Legion of the Damned

Eastward, ever Eastward, pushing ahead into the very teeth of the fierce Siberian winter, wading through snowdrifts that approach the bridle bit of the solitary officers horse, the battered little company forges on. The people whose paths they cross call them the Legion of the Damned… Perhaps they are.

Their uniforms, what are left of them, are in rags, their feet are covered in bits of blanket to supplement the minimal warmth provided by their worn boots. Still they march with pride, and in formation, and on the rare occasions that they pass through some remote village, the company’s lone drummer breaks out with a cadence that brings the straightness back into their bent spines and a look of stern determination to their haggard faces, as the color bearer comes to the front with their shredded, battle scarred banner. They pass in silence, only the staccato beat of the drum and the rhythm of their hobnailed feet on the street announces their presence. Bayonets fixed, the officer s saber drawn and presented as if on a formal parade, they stare straight ahead, without so much as a sideways glance toward the people who stare at them from the shuttered windows and barred doors of their homes. The soldiers are followed by a pathetic baggage train of push carts and small, two-wheeled wagons, with haggard, tiered looking women and children serving as human beasts of burden, guarded and watched over by the men. Dressed in the remnants of finery, ragged blankets and furs adding warmth to their tattered garments. They are not prisoners. They are following their men in a self-imposed march of exile.

They are in retreat, but their bearing does not show it. They are beaten, but not defeated. Less than fifty, they are all that is left of a once mighty army. From town to town, they march on… all the way from St. Petersburg in the far Northwest, to the frozen wastes of Siberia, on the banks of Lake Baikal in the Asian Steppes… Six and a half thousand miles of wasteland lie in between… six and a half thousand miles of frozen Hell... What started out as an army is now reduced to a single, under strength rifle company, a lone officer whose mount is as starved and worn as it's rider, and the pitiful but proud little band of women.

On and on they march, through the forest and through the swamp, through he rain and through the snow, across the mountains and onto the desolate, deserted steppes… looking for a place to stop… a place of refuge in which to regroup, and prepare to fight again. Hounded and pursued by an unseen foe, followed from afar by a victorious host bent upon revenge, they press ever onward, never looking back, never stopping unless it is to resist their persuers... to delay them... to hold them at bay... as they mount their fighting withdrawal into the vast emptiness and relative safety of Siberia.

Their tattered ranks are met by stares and silence in the few villages through which they pass. Doors are barred against them. The villagers cross themselves and look to the sky. No one dares mention their passing aloud; not until they are long gone. To most, they are nothing more than phantoms in the night... their passing relegated to knowing glances and inuendo... Children hide their faces in their mothers aprons, dogs and cats cower under houses at their passing. Their presence is something whispered about in private… something told in the still of the night and the quiet of the home. It is something that is not mentioned in polite company. Their presence is not, as it were, a good omen.

Yet, in a hundred villages, all across Russia, they have been seen. Always the same; unchanging as they soldier on toward a seemingly ever elusive goal, for truly, no place in all of Russia is safe for them… no place offers what they seek… what they have sought for so long. No villager will help them. None would dare, even if they could. They cannot find sanctuary, even in the church; that haven known to all Russians. Everyone knows… every village priest… about the Patriarchal Edict that excommunicated these men and all those like them.

“Dekabristi” is the word that is used for them. They are the “Decembrists” . The last survivors of an uprising that ended in ashes… the remnants of the cream of the Imperial Russian Army... four elite regiments that rose in righteous wrath against a callous and uncaring government, for land reform and freedom for the long oppressed and abused serfs of Russia a generation before our grandfathers fathers were born. They are not persued by any earthly foe… their revolution failed in 1826… the Great December Uprising against Tsar Alexander I. This little company, one of a handful that managed to escape the bloodbath of executions that followed the collapse of the uprising… the “Legion of the Damned”… has been marching toward the East for over one hundred and seventy-five years. But the end is not yet…

Throughout the years there have been many tales told about “phantom armies”. They range from tales of soldiers still locked in the great battles of the American Civil War at places such as Ghettysburg and Shiloh to Pictish warriors in Britain and the famous "Angels of Mons" in the First World War. No nation is without its legends and myths of soldiers still attempting to “carry on”. But… some of these tales are more than myth. Some of them, like Russia’s “Legion of the Damned” have been seen and reported for decades… over a century… and documented well enough, and thoroughly enough to place them outside the bounds of “urban legend”, a simple folk-tale that has been “colored” to fit local surroundings and put them solidly into the class of a genuinely unexplained and unexplainable phenomanon… Their story is a very real and in many ways, a touchingly tragic episode in this country’s long and bloody history, a tiny chapter of that history that is still going on… It is a story of a brave little band of soldiers who gave their all for a “cause”… of a group of men and women who chose exile and death over comfort and the toleration of slavery.

