Fall of Omsk

During the night of 13–14 November 1919 the 242nd Volga Rifle Regiment of the Red 5th Army crossed the Irtysh on the ice and took the railway station at Omsk without firing a shot. By morning some 7,000 White soldiers and officers had been disarmed in the trains standing there. So fell the capital of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, from which he had ruled as Supreme Ruler of Russia since the coup of November 1918. Soviet historiography adopted 14 November as the date of the city’s capture. According to some studies the main Red forces entered Omsk a day later, and the American consul general Ernest Harris, who had already left for the east, reported that the city fell at seven in the evening on 15 November.

The road to Omsk

After the failure of the spring offensive the Whites had lost the whole of the Urals by August. On 20 August the Red 3rd and 5th Armies crossed the river Tobol in western Siberia. In September the Whites still managed a counter-attack and pushed them back across the river. On 14 October the Reds moved again, took Petropavlovsk (PL) on 31 October and Ishim on 4 November. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Kolchak’s troops lost up to half their strength in this fighting and fell back on Omsk demoralised. In the rear the partisan war of the Siberian peasants was growing. On 4 November the Reds began their march on Omsk. Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s 5th Army advanced along the Trans-Siberian Railway and the 3rd Army along the line from Ishim, covering up to 30 kilometres a day.

The evacuation of the capital

For several days ice floes drifted down the Irtysh and the river could not be crossed in either direction. When a frost set in around 10 November and the Irtysh froze, Kolchak decided to abandon the city and destroy the military stores. The Council of Ministers under the prime minister Pyotr Vologodsky left for Irkutsk, where it was to resume work on 16 November. The gold reserve of the former empire was also sent east. The admiral himself stayed almost to the end. An American vice-consul reported from Omsk as early as 11 November that he had left, but according to Russian studies Kolchak did not leave until 12 or 13 November. On 13 November five trains of his staff left for the east, one of them carrying the gold. The commander-in-chief, General Konstantin Sakharov (PL), left Omsk on 14 November. The retreating army blew up the great railway bridge over the Irtysh.

Spoils and flight

Figures for the Reds’ spoils vary. According to information sent from Harbin to Washington on 24 November by John Stevens, the American in charge of Allied supervision of the railway, 35,000 soldiers, 1,000 officers and ten generals were captured in and around Omsk, together with 16 armoured trains, a million rifles and three million shells. Russian tallies speak of more than 30,000 prisoners, 41 guns and about 200 locomotives. Consul Harris reported that 15 trains carrying officers’ families, some 8,000 people, had fallen into Red hands, in the frost and without shelter. At the beginning of December American diplomats reported that the Reds had committed no atrocities in Omsk and were giving prisoners a choice between service in the Red Army and civilian work. The 27th Rifle Division was given the honorary title “Omsk” for taking the city.

For Kolchak there began a retreat along the single railway line, choked with hundreds of trains. The Czechoslovak Legion, which wanted only to go home, was taking locomotives for its own units heading for Irkutsk. The rearguard was formed largely by the 5th Polish Rifle Division of Colonel Kazimierz Rumsza (PL), formed in 1919 from Polish volunteers in Siberia. Consul Harris wrote from Irkutsk at the time that the admiral was now relying chiefly on Polish troops. The fall of Omsk sealed the fate of the Whites in Siberia. In January 1920 the Polish division capitulated east of Krasnoyarsk, and Kolchak fell into the hands of his enemies at Irkutsk.