The rivalry between Samara and Omsk had always been intense. It broke out in a customs war and a series of territorial disputes. But there were also growing pressures to find agreement: the military position of the Komuch was steadily weakening; and the Allies were concerned that such petty conflicts should not prevent a combined effort to repulse the advancing Reds. Such an agreement finally materialized at the State Conference held in Ufa from 8 to 23 September. There the Komuch leaders found their voice increasingly drowned out by the Rightists on their own side, who were calling for the sort of dictatorship favoured by the Siberians. The Kazan industrialist Kropotkin called for a ‘strong and united military power to save Russia from those politicians [i.e. the socialists] who have ruined it’. According to V. N. Lvov, the power-broker in the Kornilov fiasco, another ‘military dictator’ was essential.38
To appease the Komuch leaders a compromise of sorts was struck. The ultimate sovereignty of the Constituent Assembly, provided it could find a quorum of 250 members, was recognized by the Ufa Conference. But in the meantime the Komuch lost its claim to be the legal government of all Russia. In its place a five-man Directory was set up as the executive arm of the Provisional All-Russian Government based in Omsk. It was an alliance of two SRs (Avksentiev and Zenzinov), two Siberian liberals (Vologodsky and Vinogradov) and General Boldyrev, close to the SRs, who also acted as the Commander-in-Chief. Although the SRs thus had a nominal majority in the new government, they were the real losers. In the fragmented politics of the civil war it would be a Sisyphean task to raise the quorum needed to restore the Constituent Assembly. To all intents and purposes, their citadel of liberty was in ruins.
The Directory was a pale reflection of the French revolutionary government after which it was named. This was a government only on paper. It had no proper structure or means of financing itself. Until near the end of its eight weeks in power, it was accommodated in a railway carriage in a siding a few miles from Omsk, hardly a prestigious ‘capital’ for what claimed to be the only legal government of Russia. Avksentiev, its chairman, was a dilettante who played at politics. He ‘surrounded himself with aides-de-camp, brought back the old titles’, and, according to one contemporary, ‘created a buffoon sort of pomp behind which there was nothing of any real substance’. It was a throwback to the last days of Kerensky. This Directory had even less authority than the Provisional Government. It did not even command the confidence of the factions it represented. Both the SRs and the Rightist circles plotted against it from the start. Each thought the alliance gave too much power to the other side. Omsk was full of intrigues and rumours of a coup. ‘Mexico amidst the snow and ice’, was how Boldyrev described it.39
The Rightist officers struck first. On 17 November a Cossack detachment broke into a meeting of the SRs in Omsk and arrested several of their leaders, including the two Directors, Avksentiev and Zenzinov. They were accused of plotting the overthrow of the Directory. It is true that the Chernov group had plotted against it from the start. But so too had the Rightists, and they now used the SR plot as a pretext for their own coup d’étât. The next morning the Directory’s Council of Ministers gave its blessing to the coup and invited Admiral Kolchak to become the Supreme Ruler. There were hardly any forces prepared to defend the Directory. The Czechs had lost the will to fight since the declaration of Czech independence on 28 October. All they wanted was to go home. As for the People’s Army, it was in a state of advanced decay.
For the next fourteen months Alexander Kolchak was the paramount leader of the counter-revolution, along with Denikin. It is somehow fitting that an admiral without a fleet should have been the leader of a government based in a town 4,000 miles from the nearest port; for Kolchak was one of history’s misfits. Small but imposing with dark piercing eyes, he was an oddity, a mining engineer and an Arctic explorer in a tsarist Naval Staff dominated by the landed nobility. In 1916, when he was appointed Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Kolchak, at only forty-one, was young enough to be the son of most of the other field commanders. In 1917 he refused to go along with the fleet committees and, in a dramatic resignation which made his name politically, broke his sword and threw it overboard. General Budberg described Kolchak as a ‘big sick child’:
He is undoubtedly neurotic, quick to lose his temper, and very stormy … He is a pure idealist, slavishly devoted to his sense of duty and the idea of serving Russia, of saving her from Red oppression … Thanks to this idea he can be made to do anything. He has no personal interests, no amour propre, and in this respect is crystal pure … He has no idea of the hard realities of life, and lives by illusions and received ideas. He has no plans of his own, no system, no wilclass="underline" he is like soft wax from which his advisers and intimates can fashion whatever they like.40
All these characteristics were reflected in Kolchak’s behaviour during the overthrow of the Directory. He was a passive — almost accidental — figure in the coup. He merely happened to be in the right place at the right time, giving the conspirators a figurehead. At the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power Kolchak was on a military mission to the United States. After a year in Manchuria he made his way back to Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, reaching Omsk in mid-October, where Boldyrev persuaded him to become the Minister of War. There is no evidence to suggest that Kolchak played a direct role in the overthrow of the Directory, although historians to this day still refer to it as ‘Kolchak’s coup’. From what we now know of this murky episode, it seems that the Rightists in Omsk engineered the coup without Kolchak’s knowledge to force him into taking power. Earlier that day several Rightist officers had pleaded with him to become dictator. Kolchak was hardly averse to the idea of dictatorship: his trips to the Front had convinced him of the ‘complete lack of support for the Directory’. Nor was he unaware of the general plans for a coup d’étât: the salons and barracks of Omsk were full of talk about the need for an iron fist; they even talked about it in the offices of the Directory. Kolchak’s close ally, General Knox, head of the British military mission in Siberia, also supported a dictatorship.fn8 At first, on 17 November, the Admiral refused to take power: Boldyrev, he said, was the head of the army; and it was not clear if he could win the support of the Siberians and the Allies. But once the officers had taken power for him, Kolchak changed his mind. It seemed to him on the morning of the 18th that some dictator had to fill the vacuum if street violence was to be avoided. At the Council of Ministers he suggested Boldyrev for this role, but Boldyrev was absent and the ministers, in any case, preferred the Admiral to the ‘socialist’ Boldyrev. Urged by Knox to do his duty, Kolchak agreed and accepted the title of Supreme Ruler.41
*
This was the end of the Right SRs and their ‘democratic counter-revolution’, as Ivan Maisky called it. Kolchak had the SR leaders imprisoned and then escorted to the Chinese border, where they were deported. Some of them made it back to Western Europe, where they lived a life of comfortable but regretful exile. Others returned to Russia, where they continued to organize themselves underground, adopting a stance of equal hostility to Reds and Whites. For several weeks after the coup, Kolchak’s police carried out a series of bloody reprisals against SR activists. Hundreds were arrested — many as ‘hostages’ to be executed in the event of SR acts of terror against the dictatorship. Among the hostages in Omsk were twenty SR deputies of the Constituent Assembly, ten of whom were shot in December following a workers’ uprising in the town.
Kolchak, meanwhile, defined his regime’s purpose in strictly military terms. Like Denikin, he was a narrow soldier: politics were beyond him. Apart from the overthrow of Bolshevism and the ‘salvation of Russia’ he had no real idea of what he was fighting for. He made some vague pronouncements about the restoration of law and order and the Constituent Assembly, although, judging by his own views, this last was clearly not to be restored in the democratic form of 1917.fn9 But otherwise all politics were to be abolished in the interests of the military campaign. Denikin was to make the same mistake. Politics were themselves a crucial determinant of the military conflict. Without policies to mobilize or at least to neutralize the local population, his army was almost bound to fail. Moreover, by failing to make his own policies clear, Kolchak allowed others to present them for him: both from the propaganda of the Reds and from the conduct of his own Rightist officers, the population of eastern Russia gained the fatal impression that Kolchak’s movement aimed to restore the monarchy.