely because he trusted Nikki and he saw that she trusted me-but for the first ten days his habits were stronger than his resolve. He had decided he would tell me only what it was good for me to know, and so he censored himself and spoke with an air of rueful formality.
He began at the end, with his memoir of the gold-how, why and where Kolchak had hidden it. The first time he told me the story it was related in impersonal terms, as if he and his brother had been observers there. Yet the subject of the gold was a constant source of excitement to him.
At that time I felt occasional impatience with him; I had less interest in the gold than he had. I’m a historian, not a treasure-hunter. The disposition of the Czar’s treasury was a matter of academic interest; I was more concerned with the human truth of the events. Nearly a hundred million people have died in the conflicts of the Russian twentieth century* and I had become obsessed with seeking the causes of that serial armageddon. Perhaps it was hazy reasoning to study cruelty in terms of numbers-the Russians had been involved in more bloodshed than any other people on earth but they hadn’t systematized it the way the Nazis did, nor did they put to use the technology for destruction which the United States employed on Dresden and Hiroshima and the Indochina villages. But more than any other modern nation, Russia had indulged in an unparalleled and nearly unbroken succession of mass human obliterations-sometimes aggressive but often as purely self-destructive as a rabid animal which, finding nothing else to attack, turns upon itself in a foaming fury and tears itself to bloody pieces.
I wanted to find the roots of that. I had reached a point where I was compelled to go beyond the idea of history-as-source material; history-the human record-was beginning to look like a substance with shape and motive and direction. I never took a Leninist view of History as an Entity to be worshiped and lied for; but as I probed the Russian century I began to take a Freudian view of it: I began to think it might be possible, by analyzing the causes of Russian behavior and gaining an insight into the contemporary Russian psyche, to predict the direction of future events.
This wasn’t an intellectual game. It was an earnest pursuit. I arrived at it slowly and in retrospect I’m sure Nikki had a lot to do with it. We talked incessantly: most of it was light and frivolous but there were times when we sat together in the room or the cafes of Tel Aviv and discussed ideas. Ideas had more reality in that setting; you had a sense of living in the center of things, there was none of that blase insulation against hard truths which you get in the States. Israel lives always under the poised threat of a suspended axe and it heightens the reality of pleasures, the savor of simple things, the intensity of everything. In that atmosphere it is still possible to discuss the ultimate questions of good and evil without feeling ludicrous.
And so we talked. Sometimes the two of us, sometimes the three; sometimes whole groups-friends and associates of my two companions. We thought it might be possible by puzzling out the Russian destiny to know whether the Russian urge toward self-destruction could determine the odds for, or against, the Kremlin’s willingness to risk war. We asserted that it was no good studying the political and rational counterpressures in the Middle East without taking into account the character of Russian leadership and its relationship to the Arab neurosis. Reason was seldom a guiding principle in international affairs and never was it less so than when you were dealing with peoples as volatile as the Jews, the Arabs, the Russians, the Americans. How much was behavior predictable on the basis of biological urges toward domination and aggression? How much was peculiar to the nations individually? Was it possible the Russians were no more aggressive or self-destructive than anybody else-that they’d simply had more provocations and opportunities than, say, the Brazilians or Canadians? Was it possible, by the same reasoning, that the French or the British, given their Versailles and their Hitler, would have been as murderous as the Germans had been? How much different would the Soviet Union have been without Stalin?