Siberian declaration of independence

On 4 July 1918 in Omsk the Provisional Siberian Government adopted the “Declaration of the State Independence of Siberia”. It was signed by Pyotr Vologodsky, chairman of the council of ministers and also foreign minister, and by the ministers Vladimir Krutovsky, Grigory Patushinsky, Ivan Mikhailov and Mikhail Shatilov. The government announced that from then on it alone, together with the Siberian Regional Duma (PL), was responsible for the fate of Siberia, proclaimed full freedom of independent relations with foreign states and declared that no other authority could act on Siberian territory or enter into obligations in its name. On the same day it declared all decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars and of the local soviets null and void. In the history of Siberia this act is often called the declaration of independence.

The government in Omsk

Vologodsky’s government was very young. When the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion overthrew Bolshevik power in Siberia, and in June the Czechoslovaks and Russian anti-Bolsheviks took Omsk, the underground West Siberian Commissariat moved to the city. On 30 June the formation of a new council of ministers was announced. It derived its mandate from the Siberian Regional Duma, a regional representative body convened in Tomsk after the October Revolution and dispersed by the Bolsheviks at the beginning of 1918. Some of its deputies had managed at that time, at a secret session, to elect a government headed by the Socialist Revolutionary Pyotr Derber. Derber had gone to Harbin, and the ministers who had stayed in Siberia now took power in Omsk.

The declaration justified the step by saying that “Russian statehood as such no longer exists”, because a large part of Russia’s territory had been occupied by the Central Powers and the rest had been seized by “usurpers of the people’s power”, the Bolsheviks. It contained, however, an important reservation. The government declared “no less solemnly” that it did not regard Siberia as separated for ever from the lands forming the Russian state, and that all its efforts were to serve the restoration of Russian statehood. Siberia’s future relations with European Russia were to be decided by the All-Siberian and All-Russian Constituent Assemblies. Georgy Guins, who headed the council of ministers’ chancellery, later wrote that there was no separatism in the declaration, and that its hasty proclamation had been pushed above all by Mikhail Golovachev of the foreign ministry, who wanted to justify the existence of his office.

Regionalists and rivals

The declaration drew on a long tradition of Siberian regionalism, a movement whose spiritual father was the traveller and ethnographer Grigory Potanin. In the 1860s Potanin and his friends proclaimed that Siberia was an exploited colony of Russia, and for this they were put on trial in the case of the so-called Siberian separatists. After the February Revolution the regionalists demanded broad autonomy, and in December 1917 a congress in Tomsk proclaimed the autonomy of Siberia. The Siberian government used a white and green flag, whose colours symbolised snow and the taiga.

The Omsk act was also aimed at rivals. Derber’s group, which had settled in Vladivostok under Czechoslovak protection, renamed itself the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia on 29 June and at the beginning of July itself announced that it was assuming central power in Siberia. In the west, in Samara, the Socialist Revolutionary Komuch was active, invoking the mandate of the dispersed Constituent Assembly and claiming the right to power over the whole of Russia.

What came next

The British chronology of the war states that the declaration was annulled on 6 July. The Omsk government’s documents do not confirm this. On that day the council of ministers discussed, among other things, the convening of the Regional Duma and adopted regulations on a new judiciary, and on 7 July it issued an appeal to all the peoples of Siberia guaranteeing them full civil, political and national rights. The declaration was published in the government’s official collection of laws on 18 July. According to Guins, nobody paid it the attention that the birth of a new state would have deserved, “and the state itself vanished as imperceptibly as it had appeared”. Formally the declaration remained in force until 3 November 1918, when the Provisional Siberian Government handed power to the All-Russian Provisional Government formed in Ufa, and a couple of weeks later power in Omsk was seized by Admiral Alexander Kolchak.