WORLD WAR 1 BLOODLINE: BACK TO SIBERIA 1923-1927

Wilhelm Salzmann could not get used to life without his new Russian wife, Tatiana. His circle of friends in the Ruhr valley from the prison camp, such as Bruno Streich, still lived happily with the brides they had brought with them from the Great War. Shortly after Tatiana's departure, he decided to go and look for her. How my grandparents, first Tatiana and then Wilhelm following behind, managed to get back to her village near the remote Western Siberian town of Barnaul, all the way from Germany in 1923, remains a mystery. It can't have been easy. The country was now firmly in Soviet hands, from the Polish border to the Pacific Ocean.

Western Siberian Red Army Officers in 1924

Barnaul, south of the Trans Siberian Railway between Tobolsk and Lake Baikal

My grandmother Tatiana was horrified by the changes in her village of Lugovaya, on the river Ob north of Barnaul. It seemed to her that most of the decent people had disappeared and foul-mouthed drunkards had been promoted to positions of power by the Reds. Her former business associates among the Orthodox priesthood were in hiding, afraid for their lives. However, life was bearable because Lenin had replaced War Communism with his New Economic Policy. This form of 'State Capitalism' enabled enterprising Kulaks like her to survive and even prosper. A move towards total collectivisation had been postponed by Lenin to avoid further disruption while the war-torn country teetered on the edge of starvation. He envisaged gradual progress towards full communism over a decade or more, in the teeth of left-wing Bolshevik opposition. The radicals would have to wait for the time being. However, Lenin was dying, possibly of syphilis contracted in a Parisian brothel in 1904. The pockmarked Georgian gangster, Josef Stalin, quietly maneuvered behind the scenes, to eliminate any possible successors to the leadership. Stalin would soon prove to be much less squeamish about 'breaking eggs to make an omelette' than Lenin, especially if they were Kulak eggs. For now, Stalin concentrated on driving Trotsky, with his wild ideas of permanent international revolution, out of the country. This proved to be easier than he anticipated, due to the Red Army's defeat in Poland, Trotsky's arrogant 'Jewish' manners and illusions about his own invincibility. By comparison, Stalin could pose as a reasonable pragmatist.

Lenin died in 1924. While Stalin carefully prepared for power, he kept a beady eye on the economic situation in Western Siberia. An enterprising Kulak population of efficient pioneers posed a threat to his vision of a centrally organised peasant workforce, whose sole function was to feed the growing industrial urban proletariat. Kulaks like Tatiana would be on his hit list, as a class to be annihilated, once he was in undisputed control. He began to have the remaining revolutionary leaders killed, starting with the moderates. He'd show the radicals how left-wing he could be during the coming years, and eventually turn on them too. For now, the New Economic Policy continued as Lenin had planned, to prepare the conditions for 'Socialism in One Country'. This sounded suspiciously like 'National Socialism', and the final result was to be almost indistinguishable from a Fascist dictatorship. 
In Lugovaya, Shura, one of Tatiana's sisters, had married a rising young Communist. He would become the Party Boss in Alma Ata, capital of Kazakhstan, in due course. Another sister, Olga, on the right of the couple in the photograph below, could not adapt to the new regime and committed suicide.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm and Tatiana tried to make a go of it in the new Russia. However, it was clear that the vice was tightening. They noticed that many of Tatiana's former business partners simply disappeared. Trying to remain unencumbered, Tatiana practiced a traditional Siberian form of birth control by riding unbroken horses. In spite of this, a baby was born, prematurely, in temperatures below 40 degrees celsius, during the cold December of 1926. The little girl was incubated on the clay stove in the log cabin and fed warm chicken broth. She grew up to become my mother. The family poses in the picture below, which I copied in pen and ink from a 1927 photograph.

  

My grandparents tried to settle down under the new regime, but the vice was tightening. Tatiana's brother-in-law, as a local commissar, realised that she, and her German husband, would certainly be included in the death lists that were being prepared in advance of the compulsory collectivization campaign and the extermination of the Kulaks. She dug up the gold czarist rubles from their hiding places in the taiga and strapped them round Wilhelm's waist in a heavy money belt. He was told to go ahead to Germany and buy a house for the little family. As the months went by, he waited in Bochum, but began to despair of ever seeing his wife and child again. Then, suddenly, late in 1927, they appeared with what little remained of the gold. A new life began during the final years of the Weimar Republic. An even more dreadful war lay ahead, but, thank God, they couldn't know that.