(Turn) White Knight Kolchak

Grayce 2022-04-21 09:03:22

In Soviet-era textbooks, Kolchak was called a "counter-revolutionary leader" during the civil war. Brushed off the dust of history, he was a former admiral, but he was actually a genius scholar, a brave warrior and a clumsy statesman, and an Arctic explorer.

Kolchak had a soft spot for his military career when he was a child. He got up early every day to do gymnastics, take cold baths to strengthen his body, and read with great interest the biographical stories of those military commanders with outstanding military achievements. In 1888, at the age of 13, he was admitted to the St. Petersburg Naval School, voraciously read books, and he was proficient in four foreign languages, including the obscure Chinese. At the age of 19, Kolchak graduated with honors.

At that time, scientists from all over the world were very interested in the untouched Arctic region, and they organized expeditions to investigate. At the end of 1899, Kolchak received an invitation from the famous Russian polar explorer Baron Thor. He was invited to join an Arctic expedition as a hydrologist. In the summer of 1900, the icebreaker "Dawn" carried Thor's expedition at anchor and set off for the Novosibirsk Islands. In the spring of 1902, the expedition finally reached the Novosibirsk Islands, but the route to the north was blocked by the ice group, and Kolchak and others had to return the same way. In 1906, Kolchak's academic book "Ice Accumulation in the Kara Sea and the Siberian Sea" won the highest award of the Russian Royal Geographical Society - the Grand Constantine Gold Medal. In 1910, he sailed in the Far East with the icebreaker "Vaigach Island", drawing maps and nautical charts. Later, it was based on these nautical charts to open up the Arctic Ocean waterway.

In August 1914, when the First World War broke out, Kolchak, who served as a naval officer in the Baltic Fleet, was extremely excited . However, the cumbersome war machine of the Tsarist Empire quickly failed, and many generals behaved mediocrely. But Kolchak was extremely commanding, and he dealt a head-on blow to the German Marines in Riga, and was soon promoted to admiral. Kolchak was good at laying, and his ships often went deep into enemy waters to lay mines far away, and sank dozens of German ships. In 1916, Kolchak was promoted to Vice Admiral and appointed Commander of the Black Sea Fleet. He also made outstanding achievements in the Black Sea - sinking several German warships in Constantinople and firmly holding the sea control of the Black Sea in the hands of the Russian army.

In February 1917, Kolchak was the first admiral to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. He said: "I am not in the service of one form of government or another, but in the service of my fatherland, which I regard as above all else." Sailors, soldiers and workers in Sevastopol, June 17, 1917 The congress passed a resolution to dismiss Kolchak as the commander of the Black Sea Fleet and send him to the United States for a military inspection. Kolchak stayed in the United States for two months, and when he returned through Japan, he learned that the Bolsheviks had held the October Revolution, and he regarded himself as the representative of the overthrown legitimate government, and felt that it was necessary to fight against the Bolsheviks. In 1918, the supreme government

established a cabinet in Ufa, the Ural region, that is, the Russian Provisional Government, and Kolchak was appointed as the Minister of Military Affairs. On November 18, 1918, Kolchak was proclaimed the supreme consul of Russia, and the White Guard generals Denikin and Yudenich both recognized his regime.

In a short period of time, Kolchak had assembled an army of 150,000 men and launched an all-out attack from east to west in the spring of 1919. The army has reached the area close to the Volga line. On the Belaya River, several officer corps called Kolchak's elite division were annihilated by the Red Army commanded by Tukhachev. Since then, the White Army has been unable to recover and has been in retreat. In October 1919, Kolchak's forces were again defeated at Tobolsk. And so the Great Retreat began. Dozens of trains laden with soldiers, refugees and various items head east from Omsk. The last to leave Omsk was Kolchak, who was to take the gold reserves that the White Guards had brought from the treasury in Kazan to the east.

Kolchak had now become an obstacle for the British, the French, and the Czech general J. Gaida and the Cossack leader Semenov, among others. They all wanted to own the train with gold, and no one cared about the life and death of the supreme consul. In December, Kolchak's train was detained in Nizhny-Udinsk on the orders of the French general Genin. On December 19, an uprising broke out in Irkutsk, the new temporary capital of Russia, and power was transferred to the "Political Center", a Menshevik organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The French generals and the Czech regiments made a deal with this "political center", they betrayed Kolchak in exchange for the assurance of their safe departure from Russia.

In January 1920, the supreme consul Kolchak and his cabinet Prime Minister B. Pepelyaev were arrested. They were interrogated for two weeks by people from Moscow's "Chika" (Revolutionary Committee). Moscow called with instructions: "Secret execution." In the early morning of February 7, Red Army soldiers took Kolchak and Pepelyaev to an ice cave on the Angara River. The executioner suggested that Kolchak be blindfolded, but he refused, but asked for his last wish—let him smoke a cigarette. As soon as the cigarettes were burnt out, the gunshots rang out. The body was then thrown into the ice cave.

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