WORLD WAR I BLOODLINE : PRISONER IN SIBERIA

With the completion of the Murmansk railway in 1917, the prisoners were transported to Western Siberia shortly before the October Revolution. By chance, a French Army film unit captured a few fleeting glimpses of my grandfather's new POW camp at Barnaul in 1919. The distinctive wooden enclosures and towers must have been permanently fixed in his memory during the next three or four years.

Germans made up only 10% of the millions of POWs in Russian captivity. The vast majority, along with the Turks, were Austro-Hungarians. After the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power, Russia withdrew from the war. Conditions became more relaxed in the camps. In March 1918, the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk meant that the Eastern Front no longer existed. Technically, the prisoners were free. However, in Siberia they were trapped. The country was in turmoil. Russia's railways were in a deplorable state. Barnaul, on the faraway Mongolian border, might just as well have been on another planet. In the camp, the gates were left open and some inmates began to guard their scant possessions with firearms. Escape was a pipe-dream, there was nowhere to run. Endless plains and forests stretched all around them, full of natural hazards and roving desperadoes. To the Northwest, a conflict between the Red and the White armies was brewing along the Trans-Siberian line. Nomadic bands of Khirgiz horsemen hunted to the South. East of Lake Baikal, the Japanese occupied Vladivostok and paid merciless brigands under the warlord Semenov to stir up trouble. It was the Wild East. British, French and United States detachments appeared, keen to wave their flags in case the White Army prevailed. A stranded force of 40,000 Czeck soldiers, originally recruited to fight the Austrians, was poised to attack the Bolsheviks and take control of the Trans-Siberian railway from Ekaterinburg to Irkutsk. The prisoners' best survival policy was to stay together for the time being and fraternise with the local population. On Easter Day 1919, my grandfather Wilhelm and his best friend, Bruno Streich, agreed to supply the music for a celebration organised by an Orthodox priest in the nearby village of Lugovaya. Bruno played the piano, Willi the violin. After the service, the Russians traditionally kissed everybody, saying, "Christ is risen!" The two musicians

took the opportunity to introduce themselves to the young Siberian women. Within a year, they both had Russian wives and Bruno awaited the birth of a daughter. She, Rita Streich, became a world-famous opera singer after World War II in Vienna.

Tatiana Kuznezova and her village school pupils before the war

In the photograph above, Tatiana Pankratyevna Kuznetsova, my grandfather's Russian wife, stands on the far right, with members of her family. The Siberian population differed from that of European Russia. Instead of huge estates with servile peasants, the Siberians lived on their own land like frontier pioneers. They were also used to mixing with many different types of people, from political exiles to nomadic Muslim tribesmen and Chinese traders. Some became rich. Tatiana owned a logging company and a sawmill, which was now under threat of expropriation with the coming of the Bolsheviks. In the photograph below, my grandmother Tatiana sits in the centre of her timber company's open-air boardroom.

Tatiana Kuznetzova's Timber Company

Pankrat Kuznetzov, Tatiana' father had produced 19 children from two successive wives. As so often happens, the offspring of the original mother resented the new one. In the long winter evenings, young Tatiana sometimes surreptitiously pushed the edge of her hated stepmother's dress closer to the fire, hoping to set it alight. The family was split on both ideological and maternal lines, tending to take opposite sides in the Civil War and the subsequent Red persecution of the 'Kulaks', or wealthy peasants, to which they belonged. Some became informers and, later, prominent Communists. The rest were killed, committed suicide or fled. Less than a handful survived. According to Russian Marxist dogma, the peasants were, by definition, poor and oppressed. Successful frontier populations did not fit into this picture. They had to be plundered and exterminated as a class. In Siberia, this took considerable time to achieve, well into the Stalinist era. Meanwhile, confusion reigned. The ragged White Army dragged itself eastwards, among pitiful crowds of refugees, while its senior commanders, like Admiral Kolchak, chugged slowly alongside in armoured trains. On the way to Vladivostok, the old Czarist Officer Corps jangled its spurs and sold its women in the brothels of the Far East, preparing to flee to China and America. East of Lake Baikal, the White Cavalry officers were no better than bandits, leading mounted patrols of Chinese thugs, Mongol cattle-rustlers, Japanese mercenaries and Cossack raiders in a reign of terror against anybody who crossed their path.

