Admiral Kolchak (seated) and General Alfred Knox (behind Kolchak) observing military exercises on the Eastern Front of the Russian Civil War. Date 1919.
The garrison of the Winter Palace originally consisted of about 2,000 all told, including detachments from junker and ensign schools, three squadrons of Cossacks, a company of volunteers and a company from the Women's Battalion. It had six guns and one armoured car, the crew of which, however, declared that it had only come "to guard the art treasures of the Palace and was otherwise neutral"!
The garrison had dwindled owing to desertions, for there were no provisions and it had been practically starved for two days. There was no strong man to take command and to enforce discipline. No one had any stomach for fighting; and some of the ensigns even borrowed great coats of soldier pattern from the women to enable them to escape unobserved.
The greater part of the junkers of the Mikhail Artillery School returned to their school, taking with them four out of their six guns. Then the Cossacks left, declaring themselves opposed to bloodshed! At 10 p.m. a large part of the ensigns left, leaving few defenders except the ensigns of the Engineering School and the company of women.
During the Russian Civil War, he was the head of the British Mission (Britmis) and notional Chef d'Arrière of the White Army in Siberia under Admiral Kolchak. He barely intervened in the combat operations, as Kolchak was unwilling to listen to his advice and to accept demands about a Russian Constituent Assembly after the war.[5]
In 1921 Knox published his memoirs, With the Russian Army: 1914–1917. In this book he also tells the story of heroine Elsa Brändström.
^This was a major political issue of the early 1930s. Following the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32, the National Government had produced a White Paper on the constitutional future of India in March 1933. After a further year and a half of debate, legislation was introduced, which became the Government of India Act 1935, creating elected provincial governments in India.
^S.P. Agrawal and J.C. Aggarwal,Information India : 1993–94. Global View. New Delhi : Concept, 1997. ISBN9788170225379 (p. 379).
^"...General Alfred Knox MP, who in 1919 had been Churchill's special representative at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak and who still regarded the anticommunist fight as his special vocation". Markku Ruotsila Churchill and Finland: A Study in Anticommunism and Geopolitics. London ; Frank Cass, 2005. ISBN0415349710 (p. 92)
^James M. Curtis, Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination. University of Georgia Press, 2008 ISBN9780820331867 (p.70)