Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

Despite the shortage of men and arms, the Ural and Orenburg Cossacks managed to assemble a functional army relatively rapidly, in large part because the sparse communications and transport networks on the steppe hindered Red attempts to move against them. By the end of April, nearly fifteen thousand men rallied to the White cause along a front from the Caspian port of Guryev in the southwest through Uralsk to Orenburg in the east. The Cossacks’ principal weakness was a debilitating shortage of arms and ammunition.

In August of 1918, however, Trotsky reorganized the Red Army and launched a general offensive from Simbirsk to Kazan on the Upper Volga. This enabled the Reds to retake Kazan, Simbirsk, and Samara before returning south in October to strike the Cossacks along the Ural River.

At this point, the fighting on the Orenburg Steppe became a life-or-death struggle between an uncompromising, expansive Bolshevism and a traditional Cossack way of life that had existed largely undisturbed since the fifteenth century. The Bolshevik commanders made no secret of their goal to slay every Cossack male of fighting age, lest the horsemen dissolve into the wide-open steppes to return and fight another day. Because the Red leadership deemed every Cossack an implacable class enemy, they resolved to destroy Cossack manpower and settlements once and for all.

The officer chosen to carry out this mission was a rowdy regimental leader of peasant birth named Vasily Chapayev, who had served as an enlisted man in the Imperial Army and won the Cross of St. George three times. A charismatic leader much loved by his men, Chapayev was also reckless, vain, cruel, vengeful, and hostile toward everything about the old regime, particularly the Cossacks.

“There may be one or two good ones, but it’s wishful thinking to expect any good from a Cossack,” he often said, both before and after bouts of heavy drinking.

Chapayev and his Twenty-Fifth Rifle Regiment arrived outside Uralsk in January of 1919 and captured it in February, leaving behind a garrison of Red troops to defend the city. The Ural Cossacks promptly fell back to loyal villages in the south, keeping their army intact, and elected as their new ataman the officer who had led the original revolt at Guryev, Vladimir Sergeyevich Tolstov. From that day on, though Ural Cossack morale sometimes flagged, Tolstov worked tirelessly toward a triumphant Cossack return to Uralsk.

Accordingly, when the Siberian Army unleashed its spring offensive in March of 1919, and the Red Army was compelled to withdraw from along the Ural River, Tolstov’s Cossacks recaptured the stretch from Uralsk to Iletsk, blockaded Red forces inside Uralsk, and laid siege to the city. In mid-April, the Bolshevik defenders numbered 2,600 men under arms, with 19 artillery pieces, 27 machine guns, and a handful of improvised armored cars. This was substantially more heavy weaponry than the Cossacks possessed, and the Reds knew better how to use it.

But Tolstov understood that even the best discipline could break down within a besieged city and, though lacking sufficient artillery to breach the Red defenses, began the long wait for Uralsk’s conservative civic leaders and the Bolshevik garrison to turn against each other and descend into anarchy. Meanwhile, the Ural Cossacks brought in more men from the surrounding territory, collected arms wherever they could, and rejoiced at hearing that the Maid’s volunteers had departed Omsk to join them for the assault on Uralsk.

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Unlike the new American trains that had carried Ned from Irkutsk to Omsk in November and again in February, the battered Russian train that left Omsk with Zhanna and her volunteers consisted almost entirely of freight cars; only a few third-class passenger coaches were reserved for officers. So while Zhanna, Ned, Ivashov and Paladin enjoyed little comfort and even less privacy in their crowded third-class coach, they had ample opportunity to become acquainted with the hardy men who had left home to follow the Maid to war.

As on her February journey, Zhanna meditated for nearly an hour every morning and spent another half hour in prayer with Father Grigory, one of the two chaplains on board. While most of the officers passed the hours by sleeping, swapping lurid war stories, singing popular songs, or playing countless games of cards, the Maid spent nearly all of her days and nights shuttling tirelessly from one group to the next with either Ned or Ivashov at her side, posing all manner of questions into the Red Army’s and the Cossacks’ respective ways of fighting. And judging from the nature of her questions, it was clear that she was soaking up the information like a sponge. Perhaps as a result, day after day, her expression lost some of its youthful radiance and took on an air of responsibility.