Russian State (1918–1920) in the context of "White Army"

Omsk (/ˈɒmsk/; Russian: Омск, IPA: [omsk]) is the administrative center and largest city of Omsk Oblast, Russia. It is situated in southwestern Siberia and has a population of over one million. Omsk is the third largest city in Siberia after Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, and the twelfth-largest city in Russia. It is an important transport node, serving as a train station for the Trans-Siberian Railway and as a staging post for the Irtysh River.

During the Imperial era, Omsk was the seat of the Governor General of Western Siberia and, later, of the Governor General of the Steppes. For a brief period during the Russian Civil War in 1918–1920, it served as the capital of the anti-Bolshevik Russian State and held the imperial gold reserves.

The White movement, also known as the Whites, was one of the main factions of the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. It was led mainly by the right-wing and conservative officers of the Russian Empire, while the Bolsheviks who led the October Revolution in Russia, also known as the Reds, and their supporters, were regarded as the main enemies of the Whites. It operated as a system of governments and administrations united as the Russian State, which functioned as a military dictatorship throughout the most of its existence, and military formations collectively referred to as the White Army, or the White Guard.

Although the White movement included a variety of political opinions in Russia opposed to the Bolsheviks, from the republican-minded liberals through monarchists to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds, and lacked a universally-accepted doctrine, the main force behind the movement were the conservative officers, and the resulting movement shared many traits with widespread right-wing counter-revolutionary movements of the time, namely nationalism, racism, distrust of liberal and democratic politics, clericalism, contempt for the common man and dislike of industrial civilization; in November 1918, the movement united on an authoritarian-right platform around the figure of Alexander Kolchak as its principal leader. It generally defended the order of pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, although the ideal of the movement was a mythical "Holy Russia", what was a mark of its religious understanding of the world. The positive program of the movement was largely summarized in the slogan of "united and indivisible Russia [ru]" which meant the restoration of imperial state borders, and its denial of the right to self-determination. The Whites are associated with pogroms and antisemitism; while the relations with the Jews featured a certain complexity, the movement was largely antisemitic, with the White generals viewing the Revolution as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. Antisemitism and more broad nationalism and xenophobia of the movement were manifested in the acts of the White Terror, which often targeted non-Russian ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire.

Bashkiria, also called Bashkurdistan, Lesser Bashkiria, or the Autonomy of Bashkortostan, was a short-lived autonomous state which existed from 1917 to 1919, during the Russian Civil War. Aligned with the Russian State, Bashkiria was attacked and later annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, leading to its 1919 collapse and succession by the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
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The Provisional All-Russian Government, informally known as the Directory, the Ufa Directory, or the Omsk Directory, was a short-lived government of the Russian State during the Russian Civil War, formed on 23 September 1918 at the State Conference in Ufa as a result of a forced and extremely unstable compromise of various anti-Communist forces in eastern Russia. It was dissolved two months later after the coup, which had brought Admiral Alexander Kolchak to power in Communist-free areas of eastern Russia. It was meant to be a continuation of the original Russian Provisional Government that was overthrown during the October Revolution in 1917.

The Government was formed from the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, mainly Socialist Revolutionaries and Kadets based in Samara, and from the Provisional Siberian Government of regional politicians and rightist officers and based in Omsk. The two regimes had previously failed to work effectively together, with rivalry leading to a customs war and to numerous border disputes. In November 1918 a military coup by right-wing Kadets, officers, and Cossacks, with some support from the Allies, overthrew the Provisional All-Russian Government and appointed Admiral Kolchak as the Supreme Leader of Russia. Kolchak, who had been the Minister of War in the government for two weeks, was supported by the coup faction to create a new government that would have no SR influence.