“I have studied this for many years. I think Lenin really wanted to stabilize relations with the West. But he had great danger at home. Only by carrying out the promise of peace could he remain in power. ‘Peace’ was the one promise he could not afford to break.
“One can’t help but observe that this Communist Party, which came to power on its pledge of peace, has been responsible for the brutal massacres of more human beings than any other political organization in history, the Nazi Party included.”
The truce continued but a permanent peace had yet to be signed. Lenin delayed as long as he could: to placate the Western Allies and to salvage what he could from the impending negotiations with the Kaiser’s representatives.
But anti-Bolshevik pressure finally forced Lenin to sign.
Germany’s demands were voracious. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, was a horrible blow to Russia. Germany took away nearly half her industries, a third of her population and a quarter of her territory.
The cost of the peace was so harsh that indignation flared up once again and White Russian units everywhere were mobbed with volunteers.
“Whole regiments were defecting en masse to the Whites. They felt Lenin had betrayed the Motherland at Brest-Litovsk.
“The peasants rallied to the White banner because of Lenin’s confiscation of private property. The peasants had never wanted communism, you know. What they wanted was ownership of the land. That was precisely what the Reds denied them. Serfdom was the same whether your master was an aristocrat or the State.”
Military resistance against the Reds flickered into existence all over Russia. It had no central leadership and no governmental structure; at first it was partisan warfare and recruiting contests, with both sides hastily daubing the giant Cyrillic characters of their slogans on walls and barracks.
Then for a while it became more orderly: traditional warfare, great armies drawn up against one another on vast battlefields. The Whites were encouraged significantly by the victory of Mannerheim, who defeated the Reds in Finland, and by the victories of Marshall Pilsudski’s hard-riding Polish cavalry against Trotsky’s ill-supplied and ill-organized Red infantry.
But in 1918 as the Whites spread their enthusiastic forces across a great part of Russia’s acreage, no fewer than nineteen separate White Russian governments came into being in different areas, each claiming legitimate franchise from the deposed Czar. From the very beginning it was this lack of central organization which threatened to destroy the anti-Bolshevik movement in the Civil War.
3.
THE CZAR’S TREASURE
On the night of July 16, 1918, in a large manor house in the Ural Mountain village of Ekaterinburg, occurred the murder* of the Imperial family: the Czar, the Czarina, the Czarevitch, four grand Duchesses and four servants. Lenin did not want the Whites to have a live figurehead to rally round.
At the same time there was a battle fought at the city of Kazan on the Volga. The White forces won—and captured the city, which unbeknownst to the Reds was the repository of the monetary reserves of the Imperial government.
The gold and treasure had been transferred to Kazan to avoid its falling into German hands in Petrograd. According to most sources its value was estimated at 1,150,500,000 rubles; it was composed of platinum, stock securities, miscellaneous valuables and approximately five hundred tons of gold bullion, each ingot stamped with the Imperial seal.
It may well have been the greatest tonnage of raw gold men have ever moved in one shipment. When the city of Kazan fell into White Russian hands the treasure was loaded onto a train after several episodes reminiscent more of comic than of grand opera (a Red counterattack, misdirected reinforcements, the arrival of a pack of bickering White bureaucrats, the dispatching of confused plain-language telegraph inquiries that were intercepted but not understood by the Reds). Finally the gold train was taken away by members of the [anti-Bolshevik] West Siberian Commissariat. This group seems to have obtained the gold merely because it sent a more numerous delegation than any of the others.
The gold was shipped to the city of Omsk and was parked on a siding in the marshaling yards; it was placed under guard by a flimsy detachment of White Army troops. Before long, everyone—White and Red alike—knew it was there. But neither side seemed to attach very great importance to it and it stayed in the marshaling yards aboard its weather-beaten goods wagons for the next four months without incident. In the meantime both sides suffered for lack of funds.
4.
KOLCHAK: SUPREME RULER OF ALL THE RUSSIAS
Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak was born in 1874 the son of a Russian army officer. Why he decided on a naval career was a mystery to his family but—oddly, in the light of forthcoming events—Aleksandr Kolchak became a first-rate naval officer.
During the war against the Central Powers he commanded the Black Sea Fleet. His crews regarded him as a compassionate man; they were among the few who did not mutiny during the March 1917 naval revolts. Kolchak was also courageous (he had led several bold forays of exploration into the Arctic) and even efficient (he had been a key reorganizer of the Russian navy after its catastrophic defeat by the Japanese at Tsushima, a decade earlier).
In June 1917 the revolutionaries finally took control of his Black Sea Fleet. They demanded that Kolchak disarm his officers and surrender his sword to them. He expressed his contempt for these demands by tossing his sword over the side into the waters of Odessa harbor and stalking ashore. None of the revolutionaries had nerve enough to stop him.
Kolchak was diminutive and birdlike: impatient, pale, nervous in his quick movements. He always dressed impeccably and shaved with care. His small round head was dominated by a great curved prow of a nose which separated a pair of grey eyes of ferocious and penetrating brilliance. Precise, cold, mercurial, aloof.
In 1918 he was a vice admiral without a command. Toward the end of that year he made his way to Tokyo in order to offer his services to the British Royal Navy in whatever capacity they might see fit to employ him usefully, whether against the Germans or against the Bolsheviks. But the British hadn’t much use for him and Kolchak languished as a near-charity case in a second-class Tokyo hoteclass="underline" alert and energetic, but without purpose, he simmered in stunted hope for a reprieve from boredom. He did not drink very much but he came to know the pleasures of narcotic drugs and was known to use the stimulant cocaine; General Pierre Janin later insisted Kolchak was an addict.
Kolchak’s constant visits to the British Embassy brought him to the attention of the British Military Representative in Siberia, Major General Sir Alfred Knox.
There was none of the robust bearded-warrior quality of Russian ruthlessness about Kolchak and possibly this endeared him to Sir Alfred. The British general listened with interest to the diminutive admiral’s views on the conflict in Russia. Kolchak impressed the British general to the extent that Sir Alfred went away insisting that Kolchak was the great White hope.
[The Whites themselves at this time had incredibly few anxieties about their chaotic lack of organization, but the Allies—particularly the British—were desperate in their insistence that the Whites produce a single leader upon whom the Allies could rely for coordination, command and liaison.]
The Allies finally got what they wanted. An English major general, supported by Czech and Japanese and French and American officials, succeeded in imposing upon Russia a one-man government in the person of Admiral Aleksandr V. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias.
“I do not believe that [General Sir Alfred] Knox reckoned on Kolchak’s temperamental character. The Admiral was undoubtedly on his best behavior in those early days, but he had an erratic and violent temper. Much later, when we were aboard his train, I remember that the Admiral’s desk had to be resupplied every morning with pens and inkwells and that sort of thing, because during the course of a day’s business he would fly into at least one rage in which he would smash everything breakable he could lay his hands on.