It was not surprising that once he arrived in western Siberia Kolchak became involved with the new anti-Bolshevik authority and its armed forces; a figure of his known abilities, political stature and good relations with Allied benefactors was attractive. The admiral later claimed that he was invited to take part in the PA-RG Council of Ministers by General Boldyrev - the front-line commander ofthe Directory's military forces, and Boldyrev certainly did not want to overthrow the Directory.13
Lt General Boldyrev, although in late September 1918 styled as the 'Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all Russia Armed Forces', did not have the status of Kolchak among the Allied governments or their representatives in Russia. More important, he was genuinely much more sympathetic to the politicians of the centre-left. The son of a peasant, Boldyrev had risen in the tsarist army to become deputy chief of staff of the Northern Army Group, under General Ruzsky, in the winter of 1916-17; in the late autumn of 1917 he was briefly commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army. He had in early 1918 become a member of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia (Soiuz vozrozhdeniia Rossii), an influential underground organisation including activists on the left of the Kadet Party and on the right ofthe Socialist Revolutionaries; its leaders included Avksentiev and Zenzinov. It is highly unlikely that Boldyrev would have been offered the role of the military dictator by the rightist Siberian politicians, and unlikely, too, that he would have accepted it.14
On being made war and navy minister on 4 November, Admiral Kolchak immediately left Omsk for a twelve-day inspection tour of the forces fighting some 600 miles to the west, in the northern Urals. General Knox, for his part, took a train back towards Vladivostok on the 5th. Some writers accused Kolchak and Knox of absenting themselves from Omsk simply to avoid open complicity with a planned coup; the opposite case can be made - that if either man had contemplated the overthrow of the Directory in these weeks they would have wanted personal oversight. A diary entry for 5 November written by one of the main coup plotters (V N. Pepeliaev) recalled Kolchak saying that he was not prepared, under present circumstances, to seize power. At the same time Knox informed the War Office that he had told Kolchak that it would 'at present be fatal' to follow the urgings of the right-wing officers around him and take supreme power.15
Kolchak's activities in the days (and hours) immediately before the morning of 18 November are clearly important. Was he actively conspiring to make himself a military dictator? Or was he genuinely surprised by events, and was it only after the fact that he agreed to 'assume the burden of this power'? He arrived back in Omsk just before the coup, on 16 or 17 November.16 Kolchak claimed that he only learned of the night-time arrest of the SR Directors when he was woken at his apartment at 4 a.m. on the 18th; that is at least possible. Few historians have attempted to make the admiral a direct participant, and one of the best accounts, by the British historian Peter Fleming, rules out such involvement.17
Different views have also been put forward regarding the role of British military or diplomatic representatives. General Maurice Janin, who arrived in Omsk a few weeks after the coup as the senior French military representative, later maintained that the coup was supported and even organised by British military advisers.18 There were two Russian-speaking British officers in Omsk at the time of the coup, Lt Colonel Neilson and Captain Steveni, who had some contact with Omsk politicians and officers. Neither of them was in favour of the Directory, and they may have given verbal support or assurances to some of the conspirators.19 It seems unlikely, however, that they organised anything. Another British factor was the Middlesex battalion, which was still stationed in Omsk, and which at least had the potential to oppose a counter-coup. No one has suggested, however, that that battalion had been ordered to the city to carry out a strike against the Directory or that it took any active part in the events of 17-18 November.
The definitive account by Richard Ullman argued that the British government and the Foreign Office certainly played no part. The involvement of Knox, who was subordinate to the War Office, could not be determined, but he - in Ullman's view - was at most 'a warm sympathiser'; Ullman did not preclude the unauthorised encouragement (or lack of discouragement) by the junior British officers on the spot. General Knox, who had left Omsk nearly two weeks before the coup subsequently denied any involvement by Britain.20 Above all, the British War Cabinet, in the important meetings on 13-14 November (described earlier), had in fact decided, among other elements of its post-war Russia policy, 'to recognise the Omsk Directorate [sic] as a de facto Government'.21 Still, this important development in British policy was not publicly announced, and it was almost certainly not communicated to personnel in Siberia.
We are on less thin ice when considering the activities of the known conspirators, rather than the ultimate beneficiary, Admiral Kolchak.22 The core leaders appear to have been the civilians V. N. Pepeliaev and I. A. Mikhailov, and the deputy chief of staff of the Siberian Army, Col. A. D. Syromiatnikov. What is most likely is that the conspirators acted on their own. Their motives were important. They had long been hostile to the SRs, and after the Chernov Manifesto ill feeling was heightened. Genrikh Ioffe's Soviet-era account plausibly put emphasis on the intrigues of the Kadet Party and the underground National Centre (Natsionalnyi tsentr) organisation, in both of which Pepeliaev played a major role.23 They were ambitious 'Young Turks': Pepeliaev was thirty- four, Syromiatnikov thirty-one, and Mikhailov was only twenty-six. They may well have hoped to use Kolchak as a mere figurehead.
Also important was the acceptance of events by more senior (and cautious) members of the political and military leadership in Omsk. On the morning after the arrest of Avksentiev and Zenzinov they agreed to a fait accompli. In a private letter to Mikhailov written in April 1919, Syromiatnikov gave him the credit for making the higher- ups do something they would not have done otherwise.24 There was no pressure from above in Omsk, or from outside (by the foreign governments), to restore the Directory.
As for Admiral Kolchak, he did not have to accept 'the burden of this power'. But, as he declared in his manifesto, he did not want to follow 'the fatal path of party politics'. During his 1920 trial Kolchak recalled one of his conversations with General Knox in Japan, when he (Kolchak) had stressed the importance of the armed forces:
[T]he organization of political power [vlast] at a time like the present was possible only under one condition: this power must rely on [opiratsia na] the armed force which it has at its disposal. This in turn determines the question of power, and it is necessary to solve the question of the creation of the armed force on which such a political power would rely, for without it political power will be a fiction, and anyone else who has such an armed force at his disposal will be able to take political power in his hands.
Kolchak certainly had no time for the SRs, and for the Constituent Assembly on which they based their authority. '[T]he Constituent Assembly which we got ... [he testified] and which when it met broke into singing the "Internationale" under Chernov's leadership, provoked an unfriendly attitude on the part of most of the people I met [in Siberia before the coup], it was considered to be artificial and partisan. This was also my opinion. I considered that although the Bolsheviks had few positive features, their dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was a service for which they should be given credit.'25