Red Army, Black Baron

** Red Army, Black Baron**

The port of Sevastopol had been closed since the war began two months ago. By order of the GKO, nothing entered or left without a direct order of the military. So when a fine little pleasure yacht steamed up the bay, old Vanya stopped his duties for a moment to watch her fine lines dance between the squat merchantmen and ironclad cruisers in the harbor. It was a slow day, now that there was nowhere for the trade to go, and the Black Sea Fleet had run out of targets worth raiding, so Vanya lit up his last American cigarette, perched himself on a crate of Mosins, and watched the yacht sail towards his pier.

The Pharaonic was delicious and mellow, and he’d certainly miss them. Not as much as his sons, who’d already mustered for service. Vanya had tried to re-enlist too, though the constant ache in his back told him he’d pay for it at his age. But the men from the military soviet told him he was needed where he was. Perhaps they pitied this old man.

When the yacht came closer, he noticed the name Lucullus painted on her side in Latin script. Two men stood at the bow; one was tall and willowy and wore a fine black papakha. The shorter man was stockier, dressed in the brown jacket and blue jodhpurs of the NKVD.

Vanya had nearly finished his cigarette when the Lucullus came into her mooring. The butt dangled from his open lips as he recognized the tall man at the prow. The still burning cigarette dropped to the boardwalk as the hairs on the back of Vanya’s neck stood on end.

The officer of the day soon arrived, escorted by a group of black-uniformed Naval Infantry. Red faced, the chunky little officer was barking at the NKVD man about how this was all highly irregular. The tall man continued to stand at parade rest, a small twinge of amusement in his mustache, while his NKVD handler presented their orders and did his best to smooth the colonel’s ruffled feathers.

The colonel looked over the orders briefly. “It says I am to convey Major of State Security V. A. Novikov and his charge to Moscow immediately by order of the GKO.” He looked up at the man in the papakha,“It says nothing about this man’s identity or purpose. Highly irregular.”

“Do you really not recognize the Black Baron?” Only too late did Vanya realize he was thinking out loud. But all eyes were on him now, the pot-bellied old stevedore too fat to re-enlist in the Soviet Navy.

The colonel turned back to the tall man, blood draining from his once ruddy face. The man gave his salute, crisp as the day he’d left the academy. “Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, at your service comrade -colonel.”

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Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel had been one of the effective and infamous officers of the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Descended from the Baltic-German cadet branch of an old German House, Wrangel had proven himself to be a competent leader and administrator during the fight in Ukraine and the Caucuses, outshining his seniors by not totally alienating the civilian population.

But Wrangel was one man, and the Bolsheviks fought with much of the Russian people behind them. Wrangel had led his forces into exile in late 1920, and with his departure the Soviet Revolutionary Wars would wind down.

In exile, Wrangel had become the de facto leader of the Russian All-Military Union. Ostensibly, this organisation existed to provide aid the many military veterans now living in exile since the Bolshevik victory. But especially in its early years Wrangel maintained the organisation as an army in-waiting for a potential return if a second civil war would begin in Russia.

Wrangel and the All-Military Union were a prime target for Soviet espionage, and Wrangel himself evaded at least one assassination attempt in 1925. But as the years wore on, Wrangel’s attentions were forced on more practical matters to sustain his wife and two children’s futures. Distracted from military efforts by a successful career as a mining engineer, Wrangel still hoped to one day see his homeland again.

In 1933, Wrangel would endure, as his memoir put it, his worst crisis of faith, as revolution spilled far and wide from the borders of the former Russian Empire. Belgrade, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where Wrangel had made his home, was rocked by an abortive attempt to form a soviet in February. The countryside was bleeding in partisan and ethnic violence, which only the communists seem to be able to unite Yugoslavs beyond ethnic lines.

While the centre would ultimately hold in Yugoslavia, Wrangel followed the events happening in the United States with great interest. In July 1933, when news of the capture of Washington by the Red Army was printed not merely in Borba , the communist newspaper, but also in the mainstream press, Wrangel’s crisis of faith would reach its culminating point.

After a long, sleepless night spent in prayer, Wrangel came to a realisation of complete helplessness to the inscrutable plan of the Almighty. And just as God had sent his servant Nebuchadnezzar to chastise the ancient Israelites, the fall of the Empire had some role in His will. That morning, as the sun rose over Belgrade, Wrangel made his peace with his exile, that he would never again set foot on his native soil.

For the next few years, Wrangel turned away from military affairs and politics. Wrangel moved to Belgium, away from the tumult in Yugoslavia. This turn away from bellicosity had suited the pretender to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, but Wrangel received his would-be sovereign’s entreaties coolly. Wrangel was more interested in tending to his own family. In 1935, his eldest son Kyril* married the love of his life, and soon Wrangel would welcome little Pyotr into the world as the first of his grandchildren. Pyotr Wrangel was happy. And God would test him all over again.

