The Kadet politician who engineered Kolchak's dictatorship and stood with him to the end
On 22 September 1919 he wrote in his diary: 'General Knox came to see me… He received instructions from Churchill to support exclusively the Supreme Ruler.' The prime minister's own record from inside a collapsing regime.
A Kadet Party deputy in the imperial State Duma, he organized the military coup in Omsk in November 1918 that installed Alexander Kolchak as Supreme Ruler, the conspiracy's leader according to contemporary sources. He served as Kolchak's Minister of Internal Affairs and, from November 1919, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, leading the crumbling White government as its only loyal politician to the end. Handed over with Kolchak by the Czechoslovak Legion to the Irkutsk Political Center in January 1920, he was shot without trial at dawn on 7 February 1920 on Lenin's direct orders.
Career Timeline
- 1912Kadet Party deputy, Fourth State Duma (Tomsk province)
- 1914–1917Led 3rd Siberian Sanitary Detachment (First World War)
- 1917.02–05Provisional Government commissar and Kronstadt port commander
- 1918.08–11Led military-dictatorship campaign in Siberia, organized Omsk coup
- 1918.12–1919.05Kolchak government: Police Dept director → Deputy Interior Minister
- 1919.05–11Minister of Internal Affairs, Kolchak government
- 1919.11–1920.01Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister)
- 1920.01–02Handed over by Czechoslovak Legion, imprisoned and shot alongside Kolchak