Alexander Kolchak

Son of a naval artillery officer, Kolchak graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps and built a reputation as an oceanographer and Arctic explorer, reaching expeditions to the New Siberian Islands and becoming the youngest vice admiral in the Imperial Navy. Wounded and captured at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War, he returned to lobby the Duma for submarines and aircraft, then commanded the Black Sea Fleet before the February Revolution - the only senior commander who told Nicholas II not to abdicate. Conservative newspapers during the 1917 revolution saw him as a potential military dictator, and in November 1918 a coup installed him as Supreme Ruler after he'd briefly served as Minister of War and Navy in the Provisional All-Russian Government based in Omsk. Early 1919 brought battlefield gains, but his forces lost ground through lack of local support and failure to unite the counterrevolutionary factions; when Omsk fell that November during the Great Siberian Ice March, he moved to Irkutsk, where the chief of the Allied mission and the Czechoslovak Legion detained him in December and handed him to local Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks shot him in