Authors: Neal Ascherson
Many of the Cossacks were shot, at once or within the first year. Most were herded into trains and disappeared into labour camps in the Arctic or the Far East. Piotr Krasnov, tried and condemned as a traitor to the Motherland, was denied the soldier's final tribute of a firing-squad. He was hanged in Moscow on 26 August 1946.
In
From Two-Headed Eagle to Red Flag,
Krasnov had described the retreat to Novorossisk.
The nearer the Polegaeffs [two fictional characters) approached Novorossisk, the greater was the number of dead horses they saw. The bodies of soldiers, volunteers, refugees, women and children, partly stripped of their clothes, were also lying about. One came across mounds of hastily dug graves without crosses or inscriptions; broken carts, smashed cases full of clothes, rags and household goods were lying scattered about... a vast, wealthy region suddenly rushed towards the sea in search of salvation, dragging all the riches assembled during many centuries, hoping to save them and to settle with their help in a new place ... The blue sea, the fairy-story of Russia's children, the enchanted lands which must surely lie behind the sapphire sea, forced many hundred thousands to move towards the shore.
As they crossed the last ridge, the Whites saw Novorossisk ahead of them: the sea, the smoke rising from the funnels of the passenger ships and freighters alongside the piers and the moles, the British battleships at anchor in the outer roadstead. Hundreds and hundreds of abandoned Cossack horses stood about the broad streets running down to the harbour: 'although forsaken by their masters, they continued to stand in rows of six'. At the edge of the sea, the trampling, screaming panic to reach the ships had already begun.
Denikin's orderly evacuation plans were overwhelmed. In his terse, unforgiving book of memoirs, he observes only that 'Many were the human tragedies enacted in the town during those terrible days. Many bestial instincts were brought to light at this moment of supreme danger, when the voice of conscience was stifled and man became the enemy of his fellow-man.'
Only a few hundred yards of water separated the Novorossisk piers from a world as remote as a distant planet: the cheerful, monastic, scrubbed routines of the Royal Navy. Incredulous, the young officers watched the shore through field-glasses. Among them was my father, a midshipman aboard the warship
Emperor of India.
The Navy List for 1920 describes her as a battleship of 25,000 tons, with a primary armament of ten 13.5-inch guns and a secondary armament of twelve 6-inch guns. Commanded by Captain Joseph Henley, she also carried Rear-Admiral Michael Culme-Seymour, second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, who was in charge of the evacuation. Denikin, who had few good words for anyone else who witnessed his defeat, called Culme-Seymour a 'fine and kindly man' who 'nobly kept his word'. The Admiral, who was under instructions to use his squadron only to protect the civilian transports, had finally consented to embark troops and refugees on his warships as well. He was taking a risk which, as it turned out, nearly ended in disaster.
Emperor of India
had steamed up from Constantinople to Sevastopol in the first days of March, and had been off Novorossisk for nearly three weeks when the advance guard of the retreating White Army appeared over the pass leading to the Kuban and began to pour down to the harbour. On 20 March the ship's log records: 'Hands make and mend. Embarked as passenger Denikin and party consisting of one Russian gentleman, two ladies and one child.'
On Friday 26 March, the panic ashore reached its final intensity as Red Army units began to close in on Novorossisk from the hills and along the shore from Gelendzhik to the south.
11.15: sounded
action.
12.00: fired 4 rounds three-quarter charge at village of
borisovka.
3.30: fired 8 rounds X Turret at same target.
[A snapshot my father took from the bridge shows the gush of black cordite smoke from the gun-muzzles, the after-funnel blurred by the concussion.]
Saturday 27 March was the last day:
2.40: embarked about 500 refugees. 3.30: embarked 538 refugees.
5.24: weighed anchor (shifted berth). Embarked General Holman [head of the British Military Mission].
9-2o: General Denikin left ship. Approximately 850 Russian troops left on board.
10.45: Bolsheviks opened fire on ships in harbour at extreme range.
10.51: weighed, left harbour for Theodosia.
My father saw how near Admiral Culme-Seymour's gesture of generosity came to tragedy. His photographs show the decks of
Emperor of India
as a swarming encampment of ragged, fur-hatted soldiers so tightly packed together that they could not sit down; a few sailors are fighting their way through the mob with tin canisters of bully beef. He used to tell me of the crew's horror when they discovered that the torn greatcoats all round them were heaving with lice and that some of the soldiers were sick with typhus. He told me how the Cossack officers, ominous figures in their black, wasp-waisted tunics with bandoliers and sabres, stood under the bridge and stared wordlessly over the rail at the shore of Russia. It was at this point that a horse-drawn battery of Bolshevik field guns galloped over the low ridge just to the north of the city, took up position and opened fire.
Only one of the guns worked. With this, Trotsky's men engaged a battle squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet equipped with many hundred times their fire-power. Their aim, luckily, was bad, for the refugee mass on deck meant that the big warships were unable to reply. Aboard
Emperor of India,
the main armament - the 13.5-inch guns — jutted out only a few feet above the heads of the crowd, and to have fired them would have blown every human being on deck into the sea.
The field-gun shells came wavering through the air and raised harmless plumes of spray, but it was only a matter of time before the gunners registered the range accurately. The admiral decided to pull out. As the battleship came into the open sea, she encountered a drifting barge crammed with soldiers, towed out and then abandoned by a local tug. A line was attached and the barge was brought alongside
Emperor of India,
which embarked its passengers.
