Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

After a while, the artillery and mortar fire trailed off, the machine guns ceased rattling, and in the relative stillness between the muffled pops of distant rifles, Ned heard the rumbling hooves and fierce cries of charging cavalry. Sweeping down from their hiding places in hollows south of the Red landing places, the White cavalry descended upon the disorganized Red forces like furies, cutting down all within sabers’ reach and driving the others into the river, where many drowned. And the advancing White infantry promptly shot any who fled on foot. The carnage was unlike anything Ned had seen, and rivaled images of the corpse-strewn no-man’s-land along the Somme. The waste of lives was appalling. Yet, to have checked the Red advance and destroyed any chance of an enemy breakthrough was exhilarating. By nightfall, the entire Red landing force had been annihilated or captured. Among the confirmed dead was Southern Group Commander Mikhail Frunze.

The next day, the Western Army’s leaders, still dazed from their unexpected victory on the Belaya, organized a river crossing of their own. The landing parties consisted mainly of White cavalry squadrons assigned to destroy the retreating Red Army remnants before they could regroup. This effort was so successful that General Khanzin authorized a brigade-sized force to cross the following day and attack the Red divisional headquarters at Belebey, resulting in the town’s capture without a fight. The same force took Bugul’ma two days later and did not stop until it reached Sergiyevsk, north of Samara, and then only to avoid the risk of a counterattack. Within a week, the Western Army managed to recapture nearly all the territory it had won along the Ufa-Samara axis in early April but had lost by month’s end when the spring offensive failed.

As for Zhanna, she managed to elude Chapayev’s Twenty-Fifth Rifles long enough to make good her withdrawal through Buzuluk and back to Uralsk, her wagon trains laden with captured weaponry. Her troops, giddy with success and sorely tempted to indulge a penchant for rapine and plunder, were held back only by Zhanna’s charismatic presence.

Fortunately, Chapayev did not pursue Zhanna’s raiders beyond Buguruslan, where he learned of the catastrophic Red defeat on the Belaya and reluctantly turned back to protect the tattered remains of the retreating Fifth Red Army.

* * *

It took nearly a week for Ned and Ivashov to return to Orenburg by rail and horseback. En route, they learned that General Dutov’s Orenburg Cossacks had captured the city in their absence. As at Uralsk, the Cossacks had faced difficulty capturing a fortified position without superiority in heavy arms, but the armored cars soon proved a potent weapon against the besieged Orenburg garrison. Also, with all spare Red troops having been drawn into the Ufa offensive, enemy reinforcements were no longer a concern. In the end, after Zhanna’s raid had cut off rail links between Sovdepia and Orenburg, and the garrison’s ammunition ran low, the Red defenders lost heart and surrendered.

Orenburg resembled a ghost town when Ned and Ivashov entered the city. Owing to food storages, many of the city’s pro-Kolchak inhabitants had already decamped to outlying villages and stanitsas to fill their bellies and replenish scarce supplies. In Orenburg’s rail yard, a train was being loaded with captured Red Army prisoners for the long journey east to Siberian detention camps. Ned had seen such trains before and shuddered at the thought of how many would die en route of hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure.

Only later did he learn that still more Red troops, and nearly all the Bolshevik commissars and political agitators identified by the anti-Red townspeople, had been massacred and buried secretly in mass graves. According to British officers in the know, this sort of thing had never happened during the war against Germany, but was commonplace now. Each side in Russia’s civil war accused the other of mass atrocities, but the Siberians were extremely careful not to let the Allies witness theirs.

* * *

Once back at the Cossack encampment outside Uralsk, Ned found Zhanna’s volunteers in a jubilant mood following their raid on Buzuluk and Buguruslan. Their many wagonloads of captured arms were still being unloaded and inventoried and, to Ned’s surprise, no soldier grumbled at the Maid’s prohibition against looting for personal gain. More important was that they had returned with minimal casualties and had achieved the Stavka’s three main goals for the southern Urals: (1) to retake Uralsk and Orenburg; (2) to sever the link between Sovdepia and the Turkestan Soviet; and (3) to impede the Red advance toward Ufa.