White Terror

Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian

Jamie Bisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780714656908
• eBook ISBN: 9781135765958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the gripping story of a forgotten Russia in turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism.

It tells the tale of how, in the last days of 1917, a fugitive Cossack captain brashly led seven cohorts into a mutinous garrison at Manchuli, a squalid bordertown on Russia's frontier with Manchuria. The garrison had gone Red, revolted against its officers, and become a dangerous, ill-disciplined mob.

Nevertheless, Cossack Captain Grigori Semionov cleverly harangued the garrison into laying down its arms and boarding a train that carried it back into the Bolsheviks' tenuous territory. Through such bold action, Semionov and a handful of young Cossack brethren established themselves as the warlords of Eastern Siberia and Russia's Pacific maritime provinces during the next bloody year. Like inland pirates, they menaced the Trans-Siberian Railroad with fleets of armoured trains, Cossack cavalry, mercenaries and pressgang cannon fodder. They undermined Admiral Kolchak's White armies, ruthlessly liquidated all Reds, terrorized the population, sold out to the Japanese, and antagonized the American Expeditionary Force and Czech Legion in a frenzied orchestration of the Russian Empire's gotterdammerung. Historians have long recognized that Ataman Semionov and Company were a nasty lot. This book details precisely how nasty they were.

1
PRELUDE TO TERROR
Creation–November 1917

‘The history of little Chita was the history of all Russia.’

(Prince Petr A.Kropotkin)

Battleground of the Gods

Long before Siberia’s forests echoed with the ringing swords of Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Reds and Whites and the cries of their victims, the land was terrorized by vicious flying serpents, gigantic snarling canines, invisible evil spirits called shalmos, and multi-headed beasts called mangathais—according to the myths of the Buryat Mongols. These creatures fought constantly for territory and for power over the Marat, the people who inhabited the world that preceded our world. Boundaries between the natural and supernatural blurred in the old world where even mortal Marat transformed into supernatural wolves, ravens and swans. Buryat myths spin a relentless and confusing web of sacrifice, politicking, deceit and betrayal, punctuated by vicious atrocities traded by forces of both good and evil. Siblings turned against siblings and, motivated by self-preservation, thirst for power or revenge, men even cut deals with mangathais, who were usually busy boiling, impaling or disemboweling people.

It was not an idyllic world. In one case, a deformed, frog-faced infant with supernatural powers lured enemies close enough to rip out their tongues and bludgeon them to death. In another, the World White God, Esege Malan, found it necessary to spy on his own earthly emissary’s activities and attitudes. Esege Malan created the world, but could not even control his own human sons, much less the plethora of other hideous creatures running amok over the land. Evil and disorder reigned. At one point so much carnage smothered the earth that Esege Malan created flies and maggots to clean up the blanket of putrefying bodies. Epic battles raged for days and nights on end. Gargantuan combatants gouged out hills and gorges with their slashing claws and hooves, hammered out valleys where they tumbled, and pitched immense projectiles that became rocky outcrops and landmarks for the ensuing centuries of warriors, rebels and pirates.¹

Epic struggle cast its shadow across the Transbaikal plateau again between 1917 and 1921, when Reds and Whites fought ferociously for the souls of humanity. Infernal flying machines hurled fire from the sky, and giant belching locomotives roared like mangathais and pitched projectiles that tore shelters asunder and shredded people into fodder for wolves and crows. Assassins and spies lurked in the shade, modern shalmos wreaking doom upon mortal enemies. The stench of mass graves and burning flesh, rivers swollen with corpses, screams of the tortured and raucous hilarity of sadists raping, mutilating and tormenting, reveling in quarterings, hangings, whippings, brandings, beheadings and multitudinous methods of slaughter—the horrors of Buryat mythology had come to pass in Verkhne-Udinsk, Chita and hundreds of satellite villages and settlements hugging the Transbaikal plateau, nestled in river valleys, buried in the green taiga, or perched above Lake Baikal.

This modern pestilence was ordained by Russia’s conquest of Siberia and the shifting fault lines of Russo-Japanese tensions. The background of the civil war in Russia’s Far East was shaped by its history as the cradle of Mongol culture, a land of freedom and opportunity for Cossacks, runaways, fugitives and the oppressed, and a land of exile for troublemakers and criminals. An irregular flow of people, commerce and ideas, moving in and out along Siberia’s interlaced rivers, the Great Post Road and the Tea Road, kept the region in ferment and conversely swayed events in distant parts of Asia, Europe and even America.