To cover the retreat, a destroyer raced back into the bay and began to shell the field-guns ashore. By now, more Bolshevik troops were arriving from the south, and were engaged by a small White Russian warship off the cement-works jetty. The railway station caught fire, and then the storage tanks of the Standard Oil
Company were hit. My father's last snapshot shows black smoke rolling up from the harbour, white smoke patching the roofs. He wrote under it: Town Burning.'
Denikin, who had been transferred to a destroyer, now began to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire as well as the thump of artillery. The Red Army was entering Novorossisk. 'Then silence fell,' Denikin wrote. 'The outlines of the coast, the Caucasian range, became shrouded in mist and receded into the distance - into the past.'
It was halfway through the second night on the Moscow barricades, the second night of vigil around the Russian parliament, that I heard the shooting begin. It came from a few hundred yards away, from the underpass on the Sadovaya boulevard behind the parliament building. When I reached the place, this is what I saw.
A bearded priest was walking through blood. He could have found a way not to tread in the scarlet pools and rivers across the roadway, but that would have meant taking his eyes off the tanks ahead, crouching half-hidden in the underpass tunnel. So he walked straight on, slowly, his head up, not looking at what was under his feet.
Behind the priest came two captured armoured vehicles, each carrying a dozen human beings clinging to the turret, to the gun, to one another. Driven by amateurs, they moved in low gear, in violent lurches which made the riders sway and grab for support. The tracks moved over rubble and burned metal, over the glass of smashed trolley-bus windows, then over the sketchy rectangles of sticks laid down to keep walkers away from the blood. Afterwards, the people came back and rebuilt those enclosures and made them into shrines.
The procession behind the priest went slowly down the slope towards the tunnel-mouth of the underpass, in a deafening uproar of tank engines mingled with the outcry of hundreds of people leaning over the parapets on either side. They went on until the bows of the tanks which had gone over to Boris Yeltsin touched the bows of the lead tank still loyal to the army command. Then the demonstrators sprang on board and raised the Russian tricolour and yelled at the crew inside to surrender.
In that night, between 20 August and 21 August 1991, the coup failed. Most of the foreign journalists wrote afterwards that it had been bound to fail; its preparation had been feeble, its organisation slovenly and chaotic, its leaders drunk and irresolute. But I was there too, and I do not think so. In most of the provinces and republics of the Soviet Union, the leadership submitted or rallied to the plotters. The people, appalled but resigned, for the most part did nothing; if the usurpers had held on for another few days, the coup against Gorbachev might have consolidated. Only the determination of a few thousand people in Moscow and Leningrad, challenging the will of the plot leaders to slaughter them, broke their nerve.
The front line of the Moscow resistance was a chain of women holding hands. They made a cordon across the far end of the Kalinin Bridge, looking up the dark boulevard along which the tanks would come. Every few minutes, somewhere in the distance, tank engines rumbled and bellowed and then fell quiet again. Behind the women, who were both young and old, stood an anxious support group of husbands, lovers and brothers with flasks of tea, transistor radios and cigarettes. When I asked the women why they stood there, and why they were not afraid, they answered: 'Because we are mothers.'
Afterwards, when it was over, a Russian friend of mine who had been at the barricades said simply, 'A handful of good, brave people saved Russia.' I still believe that she was right. The defenders stood around the White House of the Russian parliament and around Boris Yeltsin for two rainy days and nights. On the third morning, the sun came out and the plotters ran away.
The succeeding years have shown that this was not the end of what the good and brave handful called 'fascism'. The monster returned again in October 1993. An alliance of Russian nationalists and neo-Communists, sworn to avenge the 'betrayal' of the old Soviet imperium, tried to launch another coup d'etat from the White House itself. This time, the parliament and its defenders were bombarded into submission by the same tank divisions which had refused to open fire in August 1991. But Russia has not heard the last of the plotters, and Yeltsin himself, who had shown such courage and such sureness of leadership in 1991, soon degenerated into one of those erratic tsars — now sunk in apathy and now suddenly lashing out with absurd violence - who have so often misgoverned Russia.
All that is true. And yet, in one important way, the defeat of the Yanayev putsch in 1991 was irreversible. The peasants, the industrial workers, the soldiers had all rebelled in the past. But now, for the first time in Russian history, the liberal-minded middle-class minority had come out into the street, built their own barricades and faced the guns in the name of freedom.
The coup against Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and his
Perestroika
failed, but its consequences destroyed both man and policy. Gorbachev never regained the initiative from Yeltsin and was thrust aside; Party-led
perestroika
was replaced by far more ambitious designs for the introduction of market capitalism and plural democracy. Within days, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was suspended and the Central Committee building on Staraya Ploshchad was sealed off. The Party was not yet dead, but its great head had been cut off and its limbs had been paralysed. It never thought or moved again.
A few months later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved and the nineteenth-century empire of the Russian tsars fell to pieces, and even the eighteenth-century conquests of Catherine the Great — her glorious province of 'New Russia' curving all around the northern shore of the Black Sea — were almost all lost. Ukraine, which had incorporated Crimea since 1954, now became an independent state, following the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Russia's broad windows to western seas, won and widened at such cost over so many years, closed to a chink. On the Baltic, Russia lost the ports of Klaipeda, Riga and Tallinn and kept only Kaliningrad
(Königsberg)
and St Petersburg itself. On the Black Sea - Krasnov's 'blue sea, the fairy-story of Russia's children' - Russia now peered out only through Novorossisk on the Kuban coast, and through the shallow, silting harbours of the Sea of Azov. The port-city of Odessa, the new harbour at Ilichevsk, the shipyards at Nikolaev, the ports of Balaklava, Feodosia and Kerch all passed out of Moscow's control. So, above all, did the naval base of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, in Crimea.