Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (32 page)

Throughout the summer of 1919, Kolchak’s army kept retreating farther eastward. Confidence in Kolchak and his government eroded quickly, and his army began to disintegrate. Baron Budberg, a member of Kolchak’s War Ministry, lamented the incompetence, disorganization, self-interest, and corruption he saw around him. Many in the
government, he wrote, had “taken refuge in alcohol and cocaine”; they all had been “living beyond the law” for too long to be saved, and their cause had become, in his eyes, hopeless.
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Before August was out, the Red forces had moved east of the Urals and retaken Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. By late October they had almost reached Omsk.

Alexander had remained behind in Tyumen to help oversee the evacuation of the military hospital in advance of the Reds’ march on the city. The staff loaded the wounded men into thirty freight cars filled with nothing but straw and then headed out for Krasnoyarsk. The journey took three weeks, and the rough swaying and clanking of the cars were misery for the sick and injured men. As soon as they settled the wounded in Krasnoyarsk, Alexander left to see his family in Kansk in late August. He stayed only several days but promised to return in a few months. In fact, he was not to see his family for more than a year.
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From Kansk Alexander traveled to Omsk to work in the hospitals, then overrun with typhus. He remained until November, when the city was evacuated again. The evacuation had been announced at the end of October. Soon a mass withdrawal began; panic gripped the city, and people began to flee by whatever means possible.
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Alexander stayed with his men and made sure that all of the sick and wounded were safely placed on trains and evacuated. Alexander and part of the staff then took off across the snow on several sleighs; they could make out advance units of Tukhachevsky’s Red Fifth Army approaching on the horizon. Along with Alexander rode tens of thousands of Kolchak’s soldiers. The sight of this vast movement reminded him of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. As they rode, Alexander was comforted by the thought that they were moving closer to his family.

I tried not to think much of the disaster, of the crash of our dreams of defeating Bolshevism and liberating Russia. A vague hope that something might befall to save the situation, some foreign interference, some new upsurge of energy of the defeated army, the change of the Commander-in-Chief—a miracle in short. In such an epoch as this, one becomes a fatalist and one begins to hope, that the strokes of fate are not always merciless.
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The next day caught them in a blizzard. They trudged on to the east, but the wind and snow made it hard going. Desperately cold in the
open sleighs, the men climbed down to walk for stretches in an attempt to warm themselves. They journeyed through the bitter cold for a week, usually sleeping outside in the open around a fire. At times they had trouble finding enough forage for the horses. Finally, after three weeks, they reached Novo-Nikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), more than halfway on the rail line from Omsk to Tomsk, only to find the town being evacuated as the Red advance across Siberia marched on. (It fell to the Red Fifth Army on December 14, 1919, along with as many as 31,000 White troops, 190 echelons of military supplies, and 30,000 corpses, dead from typhus.)
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Alexander boarded a train with many of the others, but for days the train sat barely moving, and so, fearing capture, they got off and joined the men fleeing on foot. By now all discipline had broken down; the army had devolved into a band of wild, desperate men. Soldiers and Cossacks began to rob the villages they passed through, and the officers could do little to stop them. One night in the town of Mariinsk the soldiers took over a distillery and drank it dry. There was shouting and shooting all night, and the next morning many soldiers lay frozen to death in the streets.
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Lyubov and the rest of the family had moved from Kansk to Krasnoyarsk in the early autumn so the older children could return to school. As winter came on, the situation grew worse, and people had begun to leave the city by the beginning of December. Lyubov did not know what to do. Alexander had promised to meet up with them by December 24, yet the date had come and gone, and they had no word from him. Nikolai and his family had already left Krasnoyarsk. They were joined by Yevgenia Pisarev and the others who had left Moscow with them two years earlier; also joining them was Pierre Gilliard, a former French-language tutor to the tsar’s children.