The White Terror that extinguished so many lives was shaped by a frontier society, where the cultural chemistry of Buryats, Evenks, Russians, Old Believers, Poles, Koreans, Chinese and other societies fused to spawn a culture of endemic violence. Cossack society and tradition, as altered and practiced by the isolated and relatively young institutions in the Russian Far East, overlaid this complex embroidery and set the stage for warlords and banditry.

Siberia is immense enough to be the gods’ battleground. The swamps and plains of western and central Siberia engulf an area as wide as Australia and the Russian Far East lies as far from the Urals as Newfoundland is from Britain. Russia’s Far East rears up like a mangathai from the eastern tendrils of the Altai mountains and the basin of the Lena river to nestle Lake Baikal between jagged alpine peaks of the Sayan mountains. From this confluence of alps around Baikal, interlocking spines of mountain ranges—the Yablonovii, Borshchovochnii, Udokan and Stanovoi, among others—fan out east from the lake to collect water for the Lena river’s long journey to the Laptev Sea in the frozen north.

No less than a quarter of a million years ago, our world supplanted the mythological world of the Marat. Some early human clans were hardy and advanced enough to settle and thrive in the Altai mountains and even in the Arctic tundra during the Upper Paleolithic period more than 35,000 years ago. By the modern era, Siberia was the home of more than 30 indigenous ethnic groups of diverse origins, but classified linguistically as mostly Turkic, Manchu-Tungus, Finno-Ugric and Mongolic. Newcomers tended to enter Siberia from central Asia, forsaking the steppes for the richer, yet colder forests of the north. The memories of some groups’ ancient migration treks from central Asia still survive in folklore.

The rich forests and waters of the Baikal region fostered cultural development. Formal burial sites around the lake evince rituals that date back 8,000 years. Paleolithic tribes such as the Mal’ta scattered carvings of birds, deer and women in mammoth ivory, bone and antler across an area from west of Lake Baikal to the Amur basin. Prehistoric clans of the Evenki clustered in Transbaikal, the region east of Lake Baikal, before scattering across the taiga to the Pacific coast and as far west as the Yenisei river.²

Nomadic tribes that would eventually become known as the Mongols had settled along Baikal’s shore and in valleys south of the lake by 500 AD. They flourished along the Selenga, Kherlen and Onon rivers. Mongols came to be defined more by geography, language and way of life than by racial characteristics. By the eleventh century, they comprised a number of fractious clans of nomadic herdsmen vying with each other for the sparse grasslands bounded by the Altai and Tian Shan mountains in the west, the Great Khingan mountains in the east and the Gobi desert in the south. They were loosely bound by a common spiritual tradition of animist beliefs, where shamans interpreted dreams, visions, omens and natural signs of the many good and bad spirits lurking in the water, ground, air, fire and other dimensions. In the life-or-death competition for livestock, water and pastures, individuals perfected the arts of horsemanship and hunting, tent-living and frequent moves. These skills were also valuable in coping with the ceaseless drama of feuds between tribes, clans and families. In contrast to settled communities where men wielded agricultural and construction implements, Mongol men mastered the lasso, dagger, saber, battle-axe, mace, javelin, hooked lance, bow and arrow. Likewise, constant competition and conflict honed clan leaders’ expertise in shrewd negotiation, spying and tactical thinking.

The heartland of Mongolian peoples is the Lake Baikal basin, Barguzin Tukum to the ancient Buryats. In Buryat mythology these kinsmen were known as Burte Chino—the Blue Wolf People. ‘The Buryats have characteristic Mongol features’, wrote one European adventurer, ‘but they are taller and more strongly built than the tribes met further east and have much more energy of character.’ This energy shone in all aspects of their rich and ancient culture. Even long after firearms came into popular use, mounted Buryats hunted wolves with bow and arrow, running down and shooting their formidable prey at full gallop. Temujin, the most famous of Mongols, was said to have been descended from the Blue Wolf clan.³

