In December 1919 a rumor circulated among American troops in Siberia. They were allied to White Russians, part of a multinational force fighting the Bolsheviks. According to the rumor, enemy troops had raided a Red Cross hospital in Irkutsk and tossed patients out of windows, leaving them to die in the snow. “That might well have been an exaggeration,” Antony Beevor warns.
As exaggerations go, it’s pretty tame. The story is told near the end of this book, when readers are already inured to atrocity. If the tale is indeed fabricated, there is plenty worse that is depressingly true. For instance, at one point the author describes how, in Siberia, both sides “strung up the corpses of their victims from the branches of trees”. Wolves would then chew on their feet. Yet he warns: “Far worse horrors were to come.” That could be the title of this book.
