Kolchak's coup

During the night of 17–18 November 1918 Cossack officers in Omsk arrested the Socialist Revolutionary members of the Provisional All-Russian Government, known as the Directory. In the morning the Council of Ministers assumed full power and handed it over to Vice-Admiral Alexander Kolchak, promoting him at the same time to full admiral. Kolchak took the title of Supreme Ruler (Verkhovny pravitel) and commander-in-chief of all the armed forces. The British chronology of the war says that he was proclaimed “Dictator of All Russia”. There was no such title, but the word captures the essence of the matter: the power of the Supreme Ruler was subject to no check other than the Council of Ministers that had appointed him. Kolchak himself told journalists ten days later: “They call me a dictator. So be it, I am not afraid of the word.”

The crisis of the Directory

The Directory had been created in September at a conference in Ufa as a compromise between the Socialist Revolutionaries, who came from the Constituent Assembly dispersed by the Bolsheviks, and the conservative Siberian government in Omsk. It was headed by the SR Nikolai Avksentiev. In October the Directory moved from threatened Ufa to Omsk and found itself surrounded by officers, Cossacks and right-wing politicians hostile to it. The concord did not last long. On 22 October the Central Committee of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries circulated an appeal written by Viktor Chernov, calling on party members to arm themselves against the “counter-revolution” behind the front. The officers saw in it a herald of the return of the revolutionary chaos that had broken up the army in 1917. At the beginning of November Kolchak, at the urging of the commander-in-chief, General Vasily Boldyrev, took the post of Minister of War and Marine in the government. The admiral, who had arrived in Omsk in October, went straight to the front, while tension grew in Omsk. The British Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward wrote that shots rang out in the city every night and that murdered officers were found in the streets every morning.

The night of 17–18 November

Kolchak returned from the front on the evening of 17 November in a train accompanied by Ward’s British guard of honour. That same night Colonel Vyacheslav Volkov, commandant of the Omsk garrison, and two Cossack lieutenant-colonels, Ivan Krasilnikov and Apollos Katanaev, arrested two SR members of the Directory, Avksentiev and Vladimir Zenzinov, as well as a deputy member of the Directory, Andrei Argunov, and the deputy minister of the interior, Yevgeny Rogovsky. The SR battalion guarding the Directory was disarmed. According to Russian studies, one man was killed in the process. Behind the conspirators stood many staff officers, the Kadet politician Viktor Pepelyayev and the finance minister, Ivan Mikhailov. The three remaining members of the Directory were left untouched. Among them were the prime minister, Pyotr Vologodsky, who was in Omsk, and the commander-in-chief, Boldyrev, who happened to be at the front near Ufa.

In the morning the Council of Ministers met under Vologodsky’s chairmanship. It declared the Directory non-existent, assumed power and decided to hand it over to a single person. In a secret ballot the candidates were Boldyrev, Kolchak and General Dmitri Horvat from Manchuria. Kolchak was chosen. The admiral at first refused but in the end agreed. Ward learned of it at about 2.30 p.m. Whether Kolchak knew of the plot beforehand remains disputed. Ward was convinced that he did not know the details. According to some Russian historians, the conspirators had forewarned him, and he had agreed to head the government “if necessary”.

The British role

Ward’s battalion of the Middlesex Regiment was one of the few armed forces in Omsk independent of the conspirators. Ward announced that he would not allow any troops to approach his barracks, and his machine guns commanded the approaches to the quarters where the ministers were meeting. He himself admitted that this gave the ministers confidence, although he denied having any influence on their decision. On the evening of 18 November Kolchak, in full admiral’s uniform, came to Ward and explained to him the reasons for the coup. Ward warned that if the arrested men came to harm without trial, the new government would lose the sympathy of Britain, the United States and France. The head of the British military mission, General Alfred Knox, later insisted that the coup had taken place without Britain’s knowledge or participation. The Bolsheviks and the SRs, however, presented it from the outset as the work of the British.

The fate of the arrested men was settled within a few days. Volkov, Krasilnikov and Katanaev reported to headquarters of their own accord and took responsibility upon themselves. A court martial quickly acquitted them, and soon they were promoted. Avksentiev, Zenzinov, Argunov and Rogovsky were taken by train to the Chinese border during the night of 20–21 November. At Kolchak’s request the carriages with the prisoners were attached to the train carrying a British detachment to Vladivostok. The SRs thanked the British for their protection, as they did not trust their Russian guards. By way of Harbin they reached Manchuria, and from there they left for exile.

Reactions

Kolchak declared in a proclamation to the population that he would follow “neither the road of reaction nor the fatal road of party politics”, and that his main aim was to create an army fit to fight, to achieve victory over Bolshevism and to restore order, so that the people could then choose their form of government for themselves. He was supported by right-wing politicians, the Kadets, most of the officers and the Cossacks. The SRs regarded the coup as treason. A congress of members of the Constituent Assembly in Yekaterinburg, led by Chernov, called on 19 November for a struggle against “a handful of conspirators”. Kolchak ordered it dispersed, and General Radola Gajda arrested its leaders, although he released them after a few days. The branch of the Czechoslovak National Council in Russia, which had recently celebrated in Yekaterinburg the birth of the republic, expressed its condemnation of the coup on 21 November. The corps commander, General Jan Syrový, nevertheless ordered the troops to remain neutral and to regard the change of power as an internal Russian matter.

Kolchak, who in 1917 had lost command of the Black Sea Fleet after a mutiny of the sailors, now became the leader of the whole White movement in the east of Russia. In the following months other White leaders recognised his authority, among them General Anton Denikin in the south. The Supreme Ruler’s troops took Perm in December and in the spring of 1919 approached the Volga. Kolchak’s rule, however, based on the army and distrustful of the socialists, alienated many of the peasants and workers of Siberia. After defeats at the front the admiral was handed over by the Czechoslovaks to his enemies in Irkutsk in January 1920 and shot by the Bolsheviks in February.