The love story of Kolchak and Anna Timireva. The forbidden relationship of Admiral Kolchak, or love that is stronger than death

And, of course, this is no coincidence, because Anna Timireva was born here - the greatest love of his life…

A talented explorer of Taimyr, awarded the title of active member of the Imperial Geographical Society for his outstanding polar works, scientist, hero of Port Arthur and the Baltic, brilliant naval commander, hydrologist and oceanographer, unsurpassed professional miner, rear admiral, then vice admiral, commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Kolchak never aspired to supreme power. It fell to him as a heavy burden, from which neither his duty as a citizen nor his officer's honor allowed him to evade it. In 1918, Alexander Vasilyevich was appointed Supreme Ruler of Russia, and the Supreme Command of all forces: land and sea was transferred to him.

By this time he is 44 years old, he is married, has a son...

And yet, the main place in his soul, and indeed in fate, is occupied by her - Anna Timireva.

Kolchak was introduced to Anna in 1915 by his longtime friend S. Timirev, with whom they did not lose friendly relations, despite subsequent events...

Having seen him once on the platform in unusual “polar” clothes, Anna asked:

- Who is this?

- Well, Anna! This is Kolchak-Polyarny, our Russian scientist!

Even then he amazed her and seemed to her the most extraordinary person in the world!

And here he is, in a snow-white admiral's uniform, incredibly gallant... At one of the evenings organized for officers and their wives... Short, not very handsome, with a predatory, cruel (at first glance) profile...

What attracted Anna to him is unknown, but from the first meeting she realized that he was her destiny.

And this unsmiling man was, indeed, unusually sentimental and capable of deep feelings...

A rare smile from Kolchak. The picture was taken by an English officer in the Baltic in 1916

Little is known about Anna Vasilievna Timireva. She was born in Kislovodsk in 1896 in the family of the then famous musician Vasily Safonov.

In 1911 she married Prince S. Timirev. She gave birth to a son, Vladimir.

... Despite the almost 20-year age difference, Kolchak falls in love with Anna. And their epistolary romance begins. In the late hours, left alone with herself, Anna Vasilyevna puts a photograph of her beloved in front of her and begins a leisurely conversation with him. She is the first to confess her love to him, and he understands that this is a real feeling. They see each other extremely rarely, but their love only intensifies every day.

There is a war going on, and all letters are censored. Therefore, soon their “mail romance” became public knowledge. Sergei Timirev and Sofia Kolchak also knew about this. How much patience and tact they needed not to descend to humiliation, to a showdown! These people behaved with dignity... simply because they also loved...

... In May 1918, Sergei Timirev was appointed commissioner of the military-industrial committee in the Far East. His wife Anna Vasilievna also came to Vladivostok with him. And in June, while traveling from Harbin to Japan, Kolchak found himself in Vladivostok. Here they met so as not to be separated again. Alexander Vasilievich and Anna Vasilievna left for Japan together. They spent August 1918 in the Japanese resort town of Nika, and these were the happiest days of their lives! In September they had to return to Vladivostok. Kolchak was invited for negotiations by the head of the government of Autonomous Siberia in Omsk, Vologda. Vologodsky offered Vice Admiral Kolchak the post of Minister of Military and Naval Affairs. The proposal was accepted. At the beginning of October, Kolchak and Anna left for Omsk.

In Omsk. Next to Kolchak Anna Temereva

But this, as we know, did not last long, and on January 4, 1920, at the insistence of the Political Council of the White Movement and the Council of Ministers, Alexander Kolchak relieved himself of the powers of the Supreme Ruler and Commander-in-Chief...

And eleven days later he was arrested. Having learned about this, Anna herself came to the Bolsheviks and said:

- Arrest me too. I can't live without him.

Kolchak: She is an old good friend of mine, she was in Omsk, where she worked in my workshop sewing linen and distributing it to military ranks - the sick and wounded. She remained in Omsk until the last days and then, when I had to leave due to military circumstances, she went with me on the train. She arrived here on this train until the time when I was detained by the Czechs. When I came here, she wanted to share my fate with me.

Popov: Tell me, Admiral, is she your common-law wife?

Kolchak: No".

