THE OMSK COUP
Meanwhile, on 5 November 1918 - six days before the Compiegne armistice - Vice Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak had become the war and navy minister of the Provisional All-Russian Government, now based in Omsk in central Siberia. He had arrived in the city three weeks earlier, on 13 October.
The train carrying the leaders of the 'all-Russian' anti-Bolshevik government had only arrived in Omsk from the west on 9 October. The executive of the Provisional All-Russian Government was modelled on that of the French Revolution: supreme power was vested in a Directory of five men. (The French version, the Directoire executif, created by the Constitution of Year III, held office from 1795 to 1799, after the overthrow of the Jacobins.) An attempt had been made to give the Russian Directory (Direktoriia) a balanced membership. N. D. Avksentiev and V. M. Zenzinov were members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR); V. A. Vinogradov belonged to the non-socialist Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) party; P. V. Vologodsky was a Siberian 'regionalist'; and General V. G. Boldyrev commanded the local anti-Bolshevik armed forces.
The events of the coup are a matter of some historical dispute. The most likely sequence of events is that on Saturday afternoon (17 November) a meeting in Omsk of middle-level politicians and military leaders, all men of the right, made the final decision to take action against the Directory.3 In the early hours of Sunday, a detachment of Cossack troops surrounded a block of flats in Omsk where the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) E. F. Rogovsky lived. Rogovsky was the deputy minister of internal affairs in the PA-RG. The Directors Avksentiev and Zenzinov, and a number of other SRs, were meeting in his flat. Cossack officers arrested those present and imprisoned them at the Agricultural Institute on the outskirts of Omsk. The barracks where a small pro-SR internal security unit was quartered was also surrounded, and the men there disarmed. There was no bloodshed.
Before dawn the following morning the PA-RG Council of Ministers, including now Admiral Kolchak, met in the former Governor-General's Palace.4 A third Director, the Kadet Vinogradov, now resigned. A fourth man, Vologodsky, the Director most closely associated with Siberian interests, was evidently surprised by the coup, but not prepared to argue for a return to the status quo. General Boldyrev, the fifth and final Director was absent at the front.
The meeting then turned to the need for a replacement executive, and there was no opposition to replacing the Directory with one-man rule; civil and military power was to be concentrated in the hands of one individual as 'supreme ruler' (verkhovnyi pravitel). After some discussion a vote of those present voted nearly unanimously for Admiral Kolchak, who agreed to serve in this post. He issued, as 'Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak', the following proclamation:
On 18 November 1918 the Provisional All-Russian Government collapsed [raspalos]. The Council of Ministers took all the power and invested it in me, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak of the Russian Navy.
Having assumed the burden [krest, literally 'cross'] of this power in the exceptionally difficult circumstances of the Civil War and the complete disruption of public life, I announce:
I will go neither down the path of reaction, nor along the fatal path of party politics. My chief aims are the organisation of a combat-ready army, victory over Bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order, so that the people may be able to choose without hindrance a form of government to which they are suited, and to realise the great ideas of freedom which are now been proclaimed [provozglashennye] throughout the world.
I call you, fellow citizens, to unity, to struggle with Bolshevism, to labour and sacrifice.5
To understand the political tensions that led to the Omsk coup, and why and how Kolchak emerged as a military dictator, some key events of the preceding year need to be outlined. While retreating from the Central Powers in western Russia in the winter of 1917-18, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd had succeeded in establishing their authority in many urban centres in the southern and eastern parts of the Russian Empire. Lenin's party took advantage of the lack of any effective rival authority in Petrograd, and of the revolutionary network of councils (soviets) of workers' and soldiers' deputies created in 1917. Detachments of pro- Bolshevik soldiers and armed workers were sent out along the railways to crush local resistance. In the city of Omsk a Bolshevik-dominated 'soviet' took charge from 30 November 1917.
Bolshevik hold on power was, however, extremely tenuous, especially in distant regions. It was weakened in the winter of 1917-18 by the rapid demobilisation of the radicalised wartime army and plummeting economic activity in the towns. The defeated political opponents of the Bolsheviks, both left and right of the political centre, were still active, in some cases in organised - and rival - political undergrounds. Some were agrarian socialists (especially the SRs) who felt that 'their' revolution had been hijacked by the Bolsheviks. Some were members of the former privileged groups; any enthusiasm for revolution that they might have had in the heady days of early 1917 had been dissipated by political anarchy, economic ruin and national humiliation. Some were 'patriotic' survivors of the pre-war and wartime officer corps, who dreamed of restoring Russian honour and international status.
It did not take much to shake the rickety Bolshevik hold on power. The main agent of this overthrow in eastern Russia took the extraordinary form of the Czech Corps. Some 50,000 men - eight regiments organised in two divisions - were numerically not a large force, but they were strung out in trains strategically positioned across the railway system. First raised in a spirit of Slav solidarity in 1914, by Czech and Slovak civilians living in Russia, the formation had been expanded rapidly in 1917, through recruitment of Austro-Hungarian POWs. In early 1918 the Soviet government in Petrograd agreed to let the corps depart to fight in France, but in May fighting broke out with local Soviet authorities. In the course ofJune and July the men of the corps took effective command of the 4,000-mile railway line from the Volga River to Vladivostok. So important was this transport artery that the Soviet government in Moscow suddenly lost control of all of Siberia, the southern Urals and part of the Middle Volga region. On 7 June, during this advance, power changed hands again in Omsk; the victors were the Czechoslovaks and the local Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks.
Some 950 miles to the west, the Volga town of Samara was taken by the Czechoslovaks on 8 June, and the first post-revolutionary government to rival the Bolshevik one in Moscow was formed. This body claimed its authority from the All-Russian Constituent Assembly (Uchreditel noesobranie). The Assembly had been the result of national elections organised in the last days of the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, and held in the first days ofSoviet rule. Some forty- five million voters had taken part, and the result was a clear victory for the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were the peasant party, in a peasant country; they had a strong revolutionary heritage and they advocated policies of popular sovereignty and land reform. The elections gave the SRs 428 deputies out of 767; there were only 180 Bolshevik deputies (and very few from the political right and centre). The Assembly met in Petrograd early in January 1918, but was immediately dispersed by the Bolsheviks. Several SR deputies, however, were present in Samara and others joined them; their organisation named itself the 'Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly', known in Russian by the abbreviation Komuch.
Komuch evolved, over several months, and through ill-tempered negotiations, into the PA-RG and the Directory. A 'State Conference' of the various local authorities that had sprung up under Czechoslovak protection was held in the town of Ufa in the southern Urals (between Samara and Omsk) in September. The SR leaders of Komuch accepted that they would have to broaden their base and, as we have seen, the Directory included, as well as two SRs, a Kadet and a leader of the former Siberian regional authority, as a well as progressive soldier.