At a site on the Onon river in 1206, a khuriltai, an assembly of Mongol tribal leaders, pronounced the great warrior Temujin as Ghengis Khan, the Lord of the Earth.⁴ As a boy Temujin learned life’s harshest lessons on a desolate stretch of the Onon after Yesugei, his respected father, was poisoned and his family cast out of their clan to subsist on berries and occasional bits of marmot and dormice. The 1206 khuriltai culminated Temujin’s struggle for his family’s survival and revenge against the Mongols who betrayed them. The event also forged Mongolian national identity and Temujin’s subsequent brutal and brilliant campaigns fortified it. Ghengis Khan’s first campaign was to unite—by the sword—all Mongol tribes by attacking the last hold-outs not under his control, the Urianhai and Merkit. His second major campaign set out to pillage, plunder and subjugate China’s Jin empire. In May 1215, the Mongol army razed the opulent Jin capital at Zhongdu (Beijing), and then, during the next 12 years, swarmed over central Asia and the Caucasus like locusts, ravaging its rich erudite cities, driven by lust for battle, power, flesh and immediate pilferageable loot, although some modern writers insist that Genghis Khan also possessed some spiritual motivation for the apocalypse he wrought.

The entire Mongol nation, estimated at between 700,000 and 3 million people, mobilized for predatory warfare and the bacchanalia that followed. Women followed the armies onto the battlefields to slit the throats of enemy wounded while children darted about the corpses retrieving arrowheads to launch against the next unfortunate foe. Military units were structured on the decimal system so that no commander had to give orders to more than ten men. The building block of the huge Mongol armies was the arban and bagatur—a ten-man squad and its leader, which could be rapidly deployed in a ten-arban squadron—the jagun, then as a ten-jagun regiment—the minghan, and on so forth up to 10,000-man divisions. Captured technologies—catapults, giant crossbows, gunpowder, incendiaries, combat engineering and psychological warfare techniques, to name but a few—were expertly exploited and applied in battle.

After Ghengis Khan died in August 1227, the Mongol whirlwind raged for two more generations. The bloody tide of the Mongol invasion ebbed at the gates of Vienna in December 1241, halted not by defeat, but by the death of the current khan, Temujin’s grandson Ogedei. The army of another grandson, Mongke, penetrated as far west as Ain Jalut, Palestine in September 1260, before his death and a powerful Mameluke army deflated its vigor. Within two centuries of Temujin’s triumphant 1206 khuriltai on the Onon river, successors to Mongol rule who had not assimilated into local societies lapsed into squabbles, debauchery and irrelevance. In the Mongols’ ‘glorious slaughter’ and sacking of Samarkand, Bukhara, Herat and other central Asian cities, they abruptly halted development and reshaped the landscape with the massive heaps of their victims’ bones. In western and central Siberia, their empire dissolved into a number of Turkified khanates and by the fourteenth century the region was labeled Tataria on Italian maps, Sibir in Arabic chronicles, the origins of both names being obscured by time. Mongol territory quickly receded back to the heartland between Lake Baikal and a rising Manchuria, and the yak-tail banner became a symbol of barbarity and sadism. Yet, in Mongol folklore, Genghis Khan became a national icon.

By 1580, when the bellwether Cossack expedition under Yermak Timofeyevich marched into Siberia, the land was still predominately inhabited by numerous clans of pastoral nomads and hunter-gatherers. Tatar khans, Turkic heirs to Mongol power, still ruled large patches of western and central Siberia, although the growth of the Muscovy principality into a Russian power center was eroding Tatar territory. After the Russian conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1554, the borders of the White Tsar (then Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’) were pressing against the Ural mountains and Caspian Sea to the east and a strong Polish kingdom and Crimean khanate to the west and south. Along the periphery of Tsar Ivan’s kingdom lived communities of iniquitous pirates, renegades, fugitives from cruel and arbitrary laws and runaways from vassalage, the flotsam of scores of different tribes and cultures, predominately Orthodox Christians, known as the Cossacks.

Yermak was a Cossack warrior originally hired and outfitted with modern firearms by the Stroganov family, rich salt-merchants on the Kama river, to defend its property. With the Tsar’s blessing, Yermak led a band of Volga Cossacks as far as the Irtysh river, defeating numerically superior detachments of the Tatar khanate of Sibir in several battles along the way. His small force captured Tyumen and Khan Kuchum’s capital, Kashlyk, before Yermak drowned in battle in about 1585, pulled under the Irtysh by a suit of heavy chainmail bestowed upon him by the Tsar. Yermak’s legend spread quickly, advertising the vulnerability of the vast lands to the east, rich with furs. The seeds of Cossack conquest for God and Tsar had been planted.

