IN RED KRASNOYARSK
When Captain Martel visited us in our railway carriage a few days after
our capture, and before any of us had yet been in the town, he told us
that Krasnoyarsk was _en fête_. “It’s hung all over with red flags,” he
said, “and everybody is laughing and jubilant. The local people all look
as if they had wakened up from a nightmare, as if they had just thrown
off an oppressive weight. There is universal rejoicing.”
As Captain Martel is, as I have already pointed out, very anti-Bolshevik,
these words surprised us, but when we visited the town ourselves we found
that they were true.
The whole town seemed to have gone red, literally as well as
metaphorically. The red flag of the revolution hung out of every house,
and red ribbons flew from most of the soldiers’ caps. That “riband in the
cap of youth” was also to be found very often in the buttonhole of youth,
and frequently cheek-by-jowl with a brass button bearing the British
arms, for many of the Red soldiers wore British military overcoats. Some
of them had even dressed themselves from head to foot in flaming crimson,
as if they meant to personate Satan at a fancy dress ball. The Bolsheviks
seem, verily, to have gone mad over the colour and the word “red.” At
least one newspaper in every town used that sanguinary adjective as part
of its title: _The Red Tocsin_, _The Red Road_ (a technical railway
periodical, but nevertheless furiously Bolshevik), _The Red Flag_, _The
Red Workman_, etc., while every triumphal arch spoke the same language:
“Hail! the Red Urals!” “Red Krasnoyarsk,” “Red Ekaterinburg,” “Red
Moscow,” “Red Petrograd,” etc. This frenzied preference for a particular
colour reminded me of Belfast on “the Twelfth,” only that in Belfast it
is a different colour that drives men insane with hate.
The happiness of the people at Krasnoyarsk may have been due to a
natural reaction after a period of anxiety when they feared that,
between them, the Poles and the Reds would make their town the scene
of a sanguinary battle in the course of which half the houses would be
burned and half the inhabitants killed. It may have been due to the fact
that the unstable and temporary Government of Shitinkin had given place
to a Government which, whatever its faults, was Russian, from Moscow,
and apparently strong. It may have been due to the unexpected pleasure
of finding that the Red Army was certainly well disciplined and that it
held the town in sufficient force to ensure the preservation of order.
Or it may simply have been due to the fact that the inhabitants were all
Bolsheviks and heartily glad to see the last of Kolchak.
Next to the happiness expressed on every face, two great facts struck
us at every step: first, the extraordinary number of ownerless horses,
and, secondly, the extraordinary number of Red soldiers who wore English
uniform. The many thousands of horses that wandered loose about the
streets and all over the surrounding country constituted one of the
strangest sights that I had ever seen. They were part of the débris of
the White Army. Some of them were cavalry horses, some transport horses,
but most of them were the horses of poor Siberian farmers, and had been
taken by force from their owners during the retreat. They wandered
into courtyards, out of which they were invariably driven with hoots
and contumely. They tried to follow other horses which had bridles and
masters and a recognized place in society, but the stable door was always
shut in their faces. They were as tame as pet dogs, but nobody had time
to stroke their noses. They stood in the streets ruminating over the
remarkable change that had suddenly taken place in their circumstances.
They tried in vain to ingratiate themselves with men who looked like
horse-fanciers. They walked into cafés. They wandered wearily through the
deep snow. Droves of them blackened the distant hills.
Many of them, alas! were lame, but a good many were sound, and the first
question we asked ourselves was—“Why does nobody take some of them?” The
answer was that nobody had any fodder for them. If a man had a horse
of his own, he had only enough fodder to feed it through the winter
and could not feed an extra animal. Besides, Bolshevism said: “These
horses are all the property of the State,” and that terrible image of
the Socialist State, formerly a monstrous figure drawn by anti-Socialist
writers, now a living and stupendous reality, made people as chary of
touching those animals as they would be of touching a tiger. They were
taboo. The red mark of Communism was on them. People violently resented
friendly attentions from them as a respectable man would resent improper
advances, threw stones at them, cursed at them in order to show that they
contemplated no breach of Lenin’s law.
At the same time the Bolsheviks took no care of them, and this showed
me the first rent in the Bolshevik armour. The Reds had centralized
everything, stifled all private initiative, abolished the municipality,
squelched all popular organizations, and would have squelched even
the R.S.P.C.A. if there had been a branch of it in Krasnoyarsk. They
themselves were too busy to attend to this matter of the horses, and so
thousands of those unfortunate beasts died. They stood in the streets and
drooped their heads miserably. Then they lay down, their eyes grew filmy,
and in a few weeks the roads and the hills were dotted with their frozen
carcasses.
Before this last stage had been reached, townswomen with kind hearts
but no knowledge of horses took pity on them as they lay gloomily with
noses touching the snow, and offered them bread and other unsuitable
delicacies. No man ever summoned up sufficient courage to make this
generous but belated effort. By and by, when all the horses were dead,
the great Bolshevik machine began to move in the matter, and some of
the carcasses were transported to a big field near the railway station,
where they were piled one on top of another. It was a ghastly sight, but
it became ghastlier when the horses were all skinned and had their tails
cut off. The large quantity of bad leather thus obtained probably figures
to-day in the stock of raw material ready for export by the Bolsheviks to
England. But the injury inflicted on the Siberian farmers by the loss of
all these horses will not soon be made good.
When all the horses had perished, some Red Government Department acted
just as a Government Department in a non-Bolshevik country would have
acted under the circumstances. It promptly turned a number of experts on
to the matter, and they compiled statistics which I was able to obtain.
