David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul thought he should be feeling more optimistic. After all, in Chelyabinsk they had received momentous news. The town was the headquarters of the Legion and Kolchak had stopped there to confer with Generals Diterikhs and Syrový. There had been the usual formal inspection of troops and, afterwards, the inevitable lunch; (an army according to Bonaparte marched on its stomach, although Paul couldn’t remember the ambitious corporal ever mentioning the fact that it was usually the general staff who could be found feeding their faces). They were still eating when a French colonel suddenly burst into the room waving a paper above his head. An Armistice , he declared, had been signed between the Allies and the Central Powers.

The colonel, who seemed to have been previously acquainted with Ward, had then produced a bottle of champagne and they had celebrated the event. The mood became instantly euphoric — as if the news had gone to their heads rather than the wine — which was just as well since, by the time the bottle reached Paul’s end of the table, it was empty.

At the time he had found the fact oddly analogous to the situation. He could picture men climbing out of the trenches all along the western front amid cheering, congratulating themselves and each other upon the victorious outcome. Yet he couldn’t help thinking it something of a pyrrhic victory. He was pleased, naturally, but too much blood had been spilt, too much had changed and been swept away, for him to feel any other emotion than simple relief that it had, at last, come to an end. But the sense of relief lasted no longer than the champagne. Nothing for the men sitting around the table had changed. The war in Europe might be over but not the war in which they found themselves. Nothing had changed for them — or him — at all.

After the lunch he had walked back to the train with Ward and his staff through the snow-covered streets of Chelyabinsk. Odd, he had reflected, how he found himself in Chelyabinsk when news of the war ending had reached him. It had been an ‘incident’ in Chelyabinsk — as related by Cumming — that had drawn him back to Russia. Without that, he supposed he would have eventually rejoined the Surreys and returned to the western front. He might very well have been killed — armistice now wouldn’t have prevented slaughter then — and so perhaps coming to Russia had saved his life.

That, of course, was to assume he could stay alive.

Ward had been readying the train for the journey to Ufa and more troop inspections when, late in the afternoon, Kolchak with Gajda in tow, back from a conference with his generals, announced, contrary to expectation, his intention of returning to Omsk immediately. He had seen enough, apparently, of the condition of the army under the government of the Directory and in his capacity as minister for war, had decided to oversee personally the proper supply of clothing, arms and ammunition to the front.

Paul hadn’t been sorry. He was as tired as Kolchak of seeing soldiers without guns and proper clothing, feet wrapped in rags and suffering from frostbite. Omsk was the centre of government and where the army general staff was based; well away from the fronts, of course, and he couldn’t help noting that the officers on Kolchak’s staff — with the possible exception of Gajda — perked up considerably at the news. It had taken some while to arrange the change of plan — the bureaucracy of the Russian railroads taking little account of minor inconveniences like civil war — and it was late the following morning before they had covered the 490 versts to Petropávlovsk. Here they found General Boldyrev, commander-in-chief of the Directory’s armies and the man who had appointed Kolchak minister of war, waiting in his train. Boldyrev was on his way to the Ufa front himself and had interrupted his journey in order to confer with the admiral.

After a short word with Ward, Kolchak boarded Boldyrev’s train. Paul wandered up as Ward was instructing his servant, Moorman, to take a photograph of the two trains.

‘There’s trouble in Omsk, lad,’ said Ward. ‘We’ll need to keep our wits about us. I think it’s going to take more than trumpets and drums to keep the peace, if I know anything about it.’

About what exactly, Ward didn’t say. There was something in the wind, he had predicted a day or two earlier, but hadn’t said exactly what that had been either. Paul had heard rumours concerning the rival factions in Omsk before. The Directory, it was said, would not last long. But there had been claims of this sort since the Directory of Five had been cobbled together out of the talks between Komuch and the west Siberian groupings and nothing had happened yet.

What Paul knew of the political situation this side of the Urals he had learned courtesy of Karel Romanek. After the February Revolution many regional governments had been set up across Siberia, some professing allegiance to the Provisional government, others to a rainbow of SRs, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Others still had announced themselves autonomous and had been ruled by local ethnic populations like the Bashkirs and the Kirghiz. In Omsk a Siberian government had been formed by Kadet and Right SR politicians who soon became dominated by reactionaries and monarchist officers.

When Samara fell, Komuch disintegrated and its members fled to Ufa. Here, in September, a State Conference agreed on the merging of what was left of Komuch with the Siberian government in Omsk and a strategy decided upon to fight the Bolsheviks. The Directory of Five was formed — a government of two SRs, two Liberals, and General Boldyrev as commander of the Peoples’ Army. To run the government, a Council of Ministers had been appointed.

Now, the speculation was that despite the apparent agreement, the rivalries still continued. The SRs in Ufa were vying with the right-wing elements in Omsk for control. The situation had worsened following the Red Army’s advance with the huge influx of refugees into the town, and had deteriorated now to the point where law and order had broken down. Murder and counter-murder was a nightly occurrence. Bodies were left lying in the streets. Each side blamed the other and the Legion, the only force capable of stopping the conflict, seemed to be caught in the middle.

Paul had hung around all afternoon. He walked around the Petropávlovsk railway station, taken refuge from the cold in the waiting room and killed, as best he could, the five hours it took until Kolchak finally emerged, only then to disappear into Ward’s carriage again to eat. When they had at last resumed their journey, Paul sensed an air of foreboding permeating the train. It was almost as tangible as the stale tobacco smoke and the odour of unwashed bodies.

Walking through Omsk, Paul saw no bodies — discounting those of the refugees who had been unable to find accommodation and slept where they could, that is. He passed aimless knots of soldiers who had declared their own personal armistice, many already drunk despite the hour and starting to turn ugly. A group of civilians — men, women and children — had set up camp in the park where the Officers’ Summer Casino stood, having pulled together some scraps of board and tin for shelter from the wind. Closer to Nikólskaya Square, he came upon seething masses of the homeless, gathering in the lee of the taller buildings in and around the railway carriages where the branch line terminated. Some, chased away by troops from the government building which had now become the headquarters of the Stavka , the Army Staff, had taken to hanging dejectedly on the steps of the Church of St Nicholas. Inside the church, supposedly, was the banner of Yermák. Ward, who had been reading from his Baedeker on the train the previous evening, had happened to mention that the relic of the Cossack leader who while in the service of the Stroganovs had conquered Siberia from the Tartars, was kept in the Church of St Nicholas. Paul had learned all about this Russian hero as child. After being ambushed by Tartars, Yermák had apparently drowned attempting to ford the Irtúish, pulled under, ironically, by armour presented to him by Ivan the Terrible. Seeing the state of the government capital, it occurred to Paul that Yermák was just the kind of leader Russia could do with now. All they had, though, was the dour admiral. Unless — as General Knox had seemed to suggest — anyone thought Gajda to be a good outside bet.