This was not a renunciation. No. He simply clearly understood that he would be shot. Therefore, he did not want the jailers to know about their true relationship. But she never hid this, and in her statement to the Prosecutor General of the USSR from Karlag she wrote: " On January 15, 1920, I was arrested in Irkutsk on Kolchak’s train. I was 26 years old then. I loved this man and could not leave him in the last days of his life. In fact, this is all my fault".

They were placed in different cells, but were allowed to walk around the prison yard. Soon a telegram arrived from Lenin: shoot.

An hour before the execution, they were allowed a meeting in Kolchak’s cell... This is Kolchak’s last note:

« My dear dove, thank you for your affection and concern for me... Don’t worry. I feel better, my colds are going away. I think only about you and your fate... I don’t worry about myself - everything is known in advance. My every move is being watched, and it is very difficult for me to write... Write to me. Your notes are the only joy I can have. I pray for you and bow to your sacrifice. My dear, my beloved, don’t worry about me and take care of yourself... Goodbye, I kiss your hands.”

The last photo of Kolchak

Later she would write the following lines:

And every year on the seventh of February

Alexander Kolchak and Anna Timireva

Wars, revolutions, social upheavals... And against the backdrop of disasters of countries and peoples, like a flower thrown onto the snow trampled by horses - love...

Alexander Kolchak

By the time he met his last love, passionate and inseparable from his biography, Alexander Kolchak had gone through fire, water and copper pipes. He was the darling of fate and the favorite of Russia. He sailed in the waters of twenty seas and four oceans, conquered the Arctic, was awarded Russian and foreign orders, but he considered her, Anna, the main award of his life...

They met by chance. Kolchak was married, she was married to naval officer Sergei Timirev. In addition, he was nineteen years older than his beloved - a whole life. They struggled with their feelings, did not see each other for months, but... Love was stronger. Many call the relationship between Timireva and Kolchak strange: addressed only as “you”, by name and patronymic... Only in their souls could they say “you” to each other - and more than the letters they exchanged for five long years, until the very moment of the admiral’s death Kolchak, they said when their eyes met.

They first met at the station: Anna saw off her husband, and he just walked past. “This is Kolchak-Polar,” her husband respectfully whispered in her ear, but she did not hear him - her heart beat so strongly and sharply, as if she sensed: it was fate itself that had passed by.

Life seemed to deliberately bring them together - either a chance meeting on the street, or an evening with mutual friends, where the famous admiral sang the romance “Shine, burn, my star...”. He sang, and at the same time his eyes looked so incessantly at Anna that she almost felt sick... Then there were meetings alone and conversations, conversations... They talked - they could not stop talking, they could not stop looking at each other, as if they had a presentiment of how little happiness they would have reserved for this century...

When Anna posed at a costume ball in a Russian costume, the photo turned out to be extremely successful. They asked her for memory cards, like some celebrity. She presented them willingly. Later, a mutual acquaintance said: “I saw your portrait in Kolchak’s cabin.” Anna smiled: “Oh, I gave them away so much... so it’s no surprise!” - “What’s surprising is that he only has one portrait of you in his cabin!”

Alexander Kolchak married a wonderful, intelligent, reliable, devoted woman. Sophia had been waiting for him for years from military campaigns and difficult Arctic expeditions. And she had to raise the children herself. They wrote to each other more than they saw each other, and there was never passion between them - their relationship was more like a brotherly one. It was Sophia who first noticed her husband’s feelings for young Anna.

Sophia and Anna were sledding, and the young woman was frozen. Sophia took off the silver fox and threw it over the shoulders of the one her own husband was looking at with eyes that hurt. Well... She was always more of a friend to him than a wife, and she saw how he fought with himself so as not to betray, not to abandon her and his son. But the premonitions did not leave the admiral’s wife, and that same evening she wrote to her friend in Moscow: “I know that Alexander Vasilyevich will divorce me and marry Anna Vasilievna...”

More than one wife noticed something that literally caught her eye: there had long been rumors in society that Kolchak and Timireva were lovers. But this was still very far away. What made them close were only the letters they sent to each other - letters with almost no hint of the future, but full of frank, keen happiness from the anticipation of meeting.

