Finally, there is little to connect the Omsk coup with the Armistice. The penultimate sentence of Kolchak's 18 November announcement mentioned 'the great ideas of freedom which are now been proclaimed throughout the world', and this might be taken to refer to the Allied victory (paradoxically, Kolchak's announcement declared a military dictatorship). The War Cabinet's secret decision of 14 November to recognise de facto the Directory was part of a review of British policy brought about by the Armistice; the British historian and journalist Michael Kettle thought it likely that information about this had been secretly communicated to right-wing circles in Omsk and might have motivated a pre-emptive strike by the conspirators on the 17th.26 Given the distances and the wobbly chain of events this seems unlikely (although it is not impossible). It is also improbable that the conspirators in Omsk feared or anticipated that the Armistice would mean that once the war ended the Allies would lose interest in Russia - although that was indeed the case.
CONSEQUENCES AND COUNTERFACTUALS
For a time Admiral Kolchak enjoyed military success. In December 1918 White Russian and Czechoslovak troops pushed the Red Army back in the Urals; at the end of the month they took the important industrial town of Perm. In March 1919 Kolchak's army began a general offensive in the southern Urals, which quickly recaptured Ufa. But by the summer the Siberian anti-Bolshevik forces were in retreat. There was some disorder in the rear, and the government made little attempt to rally popular support. Kolchak proved to be neither an effective military commander nor an astute politician. In November 1919 he was forced to abandon Omsk. He had not been able to secure the recognition of his government by the Allies, and he gave up the title of Supreme Ruler (in favour of General Denikin). In January 1920, during the admiral's retreat to the east, his train was stopped at Irkutsk (1,300 miles east of Omsk). Kolchak was arrested, tried and shot, and his body thrown through the ice of the Enisei River. He was the only one of the senior White leaders to be captured and killed during the Russian Civil War.27
We might consider some counterfactuals. The biggest of all would be if the Central Powers had not lost the war in the autumn of 1918. That is indeed a fascinating question but one well beyond the scope of this chapter; the present work is about the situation after the late summer of 1918, by which time the last German offensive had failed.
More narrowly, the Directory could have continued at least into 1919. This might well have happened had there not been a credible 'dictator' on hand, or if Admiral Kolchak had refused the post of 'supreme ruler'. He might have done this if the most 'senior' of potential all-Russian military leaders, General M. V Alexeev, had not died unexpectedly in south Russia in October; Alexeev had been chief of staff to the tsar for much of the war, and Supreme Commander-in-Chief in part of 1917.
The Directory might also have survived if the inclination of the British Foreign Office to support the PA-RG had been followed through - and if more time had been available. General Boldyrev was an alternative leader; he might have followed a more sensible political course, and he could not have been any less effective as a military commander than Kolchak.
But the tension between left and right in Russia, and the unrestrained power of the reactionary armed gangs, precluded such a happy outcome for the anti-Bolsheviks. The real significance of the Omsk coup, whoever inspired it or carried it out, was that it demonstrated the unbridgeable and fatal gulf between 'party politics' and 'the path of reaction' (to use Kolchak's words) in the anti-Bolshevik movement.28
The Armistice ended the domination by Germany and her partners over the Russian western and southern borderlands and opened fierce civil war fighting there. The Allies, with large and successful forces at their disposal, now had unopposed access to the territory of Russia. Again, thinking counterfactually, could Britain, France, the United States and Japan have decided, in the winter of 1918-19, to intervene in strength in Russia?
That they did not do so had little to do with the character of Kol- chak's government. Much more important was the fact that the overthrow of German military power in November 1918 meant that the Allies lost any serious motive to intervene, certainly on a large scale and with their own forces. Their armies and populations were war-weary and there was little domestic political appetite for action in Russia. The French did commit some military strength to an expedition to southern Ukraine in mid December 1918, but there was clear reluctance to fight on the part of their troops (and those of France's Balkan allies). The campaign culminated in a humiliating withdrawal - accompanied by mutinies - from Odessa in March 1919, and from Sevastopol in April. Meanwhile, no Allied ground forces, and few supplies, were committed to the Baltic region. The British could and did send surplus arms and other supplies to south Russia, from wartime munitions dumps in the Middle East and elsewhere, but supplies alone were not enough to defeat the Red Army.
Nevertheless, a fundamental problem for the Siberian Whites, although perhaps not the decisive one, was the opening of the Black Sea, which occurred simultaneously with the Omsk coup. The shorter length of the route to south Russia made General Denikin and the Volunteer Army a much more attractive recipient of Allied supplies than Kolchak's armies in remote Siberia. Because of this the events in Omsk were in the long run probably not of central importance. Denikin created an authoritarian government in south Russia, and would have done so in any event; there was no 'Directory' stage in the counterrevolutionary politics of the south.
The Provisional All-Russian Government probably could not have competed with the south Russian White generals for Allied military and diplomatic support. Nor, from faraway central Siberia, halfway around the world in terms of the practicalities of travel and communications, could the PA-RG have exercised control over the whole ('All-Russian') anti-Bolshevik movement. And a more democratic PA-RG probably could not have put a first military offensive together as fast as Kolchak did. Might a more democratic Siberian government have won more (or alienated less) popular support in Siberia in 1919? Perhaps, but the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party did not have strong local roots in Siberia (where there was no history of serfdom, and land hunger was not a central issue). In the task of state building, it is hard to believe that the Directory would have had any more success than Kolchak.
Probably the fatal divisions in the anti-Bolshevik movement were unavoidable. Probably, too, it was inevitable that the Allies would not consider serious post-war military intervention in Russia. Nevertheless the events of mid November 1918 did divide the tragedy of the Russian Civil War into two distinct parts. Foreign involvement was always important, but the collapse of the Central Powers and the ascent of the Allies actually reduced the scale of foreign intervention. The troops of the Central Powers had physically occupied the Baltic region, Belarus, all Ukraine, and much of the Transcaucasus in 1918. The Allies attempted nothing on this scale in 1919 or 1920.
Likewise the triumph of the military elites in the anti-Bolshevik camp in November 1918, led by men like Kolchak and Denikin, changed the political nature of the conflict. The 'White' Russian forces, even after most of the Czechoslovaks returned home after 1918, and even without direct involvement of foreign military forces, were now more of a threat to the Red Army; they were superior in their leadership, mass and effectiveness to what had existed before November 1918. But on the other hand these armies had only rudimentary political programmes, compared even to Komuch and the PA-RG. A popular dictator (or tsar-substitute) could not gain mass support in Russia, at least not before the 1930s.