Omsk coup (1918)

The Directory, set up by the Ufa State Conference in September 1918, moved to Omsk at the end of October, but the All-Russian Council of Ministers under Pyotr Vologodsky, formed on 4 November from the apparatus of the Provisional Siberian Government, stood far to its right. When Viktor Chernov, in the name of the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee, called on 22 October for party members to arm against the anti-democratic forces, the Omsk officers and right-wing politicians took it as the immediate pretext for a coup. On the night of 17 November, at a banquet for the French general Maurice Janin, Cossack officers demanded the imperial anthem "God Save the Tsar", and the Socialist Revolutionary ministers demanded their arrest; instead the Omsk garrison chief Colonel Vyacheslav Volkov, with Krasilnikov and Katanaev, arrested Nikolai Avksentiev, Vladimir Zenzinov, Andrei Argunov and the deputy interior minister Yevgeny Rogovsky. Not a single unit came out for the Directory, its Socialist Revolutionary guard battalion was disarmed in advance, and the Kadet Viktor Pepelyaev won over ministers and public figures. The next morning the Council of Ministers took over full power and by secret ballot chose Kolchak, who was promoted to full admiral and became Supreme Ruler and Supreme Commander. The arrested ministers were soon released and left the country via Vladivostok with British help; Kolchak put the officers who had made the arrests on trial, but all three were acquitted.

The Czechoslovak Legion leadership regarded Kolchak as a "usurper", the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks condemned the coup, and the congress of Constituent Assembly members in Yekaterinburg protested, for which some of them were arrested on 30 November. Kolchak told the press on 28 November: "They call me a dictator. So be it, I am not afraid of the word." Trotsky wrote on 7 January 1919: "Now Admiral Kolchak has seized power and driven out his recent helpers, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. So in the enemy camp there is discord and internecine strife, and that plays into our hands." Yet with power concentrated in his hands Kolchak was able to pull together the White forces beaten on the Volga in autumn 1918 and launch the great offensive of spring 1919, and Russian Wikipedia judges that with this event the anti-Bolshevik movement turned into the White movement.