Their love story consisted of short dates, most of which took place in front of strangers, and long letters filled with declarations of love. Kolchak did not belong to himself, he spent his entire life on campaigns and considered serving the Fatherland the most worthy thing for a man. When he left for a long time again, Anna fell into despair. Here are the lines from her letter: “I always want to see you, always think about you, it is such a joy for me to see you, so it turns out that I love you. I’m saying this because I know: this meeting is our last.”

However, he cannot let go of the one he loves more than life: “I spent so many sleepless nights in my cabin, walking from corner to corner, so many thoughts, bitter, joyless. I don’t know what happened, but with all my being I feel that you have left my life, gone so much that I don’t know if I have so much strength and skill to bring you back. And without you, my life has neither that meaning, nor that purpose, nor that joy. I wrote to you that I was thinking of curtailing the correspondence, but I realized that not writing to you, not sharing my thoughts was beyond my strength. I will write again – no matter what it leads to.”

Everything was against their love: their own families, the opinions of others, but the biggest obstacle that prevented these two loving hearts from uniting was the revolution. He, who was ready to give his life in the name of the Motherland, whose oath to serve he never forgot, was a born military man, but had little understanding of politics. Therefore, at first the revolution seemed to him no worse than another military operation; Moreover, he was glad that she would help end the protracted Russian-German war.

He was almost the only one who resisted the enemy when the ships, one after another, began to leave the battlefield. His battleship "Empress Catherine" resisted everyone at once: Turks, Germans, submarines, seaplanes... However, the blow did not come from the enemy troops: their own, Russian, rebel sailors demanded that the officers surrender their weapons. The admiral took out the golden St. George's saber and the St. George's cross from his cabin and threw them into the sea with the words: “The sea gave them to me, and only to the sea will I give them!”

While in St. Petersburg everyone was fighting for power: the Bolsheviks, Kerensky, the Socialist Revolutionaries, General Kornilov - only Kolchak did not participate in this squabble. He came to the city on the Neva with the sole purpose of seeing her, his beloved. They had two whole days - a huge wealth compared to those minutes, or at best hours, when they could be next to each other.

But the time was up, and he hugged his beloved for the last time. It seemed to him that now they were definitely breaking up forever. He accepted the American government's offer to lead the US fleet to the Dardanelles. The path to America was fraught with enormous difficulties for Kolchak - after the losses that the German fleet suffered due to his actions, German intelligence was looking for him everywhere. Even submarines were sent to search for the admiral! From ships heading to England - and this was the only way to reach the United States - they removed all passengers whose description matched Kolchak's portrait.

He was carried around the world, and he really thought that they would never meet again, but... suddenly Anna came to him in Harbin, China! She followed her husband to the Far East and suddenly found out that Kolchak was in Harbin. Hastily said goodbye to her husband, sold her pearl necklace and bought a ticket to an unknown city.

They never parted again. Kolchak fought with the Reds, Anna was next to him. She became everything for her chosen one: a guardian angel, the only outlet in the terrible whirlwind of the civil war, a companion who even followed him to prison... He called her his wife, although they could not get married.

The Bolsheviks locked him in a cell in the Irkutsk prison - four steps wide, eight steps long... Anna came to prison voluntarily. In her file it is written: “self-arrested.” He was completely calm - he was waiting for a trial, albeit not entirely fair, but one where he would be heard. But there was no trial: on the night of February 7, 1920, he was taken out and shot near a frozen river. The body was lowered under the ice - into the very water that he was never afraid of and which became his last refuge...

The admiral's wife, Sofya Vasilyevna, was lucky - the British took her and her son to France. But Anna Timireva remained in Soviet Russia. She was imprisoned several times on the charge: “Being hostile to Soviet power, in the past she was Kolchak’s wife and was with the latter before his execution.” But she was not afraid of anything. And even a terrible blow, when in 1938 her only son Volodya was shot for anti-Soviet propaganda, did not break her. She lived a long time - in memory of her great love, and even at seventy she wrote and dedicated poems to him:

But if I'm still alive

Against fate

It's just like your love

And the memory of you...

author Plotnikov Ivan Fedorovich

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Kolchak Alexander Vasilyevich Battles and victoriesMilitary and political figure, leader of the White movement in Russia - Supreme Ruler of Russia, admiral (1918), Russian oceanographer, one of the largest polar explorers of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, active

Anna Vasilievna Timireva (nee Safonova) is a Russian poetess and artist, the last wife of the admiral, who, after his capture by the Red forces in early 1920, voluntarily decided to go under arrest with him.

