“He had what you would have to call an intransigent sense of principle, but he was filled with unstable energies. I’m convinced he was honest, but he was weak; he was determined but rather adolescent—he would react to bad news with an almost catatonic frown, like a child’s—solemn and innocent. He really was uncontrollably neurotic. And I had the feeling he was always inclined to be persuaded by the last person who talked to him.”
Kolchak traveled with a retinue that included several personal servants and his mistress, whose husband was one of Kolchak’s officers. [Kolchak’s wife and children were safely ensconsed in Paris for the duration.]
Kolchak was undoubtedly a man of naïveté and excesses. But he saw through to the realities of the Civil War to the extent that he quickly realized the uselessness of the Whites’ strategy of evasive harassment. His armies were soloists who could not harmonize; they had Lenin outgunned, outmanned and outsupplied, yet they had made virtually no progress toward Moscow.*
Unfortunately Kolchak’s early efforts to set this right were undermined by his own command structure. His government, of which he was “supreme ruler,” had little actual military control. The Allies had imposed upon White Russia a commander in chief of armed forces in the person of General Pierre Janin, the ranking member of the French Military Commission. Janin took his orders from Paris.
The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia was commanded by Major General William S. Graves, who stayed in Vladivostok almost the whole time and, under orders from President Woodrow Wilson, refused to intervene in Russian internal affairs except by using his troops to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway. General Sir Alfred Knox, having installed Kolchak, seemed to feel his responsibility had been met and he made no apparent effort to help clarify the command structure between Janin and Kolchak. Janin himself was a gruff soldier who spoke poor Russian and was as inept at strategy as he was expert in tactics.
“Admiral Kolchak was a liberal. It was not through his own design that he found himself put in a position of dictatorship. I felt he regarded it as an enigmatic position—he never seemed to decide how to handle it. He lacked a tyrant’s personality, the despotic inclinations; he never seemed to realize the extent of the powers that had been given to him.
“He didn’t have the ruthlessness or force of will to make subordinates submit to his demands, and he had no effective means of contact with the ordinary people—he was a remote sort of man, he had no public personality, he spoke at gatherings only with great awkward discomfort.
“Many of our generals in the field were characterized by a suicidal and hysterical incompetence. When they made decisions that were obviously wrong, the Admiral would let them have their way until it got too late, when inevitably he would relieve them of command with utmost regret and then replace them with equally incompetent generals who were additionally handicapped by their total ignorance of the field situation.
“He never knew whom to trust. He believed everyone and no one. He had altogether the wrong political philosophy for the circumstances. As an example, one of his first acts in office was to call for a National Assembly to be freely elected as soon as the war ended. Naturally this incensed most of his officers, who regarded such ideas as useless democratic political euphemisms, mysterious to soldiers of more cynical persuasions. Many of the officers wanted to restore the monarchy and he bowed to their wishes and dropped his proposal instead of ordering them to quit disputing him.”
He was burdened impossibly from the very beginning with a staff of more than nine hundred* beautifully tailored and extraordinarily dishonest subordinates, most of them completely unfit for military duties. White officers and politicians engaged in incredible profiteering schemes and speculations. There was a black market in trains: whole trains were stolen, their contents sold in back alleys. Kolchak’s Northern Force at gunpoint stole shipments of supplies earmarked for his Western Force. Officers couldn’t be bothered to feed or clothe their men; staples and military medical supplies were sold at incredible prices.
Kolchak was aware of the corruption in which he was engulfed: He appointed several investigatory commissions, but none of them produced any results. No officers, regardless how guilty or incompetent, ever got fired. The moody Admiral seemed to feel there was no point in dismissing the corrupt because the vacancies would only be refilled by men equally corrupt: there was no other kind.
What is remarkable is that for the first months of his tenure Kolchak enjoyed as much support as he did. Nearly all the bickering factions seemed willing to pay him lip service if not real loyalty. Perhaps he was so well accepted because people found it easier to confirm credentials than to assess character; at any rate he gave the White Russian movement the appearance of a central authority and for a while, in spite of everything, that was enough to elevate morale and produce a string of White military victories.
Kolchak had established his government in Omsk, a dreary city of vast gloomy state buildings on the barren plains of western Siberia. It had the flavor of a frontier camp, laid out along exact 200-meter square blocks with wide streets and single-story frame houses painted vivid hues. The city lay about two miles behind the railway marshaling yards, on the right bank of the wide Irtysh River, and was surrounded by a huge farm area of dairies and grain. In normal times it was a four-day train journey from Omsk northwest to Moscow.
The houses here were widely separated. Each had its pigsty or chicken coop, its stable or cow corral, its courtyard and cart shed. The big public buildings were Byzantine brick. There were a few cobblestone streets at the center but most thoroughfares were unpaved impacted dirt, powder-dusty in dry weather and muddy in wet. The wooden sidewalks were bordered by deep gutters and in the springtime each house pumped its cesspool out into these gutters so that the smell throughout Omsk was indescribable.
It was anything but a sophisticated capital. Yet for a brief time there was a spirit of elegance. Czarist officers in their grey greatcoats marched the walkways in polished boots; Kolchak’s own officers made splendid visions in their white uniforms with purple epaulets, their leather heels clicking on the marble floors of the state buildings. The city flapped with the banners of the new government: Kolchak’s colors were white and green and the banners were ubiquitous.
“My brother and I were subalterns together. We were assigned to foot companies guarding the railway yards at first—this was before the Czech Legion came. I remember the first time we saw the Admiral. He came with the French General, Janin, to review us. Our Captain at that time was a brute called Grigorenkov, a Muscovite. He saluted the reviewing officers with colonial violence. (Once, later on, I remember Grigorenkov actually groveling on his knees to kiss the boots of a superior officer when he was reprimanded. But of course when he returned to the battalion he cursed and kicked the subordinates there, myself included. I suppose that got it out of his system. Cringing and brutalizing are equal parts of the Russian character, I should say. We were always burdened with the kind of vermin who leap from your feet to your throat. Have you read Alexander Werth? He has the audacity to insist the Russians are a fundamentally unaggressive people!)
“I recall that walking along with General Janin, the Admiral could not get in step. It seemed to unnerve them both. I confess I always thought of General Janin as a thoroughly poisonous man, although I did not know him really at all and have no basis for that belief. We were being inspected in barracks and he hurried right along—his flapping greatcoat made the oil lamps flicker. He scowled a great deal and kept rubbing the back of his neck with his swagger stick. As for the Admiral, I was struck by what a small man he was. He had a watchful, alien sort of impassivity—it discouraged one from speculating, from inquiry. Certainly he had none of that, what you call charisma.