New York Harbor, New York City

[Even during the prewar days, the harbors of New York would be crowded to the brim by cargo ships or luxury liners. Now as I look, it is pandemonium, New York Harbor is a sea of ships. I see boats of all sizes, from dingys to yachts to full scale battleships and cruisers. It is literally a floating city, with the flags of a dozen nations, from the Tricolor of France, to the union Jack of Great Britain. Port officials put it at probably a million civilians on the Eastern Seaboard, similar flotillas are seen in Boston, Yorktown and Charleston to name a few. It is dubbed 'the largest transatlantic mass migration in history', others called it the 'shameful exodus'. Whatever the name, the scale is unprecedented. The U.S government has been slow at processing the stream of refugees that have been arriving from Europe. One of the refugees is sixty one year old Sergei Zhelyabov, former officer of the White army of the Tsar. His face is one that has been hardened by years of combat, and the Cross of St. Andrews he bears proudly on his shoddy coat tells of his pride as a decorated officer of Imperial Russia's highest order]

Some people, 'historians' mind you, claim that this war was Russia's fault to begin with. That the Tsar's imperialist government had led its people into the bloody meat grinder like the uneducated lemmings we were, and we were slaughtered. I know that you people in the west have always patronized us, dismissed us as 'uneducated serfs', literally brutes that understood nothing but force. Then they go about offering us advice on how we can better 'liberate' ourselves? I say to hell with them! They will never see, never understand the strength of our traditions, our history. We had a Tsar once that tried and listened to the calls for emancipation, or the so called constitutional process, and look where that has got him? Blown to bits by an anarchist's bomb. He was a good man, but god gave him a fitting end, to be destroyed by the very forces of liberalism he unleashed. Remember, this all happened while the very same western countries who pushed us for reform exploited the motherland, taking away our claims in the Crimea and Asia. No…we did not need democracy, we needed unity, order and strength, and the Tsar gave us that.

I do not expect you to understand.

Did this feeling result in the rise of xenophobia in Russia and the banning of all communications, contact and travel with the West?

I would not say it was inevitable, despite what you may think, we believed we still had much to learn from the West, especially in terms of your Military techniques and organization. We're not that uncivilized you know? You can wrap it all you want in fancy polite language, but the prestige of an empire's army is measured by how efficiently it can kill their neighbours.

[He smirks, downs a shot of vodka as he stares outside his cabin porthole]

No, I think the real tipping point was the French and the Krauts. Trying to incite insurrection within our borders. We understood that the end of the Great War meant the end of the German and Austrian Empires but there were still the die hard 'liberalists', who believed monarchy as a system of government was at an end. It infuriated them that Russia was strong enough to survive on her own and that we did not need to be a part of the newly formed 'European Trade Organization'. Still, it would have been fine if they had left it alone at that.

You are referring to the Bolshevik Uprising?

Not just that, but the damn propaganda leaflets and funding and arms the French and German governments have been giving the insurrectionists…. They won't admit it, hell I'm pretty sure they forgot about it today, but a lot of Russian blood is on their hands.

but the revolt was eventually suppressed

Yes, only after we sealed off our borders. Only then did we discover the true depth of European intervention. Had their supplies continued flowing….Imagine what would have happened if we had lost at the Battle of Tsaritsyn? (*prewar estimates of casualties range from 50,000-70,000 dead) I cannot see myself saluting a Bolsheveik, let alone living in a Russia under them? They preach equality, but in truth they are little better than bandits. A great many of us were relieved when they sent their ringleader to Siberia in exile.

[He spits]

But yes, after the settling of the civil war, the Tsar decided it was time to end the treachery once and for all, and that was not just loping off a few heads and sending the rest to Siberia mind you. The Tsar was wary of all the 'anti-imperialist' propaganda and infiltration along our borders. The Third Department agreed as well, it was time for a more 'permanent' solution.

[What is now known in the west as the Red Curtain (established in 1920)]

Yes.

Can you imagine? A barbed wire barrier stretching from the Baltic to the Danube? Reinforced by steel bunkers, concrete walls and miles upon miles of minefields and anti-tank trenches and infantry pillboxes. They said it was longer than the Great Wall of China, the greatest engineering feat in history. It certainly did a better job of keeping the Huns out.

It was the first permanent mass closure of a border in history. All railroad lines with the west were destroyed, all bridges blown and all passes sealed. There would be no communication, no trade, no travel. The only contact would be through the rigid diplomatic protocols in St. Petersburg. This was to prevent the Europeans from exploiting our people, the Tsar would deal with the western powers only on a face to face basis.

Was this also around the time when the disappearances first occurred?

Nyet, there was no mention of any disturbance in the regions for the next few years after we established the Red Curtain, if anything the Russian People were content to be cut off from the west, lest they defile our holy motherland. No, I think the first incident reported was around the mid 1920s, and even then it took time to investigate.

Why is that?

You should know by now Russia, especially Siberia, is a vast place. One of the difficulties in our position was the lack of infrastructure. My battalion was assigned to Vladivostok, the worst shit hole assignment you can imagine. There was one railway line connecting us with the West, and if we were lucky a train with our letters would arrive once a month. Aside from that, my men had to rely on sleds, and when the spring thaw came, our own two feet. One patrol in the interior took my men at least five weeks before we covered the whole area.

We were just about to be reassigned to the Crimea, which was bliss compared to trekking the wastelands of Siberia. I was an old man by then, and I could've used the rest for my bones. But then one day we had a young villager enter our camp. A young boy, who spoke in some Asian dialect I couldn't understand. My sergeant managed to find a translator. There had been an accident, an illness. Everyone in the village was dead, they wouldn't move. The local colonel, some fat bastard who decided we had nothing better to do, decided to send us down.

I had a hell of a time trying to find the place. Officially it was a small village that did not exist on the map. Even finding that took us days, asking directions from the locals like some kind of stupid tourist. The boy himself was young, and did not know the country too well.

When we reached his village, a collection of small huts in a forest, they were gone. I didn't mean the village, but the bodies. Everything was intact, the food on their tables, the pots and pans, even the sheets on their bed were made. Yet there were no people, no animals. There was no explanation. That was when we started getting pissed off, one of my corporals pinned the boy down on the ground, demanding the truth. He had led us on a wild goose chase when we could have been sleeping on the train on our way back to the Crimea. But the boy merely repeated what he said tearfully, that he had went out of the village for his errands, and when he came back, they were all lying motionless on the ground, like in a coma. Now they were gone...

We reported back to our colonel, who casually replied that the villagers are acting up again. Third straight incident this week. He either accused them of fleeing across the border to the south, or just vanishing into the forests to avoid their taxes. Either way, he threw my report on with the rest on his desk.

They said that we should have told the world what was going on in Russia, hell, as if we knew ourselves? How can anyone….[pause] How could anyone foresee what was about to happen?

[Records retrieved by the British SIS now confirmed that Russian command had knowledge of at least a dozen villages that had mysteriously 'vanished'. By 1926, it was estimated that the number had quadrupled. The extent of the Russian investigation into this matter remains a mystery to this day.]