Kolchak and the Allies: the Empire’s End in Siberia – Part 2
Presented by Anatol Shmelev and Laurie Manchester

There was so much material to present at our last session on the Eastern Front (March 27) that we did not have hardly any time left to answer the scores of really fascinating questions and comments that we received.  So we decided to continue our event, to present some materials that could not fit into Part 1, and to discuss the questions, the great reminiscences and family histories that you, our listeners, have submitted and that deserve to be aired publicly.  Two of our presenters,  Anatol Shmelev and Laurie Manchester, were able to find time in their schedules and agreed to lead this session, on Saturday, April 17 – but please note that because of holiday schedules, we will start an hour later, at 2 PM EDT.

It would be great if you could send in your questions in advance, to rna@russiannobility.org.  Of course, we will revisit the questions and comments that had already been submitted.  To refresh your memory, it would be best to revisit Part 1 at our YouTube channel, giving Part 2 some context.

Our friend Anatol Shmelev, the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia and Eurasia and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, will return again to lead us through the latter portion of this period focused on the years after Kolchak’s execution, expanding on the concluding part of his just-published book In the Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920 (Hoover Institution Press).   Laurie Manchester will continue to explore the unique story of the almost Russian city of Harbin, part of the unique territory of Manchuria that caught between the competing interests of the USSR, China and Japan in the intra-war period, forcing its Russian inhabitants into a choice between return to Russia or a second dislocation.

SPEAKERS

ANATOL SHMELEV is the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia and Eurasia and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and project archivist for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection. Anatol Shmelev studied history at UCLA and UC Berkeley (M.A., 1989) and received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, with a dissertation on the foreign policy of the Siberian government during the Russian Civil War.

His bibliography of Russian émigré military literature was published in 2007 by Norman Ross, following an edited collection of essays on archiving the lives of Russian and East European emigrants entitled Tracking a Diaspora, published by The Haworth Press in 2006. Vneshniaia politika pravitelstva admirala Kolchaka, 1918–1919 (The Foreign Policy of Admiral Kolchak’s Government, 1918–1919) was published by the European University Press in St. Petersburg in 2017.

A native of New England, LAURIE MANCHESTER received her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1995. She is associate professor of History at Arizona State University, and the author of Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia, which won the 2009 Vucinich prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. The book she is presently writing, From China to the Soviet Union: The Return of the “True” Russians, is based on work in twenty archives and nearly a hundred oral interviews with repatriates and emigres from China. Professor Manchester was the recipient of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Harvard University, and the Social Science Research Center.

MODERATOR

SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY is a well-known reporter based in Moscow since 1991, writing on political and cultural issues for The New York Times and The Art Newspaper.