Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

Then an armored car pulled to a halt across the street from them and Paladin climbed out carrying Zhanna’s banner, soiled by smoke and pierced by bullets and shrapnel. Later, captured soldiers would claim that clouds of white butterflies left the banner from time to time during the battle, and that an aura of golden light surrounded the Maid, deflecting any bullets from striking her.

“Come now, Maid of Uralsk, your standard-bearer has brought your banner,” Ivashov urged. “Only you are worthy of carrying it.”

Paladin stooped to offer Zhanna his hand and Zhanna accepted it, rising slowly to her feet.

That afternoon, following an hour or more spent in prayer, she led a victory procession through Uralsk and waved her banner all the way. For the rest of the day and long into the night, the bells of Uralsk’s surviving churches rang continuously, as at Easter time, and anyone who cared to mount the belfries and pull the ropes was permitted to do so.

Chapter 14: Victory at Ufa

“Some of you may die, but there’s no use crying about that. The Revolution doesn’t count individual victims.”

—Soviet Commissar to Red Army soldiers in 1919

Musical Theme: Pictures at an Exhibition, No. 10, The Great Gate at Kiev, by Modest Mussorgsky

LATE MAY, 1919, BUZULUK

In late April of 1919, as the colossal booms of fracturing ice were heard on the major rivers of the Ural Mountains watershed, and as snow melted away in the mountain passes, seventeen thousand fresh Red Army soldiers and supporting artillery units arrived on the Urals Front, shifting numerical superiority from the Siberian Army to the Reds. Recognizing that Kolchak’s spring offensive was now largely a spent force, Red Army Southern Group Commander Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze launched a counteroffensive from the Volga river port of Samara toward Ufa, located at the western edge of the Urals, and astride a key mountain pass to Siberia.

A central element of Frunze’s plan involved a maneuver group under divisional commander Vasily Chapayev, then encamped at Buzuluk, one hundred fifty versts east of Samara. Chapayev’s assignment was to drive north toward the town of Buguruslan against the overextended southern flank of Khanzin’s Western Army. Around the time that the Maid’s regiment arrived at its training camp outside Iletsk, Chapayev’s maneuver group set out northeastward toward its objective, where it penetrated into the White rear and, through a stroke of good luck, captured a Siberian artillery battery. Soon after, Chapayev’s forces pressed on, captured the battery’s baggage train, and then took its regimental headquarters.

For many of Chapayev’s ragged, undernourished, and only lightly armed attackers, this was their first significant victory over the Whites since January at Uralsk, and their morale soared. A few days later, the Fifth Red Army crushed two Siberian divisions southeast of Buguruslan, thus turning the flank of the stalled Whites. Suddenly and palpably, the military initiative had shifted from White to Red, just as numerical superiority had shifted barely a week earlier. After Chapayev’s victory at Buguruslan, each time Kolchak’s forces were struck hard, they reeled, prompting droves of young, untrained, and unwilling Siberian conscripts to surrender or desert to the Bolshevik side.

By the time Tolstov dispatched Popov and his crews to collect the armored cars awaiting them at Guryev, Frunze’s Southern Group had seized the town of Sergiyevsk, northwest of Buguruslan, and attempted to surround forward elements of the Western Army. It was around this time that Zhanna reached Uralsk and insisted on attacking without delay. While the Ural Cossacks pressed their attack at Uralsk, the Western Army reeled further from fresh Red assaults, giving up Bugul’ma without a fight. Soon after, the Reds also took Belebey, putting them within two hundred versts of Ufa, their coveted prize, far sooner than Frunze or Trotsky had dared to hope.

But the Siberians gained an unexpected respite when the Red field commander ordered the Fifth Red Army to halt at Belebey and failed to pursue the retreating Western Army for nearly a week. For this blunder, Trotsky replaced him and ordered the new commander to advance at once on Ufa, confident that the attack would achieve Lenin’s goal of taking the city and clearing the mountain passes into Siberia before summer’s end. To Trotsky, the beaten Siberian Army looked very much like a small dog fleeing a much larger dog, attempting to bite back, but knowing it could not win.

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