Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

Your article on Lake Baikal [Sep/Oct 2004] mentions that “White Guards mounted the last major campaign of the Russian Civil War” there.

...If [you are] talking about General Kappel’s (or Semonov’s) attempt to rescue Admiral Kolchak, that was in January 1920, while General Wrangel evacuated the Crimea almost a year later. If [you mean] the uprising in Yakutsk, that was hardly a “major campaign,” nor was it near Lake Baikal.

I consider the Russian Civil War to be the most important war of the 20th century, and I would like to be enlightened, if somehow I missed a “major campaign” that took place after November, 1920, or I think that the record ought to be corrected: your magazine should not contain nonsense.

Sincerely,

Bob Schnelle

Mr. Schnelle:

The reference in question to the Civil War in this article was a comment made in passing; the author was using it (and other facts) to create an opening paragraph that would describe how all of human history had been but a blink of Baikal’s great eye.

The author relied for this small note on a passage in a popular travel guide, which stated, “Kolchak hastily retreated to Irkutsk. There he was captured and shot in 1920, which effectively ended the Civil War.”

It was a minor point in a minor sentence added to the article only to make it readable – not because the fact was in any way important to the story. In any case, though Irkutsk was Kolchak’s last hiding place, you are certainly correct that it was not the site of the “last major campaign” of the war.

We apologize for any confusion this error may have caused.

In addition, we should note that there was one other error in the article. The photo on page 24 that purports to be the magnificent Shaman Rock on Olkhon is in fact the nearly-submerged Shaman Rock at the Angara river’s mouth.

The Editors

To the Editors:

Thank you very much for review of Russian Virtual Library [Sep/Oct 2004]. However I would like to point out that total number of authors represented there is much more than 15. The section Neofitsialnaya poeziya (Unofficial poetry) is an anthology of modern Russian poetry and lists several dozens of authors.

Best regards,

Vladimir Litvinov,

Russian Virtual Library

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