It pained them all to leave Lyubov and her children behind, but she refused to go, even after a note from Alexander arrived, begging her to take the children and leave without him.
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Finally, as the situation became perilous and their chances of avoiding the Red Army were nearly exhausted, Lyubov decided they too would have to make their escape. They barely got away in time. In the first days of January 1920, the city fell to anti-Kolchak forces; the escape route to the east was blocked. On the eighth, the Red Fifth Army marched into Krasnoyarsk and took more than sixty thousand prisoners.
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By now all civilian rail traffic had stopped in Siberia, and only military trains were moving. Lyubov
was taken in by a Czech officer, who promised to take them as soon as the army evacuated.
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Some of the White Army waited too long to make their escape by train and were forced to escape across the snow in sledges. For five weeks they trekked through the frozen wastes before reaching Lake Baikal.
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Home for many Russians caught up in the war in Siberia was a boxcar. By the time they left Krasnoyarsk in late 1919 the Golitsyns and Lopukhins had been living in such a car for many months. The boxcars were preferred over the few remaining passenger cars since these were infected by lice that carried the danger of typhus. Each car could hold up to sixty people, thirty with luggage. The occupants created their own intimate world in these rustic surroundings, with special rules and a distinctive order and even its own kind of beauty. They would fashion cozy little “nests” of rugs or shawls on the bunks and shelves that ran along both sides of the car. Refugees who had more space created whole living rooms with upholstered furniture, heavy felt and rugs on the floor, shawls decorating the walls, and kerosene lamps with shades.

The cars were so cramped that people began to learn a whole new way of inhabiting space. One made certain to keep one’s arms and hands down, close to the body, to make small, contained movements so as not to get into others’ personal space. The Golitsyns’ servant Liza fashioned curtains out of sheets so they could have privacy to change and wash in a small basin. Since the cars were not heated, a wood-burning stove was installed in the middle with a stovepipe running up through the roof or a window. It was intensely hot near the stove, but ice cold in the corners and on the upper bunks, where the children slept. The coldest place was near the windows, which were frozen over. Fur coats were put up against the walls to try to keep out the cold, and the children would awaken in the morning under frozen blankets. One person would be in charge of tending the fire, and God forbid he let it go out, for this would bring the wrath of the entire car down upon him. Everything happened around the heat of the stove: food was cleaned, prepared, and cooked; dishes were scrubbed, clothes and bodies washed (as well as possible); firewood was chopped and coal broken up into smaller pieces. Smoke invariably hung in the air, and the faces of the passengers were dirty with soot.

The doors often had to be locked while the train was in a station to keep people from climbing in. Occasionally, the doors would be opened so the travelers could go barter for food. The diet was typically rusk with tea and a bit of milk, if it could be acquired from the peasants. Eggs and, even more rarely, boiled meat or potatoes were a luxury. Lyubov once traded clothes with villagers for a dozen geese and frozen cranberries, which they found especially delicious. The Lopukhins managed to get hold of an entire ox carcass, which they hauled up to the top of the boxcar; the Siberian winter made for the perfect freezer. At stops, they would open the door and one of them would clamber up on top and hack off some pieces of frozen meat for boiling on the stove. The Siberian winter was so bitterly cold that if the train sat too long, it would freeze to the tracks and it would take a long time to get it going again. From their car the Golitsyns often saw sleighs of refugees, all bundled up, nothing visible but their faces, blackened from frostbite, passing across the snow.
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Stops were also opportunities to hunt for firewood, usually acquired by ripping apart nearby fences. Fear set in whenever the fuel supply ran low; at times, the bunks had to be taken from the walls and chopped up to feed the stove. Sometimes the locomotives ran out of fuel, and then everyone had to climb out of the cars and head to the nearest stand of trees to gather wood. If there was none to be had, the train would sit motionless until another came up from behind to push it to the next village or until they were set upon by an enemy or band of partisans.
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Alexander Golitsyn found the communal life in the boxcars depressing.
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Often the trains stopped for long stretches because of lack of fuel or a breakdown on the line. Alexander remembered:

