Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

1. The Siberian Army is spread extremely thin along a front of more than five hundred miles, from Perm in the north to Orenburg and the Caspian in the south.

2. The quality of Siberian officers under Kolchak does not appear high. Of the Admiral’s roughly 17,000 officers, only 1,100 had been pre-1915 Imperial Army officers.

3. While the Cossack auxiliaries offer another source of seasoned officers and sub officers, the Stavka confines Cossack units to their home stanitsas[28] and fails to use their cavalry effectively to raid the enemy’s rear.

4. The enlisted men in Siberian Army infantry units are mostly untrained peasant conscripts of nineteen or twenty because older veterans are turned away for fear that they have been radicalized.

5. Owing to harsh conscription methods, raw recruits enter military service embittered by fear of their own government and are prone to desert at the first sign of fighting.

6. Though the Siberian army cannot properly train or equip its soldiers, Omsk continues to send more unprepared units to the front on the grounds that the offensive requires numerical superiority to succeed.

7. The danger from poor combat readiness is compounded by the Siberian Army’s glaring lack of reserves, as reserve divisions will not be ready until late summer.

8. At this time, the Siberian Armies have a five-to-four advantage in men over the Red Armies along the Urals, while the Reds possess more artillery and machine guns, and can deploy them more effectively using their dense railway network.

9. On the front’s southern flank, Kolchak’s forces are dispersed, while the Red Army is concentrated in order to crush the scattered groups one by one and turn the Siberian Army’s southern flank.

10. In recent weeks, Admiral Kolchak’s most capable generals have called for a delay to the offensive until reserves are ready. Lebedev insists on attacking at once to exploit Red weaknesses. This looks increasingly like a desperate gamble from whose failure the Siberian Armies may never recover.

* * *

Shortly after sending this dispatch to Vladivostok, Ned received word from the British Military Mission that he and Colonel Ward were to report to General Lebedev later that day regarding progress on the wireless project. By now, coded wireless messages were being exchanged daily between Admiral Kolchak at Omsk, General Denikin at Novo-Rossiysk, General Yudenich at Tallinn, and both British and American military missions.

Upon arriving at the Stavka, Ward and Ned were ushered into the war room, where General Lebedev listened to their briefing with the despotic indifference of a Mongol khan.

“I approved your wireless project and have no objection,” he told them at the end. “But as yet I have seen little benefit from its use. General Denikin has his front and we have ours; we shall see who reaches Moscow first.”