Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield Page A

about Kolchak and possibly this endeared him to Sir Alfred. The British general listened with interest to the diminutive admiral’s views on the conflict in Russia. Kolchak impressed the British general to the extent that Sir Alfred went away insisting that Kolchak was the great White hope.
    [The Whites themselves at this time had incredibly few anxieties about their chaotic lack of organization, but the Allies—particularly the British—were desperate in their insistence that the Whites produce a single leader upon whom the Allies could rely for coordination, command and liaison.]
    The Allies finally got what they wanted. An English major general, supported by Czech and Japanese and French and American officials, succeeded in imposing upon Russia a one-man government in the person of Admiral Aleksandr V. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias.
    â€œI do not believe that [General Sir Alfred] Knox reckoned on Kolchak’s temperamental character. The Admiral was undoubtedly on his best behavior in those early days, but he had an erratic and violent temper. Much later, when we were aboard his train, I remember that the Admiral’s desk had to be resupplied every morning with pens and inkwells and that sort of thing, because during the course of a day’s business he would fly into at least one rage in which he would smash everything breakable he could lay his hands on.
    â€œHe had what you would have to call an intransigent sense of principle, but he was filled with unstable energies. I’m convinced he was honest, but he was weak; he was determined but rather adolescent—he would react to bad news with an almost catatonic frown, like a child’s—solemn and innocent. He really was uncontrollably neurotic. And I had the feeling he was always inclined to be persuaded by the last person who talked to him.”
    Kolchak traveled with a retinue that included several personal servants and his mistress, whose husband was one of Kolchak’s officers. [Kolchak’s wife and children were safely ensconsed in Paris for the duration.]
    Kolchak was undoubtedly a man of naïveté and excesses. But he saw through to the realities of the Civil War to the extent that he quickly realized the uselessness of the Whites’ strategy of evasive harassment. His armies were soloists who could not harmonize; they had Lenin outgunned, outmanned and outsupplied, yet they had made virtually no progress toward Moscow. *
    Unfortunately Kolchak’s early efforts to set this right were undermined by his own command structure. His government, of which he was “supreme ruler,” had little actual military control. The Allies had imposed upon White Russia a commander in chief of armed forces in the person of General Pierre Janin, the ranking member of the French Military Commission. Janin took his orders from Paris.
    The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia was commanded by Major General William S. Graves, who stayed in Vladivostok almost the whole time and, under orders from President Woodrow Wilson, refused to intervene in Russian internal affairs except by using his troops to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway. General Sir Alfred Knox, having installed Kolchak, seemed to feel his responsibility had been met and he made no apparent effort to help clarify the command structure between Janin and Kolchak. Janin himself was a gruff soldier who spoke poor Russian and was as inept at strategy as he was expert in tactics.
    â€œAdmiral Kolchak was a liberal. It was not through his own design that he found himself put in a position of dictatorship. I felt he regarded it as an enigmatic position—he never seemed to decide how to handle it. He lacked a tyrant’s personality, the despotic inclinations; he never seemed to realize the extent of the powers that had been given to him.
    â€œHe didn’t have the ruthlessness or force of will to make subordinates submit to his demands, and he had no