Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Having on 23 May 1919 added the portfolio of minister of war to his resumé, Colonel Lebedev next oversaw a complete restructuring of the remaining forces of Kolchak’s Russian Army into a White Eastern Front (consisting chiefly of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies) in June–July. Then in July, at Cheliabinsk, he attempted to set a trap for the Reds, but the pincers of his uncoordinated counterattack failed to meet, and the helter-skelter retreat was resumed.62 After this debacle—which was doubly embarrassing as it coincided with the Omsk Diplomatic Conference, at which Allied representatives gathered at Kolchak’s capital to consider how their governments might best aid the admiral—Lebedev was sacked as chief of staff and war minister in August, but this could not alter the verdict of the Allied delegates that Kolchak was now a lost cause. (For several of them, it was their first venture from Vladivostok into darkest White Siberia.) To confirm that conclusion, another effort to check the Red advance between the rivers Ishim and Tobol′, masterminded by Kolchak’s new commander in chief, General M. K. Diterikhs, was similarly botched in early September 1919, as key army groups (notably the Siberian Cossacks Corps of Ataman P. P. Ivanov-Rinov) failed to move on the field of battle quite as smoothly as they did on paper.63 Diterikhs’s services were then also briskly dispensed with, but Kolchak’s capital, Omsk, could not be saved by his pugnacious successor, General K. V. Sakharov, despite the latter’s fashioning of the optimistically monikered “Moscow Army Group” from the remnants of the White Eastern Front. Depleted forces of the Reds’ 27th Rifle Division, who had advance 150 miles in two days, entered and captured the city early on 14 November 1918, before half the defending garrison was even awake—or, rather, half of those garrison units that remained in Omsk, for by that point “the devil take the hindmost” had replaced “all for the Army” as the Whites’ slogan of the hour. Fleeing officers were particularly anxious to remove telltale signs of their status, in case they were apprehended by the Reds, with the result that Omsk’s streets “were so thickly littered with epaulettes as to suggest the idea of fallen leaves in autumn,” according to a British witness.64 Sakharov was then arrested by the exasperated General A. N. Pepeliaev on 9 December 1919 and replaced as commander by General Kappel′, but by then the remains of Pepeliaev’s own 1st Army had mutinied around Tomsk, while their former commander, General Gajda—who had been sacked in early July 1919 for having criticized Lebedev’s direction of the spring offensive—had placed himself at the head of a mutiny against Kolchak at Vladivostok (the Gajda putsch). Meanwhile, the remnants of the Southern Army and its Urals and Orenburg Cossack auxiliaries were by now entirely cut off from the main White force; some fled south toward the Caspian (and ultimately Persia), while others followed Dutov toward Semirech′e (and, ultimately, Chinese Turkestan).65

Amid this chaos, Kolchak and his staff proceeded slowly toward Irkutsk by train. On 4 January 1920, the admiral abdicated, passed supreme authority to General Denikin in South Russia, and somewhat bizarrely, named as commander of forces in the Far East none other than Ataman Semenov—whose appetite for warlordism remained unrivaled in the civil wars and who had caused nothing but trouble for the Omsk regime.66 Perhaps the admiral believed that his own presence in the region might temper Semenov’s penchant for brutality, for Kolchak believed (rightly) that he had secured Allied guarantees for the safe passage of his trains into Transbaikalia. At Irkutsk, however, he was treacherously betrayed by the Czechs, who handed over the erstwhile supreme ruler (and the remainder of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve that was on board his echelon) to the SR-dominated Political Center that had seized control of the city. The admiral was imprisoned, interrogated, and eventually, on 7 February 1920, executed by the Cheka, local Bolsheviks having removed the Political Center from power.67 Those remaining White forces who had survived what amounted to the longest military retreat in military history then skirted Red Irkutsk and, beyond Baikal, were mostly incorporated into Semenov’s Far Eastern (White) Army.