David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

He had described how he had finally found Sofya, and that they had married. About the retreat, first to Omsk, then to Irkutsk and finally Vladivostok, he had been circumspect. There had been no necessity to describe the horrors he had seen or the act that had finally brought the curtain down on Kolchak’s time under history’s spotlight. It was an episode from which no one had emerged with much credit.

A coalition of left-wing parties in Irkutsk had proclaimed itself the Government of Siberia before the convoy had ever reached the town. The Legion trains had been held up and Kolchak declared an ‘enemy of the people’. The new government were demanding he be put on trial. In the face of a fait accompli — not unlike Kolchak’s own in Omsk a year earlier — the Supreme Ruler of Russia had had little choice but to resign. In early January 1920 he transferred control over what little was left of his army to the bandit Semenov and had been escorted by the Legion into Irkutsk. Expecting to be handed over to the Allies or at least the new government, the admiral instead was delivered to the Irkutsk Bolsheviks.

There had been a deal between the Legion and the Bolsheviks, it was said — Kolchak and his gold for safe passage to Vladivostok. Not that far-fetched a supposition. Many of the Czechs and Slovaks had been SR sympathisers and hadn’t forgotten what the Kolchak regime had done to the party and their peasant members after the Omsk coup.

At the time, Karel Romanek had tried to justify what had happened. But as far as Paul could see, using one betrayal to justify another did little more than reveal those, whom he had once thought honourable, to be mirror-images of those he knew were not.

And, true to their character and as with the former Tsar in Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks conducted no trial. Kolchak was shot. Afterwards — in the Irkutsk variation of the saying — he was transferred to the Republic if the Ushakovka. His body, that is, along with that of his prime minister, Pepelayev, stuffed under the ice of the Ushakovka River.

That hadn’t been quite the end. Some remnants of Kappel’s army had attempted to by-pass Irkutsk, crossing the ice of Lake Baikal. But Kappel died of frostbite on the march and, with him, any last resistance to the Bolsheviks in Siberia. Straggling detachments, Poles and Ukrainians, Rumanians and Serbs, and other nationalities who had not wished to live under the Bolshevik yoke and had emulated the Czechs and Slovaks by forming legions were overrun and annihilated by the advancing Red Army.

Exactly what had happened to Voitzekhovsky and Diterikhs, the Russians who had served with the Legion, Paul had never discovered. Kolchak’s designated heir, Semenov, bent on banditry to the end had tried to halt the Legion’s progress to Vladivostok. But he found the Czechs a tougher opposition than the defenceless villagers he was more accustomed to murdering. The Legion got through, weakening Semenov sufficiently so that, when the Bolsheviks finally caught up with the ogre, his army disintegrated. Semenov tried to escape dressed as a woman but was caught. Mostly, his men were shot although the Bolsheviks reserved the hangman’s noose for their leader; Semenov being allowed more rope than he had ever given his victims.

Across the road a man approached the apartment block. He moved haltingly on the icy pavement, leaning heavily on a walking stick. In the fading light Paul could see only his outline but knew he was the man he had come to find. Paul lit another cigarette, allowing the man time to reach his flat and settle in. There was still no hurry.

His back had stiffened while sitting on the hard chair in the café and he stretched to unknot it. He had tried to tell them in London that he was too old to go back into the field but they maintained there was no one else qualified for the job. This time it hadn’t been just their usual blandishments; Paul spoke both Czech and Russian and was the one man who knew the people they needed to contact.

There were no steamers having to avoid U-boats this time. He had flown to Vienna as a low-grade civil-servant attached to the British Trade Mission. After a couple of nights in a second-rate hotel he had slipped away to a safe house where a girl from the embassy equipped with hair-dye and photographic equipment had turned him into Artur Zelinka, a Czech salesman of agricultural machinery. No nonsense about pit-props this time. Two days later he crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.

London needed a network in place before what they saw as the inevitable communist take-over of Czechoslovakia. But as soon as he arrived he saw that they were far too late. The communists were already in positions of power. The Czechoslovak leader, Edvard Beneš, that old stalwart of the Czech National Council, had given in to Stalin two weeks earlier and had appointed a Communist-dominated government in the hope of avoiding civil war. The only non-Communist in the government had been Jan Masaryk. Now he was dead. Suicide. Or so the newspaper maintained.

Paul had begun with the men he had known in the Legion. They may have been SRs but they hadn’t been Bolsheviks and London thought they might be persuaded to work for them.

At the top of his list had been the name of his old friend, Karel Romanek. But Karel, he found, was dead. He had apparently been involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 and had been shot by the Gestapo shortly afterwards. Others had survived the Nazi occupation, though, and he had set up the network as best he could. He had recruited individual handlers with sufficient cut-outs, that should the StB — the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s political police — arrest any of its constituent parts, the others at least had a chance of evading capture.

In truth, he had little expectation that the network would last long. The StB might be a fledgling service but they always had the expertise of the MGB to fall back on. MGB was the current designation of the old Cheka, or OGPU, NKVD… Paul sometimes thought they changed their name more often than they must swab the blood off the cellar floors.

But call the gloves what you will; they still held a mailed fist. Some things never changed. It hadn’t quite become the brave new world the revolutionaries of February 1917 had foreseen. Nothing like it in fact.

Paul had often wondered if he had ever heard Stalin’s the name while he had been working his way across Russia and Siberia. He didn’t think he had. The man had been there, certainly, a junior cog in Lenin’s relentless wheel of state. Odd how Stalin had wound up on top when the wheel finished turning. Who would have thought he could have out-foxed Trotsky? Most of Lenin’s other cronies had been little more than journeymen who wouldn’t have got far at all if he hadn’t arrived back in Petersburg to chivvy them along the road to dictatorship. Given instruction and their head, they had become ruthless enough, though, and it was with some satisfaction that Paul had watched from the safety of England while Stalin had played one against the other before removing all the old Bolshevik pieces from the board.

He didn’t suppose Stalin would have ever managed to outmanoeuvre Lenin if it hadn’t been for Fanny Kaplan’s bullets weakening him back in Moscow the day Paul had arrived in Petersburg. Lenin had never been the same after that, they said. Some — communist apologists back before the war — had maintained that the Soviet Union would never have been as repressive as it was had Lenin lived. Paul never bought that. Between Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, the machinery had already been put in place. All Stalin contributed was a new subtlety to Bolshevik authoritarianism. Somehow his victims during the show trials — first of the SRs, then the Mensheviks, and finally his former Bolshevik comrades — had been made to believe that they actually had betrayed the February Revolution and that they deserved their fate.