Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

Two days later, on Zhanna’s nineteenth birthday, Ned and Ivashov joined a throng of her followers on the steps of the eighteenth century Lutheran Church of the Holy Yekaterina at Omsk. They were a veritable babel, with faces of every conceivable stamp. The church, a rectangular stucco-faced building built in baroque style, occupied the east side of the parade ground near the Irtysh River. Zhanna delivered a short address from a porch on the church’s south side, beneath a canopy supported by ornately shaped trelliswork of hammered iron.

The speech was her standard message, which Ned had heard her deliver on numerous occasions in Irkutsk and Omsk. But now Ned saw for the first time how Zhanna had come to master both her material and her audience, harnessing the naiveté, intolerance, and dogged determination of her youth to a message of hope and change. She began with the story of her Voices and how they had sent her to Omsk from the distant shores of Lake Baikal.

“The Lord’s Spirit told me not to be afraid,” she declared in a humble voice that came close to faltering. “It said to go first to Irkutsk, where I would find friendly officers to conduct me to Omsk, and that more would be made known to me there. It urged me to have courage and allow God to use me as His chosen instrument.”

When mentioning the friendly officers, her eyes met Ned’s for the briefest instant, sending a warm thrill through his body, despite the frosty weather. Then she described the desperate situation of the Siberian Army, with its offensive now stalled and its troops ill-prepared for an imminent Red counterattack. But no sooner did she paint this fearful picture than she offered the promise of divine deliverance.

“If the army beats back this counterattack, within two months our brave Siberians will strike a blow that will mark the beginning of the end for the Bolshevik regime. By year-end, our forces shall dash Lenin’s long-cherished illusion of bringing Siberia within his noxious grasp.”

The buzz of the crowd dropped to a faint murmur as the light of hope lit up every eye in Zhanna’s audience.

“Instead, we shall have a new national assembly at Samara and a democratically elected leader of a new Russian republic. That leader will be Admiral Kolchak, but not the man we know today as a military dictator, but a wiser man whose eyes God will have opened wide to the potential of a self-governing Russia. Our Admiral will be the leader that Russia needs him to be, the leader God intends him to be.”

The audience remained oddly silent, perhaps from deeply ingrained doubt that such a transition was possible. But, once again, Zhanna had an answer for the skeptics.

“The Admiral has not yet, to my knowledge, accepted God’s offer of help,” she continued with a radiant smile. “My Voices tell me that I am the one chosen to persuade him.”

At this, the faces in the audience lit up once again.

“And here is how it will unfold,” she went on, pausing to scan the rapt faces before her.

“First, the Red Army will launch a counterattack that will be halted at Ufa. Second, our forces will crush the Fifth Red Army and drive on toward the Volga. Third, before summer’s end, Admiral Kolchak will be elected regent of a new all-Russian government at Samara. And fourth, our combined White Armies will liberate Moscow and Petrograd by year’s end!”

Like the audience attending Zhanna’s examination at St. Nicholas Cathedral, those who listened on the steps of the Holy Yekaterina Church erupted in a deafening cheer. Ned had not thought it possible, but the girl seemed to sharpen her skills at every turn.

After her speech, the mayor of Omsk, who happened to own a leading newspaper favorable to the Maid, presented her with a chic velvet cap whose white ostrich plumes tumbled lazily to one side. Next, Paladin trotted up the steps carrying a surprise: a battle flag that Zhanna had requested some weeks earlier. He carried it fully unfurled, some three feet wide and eight feet long, white with a gold silk border, its field strewn with golden lilies, connoting chastity. Beneath an image of a seated Christ holding a globe in his lap, with a female angel to either side, Jesus’s name was writ large. Paladin glowed with pride as he presented the banner to Zhanna and, at that moment, Ned thought there could not be a happier fellow in the world.