Michael Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917-1919 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983), pp. 108, 111; Richard Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 258-84. The high-level British discussion in November 1918 is in TNA (Kew), CAB 23/8 <http:// filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-8.pdf>.
For the mechanics of the coup: G. Z. Ioffe, Kolchakovskaia avantiura i ee krakh (Moscow; Mysl', 1983), pp. 141-46; Jonathan Smele, Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak 1918-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 104-07; Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011),
p. 159.
The relevant documents have been recently published in V. I. Shishkin, ed., Vremennoe Vserossiiskoe pravitel'stvo, 23 sentiabria -18 noiabria 1918 g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, (Novosibirsk: RITs NGU, 2010), pp. 338-44.
V G. Khandorin, Admiral Kolchak: Pravda i mify (Tomsk: Izd. Tomskogo Universiteta, 2007), p. 81.
Much the best treatment of the SRs and their policies is Smith, Captives.
Ibid., p. 155.
On the underlying factors behind the coup see also Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008 [1987]), pp. 143-51.
Smele, Civil War, pp. 62-71, provides the basic biographical background for Kolchak. The admiral has aroused much interest in post-Soviet Russia, and recent biographies include Khandorin, Kolchak, and I. F. Plotnikov, Aleksandr Vasil'evich Kolchak: Issledovatel', admiral, Verkhovnyipravitel' Rossii (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2002). Kolchak was the subject of a feature film directed by A. Iu. Kravchuk, Admiral (2008); a version of this was broadcast in the Russian Federation in 2009 as a ten-part television series.
TNA (Kew), WO 33 962/186 (31 August 1918).
K. A. Popova, ed., Dopros Kolchaka (Leningrad: GIZ, 1925), pp. 143-44 (30 January 1920).
Jonathan Smele noted Kolchak's relationship with another Russian woman in the Far East, suggesting this lowered the priority of his return to his family in south Russia (Civil War, pp. 76-77). Smele's argument that there was, in September 1918, a better route to the Alekseev/Denikin forces than the Trans-Siberian route (p. 76) is less convincing; the Black Sea was still blocked. Smele's reference to the admiral as 'the dictator elect' already during his journey from Vladivostok to Omsk (p. 79) is difficult to substantiate.
Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, pp. 152-53. Kolchak was formally attached to Boldyrev on 30 October (Shishkin, VVP, p. 190).
Boldyrev left his command post once Kolchak came to power. At the end of the Civil War he decided to remain in Soviet Russia (where he was arrested and executed in 1933).
Smele, Civil War, pp. 92-93; TNA (Kew), WO 33/962, Knox to War Office, 7 November 1918.
Kolchak himself testified that he arrived on the 16th, the day before the coup ([Ia] pribyl [v Omsk] primerno chisla 16-go noiabria, za den' do perevorota). He also said that between the time of his return and the coup 'many officers from headquarters and representatives from the cossacks' had time to come to see him to complain about the Directory and urge him to take power - urgings that he maintained were steadfastly rejected (Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, p. 167). One authoritative Soviet-era historian stated that the admiral returned to Omsk only at 5.30 p.m. on the 17th which, he sarcastically suggested, could hardly have been a coincidence (Ioffe, Avantiura, p. 140); this was also the hour and date given by Colonel John Ward, who accompanied Kolchak on his inspection tour (With the 'Die-Hards' in Siberia, London: Cassell, 1920, p. 125). Smele has the admiral returning to Omsk at 5.30 p.m. on the 16th but remaining aboard his train at Omsk station, two and a half miles from the town centre (Smele, Civil War, pp. 100, 120).
Popova, Dopros Kolchaka, p. 169; Peter Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (Edinburgh: Birlina, 2001 (1963)), p. 112: 'It does seem safe ... to assume that Kolchak himself was neither involved in nor aware of the plot.' Smele, in other respects a very full account, does not raise the issue of Kolchak's direct involvement on 17-18 November (Civil War, pp. 102-07).
Maurice Janin, Ma Mission en Siberie (Paris: Payot, 1933), pp. 30-31. See the discussion in Ullman, Intervention, pp. 280-81.
Ullman, Britain, p. 34. On J. F. Neilson and Leo Steveni, see especially Michael Kettle, Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco: November 1918 - July 1919 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 11-15. Kettle quoted a 24 January 1919 typescript note, in Neilson's papers, where he apparently admitted 'having moved slightly in advance of the very halting policy, or rather lack of policy of our Government'. Peter Fleming, for his part, concluded that the two British officers 'had no part in the coup d'etat', although it is worth noting that the sexagenarian Steveni provided help in writing Fleming's book (Fate, pp. 113-16).
Ullman, Intervention, p. 281; Ullman, Britain, pp. 33-35. See Knox's brief review of an early version ofJanin's memoir; this appeared in Slavonic
Review, 3:9 (1925), p. 724. Knox noted that Janin had not been present when the coup occurred. It had also taken place 'without the previous knowledge, and without in any sense the connivance of Great Britain'. He pointed out that Janin also blamed the British for the overthrow of Nicholas II in March 1917. On the other hand Knox stated in his review, misleadingly, that the November 1918 coup was 'carried out by the Siberian Government'.
TNA (Kew), CAB 23/8.
For the conspirators see especially Smele, Civil War, pp. 90-104.
Ioffe, Avantiura, pp. 104-21. See also William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 392-95.
The Syromiatnikov letter is cited in Norman Pereira, White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War (Montreaclass="underline" McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996),
p. 106: 'If it were not for you [i.e. Mikhailov], the Council of Ministers would never have decided to give full authority to Admiral Kolchak...'
Popova, DoprosKolchaka, pp. 104 (27 January 1920), 140 (30 January 1920).
Kettle, Fiasco, p. 13; Pereira, White Siberia, p. 102, is more cautious, but considers such communication possible.
The best sources on Kolchak in power remain Smele, Civil War, pp. 108-677, and Pereira, White Siberia. See also Mawdsley, Civil War, pp. 181-215, 317-24.
For a perceptive discussion of the failure of conservative elites in Russia, including the officer corps, see Matthew Rendle, Defending the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in the Revolutionary Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
chapter ia. the fate of the soviet countryside
This is taken from Moshe Lewin, 'Taking Grain: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War', reproduced in his The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen & Co., 1985), pp. 142-77.