The rise of Nazi Germany had begun a schism in the White exile movement. In spite of the wishes of the broadly recognized head of the House of Romanov, who loathed Hitler and National Socialism, there were many in the White movement who erroneously believed that the looming war between the Soviets and the Nazis would yield the restoration of the Empire, even if it meant being a puppet state of Germany during the first decade or so. This was a foolish delusion, and one only had to read Mein Kampf to know that, but Joseph Goebbels was far from above courting such delusions.

Wrangel had initially resisted the call to arms from either side. But when France repudiated its guarantees of Czechoslovakia, Wrangel sensed that God had not wanted him to beat his sword into ploughshares just yet. Wrangel lent his considerable prestige to the anti-German faction in the struggles of 1939.

But it would not be enough. When the German border stretched to the gates of White Russia after the fall of Poland, it was clear that he was running out of time. And the anti-Germans were steadily losing ground in the White movement. Dmitri Pavlovich’s ascension to the head of the House of Romanov had never been uncontroversial; many had died during the Russian Civil War to make it possible, and there were plenty willing to defy the letter of the law of succession to find a candidate more suitable to their goals. Those preaching temperance and caution could only ever lose ground to the growing cult of action in the pro-German faction.

Some were starting to defy Dmitri Pavlovich’s explicit band on enlistment in the Waffen-SS auxiliaries, and should war break out, Wrangel feared that the trickle would turn into a torrent, and the cream of the Russian exile youth would be expended as cannon-fodder in the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Russian people. His faith sorely tested again, Wrangel did what he would have never thought he would in a million years: he invited over for supper the GRU agent keeping tabs on him.

Stretching the Grand Duke’s order for him “to do whatever he could to safeguard the honor of the Russian Empire” to its breaking point, Wrangel schemed with GRU Lt. Colonel Aleksandr Antonevich Shvets* the night after the German invasion began to do an end-run around the pro-German whites.

After bidding his wife a tearful farewell, Wrangel and a small entourage of close confidants in the All-Military Union met with a cadre of GRU illegals stationed in Belgium. This motley crew would set sail for Istanbul, with only the barest of reluctant approvals from Moscow, where they’d rendezvous with the GUGB field office for the final leg of the journey to Sevastopol.

The journey was perilous, and the Lucullus was almost attacked by the Rumanian Navy during the voyage. But they would arrive safely in Sevastopol. With the grudging support of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Wrangel negotiated a broad amnesty agreement for Russian exiles who did not collaborate with the invaders. And under the agreement, Russian exiles and their children would be permitted to volunteer in the RKKA with oaths that would not contradict their religious oaths or oaths to their sovereign.
The goal was not so much to gain manpower for the Red Army as to deny it, and any materiel or morale support it might bring to the occupying Wehrmacht. And like Brusilov before him, Wrangel would accept a commission in the Red Army. And while he would lend his talents as a staff officer and organizer in the rear echelon, his primary role impact was propaganda. The most trusted military leader of the White movement had made a public call for Russians everywhere to join in the Great Patriotic War to defend their homeland from the German invasion. His appearance in newsreels extinguished any doubt that it was Wrangel who spoke those words and put pen to paper.

Given the outcome of the Trust Operation, many were reluctant to make the dangerous journey to fight in the Godless Red Army, fearing it was yet another Bolshevik plot to undermine the White movement. But as the murderous conduct of the Nazi occupiers filled the news, and with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s confidence in Wrangel, some would answer the call. At the very least, most of the men who had been willing to collaborate with the Germans just a year before now refused. Those who did were totally isolated and regarded as the worst sort of traitors.

There were of course many in the White movement furious at Wrangel and at Dmitri Pavlovich for plotting a course that could only lead to the ruin of the White cause. Admiral Kolchak, the former Supreme Leader of the White cause, was in particular furious with the Grand Duke, and rumors began to circulate of an assassination plot. In an open letter addressed to the pretender to the throne, a group connected with Kolchak accused Dmitri Pavlovich of selling out Russia to the Bolsheviks, of cowardice and of apostasy for collaborating with the atheist Soviet state.

The Grand Duke would respond in his own open address “to all Russians everywhere,” that as symbolic father to the Russian people, his duty was to all of them, even to those prodigal sons who lost their way. And even if it meant he would never reclaim the throne ordained to him by God, he was still Emperor, and it was better to be an Emperor without an Empire that to sell his soul to the man butchering his people by the millions. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation