Meanwhile, the intervention elsewhere had become more substantiaclass="underline" the British sent troops into the Caucasus and Transcaucasia; the French landed at the port of Odessa on the Black Sea. With the Soviet regime at bay, counterrevolutionary armies arose, often with foreign backing, to challenge its rule: in southern Russia, under Anton Denikin, whose power was based in the northern Caucasus and the Ukraine; in the west, under Nikolai Yudenich, based in Estonia; in the north, under Yevgeny Miller, based in Arkhangelsk; and in the east, in Siberia. At the same time, the Bolshevik regime showed signs of destroying itself from within. Its new economic policy of “War Communism,” in which the state took over all means of distribution and production, had severely restricted private ownership and trade, and had begun to militarize the labor force, as citizens were assigned to compulsory labor gangs. The economic life of the country rapidly declined, there were uprisings in the twenty central provinces which the Bolsheviks controlled, and the anxiety aroused by the intervention had led to paranoid repressions and mass executions that from June 1918 to the end of the Civil War killed an average of one thousand people a month.
As the anti-Bolshevik campaigns merged with the greater war against the Central Powers (the Bolsheviks being viewed as de facto German agents), the early Czech escapades, when seen against the stalemate on the Western Front, had “the glamor of a fairy tale.”652 At one time or another, the Czechs controlled almost two hundred trains, which they converted into rolling citadels. Some of the cars were reinforced by wooden baulks and iron plate, were buttressed by sandbags banked along their sides, and had circular steel gun turrets as well as machine guns bristling through embrasures. A flatcar with artillery anchored on a concrete base was attached to the front of the train (preceding the locomotive), both to protect it and to cover operations of the Czech brigades.
A large number of the legionnaires were men of education and ability – doctors, lawyers, poets, civil engineers – who could build or repair roads, tracks, and bridges, prepare aspirin and other medicaments for the sick or wounded, and meet various special needs. They maintained (and in some cases reconstructed) their own trains, set up an itinerant bank and a postal service that ran from Omsk all the way to Vladivostok, and even printed their own stamps. They published a military newsletter, established cigarette and soap factories, mobile bakeries, laundries, and canteens. To keep up their spirits, they organized musicales and painted their boxcar quarters with colorful, nostalgic scenes evoking their homeland. About 1,600 of them married Russian girls and “carried them along through all the subsequent campaigns” and thereafter home to some Czechoslovak farm or town.653
Three months after the Czechoslovak uprising began, representatives of the two anti-Bolshevik governments based at Samara and Omsk met at Chelyabinsk and agreed to call an “all-Russian” conference. The conference met in Ufa, halfway between the Urals and the Volga, in mid-September, and settled upon a coalition government of sorts seated at Omsk that immediately took possession of the Imperial Gold Reserve captured at Kazan. Overall, its five-man Directory was made up of men of moderate left-wing views, but the compromise lasted eight weeks – from September 23 until November 18. On the 18th, it was overthrown in a coup d’etat when Admiral Alexander Kolchak, “a small, highstrung, and humorless former commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet,”654 proclaimed himself “Supreme Ruler of Russia” and assumed dictatorial powers.
A vice admiral in the Russian Navy, Kolchak was familiar with the Siberian Arctic (where he had taken part as a young staff officer in naval explorations to Novaya Zemlya, the Taimyr Peninsula, and the New Siberian Islands), and had shown heroism in both the Russo-Japanese and First World wars. His stewardship of the Black Sea Fleet had lasted from August 1916 to June 1917, but unwilling to acknowledge the authority of the fleet committees after the tsar’s abdication, had thrown his sword overboard at a mass meeting on the deck of his flagship, to protest the democratization of the command. Something of an Anglophile, Kolchak had both personal and professional ties to the British military and business establishment, and at the time the Bolsheviks took power, he was on a special mission to the United States, where he had met with President Wilson and was consulted about a planned Allied attack on the Dardanelles. From the United States, he had gone directly to Harbin in Manchuria, where he conferred with General Horvath, administrator of the railway zone. The two then traveled together to a conference in Peking, called at the end of April by the Russian Minister (and attended by Allied representatives) to help plot an anti-Bolshevik regime. The original Allied plan had evidently been to make the French General Maurice Janin the commander of all forces, Russian and foreign alike, in Siberia. But doubting that Russians would rally to a foreign officer, Janin was restricted to an advisory role (assuming technical command of the Czechs), and Kolchak emerged in his place.
Returning through Manchuria, he had been brought to Omsk in the private car of the head of the British military mission, General Alfred Knox, in mid-October, and after serving for fourteen days as Minister of War in the new coalition government, took the reins of power forcibly into his own hands. “I considered it to be my duty,” he afterwards explained, “as one of the representatives of the former Government, to fulfil my obligation to the Allies; that the obligations which Russia had assumed to the Allies were my own obligations also.”655 In an appeal to the population, Kolchak briefly summed up his program of action thus: “I set as my main objective the creation of an efficient army, victory over Bolshevism and the establishment of law and order, so that the people may choose the form of government which it desires without obstruction and realize the great ideas of liberty which are now proclaimed in the whole world.”656
He also agreed to reassume Russia’s prewar debt.
Omsk, as the capital of the new regime, had much to recommend it. It was the center of navigation on the Ob-Irtysh river system, a Trans-Siberian junction, and had extensive railroad and machine shops, enormous barracks, and several good military hospitals. But it had nothing around it to compare to the industrial heartland over which the Soviets still ruled. “The thought kept running through my head,”657 one Czech officer recalled,
how lonely and how dreary was the stage which Kolchak had selected for his empire-building. In the midst of this treeless steppe, six feet deep with snow in winter, windblown and brown in summer, when the only break in the endless monotony is an occasional horse-shaped cluster of Turkish yurts, Omsk is cut off from civilization. This is merely accentuated by the thin steel ribbon of the Trans-Siberian. The log huts on every hand and the unpaved street down which gallop Mongols on undipped ponies, bumping into caravans of camels, heighten the impression of the frontier.
By contrast, the Reds had the advantage of interior communications and a growing spirit of national resistance against invaders given to them by the policy of the Allies. Indeed, the collapse of Germany and the end of World War I in November 1918 (coincident with the Omsk coup) eliminated the original excuse for intervention, which now assumed an avowedly counterrevolutionary aim. President Wilson, uncomfortably aware that his promise not to become involved in Russia’s internal affairs was now automatically contradicted by the presence of American troops, proposed to mediate a peace, but the French and British rejected the idea, landed more soldiers, and stepped up their logistical support of the Whites. Eventually, Wilson was persuaded to go along, provided Kolchak guaranteed to establish a democratic regime in the event of victory. Kolchak did so, in a reply reputedly drafted for him at Omsk by French and English advisers. Nevertheless, there was a wavering will behind this Allied show of resolve, which reflected a profound uncertainty as to what the intervention could achieve. Perhaps none was more apprehensive than an American colonel, John Wood, who warned: “The Allies had better be cautious how they proceed in the diagnosis and dismemberment of this great people or they may one day find themselves on the operating table with this giant holding the knife.”658