Virtually alone and defenceless, he was shot in a grubby charade of justice as the remains of his own army fought towards Irkutsk to rescue him. For one year this man had been the Allies' candidate to lead the White armies to victory against Bolshevism. All stood in awe of this strange, moody and dedicated man, whose sense of honour and duty led him to take up a cause he must have suspected was doomed and which would lead to his death.
In the maelstrom of Siberia, where retreating Czechs first guaranteed and then turned against the White Russian cause, where Japanese, American, French, and British troops and interests co-operated, contradicted, and finally betrayed the cause they claimed to support, Kolchak attempted to establish his government. Against him were ranged not merely the conflicting and competing interests of the great powers but the growing strength of the Red Army. As the White armies retreated so their will to resist collapsed. Kolchak's flight became a desperate and epic escape attempt along the Trans-Siberian express with the gold reserve of Imperial Russia. Around him every adventurer, every half-baked revolutionary, closed in for the kill.
This is a vast sweeping panorama of Russian history in a time of crisis, of a world in the throes of revolutionary change, and of a land on which the eyes of that world east and west were focused. And at the centre of that land stood the vast brooding presence of Admiral Aleksandr Vassilievich Kolchak - the last Supreme Ruler of All the Russias.
The corpses were kicked or were prodded over the edge of the escarpment, down the short piste of frozen snow . . . into the water and under the ice . . . The lorry driver cranked his engine, the soldiers climbed aboard and the vehicle jolted back past the prison, across the bridge just beyond it, over the Ushakovka and into Irkustsk. Behind them dawn was breaking.
7 February 1920
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