A typically picturesque carved window on a home along one of the older streets in Irkutsk, known for its charming wooden homes.  Russian playwright Anton Chekhov is said to have called Irkutsk "the Paris of Siberia," but perhaps his sarcasm did not translate from the Russian.  Josef Stalin was only the most famous of the many persons to have been banished here before the revolution, Soviet forces fled this city ahead of advancing Czecho-Slovak legionnaires in 1918, but as they subsequently retreated eastward toward Vladivostok, Admiral Kolchak was taken into custody by Soviet forces here in 1920.