According to these statistics more than 5,000 horses had perished of cold
and hunger in the streets and in the fields around the town, and 15 per
cent. of all the horses in Siberia of an age capable to work were lost
during Kolchak’s retreat. In thirty-one parishes near Krasnoyarsk, all
the villages, cattle, and agricultural implements had been destroyed. In
five counties near Krasnoyarsk, 8,365 families had been ruined; 18,149
horses seized and lost; 20,415 head of cattle taken. This refers only
to the damage done along a small portion of the line, for Siberia is a
huge country, and some of its minor provinces are as large as France
and Germany put together. The Bolsheviks have voted 500 million roubles
for the purpose of making good all this loss, but twice that sum would
not repair half the material damage that has been done even in the
comparatively small area referred to, while the ravages of typhus, the
loss of children, the breaking up of homes, and the reduction of large
cultivated areas to the condition of a desert are calamities from which
Siberia will take a long time to recover.
The next great sight in Krasnoyarsk, after the horses, was the number of
English uniforms which one saw on the Reds. We sent in all 200,000 sets
of equipment to Kolchak, but they all seemed to pass through Kolchak’s
hands as water goes through a sieve, and the Reds got most of them. They
told me that in Perm they had captured enough uniforms to clothe a whole
division. They had found them unpacked in a storehouse, where they had
probably been forgotten by the Whites, though at that time Kolchak’s
soldiers were very badly clad and his Generals were pressing us to send
them more uniforms.
More frequently the uniforms walked over to the Reds, thousands at a
time, with the Whites inside them. A Red General was nearly scared out
of his wits once, during the fighting in the Urals, by seeing what he
took to be the whole British Army bearing down on him; but the alarming
manifestation turned out to be only a detachment of Whites in British
uniforms anxious to surrender. Such phenomena became so frequent, later
on, that the Reds got quite used to it; and, by the time Krasnoyarsk had
been lost, about one-fourth of the Red soldiers wore the khaki of King
George.
The misunderstandings that sometimes occurred through this similarity
in the uniform worn on both sides were generally tragic, but sometimes
humorous. In a tavern situated in the ample no-man’s-land between the
opposing armies, a number of White and Red horsemen drank together
amicably for hours, one night, before they discovered that they belonged
to different sides. On another occasion a Cossack entrusted with a
message to H.Q. of a White regiment was so misled by the dress of the
sentries standing outside a farmhouse that he delivered his message
there, though it was really a Red H.Q. His own appearance excited no
suspicion, but he gave himself away by the first words he spoke. “Is the
_Gospodin Polkovnik_ (_Monsieur le Colonel_) here?” he asked; and this
respectful title, for which the Reds have substituted the words “Comrade
Commander,” led to his instant apprehension. About the same time a White
officer made the same mistake, and betrayed himself in the same way. The
Bolshevik who told the story concluded grimly by saying that the officer
in question _saw_ the Colonel.
Some of the simple peasants serving in the Red Army had got the idea that
England had supplied them direct with all this excellent equipment, and
shortly after our capture a small but grateful deputation of Red soldiers
who had heard that we were English came to thank us for the splendid
uniforms we had supplied to them. And I must say that they _were_
splendid, and that all the web equipment, haversacks, water-bottles,
etc., were there, though not always fastened in a way that a British
sergeant-major would have quite approved of. Many of the Reds had even
got our first-aid bandages, which I had never seen with Kolchak’s troops
at all.
A great quantity of British Red Cross supplies—woollen comforters,
Balaklava helmets, etc.—had also found its way somehow or other into
the hands of the Bolsheviks. Care had, I understand, been taken in the
distribution of this stuff at Omsk; nevertheless supplies issued there
in the morning were sometimes on sale in the Bazaar before evening. If
the day was warm, the thoughtless Russian soldier parted for a glass of
vodka or a few roubles with all the underclothing he had just received;
and a week later, when it was cold, he wanted more underclothing; and his
officers, who never, never held any kit inspection, complained bitterly
of the English neglecting to supply the new levies with clothes.
Even when the complete British uniform was wanting, there was nearly
always some little token to remind one of home—a pair of British army
boots, a Canadian overcoat, British putties, a “British warm,” a Tommy’s
fur cap, a British water-bottle, and, above all, British haversacks and
web belts. British haversacks and belts I have seen very often as far
west as Moscow, and when I met Trotsky in the Kremlin he was looking
quite neat in what seemed like a pair of Fox’s spiral putties which he
had probably picked up at Ekaterinburg. The fact that the buttons on
these uniforms bore the British coat of arms never seemed to worry any of
the Bolsheviks in the least, but I must say that they never kept those
buttons polished.
The assistance we have rendered to the Bolshevik cause by these generous
gifts is beyond calculation, and it proved also to be of some use both to
Horrocks and myself. Once when Horrocks was being lectured truculently
on the supplies his country had sent to Kolchak he disarmed the wrath of
the lecturer, a Commissar, and transformed his dark scowl into a pleasant
smile by simply remarking, “Well, it seems that you have got most of it!”
As for myself, when I began to pose as a civilian, the military uniform
(shorn of all badges) which I still brought with me excited not the
faintest suspicion, even when I was arrested by the Extraordinary
Commission at Moscow. I thought it well, however, to exchange my military
overcoat for a peasant’s sheepskin, but I think that I was rather a fool
for doing this, and so probably did the Bolshevik official with whom I
made the exchange, for he carefully kept out of my way ever after, lest I
should ask to have my overcoat back again.