Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

Following one such encounter with Lebedev and Kolchak, Ned thought back to his initial audience with the Admiral and the indelible impression that the man had left on him—so dignified and correct, so resolute, the focal point of Siberia’s hopes. Yet, for all that, lately the Admiral seemed out of his depth as commander in chief, a virtual captive of an incompetent staff and a parasitic entourage, and dependent on the Allies for every material resource necessary to prosecute the war, down to the uniform on his back.[17] How could such a man, though arguably the best one on hand for the job, lead the White armies to victory along a fifteen-hundred-mile front, from a remote Siberian capital, against an enemy whose strength seemed to grow by the day?

As tension mounted between the Allies and the Stavka, Ned was delighted to learn in late January that the long-awaited wireless equipment had at last arrived in Vladivostok, and that he would soon be making a return visit to Irkutsk to pick it up and escort it and its technical team to Omsk. When he invited Ivashov to join him on the trip, the staff captain’s face showed a palpable sense of relief to leave the capital, at least for a while.

Whether his close call with dismissal and possible arrest had diminished Ivashov’s loyalty to the Omsk regime was unclear to Ned, for the Russian remained as taciturn as ever. But who would not have felt a reciprocal distrust toward his superiors after being stripped of most duties except for routine liaison work with the Allies? For that reason, Ned redoubled his efforts to show respect and trust for Ivashov, in hopes of aggravating the divided loyalty that might one day allow him to recruit Ivashov as a clandestine informant inside the Stavka.

* * *

Though Mark McCloud had arrived in Omsk on the same train as Ned, the two men rarely ran across each other during December and January. However, a week before Ned’s scheduled departure for Irkutsk in late January, McCloud invited Ned to dinner at a modest downtown restaurant whose menu, posted on a blackboard behind the bar, consisted primarily of soups, stews, and cheap cuts of meat. Since the Bolshevik uprising in Omsk nearly a month earlier, a curfew remained in place over much of the capital, and bands of Cossacks still prowled the streets with blood in their eyes for leftist agitators. Many of McCloud’s journalistic sources had vanished, with some fleeing, some rotting in jail, and others falling prey to political murder. As a result, McCloud’s innate cynicism was in full bloom.

“This town disgusts me,” he had declared even before the vodka was poured. “The upper classes throw their money about with a flagrant sense of ‘après nous le deluge.’ The streets are filled with cowardly Army officers who belong at the front. Everyone else seems to have succumbed to apathy and defeatism, the men turning to drink and the women to weeping at all hours of the day.”

“So what’s new about that?” Ned teased. “Welcome to Siberia.”

“No, laddie, I’m certain it’s worse than before. On every street corner, all I see is rampant speculation in stolen goods and worthless currency. Small wonder the Bolshevik underground is growing! Did you know that the White troops in Perm and Birsk have run short of small arms ammunition despite millions of rounds being sent from American warehouses in Vladivostok?”

“I’ve heard something to that effect,” Ned replied, feeling no less outrage than McCloud, but not wanting to give him the satisfaction of hearing Ned speak ill of the Kolchak government.

“Do you doubt then that crooked White officers are selling off vast quantities of Allied arms to the Reds?”

“It’s possible, though I’m not at liberty to comment,” Ned answered, bracing his jaw for the next question. Recently, he had done his own investigation into these claims and had discovered that the shrinkage in munitions deliveries from Vladivostok worsened with proximity to the front. Such large-scale pilferage would be impossible without the connivance of high-level officials at Omsk.

“But don’t you see my point?” McCloud insisted. “Even if you take in stride the flagrant corruption among Kolchak’s hangers-on, it seems to me the party’s over. Perhaps the time has come for me to ply my trade elsewhere.”

“So where else does one go to cover the Russian war?” Ned challenged. “Things are even worse closer to the front. And honest reporters aren’t permitted at all on the Soviet side.”

“I think I shall go to Paris,” McCloud pronounced, seizing a hunk of black bread from a pewter plate. “The peace conference will begin soon, and both Wilson and Lloyd George are going to attend. My contacts in Washington tell me that the Russian question will be resolved once and for all at Versailles, and that the civil war will wind down not long after, perhaps with some form of partition.”