A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The partisan movement was strongest in those regions — Tomsk and Yenisei provinces in central Siberia, the Altai and Semipalatinsk in the south, and the Amur valley in the east — where the most recent Russian immigrants were concentrated. These were generally the poorer peasants, many of whom had to supplement their income by working on the railways and down the mines. But the movement also spread to the richer farming regions as the repressions of the Omsk regime increased. Peasant deserters from Kolchak's army played a leading role in the partisan bands. They had that little extra knowledge of the outside world which can be enough in a peasant community to catapult a young man into power. The peasant bands fought by guerrilla methods, to which the wild and remote forest regions of the taiga were so well adapted. Sometimes they joined forces with the Red Army units which had been hiding out in the taiga since the Bolsheviks had been forced out of Siberia during the summer of 1918. The partisans' destruction of miles of track and their constant ambushes of trains virtually halted the transportation of vital supplies along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Kolchak's armies for much of the offensive. Thousands of his soldiers had to be withdrawn from the Front against the Reds to deal with the partisans. They waged a ruthless war of terror, shooting hundreds of hostages and setting fire to dozens of villages in the partisan strongholds of Kansk and Achinsk, where the wooded and hilly terrain was perfect for holding up trains. This partly succeeded in pushing the insurgents away from the railway. But since the terror was also unleashed on villages unconnected with the partisans, it merely fanned the flames of peasant war. As Kolchak's army retreated eastwards, it found itself increasingly surrounded by hostile peasant partisans. Mutinies began to spread as the Whites came under fire from all sides: even the Cossacks joined them. Whole units of Kolchak's peasant conscripts deserted as the retreat brought them closer to their native regions. By November 1919, Kolchak's army was falling apart. Once again the Whites had been defeated by the gulf between themselves and the peasantry.¹⁶

On 14 November Omsk was abandoned by Kolchak's forces as the Reds, who now outnumbered them by two to one, advanced eastwards. It was a classic case of White incompetence, with the leading generals caught in two minds as to whether to defend the town or evacuate it — and in the end doing neither properly. The Reds took the city without a fight, capturing vast stores of munitions that the Whites had not had time to destroy, along with 30,000 troops. Thousands of officers and their families, clerks and officials, merchants,

cafe owners, bankers and prostitutes fled the White capital and headed east. The lucky ones travelled by train, the unlucky ones by horse or on foot. The bourgeoisie was on the run. The wounded and the sick — whose numbers were swollen by a typhus epidemic — had to be abandoned on the way. This was not just a military collapse; it was also a moral one. The retreating Cossacks carried with them huge supplies of vodka and, as all authority disappeared, indulged themselves in mass rape and pillage of the villages along their way. One of the characters in Doctor Zhivago, much of which was based on Pasternak's experiences in Siberia, summed up the atmosphere: 'Before there had been obligations of all kinds — sacred duties to the country, the army, and society. But now the war was lost, everything seemed to have been deposed, nothing was any longer sacred.'¹⁷