David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘You think they’ll evacuate?,’ Valentine asked. ‘They took the city from the Red Army. What makes you think they’ll give it up without a fight?’

‘Trotsky,’ barked the captain. ‘They didn’t take it from Trotsky. He’s come to take it back.’

A morning mist clung to the river and the floodplain. Out of it Kazan rose eerily on her hills. Paul had never been to the city. All he knew of Kazan was what he remembered from his school lessons. Those interminable hours spent in the classroom of the Rostov house in Petersburg, vying with Mikhail to answer the tutor’s questions on history correctly and always coming second-best. Some of it had stuck, such as the fact that Kazan had been founded by a Tartar Khan before being captured by one of the tsars. He remembered this chiefly because the tsar’s regent had risen against him and massacred all the Russians in the city. It was the sort of bloodthirsty detail that appealed to schoolboys. Fifty years later Ivan the Terrible had re-conquered Kazan but now Paul couldn’t recall if that monster had taken a belated revenge. He did know that later still the pretender, Pugatchév, had destroyed the city and that Catherine the Great had rebuilt it. Now, after Lenin’s orders to Trotsky, unless the People’s Army of Komuch and the Czech Legion could stop them, it stood on the brink of a second destruction.

Malinovsky pointed through the mist to the mouth of the Kazanka River on the north shore and the steamboat pier beyond began to materialise in the dawn light. Beside it a tramway ran north-east towards a Tartar tower. To the west lay the centre of Kazan with its cathedral domes, mosques and towers.

They rounded a point and the Lyena began to wallow again as the current of the Kazanka fed into the Volga. Malinovsky swung the wheel and the steamer began to drift before her screw bit the water. She seemed to stop for a moment before turning her bow into the current. Now they were closer to the pier, Paul could see troops at the river’s edge watching their progress. Malinovsky had taken down the red Bolshevik flag they had been flying while passing the flotilla and run up in its place the tattered remnants of the white shirt Sofya had used to bandage his cuts. Seeing the troops, the captain leaned out of his wheelhouse and bellowed ‘ Komuch ,’ at the top of his voice. The name hung on the air for an instant, then was swallowed by the thrum of their engine.

Two miles further on, as they approached the railway bridge, Paul saw a line of boats blockading the river.

‘He was here!’ Sofya’s eyes were wide, her face flushed.

‘Who was here?’

‘My brother! Mikhail! He came with Colonel Kappel.’

‘Mikhail is in the army?’ That possibility was almost as big a surprise for Paul as the fact that they had reached Kazan.

‘No, not in the army,’ Sofya said breathlessly. ‘He came to take charge of the gold reserves.’

The guns opened up again. The Red Army was shelling the city from their positions on the Uslan Hill on the west bank of the Volga. They all ducked automatically. The shell whined overhead, exploding somewhere in the vicinity of the railway station and shaking the room.

‘It’s true, old man,’ Valentine said slipping into English while keeping his eyes on the ceiling as plaster began showering down like confetti. ‘I should imagine Kappel wants to make sure the reserves stay in Russian hands. He’s a monarchist, but since Komuch are the only Russians in this area fighting the Bolsheviks he’s thrown his hand in with them. Your cousin was attached to the Ministry of Finance so he’s the man Kappel’s brought to do the job.’

Paul thought Mikhail had been with the Ministry of the Interior, not Finance. He looked at Sofya but she seemed far too excited at having found her brother to be concerned about where he worked. As for Kappel… Paul could see what the general had to gain but wondered why the rump of the Constituent Assembly would do business with a monarchist officer and a reactionary representative of a tsarist ministry like Mikhail Rostov. But he had learned a lot in the past couple of days about the opposition to the Red Army and how the seemingly united anti-Bolshevik front cloaked a myriad of dissenting factions, all squabbling all over their own self-interest.

‘You’ve seen him?’ he asked Sofya.

‘No, he’s already left.’

‘They shipped the gold back to Samara,’ Valentine said. ‘Your cousin went with it.’

Another rat leaving the ship, Paul thought.

The city was in chaos. The situation had deteriorated since they had arrived four days earlier. He had been up the Syuyumbéka tower at first light that morning. The old Tartar construction was around two hundred and fifty feet high and dominated the Admiralteiskaya quarter. From the top one had a good view of Kazan and, more importantly, of the Volga and of Uslan Hill on the west bank. The Red Army had moved it’s artillery up under cover of darkness and now occupied the Uslan. On the east bank, what Malinovsky had called the Left Bank Group of the Fifth Army had advanced towards the mouth of the Kazanka. Although Paul couldn’t see them, he supposed Azin’s Arsk army had sealed the river and rail routes to the east.

The bombardment felt indiscriminate, although he didn’t doubt the Red Army had a purpose in the haphazard way they peppered various parts of the city with their shells. Terror. The poor citizen beneath the barrage had no idea where he might be safe. Initially it had seemed that their target was the Syuyumbéka tower. But no sooner had one scrambled down from the observation point into the streets of the Admiralteiskaya, or took shelter under the walls of the Zilantovski Monastery, than the shells appeared to follow one with a disconcerting vindictiveness. They shelled the railway line and the station then, to show their lack of discrimination and favour, ranged east and gave the old Tartar quarter a pasting. What little that remained of Komuch’s army in the city had been almost encircled along with the few Czech detachments left. The only route out of Kazan now was by barge down the Volga, and there was no telling how long that would remain open given the approach of Raskolnikov’s flotilla. In the panic that had followed the start of the bombardment, anyone who could had already got out, including many of the White Russian officers who’d wasted no time decamping with what they could carry. Any equipment that couldn’t be loaded onto the barges had already been abandoned. As had many of the civilians who looked to the army for protection. News of the widespread arrests and executions by the Cheka in Petersburg and Moscow following the attempt on Lenin’s life had already reached the city. No one in Kazan was under the illusion that distance and lack of complicity would save them.

It was astonishing to Paul how quickly the fear he had felt four days earlier as they had steamed up the Kazanka — fear that had vanished on realising that the blockade ahead of the Lyena was manned by Czech troops — had returned. His short-lived sense of triumph at having reached his objective had barely survived the first day. Once the reality of the situation had dawned upon him, the fear was back, gnawing at his stomach like hunger pangs. But pangs that couldn’t be placated by a couple of pounds of black bread.

As soon as the Lyena had been boarded, Paul had given Masaryk’s letter to the officer in charge of the party. Initially truculent, the man’s attitude underwent a miraculous transformation. He immediately despatched a messenger and then hurriedly arranged an escort for the Lyena and, half an hour later, Paul was standing in a railway carriage in front of the commander of the Legion’s forces in Kazan, Colonel Čeček.