ABSTRACT
Semenov had long been insulated from the main war fronts by Admiral Kolchak’s territory. By the summer of 1919, this buffer was as worn-out and full of holes as the cushions in a first-class passenger coach. Kolchak’s armies in western Siberia were afflicted with a terminal decay of spirit that no achievable military victory could remedy. The fervor that inspired White volunteers to rise up against the Reds in autumn 1918 had been exhausted by Omsk’s disastrous spring 1919 offensive. Popular support that once cemented the fragile anti-Bolshevik alliances had crumbled in the wake of the November 1918 White militarist coup, incessant crackdowns against any political opposition to the bumbling administration of ‘Supreme Dictator’ Kolchak (as the opposition referred to him) and an abysmal economic climate that stifled commerce and discouraged agriculture. Instead of maturing into a hothouse for the Siberian Provisional Government’s seedling democracy, Omsk became a nesting ground for profiteers, myopic militarists who could not comprehend the social changes in the empire, scores of elegant, cowardly officers who filled the cafes and purposeless staff positions and unfortunate bourgeois refugees with blind faith in Russia’s old institutions.
