David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

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.

Paul joined him by the fire, warming his hands. ‘I’m looking for Mikhail Ivanovich Rostov. He was staying here this time last year. His sister lived with him.’

‘Gone,’ the old man said.

‘Where to? How long ago?’

‘East. Where do you think? All gone east.’

‘How long ago?’

‘How should I know? Who do you say?’

‘Rostova, Sofya Ivanovna Rostova. A tall woman, brown hair. Her brother was shorter, overweight.’ Paul tried to remember their suite number but couldn’t.

‘Rostov?’ The old man gave the name some thought. He shrugged. ‘A week. Maybe more.’

Getting warm, Paul took off his hat and unbuttoned his coat. ‘Is the hotel empty?’

‘You’re looking for a room?’ The old man chuckled. ‘Put your money away. We’re full. Every room is taken.’

‘I don’t want a room. I’m looking for the Rostovs.’

‘Your money is of no use.’ He pulled some crumpled notes out of his pocket and pushed them into the fire. ‘See? Worthless. The Bolsheviks won’t recognise it. You have gold? Jewels, maybe?’

‘No.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Take a room if you want one. Throw whoever’s in it out. No one pays anymore.’

‘I’m not looking for a room. I’m looking for Mlle Rostova.’

‘Gone, I told you.’

Paul turned to leave, buttoning his coat again.

‘I’d take off the uniform if I were you, comrade,’ the old man said over his shoulder. ‘They say the Bolsheviks shoot soldiers if they find them, especially Czechs. And if they don’t, the workers from Kulomzino will. Or string you up. They’ll be here shortly to welcome the Reds and they’ve a score to settle for the massacres last year.’

Paul left, hand tightening on the Smith & Wesson in his pocket.

He had considered going to the British consulate where Valentine had been living the year before, but he’d forgotten where it was and felt unsettled by what the old man had said. The previous November tsarist officers had been ferocious in putting down a Bolshevik uprising in the working class districts. There were debts owing in Omsk and they would be paid before the Red Army arrived. Any man in uniform other than Red would be among the first to settle.

He pulled his hat down over his head and, turning up the collar of his coat, quickly made his way back to the railway station.

Amid the chaos, Paul stopped at the edge of the platform to light a cigarette. Nothing had changed in the few hours he had been gone although it seemed as if they had finished loading the trains. The soldiers guarding them looked bored, their faces pinched with the cold. Even the crowds they were keeping at bay had grown apathetic. They were no longer pressing forward but stood outside the cordon, as if waiting for something to happen that might alter their situation.

Nothing was going to. This was how it ended. Karel Romanek had been right when he had said the previous winter that the White advance wouldn’t last even if, for a few brief weeks in the spring, the sceptics had begun to think they might be proved wrong.

When Gajda had advanced out of Perm in March, fighting his way for 150 versts towards Viatka where the railway linked north to Kotlas on the River Dvina, it had looked for a while as if a link with Ironside in Archangel would be forged. To the south, General Khanzhin moving west retook Ufa and advanced towards Simbirsk and Samara. Uprisings against a Red Terror that had executed seven thousand peasants there had disrupted the Bolshevik advance.

But it hadn’t lasted. In the face of defeat, Lenin softened his attitude to the peasants. At the same time Kolchak hardened his, making statements on land reform that alienated them. Despite advice from Knox, and against Gajda’s wishes, Kolchak moved too soon. No reserves were yet trained or equipped and when Khanzhin, with his supply lines over-extended, was checked west of Ufa, the retreat began. Gajda’s flank to the north was exposed and by mid-June he was back in Perm. To stem the tide, Kolchak committed what few reserves he had — among them the Volga Corps of General Kappel. But it was too late. Kappel’s forces — the remnants of the Peoples’ Army of Komuch — were peasant SR supporters who immediately deserted in droves, not to the Red Army but to partisan groups fighting in Kolchak’s rear. By the end of June, Ufa had been lost again, Perm went on July 1st. Ekaterinburg followed in the middle of the month and Chelyabinsk at the beginning of August. With the loss of the Urals any possibility of a link with Ironside — however faint — had finally been abandoned. It hardly came as a surprise in the middle of August when the Allies abandoned Kolchak, too. In the west, the Supreme Ruler had come to be regarded as a liability. It was decided in the corridors of power that Deniken in the south was a better bet.

News that the troops in Archangel had pulled out reached Paul at the end of September. By then Ward and his regimental band had already returned to Vladivostok. Now there were no longer any Allies left to the west of Lake Baikal — except for the few liaison officers like himself, stranded in Siberia.