White Siberia: The Internal War, 1918–1920 Kindle Edition

For a century, one of the most vivid and unsparing eyewitness accounts of the Russian Civil War has existed only in the Russian of a 1923 Munich émigré press, read by specialists, cited in footnotes, and unknown to the English-speaking world. That changes with this edition.White Siberia: The Internal War, 1918–1920 is the memoir of General-Lieutenant Konstantin Viacheslavovich Sakharov, a professional soldier of the Imperial Russian Army, trained at the Nikolaevsky General Staff Academy, who commanded White forces during some of the most desperate fighting of the Siberian campaign under Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Written in exile in the months after the final collapse of the anti-Bolshevik cause, it is a book of uncommon power: part military memoir, part political indictment, part elegy for a generation of soldiers who marched into the frozen wilderness and did not return.Sakharov writes from the inside. He was present at the critical moments: the rise of the Omsk government, the advance and catastrophic retreat of the White armies across the Urals and the Siberian steppe, and above all the harrowing ordeal known as the Great Siberian Ice March, one of the most extraordinary forced retreats in the history of modern warfare. He knew the commanders personally: Kolchak, the Supreme Ruler whose execution he reconstructs from eyewitness testimony; Kappel, the brilliant general who drove the final march and perished in the snow; and the leaders of the Czech Corps, whose withdrawal from the front at the decisive moment Sakharov identifies, with documented precision, as one of the pivotal acts of betrayal in the entire conflict. His account of that betrayal, uncomfortable, meticulously argued, and corroborated by sources across the political spectrum, remains one of the most significant primary sources for understanding why the White cause failed.The book does not pretend to neutrality. Sakharov was a monarchist who never moderated his convictions, and the reader will find him a fierce, sometimes infuriating, always honest polemicist. But he was also a man who could write about landscape and suffering with the eye of a poet, and the passages describing the Siberian winter, the frozen rivers, the blizzard-swept plains, the silent forests through which the remnants of a great army made their final passage, belong to the literature of catastrophic retreat alongside Xenophon and Tolstoy.This first complete English-language edition, translated and edited by Zachary James Lewis, presents the full text of Sakharov's original alongside fifty original Historical Notes that place the narrative in its broader context: the politics of the Omsk government, the role of the Cossacks and the Siberian peasantry, the intelligence war, the international dimensions of Allied intervention, the fate of Kolchak's famous gold reserve, and much more. The edition also includes twenty-six appendices covering the principal figures of the campaign, a chronology of events, a glossary of Russian military and political terminology, notes on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Izhevsk and Votkinsk factory worker divisions, the religious and cultural life of the White armies, and a full select bibliography for readers wishing to pursue the subject further.Translator Zachary James Lewis brings to the project five years of formal Russian study and an extensive background in military and geopolitical history. His translator's preface explains his approach to rendering Sakharov's distinctive voice, the alternation of precise tactical detail and lyrical evocation, the passages of grief barely held in check, the fierce polemical energy of a man writing not only to record history but to demand that the world bear witness to it. His afterword and closing essays engage honestly with Sakharov's limitations as a narrator.Originally published as Белая Сибирь, Otechestvo Verlag, Munich, 1923. This English edition, 2026. Read more