Magazine: Canadian Journal of History; December 1997

                  REVIEWS: MODERN EUROPE

                     ----------------------

    Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak,
    1918-1920, by Jonathan D. Smele. New York, Cambridge University Press,
    1996. xxviii, 759 pp.

    The Russian civil war was a terrible, brutal straggle between the new Soviet
    government, led by V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotskii, and adversaries ranging
    from Socialist Revolutionaries to tsarist officers and pogromists. The
    anti-Soviet opposition was supported by foreign interventionists -- France,
    Great Britain, the United States, Japan, even Canada. It brought out the
    worst and best in the human character: depravity, cruelty, corruption,
    senseless violence, but also courage and self-sacrifice of the highest order.
    Several million combatants and civilians died in battle or from cold, hunger,
    and disease. The Russian civil war is a story about which novelists and
    historians have written at length.

    The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the opening of Russian archives have
    prompted new interest in all aspects of Soviet history, including the civil
    war. Some of the new scholarship is driven by American "triumphalists" and
    Russian "liberals" seeking post facto justifications for the cold war or wishing
    to denigrate Soviet history and achievements. Fortunately, not all the new
    scholarship is so politically motivated.

    Jonathan Smele's effort fits into the latter category. His book is physically
    imposing, a thick tome of more than 750 pages with social scientific tables,
    an attractive dust cover, and published by an important university press.
    Smele's focus is on the civil war in Siberia and in particular the
    anti-Bolshevik government of Admiral Aleksandr Vasil'evich Kolchak, a
    former tsarist naval officer, who was made dictator in an army coup d'etat
    in November 1918 and who was executed in February 1920 in the aftermath
    of his government's collapse.

    Smele"s main points, like those of many historians writing before him, are
    that the Kolchak government was corrupt, lawless, poorly organized, and
    ill-fated. Even so, he sees Kolchak as a not so bad, principled individual, if
    an unstable personality and unfit to govern. On first glance the Siberia
    controlled by the Kolchak government, and presented to the reader by the
    author, is imposing. "Kolchakia," as it was called at the time (and a term
    adopted by Smele), stretched several thousand kilometres from the Ural
    mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

    But all was not quite as it seemed. As Allied officials in Siberia reported at
    the time, Kolchakia could not survive without Allied support. Its authority
    did not stretch far north or south of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the vital
    single-tracked communications and supply line ending in the port city of
    Vladivostok. The railway was effectively controlled by an Allied commission
    and guarded by the Czechoslovak Legion, a sizeable force of former
    prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army turned to Allied purposes.
    The Legion had overthrown Soviet authority along the Trans-Siberian
    Railway during the spring and summer of 1918, encouraged at the outset by
    Allied agents and then supported by the Allied governments. Later,
    however, the Czechs proved unenthusiastic about further fighting after the
    easy gains of the summer became costly to hold when the Red Army learned
    how to fight. Like school boy bullies who have had their heads punched,
    the Czechs withdrew from the front, skulking and nursing grievances against
    the Allies who had not adequately supported them, and against Kolchak,
    whose old guard officers the Czech rank-and-file despised.

    This was not the least of Kolchak's difficulties. Part of the line of the
    Trans-Siberian was held by freebooting. Cossacks and scoundrels, only
    nominally subordinate to Kolchak, and often insubordinate and rebellious.
    They blocked the transport of vital supplies, often seizing them for their
    own use or profit. Their freebooting contributed to the development of a
    widespread partisan movement in 1919, which slowly narrowed the Kolchak
    government's control to a thin corridor along the railway, eventually cut, as
    the Red Army advanced from the west. When Kolchak and the debris of his
    forces had to withdraw in the Siberian winter, the Czechs controlled the
    railway and shunted aside or delayed his trains. The Czechs, now bullying
    Kolchak's Russians, gave their own echelons priority in the race to keep
    ahead of the advancing Red Army. But their discipline was poor, and the
    French officers nominally in charge feared that the Czechs would mutiny
    and strike a deal with the Bolsheviks for their passage out of Russia. Fear
    and panic, intensified by Siberian winter, reigned along the railway as the
    Czechs' rear-guard (of Polish troops organized by the Allies) surrendered to
    the Red Army. Soldiers and civilian refugees died of hunger or typhus, their
    frozen corpses left piled and scattered along the escape routes to the east.
    To save themselves, the Czechs finally bartered captured Soviet gold and
    Kolchak himself for safe passage out of Siberia. Kolchakia had survived for
    only a year.

    This is a story of great pathos and high drama, and yet Smele in his long,
    physically impressive book does not really capture it. The text reads like an
    insufficiently revised doctoral dissertation, which is repetitive, long on
    detail, and short on overview and a climactic story. The author attempts a
    topical rather than chronological approach, with numerous, but in most
    cases unnecessary tables of data and statistics. Moreover, the research base
    of the study is predominantly an impressive range of old printed sources,
    many of which have been available since the 1920s. Newer secondary works
    are to be found in the long bibliography, but in many cases appear
    unassimilated in the author's text. There is minimal use of the manuscript
    collections at the Hoover Institute in the United States. British archival
    sources are better exploited, but there is no use whatever of important
    French or Russian archives. An example of the archival research one might
    have expected in a new study on the civil war may be found in the book by
    Norman Pereira, White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War, published by
    McGill-Queen's University Press a year before Smele's work. In short, this is
    a book of prodigious labour and of new details of interest to specialists, but
    it is otherwise a disappointment which should not stand high in the field.

    ~~~~~~~~

    By Michael Jabara Carley, University of Akron

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