This particular incident is unique. Most hauntings and recurrent apparitions or anomolies are limited to a certain area or location, and this one isn't, or at least the area that it is limied to is about twenty miles wide and over 6,000 miles long. This little band of refugees can, and do appear at dozens of points along a well documented and historically provable line of march. This group was a "rear gurad" that was purposely lagging behind the rest of a far larger refugee column. They were the ones, charged with the defense of the column as a whole, who made the stand in the Ekatrinburg gap to delay persuit while the rest put more distance between themselves and the persuing "loyalist" forces. They were almost wiped out, but managed to beat off the troops loyal to the Tsar and continue the march East themselves. They never reached their destination. No one knows where the last of them died or how close they came. However, there is a little monument in Yakutsk to their memory... the 2nd Imperial Guards Infantry Regiment... One must note that one aspect of this haunting verifies yet another historically verifiable fact… When the men of the 2nd Imperial Guards Infantry stayed behind to fight off the Loyalist forces persuing the “Dekabristi”, their women would not leave them… Knowing that, outnumbered dozens to one, most of their men would surely die in the bloody snows of the Ekatrinburg Gap, they chose willingly make their stand with the men and to face the same fate…

In the aftermath of the rebellion, some... not many... of the "Dekabristi" made good their escape and settled on the shores of Lake Baikal in extreme Eastern Siberia. Their children's children's children are still there today, proud to be the descendants of those who were among the first to rise up for the cause of freedom in this vast land which is "Mother Russia" to all of them. Yakuts, the city that they built up from a mere gathering of crude huts, is equally proud, today, to be "The City of the Dekabristi". This little band... "The Legion of the Damned" never made it... They vanished over the Urals never to be seen again.They have been spotted, quite litterally, all over Russia. Their line of march has been traced, year after year, from St. Petersburg, through the outskirts of Moscow... always Eastward... across the Urals and onto the vast steppes of Asiatic Russia... all the way to lake Baikal. There is hardly a village along that torturous route that has not... and does not still have reports of their passing. Unlike many repetitive sightings, the very nature of the reports coming in about the “Legion of the Damned” and the nature of those who report seeing them changes the perspective with which one views such incidents. As investigators of the paranormal, most of us are familiar with repetitive stories such as the “phantom hitch-hiker” and assorte tales such as Chicago’s “Resurection Mary” which are told over and over, changing only in location and minor detail. In all such cases, it is generally a desire to bring publicity to an area or a quest for personal noteriety which prompts such reports. In the case of the “Dekabristi”, this is absolutely not the case. Russian farmers in tiny villages, usually a superstitious and rather clannish lot, have nothing to gain from such reports. In a contry in which bringing attention to ones self was, for gerations a dangerous, often fatal thing to do, old practices die hard. It is highly unlikely, to the point of being absurd, that a farmer in Brabaniski Oblast (County) would make such a report on a whim or in seeking any sort of publicity for himself or his area. The prying eyes of the press, and particularly the government, are singularly unwelcome by most people in this country, and the more rural the area, the more likely this is to be so. Likewise, the number of official reports by Police and Border Guard Units precludes hoax. No serving member of a Police or Border Guard formation would file such a report unless he had numerous witnesses and solid documentation. Keep in mind that the first thing that would come to a superior’s mind would be the possibility of drunkeness on the part of the reporting officer, and, for about eighty years, drunkeness on duty was an offense that could, and would, get an offier shot. Even today, it is cause for immediate termination. Very few men will risk a career, their family’s livehood and their retirement pension on a lark. One might tell such stories to children, but one would never attach one’s name to an official document unless the testamony in that document were certainly and verifiably accurate and true.Several times, over the years, they have been encountered by Police patrols, army units... and yearly by the populations of dozens of small villiages. They have been the subject of television coverage and live radio reports. Their story has graced the pages of practically evey newspaper in Russia. Every year, beginning in December, they are spotted. Every year, until they finally dissapear over the Urals, through the Ekatrinburg Gap and pass through Perm, they are followed by the currious, and ocasssionally persued when a report is fresh enough for some group, usually police or army, to do so. Soviet (now Russian) Army archives and Border Guard archives record dozens of encounters with the "Dekabristi". In late December 1956, a Border Guard Cavalry troop on a routine patrol through the Ekatrinburg Gap encounterd, and exchanged fire with this little band when they refused to halt their march. The range was extreme, but the soldiers of the December Uprising formed ranks and volleyed with their muskets into the oncoming mounted patrol... Lt. Anatoli Sarokin states in his engagement report, dated 28 December, 1956 that the “subjects, armed with weapons of the last century, fired two volleys at our patrol to no apparent effect, then... simply disappeared into a dense mist that appeared to form around them”. Sarokin’s repot was subatantiated by that of his second-in-command, Sargent Mikhail Glazov, who was later questioned in ignorance of his commanding officer, by Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs officials concerning the encounter.

