The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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of the University of California, cultivated close relations with a Manchurian detachment headed by Cossack Ataman Gregori Semonoff, who according to Barrows “was capable of great severity” toward the Bolsheviks, whom he had “devoted his life to destroying.”27 A decorated veteran of the tsarist and Kerensky armies nicknamed “the Destroyer,” Semonoff allegedly set up “killing stations,” boasting that he could not sleep at night if he did not kill somebody that day. In Trans-Baikal, according to General Graves, his men shot the men, women, and children of an entire village as if they were hunting rabbits. U.S. Army intelligence estimated that Semonoff was responsible for 30,000 executions in one year, which earned him promotion by Kolchak to the rank of major general.28
Another Kolchak deputy, Ataman Ivan Kalmykoff, roamed the Amur territory robbing, burning, raping, and executing hundreds of Russian peasants without trial, including two Red Cross representatives and sixteen Austrian musicians who allegedly housed a Bolshevik one night. Lt. Col. Robert Eichelberger said Kalmykoff’s “actions would have been considered shameful in the Middle Ages.”29 Graves referred to Kalmykoff as a “notorious murderer” and “the worst scoundrel” he had ever seen. He compared him unfavorably with Semonoff since he “murdered with his own hands,” whereas Semonoff “ordered others to kill.”30 Third on the brutality scale was General S. N. Rozanoff, who would execute the male population and burn down villages that resisted Kolchak incursions.31
Congressional hearings ignored the White Terror, which General Graves predicted would “be remembered by, and recounted to, the Russian people for [the next] fifty years.” Instead, as historian Frederick Schuman summarized, they depicted “Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs [the Bolsheviks] whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism.” Drawing from these hearings, the press became filled with screaming headlines, claiming the Bolsheviks had even nationalized women. Graves, however, wrote in his memoirs that he was “well on the side of safety” in saying that “the anti-Bolsheviks killed 100 people in Eastern Siberia to everyone killed by the Bolsheviks.”32
A Texan with experience fighting in the Philippines and with the Pershing mission in Mexico, Graves had gone into Siberia believing his mission was to uphold Soviet Russia’s neutrality and protect the Trans-Siberian railway. He became disheartened at how America’s allies applied the word Bolshevik to “most of the Russian people,” including peasants opposed to the Kolchak coup who were “kicked, beaten and murdered in cold blood by the thousands.” This damaged the prestige of the “foreigner intervening” while serving as a “great handicap to the faction the foreigner was trying to assist.”33 Turning against the war, Graves was hounded by the Bureau of Investigation as a security risk when he came back. According to historian Benson Bobrick, “in the whole sad debacle, he may have been the only honorable man.”34
Graves had conducted an investigation which found that Kolchak would force young men into the army. If any resisted, he would send troops into their village to torture men beyond military age through methods like pulling out their fingernails, knocking out their teeth, breaking their legs, and then murdering them.35 Ralph Albertson, the Young Men’s Christian Association secretary with the army in Archangel, said that wide-scale executions by Kolchak’s forces created “Bolsheviks right and left.… When night after night, the firing squad took out its batches of victims, it mattered not that no civilians were permitted on the streets as thousands of listening ears [could] hear the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and every victim had friends who were rapidly made enemies of the military intervention.”36
Albertson wrote that though he had heard many stories of alleged Bolshevik atrocities that told of rape, torture, and the murder of priests, the only Bolshevik atrocity about which he had any authentic information through the entire expedition was “the mutilation of the bodies of some of our men who had been killed in the early days of Ust-Padenga”—where an entire U.S. platoon was wiped out. U.S. prisoners of war were well treated and released, with the exception of two men who died in a Soviet hospital. Sgt. Glenn Leitzell described how he was allowed to walk around the nearest city dressed in a Russian overcoat and fur cap and encouraged to attend a club where he was “harangued in English on Marxist doctrine and the evils of capitalism,” and then rewarded with plates of hot soups and horsemeat steak.”37
Referring to them as “John bolo” or “bolos,” a euphemism for wild men, American and British troops pioneered the use of nerve gas designed to incapacitate and demoralize the Red Army, and, according to Albertson, “fixed all the devil traps we could think of for them when we evacuated villages.” He noted that we “shot more than thirty prisoners in our determination to punish these murderers. And when we caught the Commissioner of Borok, a sergeant tells me, we left his body in the street, stripped, with sixteen bayonet wounds.”38
According to Lt. John Cudahy, U.S. soldiers let loose their firepower upon the “massed Bolsheviks, felling them like cattle in a slaughter pen.” On the day of the First World War armistice, Toulgas, on the Northern Dvina river, where Leon Trotsky led the Bolshevik defense, was turned into a “smoking, dirty smudge upon the plain,” as Capt. Joel Moore, Lt. Harry Meade, and Lt. Lewis H. Jahns described it in an eyewitness account.
Given three hours to vacate, the authors describe a “pitiful sight” in which the inhabitants of Toulgas turned “out of the dwellings where most had spent their whole simple, not unhappy lives, their meagre possessions scattered awry on the grounds.” With their houses engulfed by roaring flames, “the women sat upon hand-fashioned crates wherein were all their most prized household goods, and abandoned themselves to a paroxysm of weeping despair, while the children shrieked stridently, victim of all the realistic horrors that only childhood can conjure.” Sad as the situation was, the authors wrote, when “we thought of the brave chaps whose lives had been taken from those flaming homes, for our casualties had been very heavy, nearly one hundred men killed and wounded, we stifled our compassion and looked on the blazing scene as a jubilant bonfire.”39
Such dehumanization in war and desire for revenge would go on to spawn the ‘atrocity producing environment” that characterized the war in Vietnam and other Cold War conflicts.40 Moore, Meade, and Jahns’s history spotlights the “enormous” and “terrific” Red Army losses under bursts of “murderous” shelling and “dreadful trench mortars” that could shower the enemy at eight hundred yards with a “new kind of hell.” The British contingent had many First World War vets who had been gassed or wounded and were prone to “homicidal excesses,” as were the Japanese.41 A Canadian platoon from rural Saskatchewan included “unpremeditated murderers who had learned well the nice lessons of war and looked upon killing as the climax of a day’s adventure.” They committed gratuitous acts with Americans such as closing a school for the storage of whiskey, and threw peasants out of their homes, looted personal property, stole rubles from dead Bolsheviks, and ransacked churches.42
British General Edmund Ironside said he was “overpowered by the smell” upon visiting the Archangel prison; suspected Bolsheviks were crowded into dank cells sometimes sixty to a room, with the windows sealed and baths closed.43 Ralph Albertson concluded that the
spoliation of scores of Russian villages and thousands of little farms and the utter disorganization of the life and industry of a great section of the country with the attendant wanderings and sufferings of thousands of peasant folk who had lost everything but life, was but the natural and necessary results of an especially weak and unsuccessful military operation such as this one was.44
In southern Soviet Russia, the British deployed tanks and bombed enemy transport vehicles, bridges, towns, and villages. For the first time, they deployed gas bombs that caused respiratory illnesses (one victim had his eyes and mouth turn yellow and then died). The British were supporting viciously anti-Semitic White Russians under the command of General Anton Denikin. Winston Churchill, then a minister in Lloyd George’s government, urged Denikin to prevent the massacre of Jews in “liberated” districts—not out of concern for the Jews but because they were powerful in England and could impinge on his