The Republic of the Ushakovka: Admiral Kolchak and the Allied Intervention in Siberia 1918-20

1918: The World War was over, but the battle against Bolshevism had barely begun. Soviet Russia was assailed on all sides, by a combination of her foreign enemies and the supporters of the old Imperial order. The most dangerous threat came not from the White armies close to Moscow and Leningrad, but from the east in Siberia. There the ambitions of the White soldiers, lead by a Czarist admiral, matched the aspirations of the former allies, Britain and the United States. In the East also, was an army of mercenaries determined to fight their way home - the legion of trained soliders formed among former Czech prisoners of the Russians. And, above all there were the hidden ambitions of the Japanese, fulfilling their plan to achieve an ever greater presence on the mainland of Asia. The Republic of the Ushakovka, the creation of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, was the facade, behind which all these contrary ambitions were played out. Kolchak was a patriot, a tragic if inadequate figure; his associates, foreign and Russian, were a seedy rag-bag ruled by self-interest, greed or political ambition. If the characters were small, the landscape on which their games were played, was immense. The skill of Charles Connaughton's narrative is that he is a master both of the detail and the wider implications of these inglorious but epic events.