The Golden Army

An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.

Moishe Bronstein sets the amulet down on the chessboard.

Would like to know if it’s authentic. Has a reasonable amount of money - got into the spice trade after fleeing Russia, penniless, aboard Wrangel’s fleet in 1920. Lives modestly. Drops by the Manzikert Hotel to play chess with Karim from time to time. Two warehouses full of cloves and pepper by the docks belong to him.

Bought the amulet - a snake-legged woman, clutching a scowling bearded head, molded from soft gold - from a dealer named Lev, a nervous little man who sought him out specifically to ask if he’d be interested in making trouble for the Bolsheviks. Lev claimed to represent a group called the Golden Army, a resistance organisation with branches in every Soviet city who have a plan to overthrow Stalin and restore the Tsar.

Moishe has no love for Tsardom. But he hates Communism more.

What he hears on the expat grapevine is there’s a squad of highwaymen active in the western Ukraine. They raid collective farms. Smash up tractors. Kidnap commissars. Stage daring daylight robberies on trains. Unusually brutal. Butcher babies in their cribs. Cut the hands off peasants who dare to question them.

Always leave a single gold coin behind at the scene of the crime, to represent the power of the bourgeois. It’s rumoured they hide out in the houses of the richest kulaks, and big international Jewish bankers are sending them weapons through smuggling routes in Bessarabia.

Lev’s already gone back to Odessa. He invited Moishe to come visit him in the city - establish a pipeline by which the Golden Army can exchange its stolen goods for funds and arms. Moishe isn’t keen to go himself. Would like you to check it out - see if it’s legit and learn where the amulet came from.

Suspects it’s Artimpasa, the snake-legged goddess of the ancient Scythians, worshipped by transvestite priests. Has read that Artimpasa had the power to change women into men, and vice versa. Wants to bottle her secret formula and sell it to a Paris fashion house - double the potential market for their clothes.

The cafes and flea markets of old Odessa have mostly gone underground - replaced by shiny new workers’ clubs, on Constructivist lines, full of chess sets and bright red chairs. Women from the Young Communist League hand out pamphlets on the streets. Exhort you to have a revolutionary day. Ask why you’re not at work.

Klezmer music has been banned, along with everything else fun. Lev Zborowski and Sashka the Fiddler run a small junk shop in the city’s Jewish ghetto, where they spend most of their time reminiscing about the good old days. They claim to donate half their profits to a charity called the Workers’ Time League, which aims to standardise clocks across Russia by putting them on the metric system. No more losing half your lunch break to fiddly calculations, comrade!

Much of what they sell is taken from the estates of old landowners, or made to look like such. Oil paintings, birdcages, samovars, low-quality pearls. Old books. Antique tables. A make-up kit that Levi swears up and down belonged to Princess Anastasia, and (looking furtively around) isn’t it a shame what happened to her. No, I’m only joking, comrade, she was an exploiter of the people.

Sashka is old, bearded, missing a finger, plays the fiddle beautifully. Lev is young and talks fast. They live in fear of the OGPU - the Soviet secret police.

They work for Uncle Benya. Last remaining kingpin of Odessa’s Jewish underworld. Now fallen on hard times. Plays cards in the shop basement with a rabbi and three tough-looking shtarkers - all that remains of his once-proud smuggling network. Wants revenge on the Reds. Looking for rich Westerners to fund the Golden Army. He admits - maybe they can’t overthrow Stalin tomorrow. But they can hurt the Reds.

He will even show you their stash of Scythian gold, taken from a kurgan - an old burial mound on the steppe. Now kept in a box in the basement of the synagogue next door. You’re aware that Moishe’s interested in paying good money for this stuff.

Benya won’t sell it to you, though. He wants Moishe to come here in person.

All Odessa buzzes with talk of the Golden Army.

Red propaganda trains cross the countryside, dispensing leaflets. Sides painted with heroic workers. Equipped with a full-time staff of agitators, plus a film projector, so the illiterate peasants can get their news of the outside world. The Golden Army hijacked one and set it on fire with all the agitators still inside. Will probably do it again.

Razed the machine tractor station on one of the new collective farms, where the latest agricultural techniques are taught. Threw the overseer down a well. Probably the reason why the harvest has been so bad this year. A terror to hard-working peasants everywhere.

Solovei, a Cossack, leads the Army. A tall balding man with fierce eyes and a flowing white moustache, who keeps the heads of his victims dangling by their hair from the saddle of his horse. Said to wear a golden crown. Fought with Nestor Makhno during the Civil War. Hung by the Cheka for his crimes against the people. Should be dead.

Hides out in the Akkerman Fortress, in Bilhorod - a mid-sized farming town on the other side of the Dnieper. Offered safe harbour by the reactionary Romanian government. The fortress was built by Genoans along Freemasonic lines - used for occult fire rituals by the Crimean Tatars.

Solovei has built a pagan temple on its grounds. Burns prisoners alive. Eats roasted children. Abuses peasant girls. Consorts (so they say) with ambassadors from a shadowy Anglo-Jewish cabal. The OGPU are doing all they can to catch him. If the kulaks would cooperate, he’d be in prison already.

Obviously this is all a trap.

The first Solovei was indeed a minor chieftain in the Civil War. The Reds hung him and took his gold. The OGPU decided to resurrect him as their own private reactionary bandit, and use him as bait to try to lure problematic émigrés back into the country, where they can be shot.

Found their second Solovei in Rostov - Ivan, a Red Cossack who’d betrayed his people in the sincere belief that Communism would work. Took away his vodka. Explained the revolution needed him once more. Gave him a Scythian diadem from the first Solovei’s stash and told him to put it on. Establish his image as a decadent pawn of the bourgeois.

Vsevolod Balitsky, OGPU chief and Ukraine People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, is determined to make the scheme work. Has collectivisation quotas from Stalin to meet. Needs to prove he’s capable of crushing resistance in the countryside.

Has men everywhere. Running Uncle Benya. Was on the team who trapped Sidney Reilly in 1925. Would ideally like to get the British government to send Solovei money, then expose their complicity in crimes against the people.

Is slowly working out that Solovei’s less loyal than he hoped.

The diadem contains the spirit of Tomyris, the ancient Scythian warrior queen. Possesses anyone who wears it. Commands them to conquer the world at the head of a barbarian horde. Worships Tabiti, goddess of primordial fire. Can summon shadow creatures from a pyre of burning human bones. Digs up the tombs of her old outriders. Raises them from the dead.

Not entirely under Soviet control.

Solovei is recruiting soldiers for a genuine raid on Odessa. Peasants who fought in the Green militias. Black Army anarchists who haven’t given up. Left SRs. Whites who fought with Wrangel. Basmachis from Turkestan. Soldiers of fortune from every part of the world. He’s buying guns from Basil Zaharoff, currently resident in Istanbul, and negotiating for a submarine.

It’s no longer political for him. Tomyris thinks of Stalin as just another Cyrus the Great, and plans to take his head. But he could still provoke a Soviet invasion of Romania - and possibly start WWII.

Balitsky hasn’t realised this yet. Still thinks he can call time on the Golden Army whenever he wants. Will clock it soon. Will need somebody to go to Bilhorod, shoot Solovei and shut the whole thing down before Stalin finds out.

Might ask you to do this if his secret policemen capture you. Will keep somebody hostage in the OGPU torture chambers as collateral. Beat them to death if you fail. Keep his word and let them go if you succeed.