It became clear that the Legion — beyond its rescue of Chernov at the Palais Royale Hotel — was not going to step in on behalf of the Social-Revolutionary Party. Gajda had promised Kolchak the Legion’s neutrality in the event of a coup and had delivered it. In its wake the promise left a seething atmosphere of resentment. The air in Syrový’s office had been thick with it.
Paul explained what he had seen and what he knew to have happened during the coup. Syrový and Diterikhs heard him out, although when he had requested permission to return to the Legion unit he had been serving with before Voitzekhovsky had brought him to Ekaterinburg, he could see they were not keen. Syrový’s face had remained as blank as his eye patch until Diterikhs, inclining his head towards Syrový, said a few words in an undertone that Paul could not catch. Perhaps it was his contacts in Omsk that swayed their decision, presupposing the day might possibly come when he might prove useful. They acceded to his request and Paul left feeling like a doubtfull asset squirreled away against future adverse conditions. Two days later the Czechoslovak National Council meeting in Chelyabinsk advised soldiers of the Legion not to co-operate with the new regime nor obey officers who supported Admiral Kolchak.
‘We should let the Reds have him and all the rest of his drunken rabble.’
Romanek, finally replying to Paul’s remark about someone having to draw the short straw, startled him back into the present.
He had assumed their conversation over. It was hard to disagree with Romanek’s sentiment, though, even if the Reds weren’t making much of an effort to reach Kolchak. With winter closing its iron fist on the country, they seemed to have concluded that there was little point in fighting for a town they could have for the asking in a day or two. Their army was still advancing, bringing their guns up over the ice of the Irtúish, but they were hardly moving any faster than the train Paul was travelling on. In truth, there was no hurry. Sooner or later not only Omsk but the rest of Siberia would be theirs for the taking.
‘We owe him nothing,’ Romanek continued to mumble.
Paul wasn’t arguing.
Having returned to the front, he found that Karel Romanek had been pleased to see him back even if few of the others were. It hadn’t been much over three weeks since he had left the train and, managing to reclaim his old bunk without too much difficulty, he found little had changed. But this, in the wake of the news filtering out of Omsk was deceptive.
To Paul’s surprise, news arrived that Krasilnikov and his fellow conspirators had been brought to trial.
‘Propaganda. For the Allies sake,’ Romanek cynically insisted. ‘If they’re found guilty they’ll get no more than a slap on the wrist.’
And he had been almost right. The trial proved to be a stage-managed affair and, despite confessing to having engineered the coup, Krasilnikov and the others were acquitted. The court accepted their defence that their coup had been staged to pre-empt an SR insurrection.
Karel merely spat on the floor and looked in askance at Paul.
The verdict seemed to give a signal to Kolchak’s Stavka, White officers regarding the decision as authority to take their revenge on those they saw as primarily to blame for the disintegration of Imperial Russia. Anyone with a connection to Kerensky and the former Provisional Government was murdered on the street. An insurrection in Omsk’s industrial suburb of Kulomzino was put down by Kolchak’s army, killing hundreds of workers and SRs. Then, in December, came the news that Cossacks had gone on a rampage in the city, burning houses, beating and killing anyone suspected of SR or Bolshevik sympathies.
For Paul the nadir had been reached when some SR prisoners, freed during the brief workers’ insurrection but who had returned to prison on its suppression upon guarantees of safety, were brought before a hastily arranged military court and shot. Their guards, reluctant to give them up, had shared their fate. Their bodies, in a phrase he remembered Valentine having used, were ‘transferred to the Republic of the Irtúish’.
But it was not only Paul who was sickened by the stream on news coming out of Omsk. The massacre brought about a sea change within the Legion. The soldiers’ committees, always in sympathy with the Social-Revolutionary Party, mutinied and, taking their National Council at their word, the Seventh Regiment and parts of the Fifth and Sixth, refused to serve at the front.
Paul didn’t doubt that their decision would merely confirm Kolchak in his view that the Legion was unreliable. Had the Supreme Ruler, as he now styled himself, had the strength, Paul was sure he would have attempted to suppress it; liquidate it, in that oft-used euphemism. But he lacked the strength and the admiral had to satisfy himself with ordering Czechs and Slovaks to assume the passive role of guarding the Trans-Siberian line.
This had suited Paul well enough at the time although, while glad enough to be behind the lines, he nevertheless felt a sense of guilt over what others saw as the Legion’s betrayal of the fracturing army that was trying to hold back the Bolshevik front.
But betrayal came in many shades. Gajda, in what could only be seen a reward for his assuring the neutrality of the Legion during the coup, was appointed commander of Kolchak’s forces.
Galvanising the army, he had retaken Perm at Christmas, although marring his victory by massacring fifteen hundred workers. Ufa fell a few days later with Uralsk and Orenburg following swiftly in the new year.
Meanwhile Paul and his échelon had been kicking their heels behind the front, on the line between Ufa and Chelyabinsk in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. The Red Army stalled at Ufa finding itself short of men. As long as the SR Party had been part of the government, the Bolsheviks had not lacked volunteers but, following the split in the summer, all except a few hard-line SRs had repudiated the Bolsheviks. Peasant uprisings in the rear of the Red Army starved them of recruits and, as Romanek pointed out, like every Russian government before them, they resorted to forced conscription.
‘What did they do?’ Karel had asked rhetorically. ‘Conscripted men at the point of a rifle. Beat them and burned their villages. Took the ones the Poor Peasant committees said were Kulaks and shot them as an example to the others.’
‘What’s a Kulak?’
‘A rich peasant. The word means, “fist”.’
‘I know what the word means,’ said Paul. ‘I wondered why it was used for rich peasants.’
Romanek laughed. ‘“Rich” is a flexible word. It can mean a man with a couple of cows and a few acres. It depends if the Poor Peasant committee sees him as a threat. It’s a term of abuse, marking the man out as an oppressor. Now they’ve got rid of the landlords the next to go will be the small-holder. Follow their logic and all they’ll have left to work the land are the landless dimwits without the ambition to better their lot. Then they’ll resort to the knout again. The poor bastards will really know what a fist is then.’
Paul was tapping water from the samovar to brew tea. Romanek had stripped off his boots and stood them by his bunk. His gloves and coat were hanging on pegs near the stove to dry, a musty steam rising from them and adding to the thick atmosphere. They had been out on a patrol although here on the main line it was no more than an amble through the trees. With winter and the country frozen hard hostilities had more or less stopped. There was little fighting at the front and, for the Legion strung out along the railway line again, even less. The Bolsheviks were no doubt busy, slaughtering peasants in their rear, but that was their way.