Archive 17 ip-3 Read online

  The reason for these mutinies was simple. The Czechoslovakians had achieved their independence. They had nothing to gain by continuing to fight against the Bolsheviks. The Czechoslovakians simply wanted to get home, but their ordeal was by no means over.

  Although the Great War had officially ended, Siberia remained a battleground.

  On November 18, one week after the cessation of hostilities on the western front, Alexander Kolchak, formerly admiral of the Tsar’s Pacific fleet in Vladivostok, had established a dictatorship in Siberia, declaring himself “Supreme Ruler of All Russia.” His “war of liberation” came at a terrible price.

  With the help of marauding bands of Cossacks, led by Atamans Semenov, Kalmykov, and Rozanov, Kolchak went on the offensive.

  Semenov, who gave up his horse in favor of an armed train known as “the Destroyer,” operated in the area of Lake Baikal. In October of 1920, having committed numerous atrocities, Semenov’s troops fled across the border into Manchuria. Semenov himself escaped to Japan, where, during the Second World War, he became an officer in the Japanese army. Captured by the Russians in 1945, he was hanged as a war criminal in 1946.

  Kalmykov, operating in the Ussuri region, was equally guilty of atrocities, the most notable of which was the hanging of Red Cross personnel inside boxcars in the city of Khabarovsk. So outrageous were Kalmykov’s acts of violence that even his own Cossacks refused to carry out his orders. Kalmykov also escaped to China and was shot in the early 1920s.

  Rozanov, meanwhile, enacted a policy of killing a tenth of the population of every town he passed through and wiping out entirely any town which offered resistance.

  In an alliance brought about in part by the fact that Kolchak now controlled their only means of escape, the Czechoslovakian forces became merged with Kolchak’s army. In recognition of the Czechoslovakian’s fighting reputation, Kolchak placed Czech general Gaida in overall command of his troops.

  By the summer of 1919, Kolchak’s army had reached the city of Kazan. And he was not alone. The White Army of General Deniken was on the outskirts of Moscow, while the army of General Yudenich was approaching St. Petersburg.

  This was the moment when, had the Allies chosen to act, they might have tipped the balance against the Reds. Instead, they remained paralyzed by indecision.

  With increasing momentum, the Reds fought back. By the autumn of 1919, the White armies were either destroyed or in retreat.

  On November 14, Kolchak was forced to abandon his headquarters in Omsk. He began a retreat which lasted through the winter and cost the lives of thousands of his followers.

  In an attempt to make scapegoats of the Czechoslovakians, Kolchak fired General Gaida. Adding to the already confused situation, Gaida responded by creating his own army, which he named the Siberian National Directorate. Gaida, who was by now both anti-Bolshevik and anti-Kolchak, began openly recruiting in Vladivostok, which resulted in a gun battle between his soldiers and those of General Rozanov. This culminated in a massive shoot-out at the Vladivostok train station on November 17, 1919, bullet holes from which can still be seen today on the main station building.

  In that same month, the British garrison, seeing that the situation was hopeless, departed.

  Faced with imminent defeat, Kolchak stepped down from power on January 4, 1920. On January 7, he placed himself in the protective custody of his old allies, the Czechs. The responsibility for this safeguarding fell to the Sixth Rifle Regiment, under the command of General Janin.

  Hoping to reach the safety of the coast, where he might find asylum among the Allied expeditionary forces stationed in Vladivostok, Kolchak got as far as the city of Irkutsk before being halted by soldiers of a local government calling itself Socialist Political Center.

  Although the Czechoslovakians, with more than thirteen thousand men, eight field guns, and an armored train at their disposal, could easily have defeated the Irkutsk garrison, these soldiers had placed mines in tunnels through which the Czechoslovakian convoy would have to pass in order to reach the coast.

  The Socialist Political Center made the Czechoslovakians an offer-hand over Kolchak and we will let you proceed. There was one other thing they wanted, and that was the Tsar’s Imperial Reserves. These had originally been hidden in the city of Kazan, but had since found their way into the safekeeping of the Czechoslovakians.

  Faced with the possibility of never seeing his newly created homeland, Janin gave in to the demands of the Irkutsk garrison. On January 15, 1920, Kolchak and the gold were handed over.

  On January 30, after a trial lasting one day, in which Kolchak was convicted of atrocities, the “Supreme Ruler of All Russia” was shot against a brick wall in Irkutsk.

  Although Kolchak’s army was not the only force brought to bear against the Bolsheviks, its defeat and the execution of its leader spelled the end for any hopes of Allied intervention in the conflict. Leaving behind hundreds of dead, soldiers of the U.S. Siberian Expeditionary Force (AEFS) departed in April of 1920. Japanese troops sent to help the Allied cause were the last to leave, in 1922. Their reputation for atrocities not only against Bolsheviks but also against civilians and even their own allies would soon be dwarfed by Japanese actions against the Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s.

  By the time the last Legionnaires left Vladivostok on September 2, 1920, more than thirty-five thousand Czechoslovakians had been evacuated from Russia. Although they had played a pivotal and heroic role in establishing their country, freedom for the Czechoslovakians would be short-lived and sporadic.

  Eighteen years later, Germany invaded.

  Another eighteen years would pass before their onetime ally, Russia, sent its tanks across the border.

  Unlike the beautifully maintained cemeteries of Great War dead in France, Belgium, and the Dardanelles, the dead of the Siberian campaign lie mostly in unmarked graves and all trace of their battles, except for a few bullet holes on the walls of Vladivostok station, is lost forever in the wilderness.

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