Asian Odyssey by Dmitri Alioshin (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1940, accessed on hathitrust.babel.org 25 May 2024)

This is a violent, vicious, cursed book. It’s also deeply engrossing and at times it approaches real beauty in the descriptions of nature and exotic ways of life. It purports to be a true story, making it a historical source. It rings true and mostly  corresponds to other sources I’ve read. But it can’t possibly all be true. 

So, yeah, it’s a strange one. 

Let’s try to sum up the story. Dmitri Alioshin is the son of a Russian merchant family in Harbin, China. He is a university student when the Russian Revolution takes place. He joins the White Armies to fight against the Red Army. He arrives at his frontline unit just on time to experience the decisive Red offensive and the collapse of White Siberia. Through wild adventures, some bloody, some farcical, he escapes at last to Mongolia. Here the remnants of the Whites fight on. He joins an armed band in raids against the Chinese and over the border into Soviet territory. His band is forced at gunpoint into the army of the ‘mad baron’ Ungern-Sternberg, and Alioshin bears witness to all kinds of unspeakable horrors in the course of one final campaign. After the defeat of Ungern, he escapes across the Gobi desert and back into China along with a small band of survivors. There is a final round of battles, both against the Reds and against White rivals.

You can get a taste of Alioshin’s book here, in this chapter of Revolution Under Siege where I quote him a lot. A lot of it is there in miniature: lyrical descriptions of nature and scenery; valuable first-hand accounts of war; absolutely ghoulish details like the cup made from the skull of a Red partisan. There is romance in how he describes the wilds of Asia and the people who live in it. He meets more than one picturesque old hermit. Many times he has to flee on foot across harsh and beautiful landscapes. He lives among the nomads of Mongolia, and gives us a powerful sense of what that was like.

Many times, he is within a whisker of death. Several times, he gives a frank account of himself killing someone with his bare hands; other times the reader doesn’t even need to read between the lines to figure out that Alioshin has participated in some unspeakable atrocity, such as forcing hundreds of people into a building and setting it on fire. Regarly  he is a witness to atrocity – to men being burned or frozen, to the sack of a city, to a gang-rape. 

You wonder if he’s making a lot of it up, if he’s credulous, if he’s pushing some agenda. Often he reports an atrocity second-hand, and this is a relief, because we have another degree of separation that allows us to say, ‘That’s probably bullshit. At least, I hope so.’ But sometimes it’s first-hand and there’s little comfort.

What really struck me was how benevolent the Reds come across in comparison to the Whites. He never stops saying that the ‘communists’ are terrible, and on occasion he gives examples of friends who were shot by the Red Army, or tells us that between Red and White neither side ever took any prisoners (It’s possible that this is true for the parts he experienced, but in relation to the whole it’s not accurate). But after the defeat of White Siberia, Alioshin disguises himself as a doctor, somehow becomes a major in the Red Army and then a high official in local civilian government. The Red soldiers he meets are kind, the officials less so. One nurse, an ‘exemplary communist,’ sees through his disguise (p 84), but she shrugs her shoulders and lets him go. The Reds are a soft touch!

How to begin to describe the depravity of the Whites, as recorded in these pages? Ungern is the worst, but he is only the most prominent star in a constellation of Colonels and Generals who are, variously, backstabbing, cowardly, incompetent, bloodthirsty, bigoted, sadistic and callous. Colonel Sipailov has his girlfriend serve drinks to a group of officers, then he takes her into the next room, strangles her to death, drags her body back into the room in a sack and proudly shows it to the officers (250). This Sipailov is only one of several officers who keep trying to ambush, poison or hang the young Alioshin. Why? Paranoia, office politics, casual cruelty. 

Alioshin’s narrative is clear and sober – a contrast to the blood-drenched insanity he is describing. Explicitly, he only allows a hint of regret. But implicitly the older Alioshin seems to be telling us that he realises now what he didn’t realise then: that his cause was evil. Or else he’s just looking for money by refashioning his war stories into a sensational mix of ultra-violence and orientalist romance.