Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

Later, Genrikh showed Ned to an upstairs bedroom where his rucksack had already been left. Once inside, Ned undressed, put on the neatly folded men’s flannel nightshirt that had been laid out on his bed, and turned out the lamp on his bedside table. Within a few minutes, he was aroused from sleep by a soft knocking at his door. On an impulse, rather than call out to whomever might be there, he padded quietly to the door and opened it. Before him stood Yulia in a silk dressing gown and matching nightdress, a lit candlestick in her hand. With her other hand, she raised a finger and pressed it to Ned’s lips, then stepped past him into the room.

* * *

Over the next two months, each week brought Ned a heavier workload. By day he divided his time between desk duty at the Railway Service Corps offices and meetings at the American Consulate, the British Military Mission, the Stavka and the executive offices at Liberty House. By night he met informants and prepared secret intelligence reports for dispatch to Colonel Barrows at Vladivostok. The routine was relieved only by a brief excursion to the Siberian Army’s forward bases at Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk every two or three weeks.

The Northern Army’s capture of Perm in late December under the charismatic but erratic young Czech general, Rudolf Gaida, gave the Siberians a boost in confidence shortly before the two opposing armies halted activities for the winter, one of the coldest in living memory. And around the same time, Kolchak’s security forces quelled a minor Bolshevik uprising in Omsk with brutal force, killing four hundred insurgents and executing without trial fifteen former delegates to the Constituent Assembly from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had voluntarily surrendered into White protective custody.

This incited widespread public outrage, which provoked the security organs to even greater excesses. The days that followed were filled with random gunfire in the streets, bands of Cossacks galloping through Omsk with bloodied sabers, and panicked civilians barricading themselves in their homes. Though Kolchak privately denounced the Omsk massacre as an overreaction, calling it “Bolshevism of the Right,” he did nothing to punish those responsible, for they were the very men behind the coup that had put him in power. For weeks afterward, hundreds of S-Rs and suspected Bolsheviks disappeared quietly in the night and were rumored to have been ”transferred to the Republic of Irtysh,“ a euphemism for disposing of murder victims in the frozen Irtysh River.

Not only did this incident sour politically moderate Siberians against Kolchak’s regime and offer the Bolsheviks a propaganda field day, but it also dampened support for the Supreme Ruler in Allied capitals at a time when sympathy had been quietly building. For weeks afterward, Ned felt compelled to send one soothing report after another to AEF Headquarters in an attempt to calm nerves about the situation in Omsk, while the American consular staff sent similar missives to the State Department.

Another consequence of the S-R rebellion was that Ned discovered Staff Captain Ivashov’s name on a secret list of officers to be purged from the Siberian Army on suspicion of being former S-R members or sympathizers. Fortunately for Ivashov, he had been on temporary assignment in the Urals during the Omsk massacre and, by the time of his return, the Allied governments had sent a forceful message urging Kolchak to reconcile with liberal supporters of the Siberian government, and to refrain from disciplinary action against former members of the People’s Army and other moderates who had played no part in the December rebellion.

The Allied message soon became a source of friction between Allied missions in Omsk and the Stavka, as Lebedev had long been intent on purging his staff of anyone showing less than a slavish degree of personal loyalty and political orthodoxy. Another source of friction was the continued delay in delivering the wireless apparatus to Omsk, as promised to Admiral Kolchak in early December. Lebedev, ever the bully, voiced suspicion over the delays and became increasingly brusque with Ward and Ned, despite the Supreme Ruler’s continued support for the project.