The train is stopped in the steppe; a snowstorm is howling; it is warm in the box car, a kerosene lamp burns, or if there isn’t one—candles; while outside a line of sleds full of soldiers of the retreating army passes. One wants to join them, even in the bitter cold. Anything not to be standing still. In the end, that was what I did (near Novo-Nikolaevsk) when during one period of ten days we travelled only 100 versts
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and were almost captured by the Reds.
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Lyubov, on the other hand, recalled her months in the boxcars as a period of rare beauty. “Everything had a special aura of love,” she remembered, “and somehow torn away from reality as if it was not of this life.” Although they had very little, everyone was happy to share with others and to make sacrifices, even for strangers. They could often hear the soldiers singing, and they gazed with wonderment at Lake Baikal as they rode along its frozen shores. “Sometimes in the evening, when the sun was setting, the mood was quite evocatively poetic. [. . .] It was a time of love and helpfulness to each other. And living close to nature, all around.” Soon after leaving Krasnoyarsk, they stopped alongside a railcar carrying YMCA aid workers. Among them was a young American, who gave them a small Christmas tree decorated with chocolate bars and cigarettes and canned meat that allowed the Golitsyns to enjoy an unexpected Christmas feast.
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Kolchak fled Omsk on November 14 just hours before the Red Army, carrying with him the remains of the large imperial gold reserves (more than four hundred million gold rubles’ worth of bullion and coinage) seized the previous year in Kazan by the Komuch government. The thirty-six heavily laden cars slowed his movement to a dangerously slow pace. He set out to meet the rest of his ministers, who had left earlier for Irkutsk, but the Czechs and rebellious railroad workers repeatedly stopped and diverted his train onto sidings. From behind, Red forces chased after, at times even capturing some of the trains fleeing Omsk together with Kolchak. Kolchak’s train traveled for a month yet had still not reached Irkutsk, some 1,534 miles east of Omsk, where the remains of his government were awaiting him. His men began to desert his train to join the Bolsheviks.
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The Lopukhins and Yevgenia Pisarev managed to attach their boxcar to a train following directly behind that of Kolchak. At first it seemed like a good idea since being part of Kolchak’s convoy led by his armor-plated engine bristling with cannons would provide them excellent protection. But Kolchak was also the primary target of the hostile forces all around them. The train moved slowly and stopped for long periods as Kolchak tried to determine whether it was safe to move forward. There was no good information on what was happening up ahead, though there were rumors of battles with the Reds in Irkutsk.
Gunfire could be heard close by. Apprehension and then fear spread throughout the train.

They had traveled only a few days before Kolchak’s trains stopped in Nizhneudinsk, not quite halfway between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. The Czechs had blocked Kolchak from moving, in part to ingratiate themselves with the new anti-Kolchak leaders in Irkutsk, whose permission the Czechs needed to continue their trek to the coast. From her car Yevgenia could see Kolchak’s men leaving the train and drifting away; his personal band marched off into the nearby Bolshevik-controlled town playing the “Marseillaise.” She and the others realized that if they were to keep moving east, they had to uncouple their car and try to join a different train convoy. Eventually, they convinced the Americans to attach their boxcar to their train, and after several tense days they finally left Nizhneudinsk and Kolchak behind. In the first week of 1920, Kolchak’s government collapsed and the former “Supreme Leader” was taken to Irkutsk and handed over to the new Soviet government. He had had opportunities to attempt an escape but, determined to accept what fate awaited him, had refused to take them. Kolchak was interrogated and then taken out into the bitter cold morning of February 7, 1920, and shot by members of the newly established Irkutsk Military Revolutionary Committee. One of Kolchak’s executioners recalled how he had bravely refused a blindfold and stood erectly, calmly waiting to be shot, “like an Englishman.” They tossed his body into a hole in the ice of the Ushakovka River.
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