Kolchak’s ministers had decamped four days earlier, leaving the city ahead of the Supreme Ruler to prepare for his arrival at Irkutsk, his new capital. Kolchak was to travel in the last convoy with his staff, the chancery and his personal guard. The Legion — with Paul in tow — was to bring up the rear in their own armoured train. All that was left behind, between them and the Red Army, were some ragged units of Poles, Ukrainians and some Serbs. They were attempting to move faster than the Red units chasing them.
On top of the chaos and the anarchy of the evacuation, Paul had heard there was an epidemic of typhus in the city. There was really no reason for anyone to go back into Omsk. Except Paul. He still had a reason.
Romanek had tried to dissuade him, but Paul knew that if he didn’t go back he would spend the rest of his life regretting not having tried. He had armed himself with the Russian version of the Smith & Wesson 10.67mm, less cumbersome than his old Mauser although neither gun was particularly reliable. Short of dragooning a detachment of legionnaires to accompany him, he didn’t know what else he could do. That he was wasting his time he didn’t doubt. Mikhail wouldn’t have been fool enough to stay any longer than he had to and, if Paul knew anything about his cousin, he had probably left with the ministers — if not before.
On the other hand Mikhail wouldn’t have wanted to be too far from the seat of power. It was always possible he had a berth on the convoy; after all, where safer to be than next to the Supreme Ruler? Either way, Paul really didn’t give a damn. Not about Mikhail. He was more concerned as to where Sofya might be. Already in Irkutsk, with any luck. If Mikhail had had the decency to send her on ahead. It was true his cousin had left her in Petersburg without a quibble, but then Sofya herself had not wanted to leave the city. Omsk was a different matter. Who in their right mind would want to stay here? She might very well have still insisted on remaining with her brother. She was stubborn enough, but Paul couldn’t imagine that having lived under the Bolsheviks in Petersburg she would have wanted to risk repeating the experience in Omsk. And even if Mikhail had not made arrangements for her to leave, Paul didn’t doubt that Sofya was resourceful enough to make her own.
He tried to resist the worm of suspicion that had been eating into his head for days that Krasilnikov might have made arrangements for her. She had said she detested the man but a lot could have changed in the intervening year. And in a town like Omsk, who could say what had happened?
They had all heard the rumours.
Stories of what it was like in Kolchak’s capital had spread down the line like a tide carrying detritus from a sinking ship. Omsk had become a by-word for corruption. The venality of army officers and of government functionaries was legend. It had tainted their every act. As had happened the year before, war matériel sent by the Allies had ceased to flow to the front and instead lay stuffed in Omsk warehouses, traded to whoever would pay the most. Even civilians, it had been said, dressed in military uniform while the troops at the front were reduced to rags. Everything had its price. While the ordinary citizen went hungry, restaurants burgeoned with expensive food. Night-clubs flowed with champagne, and cocaine was supposedly to be found as readily as tobacco.
Paul had tried not to picture Sofya in this inflamed atmosphere of vice and temptation. He had refused to admit any possibility of her giving in to the detestable Krasilnikov. But what could he know about it, hundreds of miles away chasing some chimera called duty? It might have been upon Sofya’s insistence that he had left, but how did she react in the vacuum?
That these thoughts not only traduced his own good opinion of her but of her own honour as well, made no difference. He couldn’t help himself. His mind kept returning to it time and again. It was as if the depravity that infected Omsk had infected his own thoughts. He was powerless to fight against it. He had promised himself that if he ever got a chance to return he would find her and — irrationally — atone for the damage he felt he had done to her memory.
Taking the same route he had a year earlier, he found the branch line that terminated in Nikólskaya Square had mostly been cleared of trains. The few abandoned carriages and boxcars left had been taken over by refugees. Soldiers no longer guarded the Stavka building and droves of people were passing in and out of its doors at will. Those leaving mostly carried some sort of booty.
There was little sign of the Gomorrah he had expected, though. Then he supposed those with the means to indulge in excess had already departed. Army officers had left with their families; government officials and clerks with their files. If they hadn’t managed to get a berth on one of the hundreds of trains that had already left in the last weeks, they’d gone by cart. Or walked. The host of the fleeing was endless: café owners, restaurateurs, merchants and shopkeepers… the rich hugging bags of money to their chests as mothers hugged their children. Even the prostitutes had gone.
Paul passed abandoned property that had been boarded up, betraying, perhaps, a fanciful optimism of some future return. Most had simply been abandoned. It made little difference. Whether secured or left open, it had all been entered and looted for whatever remained.
Rumour said there were still huge amounts of stores and munitions left in the town; matériel that Omsk’s dithering defenders had failed to destroy. What couldn’t be carried off at the last minute remained behind as a gift for Trotsky. What decidedly had not been left behind were the vast supplies of vodka held in the warehouses. It was said the retreating Cossacks had taken what they could not drink with them and were now in the process of raping and pillaging the villages they passed on their way east.
There were still supposedly some 30,000 troops in Omsk, abandoned by their officers in their rush to retreat, and it seemed odd to Paul not to see the number of drunken soldiers he had the last time he had been in the city. There was no shortage of drunks, it was true, looking unsteadily into a bottle for a personal oblivion before the arrival of the apocalypse. But they were not in uniform. Much of the rank and file of Kolchak’s army had already deserted — to join the Reds or bands of partisans, or simply to go home. The remainder had discarded their uniforms — presupposing, of course, that they had ever been issued them. Anyone with any sense was dressing in civilian clothes before the Red Army arrived.
Taking the Dvortzóvaya to the iron bridge that crossed the Om, Paul saw there were no longer any steamboats at the wharf. There were no craft capable of carrying passengers left at all. Those still alive in Omsk were cramming the hotels and abandoned restaurants as they had the railway station. Despite the evacuation the town still seethed. Packed to the gunnels, to use a naval expression. Cumming would have liked that, even if he wouldn’t have liked the scenes that greeted Paul. The living crowding the buildings were bad enough; worse were the dead inhabiting the streets. There was no shortage of bodies. He saw them lying in every attitude imaginable, men, women and children. It couldn’t have been plainer how the Allies’ policy had finally unravelled; that their scheming had come to nought. The retreat was a rout.
The Hotel Rossíya on Lyúbinski Prospékt had lost the few trappings of class he recalled it still possessed on his previous visit. There was no liveried doorman any longer. Outside, glass from broken windows lay in the snow; inside, broken people lay on what was left of the shabby furniture. He walked up to the desk but there was no clerk. The heat wasn’t working and he found an old man warming himself by a stove in the porter’s vestibule. The man was smoking a pipe, its stem stuck between lips half-hidden beneath his tobacco-stained moustache. Voluminous clouds of smoke mingling with that coming from the leaky stove.