I had a chance to see a good deal of Kolchak while the mission was here. He was said to be of Tartar descent. Of medium height and very dark complexion, he had piercing eyes and a determined expression. He admired Farragut greatly, and made a special trip to his tomb to place a wreath upon it. He was also a great admirer of our Arctic explorers, probably because of his own Polar service. I remember the dinner Admiral Kolchak gave at a Washington hotel to the Secretary of the Navy and prominent naval officers just before he took his departure in 1917. It was about the gloomiest, most funereal occasion I experienced in all my eight years in Washington. News had just arrived of a German victory over the Russians in the Baltic. The Kerensky government was in a perilous position. The depressing situation was reflected in the solemn faces of the banqueters. I did my best to cheer Kolchak, predicting a wonderful future for a democratic Russia when the Allies and America had won the war. "Do you really believe Russia can again have peace?" he asked me, and the tone of his question spoke his own despair. The premonition of tragedy must have been in his soul. At the end of October he sailed from San Francisco, intending to return to European Russia by Siberia. When he reached Japan he found the Bolsheviki had seized power and Kerensky was a fugitive. The Bolshevik government offered him and his officers safe journey to Petrograd, if they would recognize its authority and swear allegiance. Kolchak refused. Gathering together the forces opposing Lenine, he became leader of the anti-Bolshevik movement in Siberia. In the spring of 1919, when the Admiral was head of the Omsk government, the world thought he was going to succeed in his great effort to overthrow Lenine and Trotzky. Then the tide turned. He was driven back. His retreat became a rout. When he reached the region of Lake Baikal, his forces disintegrated and fled, leaving him alone. One day in January, 1920, a revolutionary group raided the village of Innokentieskaya, near Irkutsk, and found Kolchak. They took him prisoner, and turned him over to the Bolshevik commissairs. There was a perfunctory court-martial, which passed the predetermined sentence of death. In the early dawn of February 7, he was led from his cell to the courtyard of a building in Irkutsk, where he was stood with his back to the wall. It was too dark to see his face distinctly, the stories that came to us stated; so a soldier held a lighted lamp near it to guide the firing squad. When the command to fire was given, the squad failed to obey. Angered at their soft-hearted reluctance, the Bolshevik commissair who was supervising the execution pushed the squad aside, strode up to Kolchak, and shot him down. Thus the famous Russian admiral met his fate.