Glazov’s interview statements, transcribed into the official MVD archives, and dated 04 January 1956 states:
“ We first sighted then at a distance of approximately 200 meteres, and closed to perhaps half that. They were completely silent. There was not a sound of any kind except for the sounds of the wind and our own horses. We had not expected to encounter anyone. The weather was horrible, with light snow driven by a strong wind. It was nearing evening when we approached them, and we were looking for a place to make camp for the night. The officer in charge of the party, who was on horseback, formed his soldiers into two ranks. We watched them as they calmly and silently loaded their antique weapons. The officer, motionless on his horse, held his saber in the air. Once loading was complete, he lowered the sword and the first rank fired. There was a thick cloud of smoke, but no sound. Immediately after firing, this line of troops, maybe ten of them, but certainly no more, withdrew through the second rank and took up a position nearer to a shabby looking collection of pushcarts and what appeared to be a group of women and children, then reformed their line and proceeded to reaload, as the rank that was left behind, about the same number, fired at us. Upon seeing what they were preparing to do, we immediately dismounted and took up a defensive position, however, no musket ball reached our party. We returned fire with our P-P Sha’s (PpSh submachine guns: This was the standard issue for Police and Border Guad units at the time), but had no effect on them, even though the range of our weapons is far greater than those that they seemed to be using. Upon returning fire, a cloud, or dense fog formed around the group and they disappeared from our veiw. We never saw them again, although we conducted a thorough search of the area both that evening and the next morning”.

In December and January 1998, this little band was encountered by a police patrol doing conducting a routine check of the rail line between Barabinsk and Novosibirsk. In his official report, filed in Barabinsk on 16 January, 1998, Sargent Vladimir Ustinov report states that he and Officers Dmitri Voritnikov and Alexi Antonov encountered the “Dekabristi” on two seperate ocassions between 28 December 19997 and 2 January 1998. On both instances, at a distance of less than 100 meters, Sargent Ustinov catagorized the former soldiers of the Tsar and their followers as "imposible to mistake" and that on both ocassions his patrol "followed the band at a distance" for some ten kilometers before they finally disappeared into a fog bank, never to appear again". On four seperate, ocassions, in 1962, 1970, 1981 and 1993, the tattered little army has been spotted and tracked, for a time, by air. In each instance, the aircraft lost sight of the ragged little company as it entered a dense fog bank and did not emerge again. Several attempts have been made to photograph the proud and defiant troop, but in all cases, the resulting negatives have shown only an amphorous haze... a cloud-like shadow covering the entire frame.

On 29 December 1993, noted Russian photographer Alexander Borodoulin accompanied an ORT crew by helecopter to a small village on the outskirts of Ekatrinburg to attempt to photograph the “Dekabristi”. Borodoulin was in Ekatrinburg conducting a photographic documentation of the change in the town’s name from Sverdlovsk to it’s pre-revolutionary name when the report came in, and he was invited to join the expedition. Upon returning, his comments to several of the assembled observers, as related both by himself and others involved in the expedition, were direct and to the point… and mirrored his frustration. “ It is inconceivable that ten thousand American dollars worth of Hasselblad equipment captured nothing. I saw them with my own eyes. They were as solid as you and I”. He later repeated those same comments to field investigators from “Angels of the Battlefield” the Western Russia Paranormal Investigative Society.
Borodoulin, who is a skeptic with regard to the paranormal, nevertheless expresses his conviction that what he saw was consistent with the story of the “Dekabristi” and that obtaining photographic evidence of their existence would be “a great achievment for the photographer who manages to do so”.

Again, between 25 December, 2003 and 18 January 2004, the Dekabristi were reported by the ORT (Russian State Television) affiliates in Ekatrinburg, Perm and Barabinsk to have been sighted by local farmers and ranchers as they trudged wearily toward the East. It is important to note that these locations are widely sepearated and there is for all practical purposes no possibility of collusion between the parties reporting the sightings. In the case of the December 2003 sightings, ORT Television dispatched a film crew by helecopter, and although the entire crew witnessed the spectacle of the "Dekabristi" marching through an open field near Barabinsk on the evening of 2 January 2003, the video footage that was shot produced nothing but electromagnetic "snow" when viewed. Interestingly, footage both before and after the ten minutes or so that the crew followed the troop, surveying them from above, was completely normal. This was brought out in both the live report from the scene and in a report given the following day, in which ORT correspondent Valeri Shupiaev recounted the entire expedition as well as the story and the sighting report behind it on a special segment of the evening news which was shown across Russia. It would appear then that they marh on... seeking a goal that will forever elude them… and will do so until some power beyond the scope of man ends their determined but endless wanderings. It has been thus, every year, since that cold and fateful December in 1825 when it all began.

And so… Eastward, ever Eastward, pushing ahead into the very teeth of the fierce Siberian winter, wading through snowdrifts that approach the bridle bit of the solitary officers horse, the battered little company forges on. The people whose paths they cross call them the Legion of the Damned… Perhaps they are.
With their tattered banner flying, all but barefoot in the Siberian winter’s icebound fury and dressed in rags… they “soldier on”. Their eyes, hollowed from hunger, stare forward and their backs straight… They are always on guard and watchful of the women and children in their charge… women who would not leave them in their time of greatest trial… as they march on and on… There is, it would seem, "no rest for the weary and no peace for the damned". But… their courage and fortitude… determination and loyalty to a cause spans the centuries… even death itself.

author: Dr. J.Lee Choron