July 1st 1919, the first anniversary of the inauguration of the Provisional Siberian Government, was long anticipated as a day of festivities at Omsk. Parades, charity rallies and football matches were among events organized in the capital for the jubilee of White power in Siberia. As the day finally dawned, however, only the most ignorant or intoxicated of revellers could have altogether obscured from their minds feelings of uneasiness engendered by incoming reports of panic and disorder at the front, as the Red Army, having rebuffed Kolchak's spring offensive on the Volga, poured through the Urals passes to debouch onto the West Siberian plain. Indeed, even as the last celebratory cups were being drained towards the evening of the holiday, the devastating news was to reach the capital that Perm, the first jewel in Kolchak's crown, the first trophy of his Siberian Army, had that very day been abandoned to the Reds. It was the beginning of the end for White Siberia.

Kolchak's fragile nerves seem to have cracked altogether under the strain of these military reverses. Interlocutors and supplicants of the Supreme Ruler during July and August invariably talk of his ‘appearing to be in a state of extreme nervous tension’, looking ‘really and truly worn out’, and speak of ‘gloomy, mistrustful and suspicious moods’ alternating with ‘uncontrollable fits of anger’ as Kolchak snapped pencils or paced manically about his office, railing against everyone from the Allies to the Masons for sabotaging the White cause.