Mystery of the Russian Tsar’s Lost Gold
When a crown has held power for centuries, it isn’t hard to believe that it will do anything to protect its wealth and power when warning its own vulnerability. Just in the case the proximity of its defeat is mistaken. The Czar’s lost gold is one of the oldest mysteries in the modern world.
As explained in last post, after the revolution there was a red side and a white side that confronted each other for the control of a nation that was mired in scarcity and uncertainty. The whites were defending the interest of the royal family. It is said that the gold reserve of the Romanovs was one of the largest amongst all European kingdoms. It is also said that they managed to keep it safe from the Red Army, thanks to Admiral Alexander Kolchak, after whom the treasure was renamed. What happened to the gold is the body of the mystery.
Theories and conjectures of all kinds have raised and hundreds of searchers have gone to find the treasure using historical documents and mathematical calculations. Kazan, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lake Baikal and even Beijing and Tokyo, have all been visited by secret, official, and unofficial missions throughout the 20th century. It is probable, however, that each theory has some truth in it and that the gold is distributed in several of these places, scattered along the transiberian railway, which was used as an escape route of the White Army and its resources. It is also possible that the gold had simply been used by the military to supply and fund themselves in the remaining time of the war, which they obviously intended to win. If this is true, the mysterious treasure could have ended up with no pain nor glory in the hands of European Banks and companies that added billionaire interests to the debt.
We can’t be sure of anything. What we do know is that Admiral Kolchak was killed by the reds and that the official record of the gold is missing. Red Snow, Golden Clouds provides a new approach to the query of this mystery, that doesn’t seem to ever die. Our two protagonists Andrew and Katya find the two halfs of a treasure map. Will it lead them to the gold. Will they be able to discover the real fate of the Czar’s lost gold?
If you want to learn more about the lost gold of the Czar you can visit these sources:
http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/international/kolchaks.shtml
And you can also watch this video:
“Red Snow, Gold Clouds” thriller by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker
The Russian Civil War 1918-1922
The plot of the thriller Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker is based on the diary of Lidia Markov, the great-grandmother of Andrew Bartholomew, the book’s main character. The diary narrates Lidia’s dramatic escape from the Russian Civil War in 1919 to Harbin, China, and tells of Lidia’s tragic love affair with General Baratov and how they and two White Army officers hid seven boxes of the Czar’s Gold in the Siberian taiga. Chapters seven and eight focus on their dramatic journey to a new life. You may want to read a short account of the Russian Civil War to help you better understand the story’s setting.
Two revolutions, two armies, millions of deaths. Russian Civil War can be told in numbers if we’re trying to create a general background, but in this case, the facts are more important.
When the October Revolution of 1917 finally came to an end, giving the victory to the Bolsheviks, (renamed as the Red Army), they had to confront a new difficulty: the inevitable union of all their enemies. The new unified force was known as the great White Army or the White Movement. It was made up of the Czar’s imperial army, the fierce Kozakhs, the Mensheviks and some other left groups defeated in the revolution, and nationalist groups from every territory of the recently extinct empire.
In the wake of the Czar’s assassination and later with the end of the European war; new armies, regional governments, foreign interventions and all kinds of factions started to form in order to continue their own agendas (with the promise of exterminating all the others eventually.) Czarists, liberal republicans, communists, anarchists, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mongols, Allies from other countries, and many others, confronted each other restlessly in what was probably the cruelest and most bloody civil war of the western history.
We’re talking about nearly six years of civil war between November 1917 and June 1923. Historical leaders such as Czar Nicholas II and Alexander Kolchak on the white side (both killed in different moments) and Lenin and Trotsky on the red side (whose implacable strategies would result victorious), headed this long and messy battle for power in the vast territory that would eventually turn into the controversial world power of the Soviet Union. According to some, the final death toll was above three million souls, evaporated between blood and gold, deception and secrecy.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Civil War you can visit these sources:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUScivilwar.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/civil-war-of-1917-1922
You can also watch this video: