Free Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield

Admiral’s government assigned each village a quota of conscripts or volunteers to serve in his army. If the quota was met voluntarily, eventually the Reds would arrive in the village and when they learned that the village’s men were in the White armies the Reds would raze the village to the ground and massacre the inhabitants. If the quota was not met, on the other hand, White generals would send our Cossacks out on area sweeps to punish those villages which had failed to meet the army’s levy, and the Cossacks would slaughter the entire village.
    â€œThese conscription squads and punitive expeditions were far more responsible than the Reds for the rise of partisan bands. Siberia came to be filled with bands of Socialist revolutionaries, monarchists, partisans and ordinary bandits. The Reds were willing to try recruiting them; the White Russians took them all to be Bolsheviks. It was one small difference, but it hardly meant anything.
    â€œYou saw these vicious recruiting practices done by both sides equally. The issues of the war were of little importance to most of us, particularly those outside the cities. The Bolshevik insurrection had been almost exclusively urban and the Civil War was always a war between two minorities. Neither side enjoyed any support except what it could command by extortion, threat of force, or benefit of hate and reaction (that is, if the Reds wiped out your village you would probably join the Whites, and vice versa).”
    When Kolchak began to look as if he might win after all, many of the Siberian Atamans made belated overtures to him. The warlords wanted to be on the winning side because in that place and at that time it was probable that being on the losing side would lead to a firing squad. (British pressure on Japan to modulate the Atamans’ brigandage also had an effect.) Nevertheless no one—Red or White—trusted the warlords; and the Czech Legionnaires kept their posts along the Trans-Siberian. Kolchak’s principle source of supply was the British, who during the campaign delivered to him the contents of seventy-nine shiploads of war matériel from Vladivostok and the northern ports; keeping the railway open was vital.
    By April 1919 the Whites had everything in their favor and the Allies happily felt that it was only a matter of weeks, a few months at most, before the Red menace was annihilated permanently. The membrane of Bolshevik control was so fragile that it was hard to comprehend why it wasn’t already ruptured.
    Victory was in sight for Aleksandr Kolchak. No one could credit a reversal at this point; the Whites were just too strong.
    No one could credit it. But it happened.
    7.
    THE WHITE RUSSIAN DEBACLE
    In April 1919 Kolchak’s lines, spread too thin and supported poorly by supply lines that were too long, staggered to a halt in the Urals.
    Now the war went into a state of deadlock which was to the Reds’ advantage. The Whites were scattered across two vast continents without adequate communication and their only means of achieving a juncture of forces was to destroy the Bolshevik center. Until that happened the Whites could not coordinate their efforts and it left the Reds free to deal with each White force in turn—a tactic which Trotsky made splendid use of, rushing from front to front in the armored train that was his headquarters.
    â€œFor more than a month I can remember fighting there in that awful frozen muck. We were toe-to-toe in the mountains, neither side giving ground, each attack foundering on the insensate resistance of the enemy’s defenses. Our troops would march wearily to the front, herded by Cossack warders who ran swords through those who moved too reluctantly toward the battle. There were many who froze, or went out of the lines with frostbite and trenchfoot.
    â€œThere was no real net change up there until the fourteenth of May. Trotsky’s counterattack. It was sudden and ferocious. We were