Anna Vasilievna Safonova was born on July 18, 1893 in Kislovodsk. She was the sixth child in the large family of Vasily Safonov, a music teacher, pianist and conductor, who for some time was the director of the Moscow Conservatory.

Anna Timireva in her youth | Musiclist

When Anna was 13 years old (1906), her family went to St. Petersburg. In the northern capital, Anna graduated from high school in 1911, after which naval officer Sergei Nikolaevich Timirev took her as his wife.

Anna gave birth to a son, Vladimir, in 1914, and a year later, while in Helsingfors, where her husband was stationed, she met Alexander Kolchak for the first time. This event completely changed their lives. They instantly fell in love, as in the books - at first sight, but they did not confess to each other right away.

Career

In 1918, Anna Timireva worked as a translator in the printing department under the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Ruler in the city of Omsk. In addition to this, the woman worked in a linen-making workshop and was responsible for distributing food to crippled and sick soldiers. Later, already under Soviet rule, she became known as a poetess and published her poems about Kolchak.

Personal life

He was married, and besides, he was nineteen years older than Anna. He sailed on the waters of four oceans, entered twenty seas and earned many domestic and foreign awards and orders. Alexander Kolchak was considered a talented naval commander and a very patriotic person. It is not clear what connected him with Anna, a young married artist, but feelings cannot be deceived.

Gossip

From their first meeting until the arrest of the admiral, for five long years, the soul lovers were always with each other, despite the fact that they might not see each other for months. Both Anna and Alexander had their own families. Many guessed about the feelings of the brilliant naval commander for Timireva, but no one dared to express their assumptions out loud. Anna's husband, like Kolchak's wife, pretended not to notice anything, perhaps hoping that over time their feelings would fade away.

By the oak

In 1938, Anna’s first and only son, Vladimir, was shot. During the search, they found a sword and a pistol on him, and in the indictment they called him a German spy, allegedly obtaining information for Germany about the fishing industry in the USSR. Years later (in 1958), Anna achieved the rehabilitation of the murdered child.

Divorce from husband

Timireva and Kolchak communicated by correspondence. They wrote to each other with amazing respect and nobility, seemingly incomprehensible to modern realities: they always addressed each other as “you” and by their first and patronymic names. “Dear, dear Anna Vasilievna...” - Kolchak usually began his letters with these lines. When she revealed her feelings to him, Alexander put his whole soul into the answer: “I love you more than…”.

Historian's Drafts

Anna divorced Sergei Nikolaevich and abandoned her family and son for the sake of her admiral. Since then, she became Kolchak’s de facto wife and tried to leave him as little as possible. She later called these times the happiest of her life. Through the horrors of the civil war and the mud of the revolution, which then tore Russia apart, they maintained mutual love until the very end.

Kolchak's arrest and years of exile

After the arrest of her beloved, Anna, without a moment’s doubt, followed him into custody. A very young girl, she was twenty-six years old, sought the release of various things and medicines from the director of the prison, because Alexander was very sick. All this time they did not stop writing letters to each other...

Historian's Drafts

In February 1920 he was shot. The girl immediately felt it. The gloomy jailers only turned away to her questions, and the commandant could not deceive her and only said that he had been taken away. A woman’s heart cannot be deceived - Anna immediately understood everything, but until the very end she tried to hear about it from another person just to make sure that her loved one was really gone. Then she will receive a paper with the treasured name and the line “cause of death: execution.”

Anna Timireva in recent years

The death of the admiral did not become the only source of suffering for Anna Vasilievna. She had to spend about thirty more years in camps, prisons and all kinds of exile. Happiness eventually left her life forever; her last photos show her dull eyes. She died at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind a mountain of notebooks with poems and some letters, read out to holes.

Biographical films

More than one film has been made about this beautiful and tragic story. In 1997, director Sergei Yurzhenko completed the documentary film “More than Love. Romance of Kolchak. In 2006, Channel One showed the movie “Admiral Kolchak. Two over the abyss."

Konstantin Khabensky and Liza Boyarskaya in the film "Admiral" | Livestory

In 2008, the big-budget feature film “Admiral” was released in cinemas, telling the story of the love story of Kolchak and Timireva. The key roles in the film were played by, and. The film was received positively by both adults and children, so Channel One later showed a series based on it.