Expansion into Siberia handed the Tsar an opportunity to simultaneously employ Russia’s restless Cossacks against the troublesome Tatars on his eastern frontier and to tap into the treasures of Siberia’s forests. The push to the east would offer the added benefits of siphoning off Cossacks away from the burgeoning frontier of Russian commerce and population where they engaged in banditry and inspired disobedience and disperse the explosive concentrations of troublemakers in the Volga and Don river basin voiskos (hosts), the unruly communities that were swelling with runaway serfs and tax-dodgers. Siberia provided the pressure-relief that made it possible for Russia’s property-owning elite to tighten the screws upon the peasantry, institutionalizing feudal relationships by indenturing serfs to land and landowner, and constantly increasing the tax burden.

Thus, Cossacks, trappers and traders bore into Siberia’s forests in search of freedom as much wealth from furs. Allured by the scent of new revenue, the Tsar began dispatching settlers and exiles to reinforce the territorial gains of the Cossack vanguard within ten years of Yermak’s first expedition. Throughout the seventeenth century, the oppression of Russian and Polish governors, nobles, priests and bureaucrats enkindled violent upheaval among the Cossacks. Cossack aversion to authority and the grind of feudal life drove them east into the forests, despite Siberia’s threats of scurvy, starvation, frostbite, snow-blindness and hostile natives. Some Cossacks exchanged the uncertain life of trader or robber for service as garrison soldiers or government agents (prikazchiki)—service Cossacks, the backbone of Russian imperial expansion. Service Cossacks were paid in cash, grain, salt or sometimes land and titles, however Siberia often extracted payment of its own in misery, blood, sanity and life.

As Cossack camps evolved into settlements and then towns, attracting colonists and meddling Russian administrators, Cossacks drove deeper into Siberia to escape the stifling influence of the latter. Within 60 years of Yermak’s expedition, Cossacks had swarmed over the 4,000 miles of Siberian wilderness between the Urals and the Pacific. The steady march across Siberia left a string of fortified settlements at strategic, defensible sites along major rivers: Tyumen in 1585, Tomsk in 1604, Krasnoyarsk in 1628, with dozens of zimov’e, small cabin outposts, to collect the yasak, in between. In 1689 the Russian-Chinese Treaty of Nerchinsk halted the Cossack advance at the Amur river, the natural boundary between Siberia’s forests and the Manchurian badlands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, armies of China’s Qing dynasty coincidentally removed the biggest threats to Russia’s vulnerable chain of outposts by defeating the Kalmyk and Kyrgyz princes of the Turkestan steppes. Offshoots from the Mongol family tree, they had refused to pay the yasak—an age-old tribute paid in furs and commanded formidable nomad cavalry that proved lethal to the small Cossack detachments.

Of course, Siberia was not unoccupied, virgin territory, and the inhabitants were not eager to share the forests and waters with the newcomers. Cossacks became adept at pitting tribes against each other, a task made easier by generations of squabbling over hunting and fishing rights. They made alliances with many tribes, took hostages when expedient, instituted loyalty oaths, and, to the tsar’s delight, collected the yasak. There were fierce battles between combatants, enslavement of natives, forced labor, smallpox outbreaks among isolated clans in the far north, and incidences of mass murder of locals and cannibalism among stranded, starving Cossack detachments. Their tiny parasitic colonies were precarious footholds in a vast green sea brimming with hostile inhabitants. Cossack surviva...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: PRELUDE TO TERROR: CREATION–NOVEMBER 1917
• 2: REVOLUTION AND RED TERROR: NOVEMBER 1917–MAY 1918
• 3: COUNTERREVOLUTION: MAY–OCTOBER 1918
• 4: THE WHITE TERROR BEGINS: OCTOBER 1918–DECEMBER 1918
• 5: RODOMONTADE AND GIRLS WITH DIAMONDS: JANUARY–APRIL 1919
• 6: WHITE TERROR ON THE MAGISTRAL: MAY–SEPTEMBER 1919
• 7: THE WHITE COLLAPSE BEGINS: SUMMER 1919–JANUARY 1920
• 8: RED ONSLAUGHT: JANUARY–APRIL 1920
• 9: WHITE-JAPANESE RESURGENCE, PANIC AND DISASTER: APRIL–DECEMBER 1920
• 10: GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG: OCTOBER 1920–NOVEMBER 1922
• 11: DIASPORA, MANCHURIAN REVIVAL AND LEGACY: JUNE 1921 TO THE PRESENT DAY
• APPENDIX 1: THE MAGISTRAL
• APPENDIX 2: CADRE AND STAFF
• APPENDIX 3: PROCLAMATIONS OF THE ATAMANS
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY