Kolchak, Aleksandr

Kolchak, Aleksandr (Vasilyevich)

(born Nov. 16, 1874, St. Petersburg, Russia—died Feb. 7, 1920, Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Russia) Russian naval officer and political leader. He was forced to resign as commander of the fleet in the Black Sea after the Russian Revolution of 1917 began. After a coup d'état in Omsk in 1918, he gained power among the counterrevolutionary White Russians, and in 1919 he was recognized by them as supreme ruler of Russia. After initial successes against the Red Army, his armies were routed in 1919; the next year he was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks.

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Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasil’evich 

Born Nov. 4 (16), 1874, in St. Petersburg; died Feb. 7, 1920, in Irkutsk. One of the leaders of the Russian counterrevolution; admiral (1917). Son of a naval artillery officer.

Kolchak graduated from the Naval College (1894). During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 he commanded a destroyer and a battery in Port Arthur. He participated in polar expeditions in 1900–03 and 1908–11 (as a hydrologist). In 1906–09 and 1911–14 he served on the Naval General Staff. He took part in World War I (1914–18) as chief of the operations department of the Baltic Fleet, commander of a mine division, and, from July 1916, commander of the Black Sea Fleet. After the February Revolution of 1917 he took a sharply counterrevolutionary position and, under pressure from the masses of seamen, he was recalled to Petrograd by the Provisional Government. He was sent on an assignment to Great Britain and the USA.

In October 1918, with General A. Knox of Britain, he arrived in Omsk and on November 4 was appointed minister of war and of the navy of the “Siberian Government.” On Nov. 18, 1918, with the support of Cadets, White Guard officers, and interventionists, he staged a coup and established a military dictatorship, taking the title of “supreme ruler of the Russian state” and the rank of supreme commander in chief (until Jan. 4, 1920). After the defeat of the White Guard troops he fled from Omsk to Irkutsk, where on Dec. 27, 1919, he was taken into custody by Czechoslovak troops. On Jan. 15, 1920, at the demand of insurgent workers, he was surrendered to the Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik Political Center and then turned over to the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee. After an investigation and a trial he was shot by sentence of the revolutionary committee.