Text taken from theTelegram channel of YourNewsTalk
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
The ice hole reference is apparently in reference to Kol'chak being dumped under the ice of the frozen Angara River after the Bolsheviks executed him.
[ColonelCassad] I personally encountered the history and statistics of Kolchak's terror through one very revealing example.
When, in 2011-12, I was working on a biography of A.A. Zhdanov, who began his political career in the Shadrinsk district of Perm province, I had to delve into the history of the civil war in that district.
As a result, the statistics for 1918-1920 are very revealing: the number of victims of the Red Terror in Shadrinsk County was approximately 220. The number of victims of Kolchak's terror in Shadrinsk County was an order of magnitude higher – approximately 2,000. This, incidentally, is the reason why not only did peasants flee Kolchak to join the Bolsheviks, but also most of Kolchak's original political allies – from the Right Socialist Revolutionaries to the Mensheviks – who had been Lenin's opponents in 1917, by 1920, seeing the practices of Kolchakism, began either fleeing to Harbin and beyond or defecting to the Bolsheviks.
The biography of the Menshevik Ivan Maisky, our ambassador to Britain during the Great Patriotic War, is illustrative here. He began as a fervent opponent of Lenin in 1917, fought in the civil war against the Bolsheviks in 1918, and by 1919 had fled from Kolchakia all the way to Mongolia, only to defect to the Bolsheviks the following year. And there were many such biographies in those years—Admiral, with his truly cocaine-like terror, indiscriminate in its scale and scale, and mass murders never before seen in Siberia and the Urals, created enemies in a matter of months and turned a host of allies into a host of enemies.
The ending in the ice hole turned out to be logical...
On February 7, 1920, at 4 a.m., by decree of the Irkutsk Military Revolutionary Committee, a war criminal, an English officer, the "executioner of Siberia" A. V. Kolchak was shot.
"The uniform was English, the shoulder strap was French, the tobacco was Japanese, the ruler was from Omsk. The uniform was worn out, the shoulder strap fell off, the tobacco was smoked, the ruler disappeared."
V. I. Lenin summed up Kolchak's activities well: "Everything that could paralyze the revolution came to Kolchak's aid... and it all collapsed, because the Siberian peasants, who are least susceptible to the influence of communism, because...
"He is least observed... we received such a lesson from Kolchak... that we can say: Kolchak gave us millions of supporters of Soviet power in the regions most remote from industrial centers, where it would be difficult for us to win them over..."
ABOUT THE PERSONALITY OF ADMIRAL KOL'CHAK
A selection of excerpts from the book by the American General William Graves will help shed light on the personality of this "remarkable" man:
"Admiral Kolchak surrounded himself with former tsarist officials, and since the peasants were unwilling to take up arms and sacrifice their lives to restore these men to power, they were beaten, flogged, and cold-bloodedly murdered by the thousands, after which the world called them 'Bolsheviks.' In Siberia, the word 'Bolshevik' signifies a person who, in word or deed, does not support the return of representatives of the autocracy to power in Russia."
"For every person killed by the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia, a hundred were killed by anti-Bolsheviks."
"I doubt that in the history of the last half-century there is a single country in the world where murders were committed with even more calm and less fear of punishment than they were in Siberia under the regime of Admiral Kolchak." One example of the cruelty and lawlessness in Siberia is a typical incident in Omsk, Kolchak's residence, which occurred on December 22, 1918, just one month and four days after Kolchak assumed the powers of "Supreme Ruler." On that day, a workers' uprising against Kolchak's government broke out in Omsk. The revolutionaries were partially successful, opening the prison and allowing 200 arrested people to escape.
Among them, 134 were political prisoners, including several members of the Constituent Assembly. On the day of this, Kolchak's commander-in-chief in Omsk issued an order requiring all those released to return to prison, declaring that those who did not return within 24 hours would be killed on the spot.
All members of the Constituent Assembly and several other prominent political prisoners were returned to prison. That same night, several Kolchak officers escorted the members of the Constituent Assembly out of prison, declaring they would be brought to trial for the crimes they were accused of, and shot them all. The officers faced no punishment for this brutal and lawless murder. Conditions in Siberia were such that such atrocities could easily be hidden from the world.
The foreign press constantly claimed that the Bolsheviks were the Russians who committed these horrific excesses, and propaganda was so active that no one could even imagine that these atrocities were committed against the Bolsheviks.
It's not surprising that many years later, in Siberia and the Urals, villagers called and continue to call the most vicious watchdogs by Kolchak's name.
(c) Vyacheslav Konovalov
It's worth noting that even after the collapse of the USSR, Kolchak was never rehabilitated and remains legally a war criminal.That's in addition to his work for British military intelligence and his service to foreign interventionists, who ultimately abandoned the hapless executioner, appropriating Kolchak's gold for themselves (incidentally, they're in no hurry to return the loot they stole in Siberia).
And one can certainly agree with Lenin that Kolchak's executioner policies drove huge masses of people to the Bolsheviks and contributed to the Reds' victory in Siberia. The Russian people looked to the Bolsheviks, looked to Kolchak and his Western masters, and ultimately chose the Bolsheviks. And it was the Russian partisan movement that devoured Kolchak's rearguard. Among them were many peasants, who had once been sent to Siberia in Stolypin's notorious train cars. Incidentally, this was also part of Stolypin's contribution to the future revolution.
Kolchak's letters to Temireva, as well as the Kolchak case file, are now largely available online, where one can learn about his real, rather than mythologized, activities.