I ESCAPE
I was finally offered a room in an institution which constituted the
heart of Bolshevism in Krasnoyarsk, and as, for obvious reasons, my
comrades were all of them in favour of my accepting the offer, I did so
at once.
I told them that I would see them frequently afterwards, and I kept my
promise, but I did not give them my address as I feared that some of
them might unconsciously give it away or that they might chance to be
overheard while talking about it among themselves. I was particularly
suspicious of some of our ex-interpreters who came to see us; but several
of my young companions, with that generous frankness which is (in
England) such a charming trait in the character of English public-school
boys, refused to entertain any suspicions, and confided in them all their
little plans for escape. The ex-interpreters listened attentively, made
helpful suggestions, and the plans went wrong.
The room which I occupied was separated by a low wooden partition from an
office where a good deal of Government business was done, and there was
much shouting, day and night, into a telephone. One day a young married
lady came to get permission to bury in a separate grave the body of her
husband, a White officer, who had been murdered by the Reds under the
following circumstances: A White volunteer detachment which had already
surrendered and given up its arms happening to encounter a Red volunteer
detachment belonging to the same town in the Urals, the Reds immediately
murdered all the White officers. One of those White officers was the
husband of the above-mentioned lady, whose modest petition was that the
body should not be buried in a common grave with the other corpses but in
a separate grave. I do not know whether her request was granted or not,
but I do know that none of those Red murderers was punished for their
massacre, and that the matter was hushed up.
To be quite fair, however, I must say that the Whites had, to my certain
knowledge, committed innumerable atrocities during the one year that
they had ruled Siberia and that the White officers had behaved with a
peculiar brutality, against which the English and Scots officers strongly
and manfully protested. (One officer, formerly of Carson’s Army, who did
not protest, now—October, 1920—holds an important position in the Irish
Secret Service.) On this occasion in Krasnoyarsk a Bolshevik leader
tried hard to have those Red murderers punished, but he was overruled
by superior authorities who believed that punishment for such acts is a
delicate matter and that it is only human that they should act on their
own initiative.
One of our visitors was a Commissar from Moscow, who had false passports
and was on his way to Irkutsk and Vladivostock in order to overthrow
the Social Revolutionary Governments in those places. He succeeded at
Irkutsk, but what happened to him afterwards I do not know. These agents
with false passports are a feature of every Russian front, being very
numerous in Finland, Poland, and South Russia, and always exceedingly
confident of success. They laugh at the idea of Social Revolutionary
Republics holding out against them, and, had it not been for Japan, they
would have extended Bolshevik rule to Vladivostock six months ago.
I had frequent difficulties in explaining my position as a journalist,
but was helped by the general chaos that prevailed and by a scrapbook
full of newspaper cuttings, many of them in Russian, in which I was
described as a celebrated war correspondent.
Some of these Russian cuttings were so laudatory and spelt my name
so badly that I am afraid the Bolsheviks attributed to me a literary
importance which I do not possess. One triumphant radio of theirs which
was quoted in the English Press described me as “the well-known writer
Macaulay.”
During the revolutionary movement of 1905-1906 I had, like all the
British correspondents in St. Petersburg, criticized the Tsar’s
Government, and, for journalistic purposes, got into touch with opponents
of that Government. I now met some of these people or acquaintances of
theirs, and, later on, I met several American correspondents, one British
correspondent, and one high official of the People’s Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs, who had known me as a journalist five years earlier and
were unaware that I had spent all the interval in the British Army. The
journalists, Russian and foreign, who did not know me personally were
acquainted with a great many newspapermen whom I knew. My name appeared
in “Who’s Who” as a journalist; and several prominent Bolsheviks who had
been living in Italy at the time my dispatches from Tripoli raised a
storm in the Italian Press, recollected me perfectly, while a very large
number who had not been in Italy had heard of my connection with that
storm.
I could not show my passport, as I was described in it as a military
officer, but, luckily, I had with me a cutting from the _New York World_
containing a portrait of myself, and this proved better than any passport.
I was sorry that I had to leave so many people under a false impression,
but I had now gone so far that there was no turning back; and, besides,
the money question was still very acute with my companions. They had not,
at this time, begun to get any money at all for teaching, and what they
earned in that way later would never have sufficed to keep them from
starvation. My first duty, therefore, was to persuade Commissar Sverdlov,
Vice-Minister of Ways and Communications, to let them have some money
by casually pointing out to him, in a tone of emotionless unconcern,
that the death by cold and starvation of my comrades, most of whom
belonged really to the working classes, would not be good propaganda for
Bolshevism among the workmen of England.
Having succeeded in this important matter, I quietly took various steps
in other directions to render their position safe. I found them more
protectors than they were aware of, for I always impressed on these
friends the necessity of not showing their friendship openly by making
themselves known to my companions.
