David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

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.

He passed Karel a mug of tea.

Romanek still kept abreast of events beyond their small attenuated world. He knew what was happening and felt he ought to have some sort of say in its outcome.

Not so Paul. That was where he differed from Romanek. Russia had changed him, Paul knew. He was tougher now, more resilient; hardened by what he had seen and what he had done. But he still thought himself to be little more than a passive link in the chain of events. If he happened to break, no matter; the chain would adjust and things would flow around him as they always had, as if he had never existed. His passiveness hadn’t changed. He still felt himself at the mercy of circumstance and supposed he always would be. Perhaps it was his nature to be blown this way and that, whichever direction the prevailing wind blew.

Karel had stretched out on his bunk with a newspaper. Posted as they were on the main line, editions of the Legion’s Československý deník were readily available. They were almost up to date. News, too, came from the constant stream of refugees passing along the track. Lucky ones had a horse and cart, sometimes even a cow; Kulaks in Bolshevik eyes, Paul supposed. Most were on foot, destitute families or widows with their children. A great number of the men passing were deserters from the Red Army or peasants dodging the Bolshevik draft. Caught between two armies, though, if they lingered in the rear of Kolchak’s forces too long it was likely they would end up as soldiers in his cause. Sometimes a few prisoners of war passed under armed guard. It was no war for taking prisoners and, dejected and demoralised, they had the look of men with no future. But having got this far from the front there was always the chance they might survive; conscripting them to Kolchak’s cause was easier than shooting them and digging graves in the frozen ground.

Romanek was reading from his newspaper.

‘It says here that your General Knox has taken charge of training Kolchak’s army in Vladivostok. More foreign aid is arriving as well.’

‘The British government see Kolchak as the saviour of Russia,’ said Paul.

Romanek hooted. ‘Too far away to see him for what he really is, that’s why.’

Being stationed on one of the rail arteries, they knew it was true about the war matériel. Fresh guns and supplies were flowing along the Trans-Siberian. Omsk was still a bottleneck, but they had seen for themselves trains of stores moving west. To the north of them, Gajda had benefited from a swelling of both men and supplies. He was now far better equipped and clothed than the old Peoples’ Army of Komuch had ever been.

Paul had struggled to understand it, though. Why were men — the majority of them peasants, after all — flocking to Kolchak’s banner now when, in the autumn when Komuch had lost Kazan, Samara and the other cities, they had been deserting in droves?

‘They’re a different class of peasant in Siberia,’ Karel said.

Paul scoffed. ‘You would have to classify them, wouldn’t you?’

Romanek may not have been an ideologue, but involving oneself in politics for any length of time was always to risk mud sticking. Politicians invariably dealt in generalisations as far as Paul could see — the thoughts and motivations of individuals far too complex a phenomena to be dealt with by the political mind. They preferred to reduce people to classifications. It had, after all, become the sine qua non of Bolshevism. In Paul’s opinion it was the first step anyone took in dehumanising a population.

He’d often said as much to Karel in the tedious dark hours spent killing time when they had had their fill of sleep.

‘You’re a cynic,’ said Karel.

‘All right, a different class of peasants how?’ he insisted, drying his socks over the stove and adding to the unwholesomeness of the atmosphere.

Karel propped himself on an elbow. ‘Different in that they’re not tied to landlords east of the Urals. There are no great estates in Siberia like there are in Russia. The Siberian peasant is either a tribesman or a man who has come east to escape serfdom — either the kind that existed before Alexander II, or the kind they’ve had to endure since.’

‘Or political exiles,’ Paul suggested.

‘Plenty of those,’ Karel agreed. ‘And their descendants. Did you know more than half a million were exiled up to nineteen-hundred?’

‘No,’ Paul replied, wondering who on earth had counted them. ‘In that case, I’d have thought they’d have no more love for White tsarists than a Russian peasant.’

‘Can’t speak for the tribes,’ said Romanek. ‘Who knows how they think? But the exiles made a life for themselves away from the government in Petersburg. They’ve got land, built businesses… Do you think they want to see the Reds take it away from them? Why do you think none of the local Soviets lasted long in Siberia unless they were SR controlled?’