Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

“If you go there, know that there will be nothing left to see,” the courier warned in a low voice. “The bodies will be buried and the ashes scattered over them.”

“Still, I would go,” Ivashov proposed with a mournful shake of his head. “I must see it to believe.”

Ned looked up with wide eyes that stared into space.

“You go,” he said at last. ”I couldn’t bear it. I refuse to think of Zhanna dying so, and won’t let that image into my head. I’ll wait instead and celebrate her final victory in Moscow. Nothing less would be a fitting memory.”

* * *

Though most Siberians seemed to have lost interest in the Maid’s plight after the first weeks of her captivity, they rose in outrage when they learned in mid-December of her trial in Ryazan. Even Archbishop Sylvester, one of Zhanna’s leading detractors at Omsk, denounced the Maid’s Chekist-inspired show trial as a blasphemy and demanded her immediate release. But when the newspapers published news of her death at the stake two days later, it sent a massive shock wave across Siberia and through White-held South Russia. Had free Russians harbored any lingering doubts about alleged Cheka atrocities, this was one barbarity that could not be explained away—or forgiven. They demanded justice, and nothing less than an unconditional Bolshevik surrender would do.

When the troops of Kappel’s Western Army, whom Zhanna’s raid had saved from annihilation at Ufa, learned of her brutal execution, they were moved to fury. They fought ferociously in the final drive on Moscow, forcing the Red Army to retreat headlong from Penza and chasing them across more than three hundred versts of forests and swamps to the outskirts of the Red capital. Riding with Kappel’s advance guard was young Paladin, carrying the Maid’s banner proudly aloft.

Ned and Ivashov rode with Kappel’s staff on that final drive. Not far behind Kappel’s main Siberian force, Gaida’s Northern Army descended on Moscow from the northeast while Denikin’s AFSR advanced from Tula in the south. And at the same time, Yudenich’s Northwest Army, backed by Finnish units, approached Petrograd from Estonia, capturing Gatchina, fifty versts west of the former imperial capital.

Kappel reached Red Square the day after Christmas. He accepted the surrender of the Moscow garrison two days later. The last sizeable Red Army unit to surrender did so in a remote Moscow suburb on New Year’s Eve, shortly before the sole surviving member of the Soviet Politburo, Lev Kamenev, signed the Soviet government’s unconditional surrender in the waning hours of 1919. By then, the remaining Politburo members were all dead: Trotsky, Stalin, and Zinoviev were all killed in battle, through Trotsky’s body was never found, and Lenin and the others committed suicide rather than face capture. Felix Dzerzhinsky, Yakov Yurovsky and other notorious Cheka leaders were shot by anti-Bolshevik partisans while attempting to flee the Lyubyanka.

Ned entered Moscow the same day the Moscow garrison surrendered and had his photograph taken raising the American flag over the American Consulate, which the prior consular staff had evacuated in August of 1918. The Russian photographer dispatched the negative immediately to Finland, where it was published a few days later, and soon after that appeared on the front page of nearly every major newspaper in America.

Early in the New Year, Ned set about securing the former consulate on behalf of the U.S. government and restoring it to habitability, using his hoard of AEF cash to hire skilled workmen and buy up scarce building materials. Within a week, a new wireless apparatus and a fresh team of wireless technicians were on their way to Moscow from an American warship stationed in the Gulf of Finland. Meanwhile, State Department staffers arrived from the embassy at Helsinki with codebooks and office supplies, so that official cables could be exchanged between the Moscow consulate, Washington, and American embassies in key Allied capitals. But, as it happened, the very first message Ned received in Moscow was a commercial telegram from his Cousin Pierre du Pont, applauding him for his contributions to Russian democracy and American national interests.

Similarly, Ned’s first non-official visitor in Moscow was Mark McCloud, who had entered the city with a delegation of foreign journalists. McCloud brought with him the gloomy tidings that Zhanna’s father had died of grief in Verkhne-Udinsk within days after learning of his daughter’s death. The journalist also showed Ned a sheaf of clippings from various Siberian newspapers that were already laying a foundation for the Maid’s martyrdom legend.

“We were only a day away from Ryazan when she was killed,” Ned told McCloud when they met in his sparsely furnished office on the consulate’s third floor. “Until the very end, I really thought we had a chance at saving her.”