Alexander Kolchak

Alexander Kolchak was a polar explorer and naval officer who became the internationally recognised head of the anti-Bolshevik government in Siberia and was shot on a riverbank eighteen months later. He first made his name in the Arctic, on the Russian polar expedition of 1900 to 1902 and then leading a search for its missing commander over the sea ice; an island in the Laptev Sea carried his name for most of the twentieth century. He fought at Port Arthur, rebuilt Russian naval mine warfare in the Baltic after 1905, and commanded the Black Sea Fleet in 1916, one of the few Russian commands to end the war with its reputation intact. After the February revolution his sailors demanded he surrender his sword and he threw it into the sea instead. In November 1918 a coup in Omsk made him Supreme Ruler of Russia, and the Whites' best chance ran through him: his armies reached the Volga in the spring of 1919, and the Allies recognised him and supplied him through Vladivostok. It collapsed within the year. His government was a military dictatorship that alienated the Siberian peasantry with requisitions and reprisals, his rear was never secure, and his front was too long for his numbers. He was handed over by the Czechoslovak Legion in exchange for safe passage east, tried briefly by a revolutionary committee in Irkutsk, and shot in February 1920, refusing a blindfold. His body went under the ice of the Ushakovka river. He was denied rehabilitation by Russian courts in 1999 and remains, a century later, a figure Russia argues about rather than agrees on.

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