Alexander Kolchak

Biography

Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak was born on November 16, 1874, in St. Petersburg, into a military family with roots in Turkish ancestry captured during eighteenth-century wars. He was one of Russia's greatest naval officers and Arctic explorers before politics and the revolution made him its most powerful White commander. Kolchak graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps with distinction and immediately distinguished himself in the scientific and exploratory expeditions that were a feature of the pre-war Russian Navy. He participated in the Russian Polar Expedition of 1900–1902, spending two winters in the Arctic and nearly dying of scurvy, and conducted extensive surveys of the Kara Sea and Baltic coasts. In the Russo-Japanese War he commanded a destroyer in Port Arthur and was wounded; in the First World War he rose to command the Black Sea Fleet and became famous for his aggressive mining campaigns that effectively sealed German and Turkish warships in port. By 1917 he was widely regarded as the most capable and dynamic officer in the Russian Navy. After the February Revolution Kolchak remained loyal to the Provisional Government and was offered command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet — an extraordinary honor for a foreign officer — but chose instead to travel east to continue fighting. When the Bolsheviks took power, he made his way to Omsk, Siberia, where in November 1918 he was proclaimed 'Supreme Ruler of Russia' by a coup of naval officers and Cossacks, with Allied backing. He commanded the largest White force — some 400,000 men at the peak — and held the entire Trans-Siberian Railway corridor. Kolchak was a brilliant naval officer and a genuinely decent man, but a poor politician and a worse army commander. He was unable to inspire his subordinates, tolerated corruption and brutality in his forces that alienated the Siberian peasantry, and failed to coordinate with Denikin's simultaneous offensive in the south. The great spring offensive of 1919 collapsed; by autumn his government was in full flight east along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Czechoslovak Legion, disgusted by his government's brutality and anxious to return home, handed Kolchak over to a Socialist-Revolutionary political committee in Irkutsk in January 1920. He was executed by Red Army firing squad on February 7, 1920, his body pushed under the ice of the Ushakovka River.

Key Battles