Snippet 20, 1919: The Romanov Rising
Copyright (c) 2024, Thomas P. Kratman
Yekaterinburg, Russia
The Rreds are surprisingly thin on the ground in the town, thought Mokrenko.
Having left the captain and the rest behind, newly commissioned Guards Lieutenant Mokrenko and one of the junior enlisted men, had found a suitable hotel and stables. They’d then gone back for the rest, where they were camped near the Perm-Yekaterinburg rail line, in the woods a few hundred meters northwest of the railroad bridge over the Iset River.
“It’s very quiet in the city, sir,” Mokrenko had reported, back at the camp. “Hardly any soldiery or police at all. There were a few – well, all right, a few dozen – frozen bodies hanging by the neck, here and there, which may account in part for why it’s so quiet.”
“Any sign of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna?” asked Turgenev.
“I…” Mokrenko hesitated, “I really don’t know. There’s a house we saw – we saw it before, if you’ll recall, on our way to Tobolsk – with a stockade around it, and a few guards, but they’re so few I doubt anyone important is being held there any longer. The ‘Ipatiev House,’ the locals call it, and the locals didn’t seem to know anything about what’s inside ether. It’s the only actual house I saw guarded, though there were some guards on the prison, and the Bolshevik headquarters had a couple, as well.”
“No chance of renting us a safe house?”
“I thought about it but once I got a feel for the town…no, I think we’re better off hiding in plain sight. With plainer red armbands.”
Turgenev had learned to trust his former sergeant’s judgment and insight over such matters; he let it go.
“I’ve got to warn you, sir;” Mokrenko said, “Yekaterinburg seems redder than Lenin. If there’s anybody in the city who’s not in sympathy with the Bolsheviks, they’re being very quiet about it, indeed. Except for the Czechs.”
“Czechs? What are they doing here?”
“Yes, sir, quite a few Czechs. Well, Czechoslovaks, but there are more Czechs than Slovaks. There’s a contingent of the Czechoslovak National Counsel staying at the same hotel we are. Some of them speak some Russian and a few speak it well. They’re setting things up for a convention of some kind, I think. Pretty optimistic, too, I think. But at least they’re not Bolsheviks.”
Turgenev chewed on his lip, while thinking. “Hmmm…I’d bet the reason there are so few guards is that all the Bolsheviks are marching on Tobolsk.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Mokrenko, “that was my guess, too.”
“And if it’s as red as you think, ser…Rostislav Alexandrovich, the Bolsheviks might be confident they can hold it without a substantial military force.”
“That, too, sir, yes, though the number of people they’ve strung up by the neck suggests they thought they needed that little something extra.”
“Yes,” Turgenev agreed, nodding. “Get the men of Strat Recon packed up and ready. We’ll go to the hotel you found and, as you say, hide in plain sight. Our story should probably be that we’re reinforcements sent from Moscow to the force marching on Tobolsk.”
Turgenev signaled for Garin to come over.
“I’m sure you believe that the men will do as they were told, Mister Garin,” Turgenev said. “However, they are mostly your friends, yes?”
“Yes, of course, sir,” the teamster agreed.
“You will never shoot your friends. We both know you won’t. I am, therefore, still leaving two men here, Bulavin and Gazenko, to relieve you of the burden of having to shoot your friends. They will do the shooting, should any be required.”
*****
Outside the town was still strangely quiet as the men of Strat Recon rode, skied, and sleighed toward it. The teamsters, too, had been quiet, after several days of being forced to stay in camp. It had been long enough that Turgenev trusted them to stay there for at least a few more days, provided they had that little extra bit of motivation to do so. Inertia, after all, has a large place in human affairs, too.
As the section rode, the afternoon sun settled down behind them. They all wore the red armbands purchased months before in Tsaritsyn, plus a couple more made in Tobolsk, and, having skirted the town to set up their earlier camp, came in from the west. Even after turning over the bulk of the hoarde from their safecracking venture, the section was still quite flush with both cash and gold.
The town itself, once they got inside of it, was noisy and dirty, the latter not from any habit of the people, but from the source of the noise, the factories whose intense pounding constituted an unending assault on the ears, as the smoke pouring from the chimneys assaulted the nose and eyes. An American of the day would have taken one look and asked, “When did Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania open a joint branch office in Russia?”
And yet it wasn’t the noise that made the greatest impression. Oh, no; the thing that truly assaulted the mind and heart was a different smell, different from the factory smoke. This was a mix of food poor to begin with and poorly cooked, of garbage long overdue for burning or burial, of rotten meat, some of it likely human in origin, of unwashed bodies, and, above all, of fear.
There wasn’t a man in the party who hadn’t smelled that very thing already, on the battlefield, in burnt out towns, in vermin-filled trenches, and in hasty graveyards.
“Chekhov was right,” said Turgenev, looking at some of the people in the street. “This is a place where the people were ‘born in the local iron foundries and brought into the world not by midwives, but mechanics’.”
They passed a gallows just left of the road that had led them further into the town. On it, hung by their necks five men and two women, hands tied, eyes bulging, mouths agape, and frozen solid. Another three women knelt at the uprights holding up the cross beam, one to one, two to the other, all weeping.
I wonder what their crimes were, thought Turgenev, if any. I wonder, too, how many people the Reds have had to string up to keep the others in terrified submission. One suspects that the place is less red than Mokrenko thinks, but even more frightened. Maybe…