Baron Ungern Sternberg of the Special Manchurian Division and Outer Mongolian Horde

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In the Wild West, the American Civil War produced gangs of murdering thieves led by sadistic lunatics like Bloody Bill Anderson. In the Wild East of 1920, a Baltic aristocrat called Baron Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg was another example of this type. He fought heroically at Tannenberg and was with one of the few remnants of Samsonov's army to escape. Above, he appears in a Corto Maltese comic-book adventure by the great Italian illustrator Hugo Pratt. He operated out of Manchuli with the Cossack Ataman Grigori Semenov's degenerate crew. Eventually, he fell out with everybody and led the Outer Mongolian Horde in a mad, doomed effort to revive Genghis Khan's old empire. While the Czech legion, many of whom had socialist sympathies, handed Admiral Kolchak over to the Reds at Irkutsk, to be shot, Semenov's men loaded 30 hostages onto a boat in Lake Baikal. They amused themslves by getting drunk, stripping their victims on deck, clubbing them to death and throwing their bodies into the freezing water. The only female hostage was gang-raped before being dropped overboard. Eventually, wide-ranging elements of Trotsky's 1st Red Cavalry drove Semenov's men into Manchuria, where they enjoyed Japanese protection. The last Japanese troops did not leave Russian soil until 1922.

An armoured train on the Trans Siberian Railway

Most of the fighting in Western Siberia was done by ragged, starving infantry like those pictured above. It consisted of long marching and sporadic skirmishes rather than pitched battles. Bare survival in the extreme weather conditions was the main priority. Desertion was rife. The Whites often wore bits of British uniforms, like the puttees wrapped round their shins. The Red lower ranks in this photograph were barefoot. By instilling a measure of discipline under political commissars, Trotsky gave his troops a vital edge. They also had the advantage of moving outwards from a unified centre, while their enemies were scattered on the periphery. Surprisingly, horses were in short supply West of Lake Baikal. Perhaps, most of the animals in combat zones were eaten. Kolchak's men prided themselves on wearing epaulettes, which had been banned in the Red Army, as relics of  Czarist snobbery. Captured White officers sometimes had their epaulettes nailed to their shoulders and the skin of their hands boiled to resemble gloves, before being shot. Red prisoners too received little mercy, they could expect to be buried alive by Kulak partisans or flogged to death by Cossacks. The White armies routinely killed Jews on sight, after raping their women, especially since Trotsky and many other Bolsheviks were Jewish. Armoured trains, containing the warlords' headquarters, food supplies, brothels and barracks, were followed by death trains packed with starving prisoners, periodically emptied of corpses en route. Compared to this, my grandfather's camp in Barnaul, with its friendly neighbourhood villages, seems to have been a haven of relative safety.

TROTSKY AS ST GEORGE - KILLING THE CAPITALIST DRAGON

My grandmother, Tatiana, realised that the Romanov Czars and their lazy, parasitic aristocracy, were a disaster for Russia and should not be allowed to continue in power. However, she was no Bolshevik either. She was too much of an Orthodox believer. She shared some of the romantic, populist ideas of the Narodniks and their heirs, the Social Revolutionary (SR) Party. In the end, her main passion was her thriving timber business. She went so far as to hang a Russian version of the 1st Baron Rothschild's coat of arms, painted on a large wooden board, outside her Lugovaya sawmill, aspiring to become as wealthy as the Jewish plutocrat (see below, right), whose name translates as 'Red Shield'. The sign remained in place after Admiral Kolchak's execution at Irkutsk, in early 1920. Trotsky's Red Cavalry units occupied Barnaul and scouted around the neighbouring villages. At first, they mistook the sign for a distant red flag. This gave Tatiana a chance to bury a fortune in gold rubles under specific trees, deep in the surrounding forests. However, village gossip about the coming Red Terror and quarrels within her own family indicated that her life was in grave danger. It was time to take advantage of the end of the Civil War. The repatriation of the last German prisoners, including her new husband Wilhelm Salzmann, had started. It was time to get out alive. The money could stay where it was until the situation returned to some kind of normality. However, it was becoming clear that pre-war 'normality' had gone forever. Already, people spoke of 'the good old days' before 1914 as of a vanished fools' paradise. Now, more than ever, one was doomed if one did not change with the times and gamble on the future. With the exact locations of the buried gold committed to memory, she prepared to accompany Wilhelm on his long journey back to the Ruhr valley. In the summer of 1921, after a slow train back to Murmansk, a transport steamer took the released inmates and their new families to the German port of Rostov, on the Baltic Sea.