Faktrum publishes an essay in the online magazine “Culturology” about this extraordinary woman and her strange fate.

Anna Timireva and Alexander Kolchak

Anna Vasilievna Safonova from the nobility. She was born in Kislovodsk in 1893. When she turned 13, the family moved to St. Petersburg. There Anna studied at the Princess Obolenskaya gymnasium and graduated successfully in 1911.

Anna was a very educated lady, fluent in German and French. At the age of 18, she married a naval officer and 3 years later gave birth to his son, Vladimir. But this marriage was happy only until the moment Timireva met Kolchak.

They first met in 1915 in Helsingfors. Anna's husband, a captain of the first rank, served there. It was real passion! Anna Vasilievna and Alexander Vasilyevich were not stopped even by the fact that both of them were not free. Meetings became frequent, and passion eventually turned into love. Timireva simply idolized the then vice admiral, and he often wrote touching letters to her.

In 1917, almost immediately after the revolution, Timireva’s husband emigrated, Kolchak’s wife and son remained in Paris. As soon as Kolchak returned from England, Anna Vasilievna came to him. In 1918–1919, Timireva worked in Omsk as a translator for the Press Department under the Administration of the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Ruler (as Kolchak was now called). She was often seen in the hospital near the wounded and in a workshop sewing linen for soldiers.

Anna Vasilievna remained with Kolchak under any circumstances: both when his army was defeated by the Reds, and when the leadership of the Czechoslovak corps, with the tacit consent of the French General Janin, agreed to hand over Kolchak to the Military Revolutionary Committee. When the Cheka interrogated the white admiral for two weeks, Anna not only voluntarily went under arrest, but was also able to break into a meeting with him three times - she supported her lover as best she could before his inevitable death.

After the execution of Kolchak, Anna Timireva was released from prison, but it was from that time that her real way of the cross began. Already in June 1920, she was sent to two years of forced labor in the Omsk concentration camp. After leaving prison, she submitted a request to the authorities to leave the country for Harbin, where her first husband lived. But in response, a resolution came - “Refuse” and another year of imprisonment. In 1922, she was arrested for the third time, and in 1925 she was sent to prison for another three years “for relations with foreigners and former white officers.”

After her release, Anna Vasilievna married railway engineer Vladimir Kniper. But the spring of 1935 brought a new arrest “for concealing one’s past.” True, after some time the camp was replaced by supervised accommodation in Vyshny Volochyok, where she worked as a janitor and seamstress. In 1938, the sixth arrest took place. But Anna was released only after the end of the war. By that time, she had no one left from her family. 24-year-old son Volodya was shot on May 17, 1938. Vladimir Kniper could not stand his wife’s bullying and died of a heart attack in 1942. Anna was not allowed to live in Moscow, and she moved to Rybinsk (then Shcherbakov), getting a job as a prop maker at the local drama theater.

In December 1949, Anna Vasilyevna was arrested again. This time for anti-Soviet propaganda based on the slanderous denunciation of colleagues. Again ten months in Yaroslavl prison and a transfer to Yeniseisk. Returning to Rybinsk again and working in the drama theater again.

By that time, she already looked like an intelligent, neat old woman with bright, lively eyes. No one in the theater knew the story of Anna Vasilievna associated with Kolchak. But everyone was surprised why the theater director (they said he was from the nobility) every time he saw Anna Vasilievna, came up and kissed her hand.

Anna Vasilievna was rehabilitated only in 1960. She immediately moved to Moscow and settled in a communal apartment on Plyushchikha. Oistrakh and Shostakovich got her a pension of 45 rubles. Sometimes she was invited to be an extra at Mosfilm - in "The Diamond Arm" Gaidai appeared as a cleaner, and in Bondarchuk's "War and Peace" - at Natasha Rostova's first ball in the image of a noble elderly lady.

Five years before her death, in 1970, she wrote lines dedicated to the main love of her life, Alexander Kolchak:

I can’t accept it for half a century -
Nothing can help:
And you keep leaving again
On that fateful night.
And I am condemned to go,
Until the deadline passes,
And the paths are confused
Well-trodden roads...
But if I'm still alive
Against fate
It's just like your love
And the memory of you.