David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘Bread, Peace and Land?’ he had a habit of suddenly asking, apropos of very little at all, ‘who does Lenin think he is, the tsar? Are bread, peace and land, his to give? Don’t the peasants already occupy the land? Don’t they use it to grow the wheat to make their own bread? Now if he was to give them peace…? But no, he doesn’t give them peace. He makes them fight for what is already theirs, and requisitions their wheat so they can eat while they do it! And if he wins, what then? He will steal their land as well and force them to work on state-run farms… What a paradise comrade Lenin offers his people!’

Back in the summer, there had been many peasant uprisings to illustrate Romanek’s disquisition on the Bolshevik’s policy towards the peasants and the question of land. It had been one of the causes of the split with the Social-Revolutionary Party and why Komuch had been able to raise an army so quickly. But things had changed since then.

When Paul had first heard of Trotsky’s decree that every tenth man in units not obeying orders be shot, he had been reminded of Voltaire’s supposed remark upon hearing that the Royal Navy had executed Admiral Byng: that the British shot the odd admiral now and then to encourage the rest.

There may have been a cold mathematical elegance underlying the terror of decimating one’s own army, but Paul couldn’t deny that it seemed to work. The Bolsheviks had retaken Kazan barely a month after they had lost it. Simbirsk had fallen two days later, followed by Syzran and the Alexandrovsk Bridge. A demoralised Legion, with Paul in tow, were now retreating along the railway into the western foothills of the Urals. Samara had already fallen and the Red Army was advancing on Ufa.

Part of this had to be put down to the Social-Revolutionary’s Komuch government squabbling with the more reactionary West Siberian groups that controlled Omsk. The talks they had in Chelyabinsk, it was said, had been acrimonious with the atmosphere worsened by the fact that the gold train had been spirited away from under the nose of Komuch at the railway station.

The compromise cobbled together to present a united front against the Bolsheviks had given rise to the creation of what was known as the ‘Directory of Five’ — a government which consisted of two SRs, two Liberals, and General Boldyrev who commanded the Peoples’ Army of Komuch . It may have been the best they could come up with at the time, but not all the SRs acknowledged it and most reactionaries detested it. Amid rumours of coup and counter-coup, the reactionary rump of the tsarist officer corps had subsequently gained ascendancy in the People’s Army of Komuch and now seemed more intent on exacting revenge upon the SRs — who they regarded as responsible for the Revolution in the first place — than in actually fighting the Red Army. But since the gold reserves had now turned up in Omsk, Paul presumed it would be the Omsk government who would be playing the tune. Given that they were now the only ones who could afford to pay the piper.

He suspected Kolchak’s arrival would change things once again. For good or for ill. Opposing the Bolsheviks, as Karel Romanek was often wont to remark, was making strange bedfellows of them all. With the Legion caught in the middle of every faction, Paul had even heard the opinion voiced that the Czechs and Slovaks had more in common with the Bolsheviks than they had with the current regime in Omsk. For his part, he was beginning to wonder if he had anything in common with any of them…

Men came down the length of the train hammering on the doors announcing its imminent departure. The guard prepared to change, with men turning out of their bunks and pulling on their winter coats for a cold vigil on the flatcars behind the machineguns. Paul luxuriated in the knowledge that having just returned from a two-day patrol, he could look forward to twenty-four hours of inactivity.

Karel passed his copy of Českoslovensýk densk to one of the returning guards who was warming himself in front of the stove. He pointed out something in the newspaper and a discussion ensued, joined by one or two of the others who had been woken by the noise. As they spoke in Czech, Paul found himself unable to follow what was being said but assumed it to be the usual debate about Masaryk’s decision to bow to the Allies request and have the Legion join the White forces in a new offensive against the Bolsheviks.

Grand strategy being out of his hands, Paul was more concerned with the insular problem presented by Kolchak’s arrival. If the admiral was in Omsk then somehow Paul was going to have to find a way of getting there. Omsk was the other side of the Urals — in Siberia on the main Trans-Siberian line. He didn’t doubt that his train’s commander, Kapitan Lubas, would not be sorry to see the back of him although as his commanding officer Paul would still have to seek his permission to leave. Then, once back with the échelon, there would be other permissions to seek: Švec’s or Čeček’s, or whoever was now commander of the 1st Division. Whoever would have the final say-so wouldn’t miss him, Paul was sure; after all, his presence was a constant reminder to them all of the Allies inconstancy.

Oddly enough, having just thought of the man, Paul suddenly heard Colonel Švec’s name mentioned amidst the Babel of the carriage. Or perhaps hearing it was what had brought Švec to mind. Whichever, Paul now became aware that the earlier discussion had escalated into an argument. He could still make nothing of it, although in the heat of the disagreement some Russian was creeping into the dispute, resorted to by those for whom Czech was not their first language.

They were certainly quarrelling over Švec even if Paul could not make out exactly why. He had only met the man briefly, having been passed by Čeček along the line to the Russian Colonel Voitzekhovsky, and had spent just three days under Švec’s command. It was common knowledge that Švec’s men, the 1st Rifle Division, were the first to have been ordered to rally and turn for the new counter-offensive and there had been a rumour that, exhausted and demoralised, they had refused. But that had been shortly before Lubas’s train had left on its escapade up the branch line. The Legion kept itself informed of events via the telegraph line that paralleled the railway but, as the small branch line on which they’d been travelling didn’t have a telegraph line, no one on Lubas’s train had heard if the rumour had proved true. Or, if true, what the outcome had been. At the time, the claim that any unit of the Legion would disobey orders had been hotly contested; they had mutinied at Chelyabinsk, but that had been against Russian officers in the face of Bolshevik aggression.

On the western front, Paul was well aware that men had been shot for disobeying orders; here in Russia, Trotsky was now famous for it. But the Legion did things differently. On hearing the rumour, the men had talked it over among themselves — always in Czech, suggesting to Paul that it wasn’t something they cared to discuss with an outsider. Nonetheless, his impression had been that while most of the men were in sympathy with comrades too shattered to turn and fight, they would also be ashamed if the report proved to be true and the 1st Rifle Division had disobeyed orders — particularly the orders of a man like Švec. His ability and character were highly regarded, an opinion Paul had come to share despite the brevity of their acquaintance. If what they heard proved true, however, he supposed Švec would be too preoccupied by problems of morale and discipline to be concerned with any request from Paul to proceed to Omsk.

Doubting anyone would tell him what the argument was about, he didn’t bother to ask, assuming it concerned Švec’s 1st Rifle Division again. In the event, the locomotive — a dozen or so wagons ahead of their boxcar — interrupted the argument by expelling a great breath of steam as if impatient to be on the move again. A moment later, two long blasts on the whistle alerted any last dawdlers to get aboard and shortly afterwards the train lurched to the grating accompaniment of clanking bogies and couplings.