My access to Commissar circles also enabled me to telegraph from
Krasnoyarsk to Moscow and Copenhagen and to bring to Moscow many letters
from my companions to their relatives, and to send those letters to
England. At Moscow I found the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
in a curious state of ignorance about our officers in Siberia, owing
apparently to a lack of connection, not only between the Commissariat of
F.A. and the Commissariat of War, but also between the representatives of
those Commissariats in Siberia and the central Commissariats in Moscow
to which they were supposed to be respectively subordinate. I also found
that Provincial Soviets and other organizations had at times an awkward
habit of obstinately claiming a sort of local autonomy, and of impeding
rather than helping the representatives of the Central Government.
Hence it came to pass that the F.O. in Moscow does not seem to have ever
been informed officially of the capture of British troops in Siberia.
So far as I know, all the telegrams on that subject that got through
from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow in January, 1920, were sent by me. I sent two
telegrams from Krasnoyarsk at that time to the Commissariat of F.A.; and,
when I arrived myself in Moscow, I was able to supplement those telegrams
by a good deal of additional information helpful to our prisoners. Many
enquiries about them came from our Legation in Copenhagen, and Chicherin
had always to apply to me for answers to these enquiries. Meanwhile, in
Krasnoyarsk, at the Ministry of Communications in Moscow, and at the
Bolshevik Foreign Office in Moscow, I lost no opportunity of making
representations on behalf of my comrades. I always pointed out that, from
the Bolshevik point of view, it would be good policy to release these
men at once. They had been well treated, I said, and their release in
itself would be a contradiction of the report that the Reds always killed
their prisoners. If detained till they contracted typhus, or even till
they had got excessively bored, as soldiers easily become when kept a
long time in one place doing nothing, they would only become permanently
embittered against Bolshevism. My arguments seemed to make a considerable
impression; nevertheless, as my companions were detained in Eastern
Siberia six months after I left, it is to be presumed that there were
difficulties in the way of acting on my advice. The difficulties were, I
think, these: (1) The higher Commissars are secretly afraid of the dregs
who keep them in power; and (2) local authorities, such as those who had
charge of our prisoners in Siberia, are, as I have already pointed out,
sometimes difficult to manage. The first reason is the more important. It
will also tell against any trade between England and Russia and against
any modification of Bolshevism.
My fellow-captives, who cordially approved of all I did for them and of
the secrecy with which I did it, were very glad when I told them that
my next move would be to get to Moscow and then to England. In Moscow I
might be able to do something for them, and I was able to do something;
but in London I could furnish the British Government with the fullest
information about them, and that also I have done. They offered to draw
up a paper signed by all of them, and declaring that I was acting with
their sanction; but I declined to take such a compromising document with
me, and it was lucky for me that I did decline.
If I had asked permission from the Bolsheviks to go east to Vladivostock,
their suspicions would have been at once aroused; and, moreover, there
was a front in that direction: the railway was cut, and I could never
have got through. I therefore asked permission to go to Ekaterinburg in
order to see Trotsky carry out there his great scheme for converting a
whole army into a labour force, and making a hundred thousand soldiers
beat their swords into ploughshares. I did not particularly want to see
Ekaterinburg again, for I had been there three or four times and might
be recognized. But if once I got to Ekaterinburg, I might have a chance
of going to Moscow, and Moscow is close to Petrograd, which is near the
Finnish frontier, and from which, as I knew every inch of the ground,
escape should be fairly easy.
This proposal appealed to them at once, and they said that, if I had
asked them earlier, they would have sent me off by a train of technical
experts which was leaving in a few hours. Fearing that any delay might
be fatal to my plans, I offered to go at once. It would not take me
half an hour, I said, to fetch the little kit I had from the town to
the railway carriage in which this conversation was being carried on.
“Then,” they said, “we will arrange the matter at once.” I saw that they
were pleased at my rapidity of decision and at the indication that I was
not overburdened with baggage, for, to do them justice, they are men of
rapid decision themselves, and not possessed of much movable property.
The matter was accordingly arranged in one minute by telephone, and in
another minute I was dashing townwards for my kit.
The only difficulty I experienced was from the cold, which, as I
have already remarked, was 49 degrees below zero—a frightfully low
temperature, which made exposure in the open air for more than an hour
positively dangerous. I had never in my life experienced such cold. Even
inside the heated carriages it caused the windows to be coated with
sheets of ice, half an inch thick at top and perhaps two inches thick at
the bottom. All the brass-work near the windows and doors was covered
with hoar-frost, and, whenever a door was opened, the cold air rushed
in like a whiff of smoke. Outside, my glasses were always covered with
frost, and the metal pincers of the _pince-nez_ burned the bridge of my
nose like red-hot irons, so that I had to remove my glasses altogether. I
had also to cover my face from time to time, as, otherwise, all of it and
especially my nose would have been frost-bitten. But finally I managed
to return in time with my kit, and to stow it in an upper bunk which
had been assigned to me in the special train. I had no time to bid my
companions good-bye, but I had told them beforehand that I would probably
leave that day, and leave, perhaps, without being able to see them again.
The sound of the train rumbling slowly out of Krasnoyarsk was one of the
pleasantest sounds I had heard for a long time, though mingled with my
pleasure was a certain uneasiness when I remembered that my destination
was Bolshevik Russia and Red Moscow.