In 1900, a young Russian naval lieutenant sailed into the Arctic ice to chart seas no one had adequately mapped. He endured three years of polar darkness, crossed open ocean in an open boat to rescue a dead man's notebooks, and returned to Saint Petersburg with a scientific monograph that would remain foundational to Arctic research for decades. His name was Alexander Kolchak. Twenty years later, he was shot beside a frozen Siberian river and his body was pushed beneath the ice. In between those two events lies one of the most extraordinary lives in modern Russian history.
Admiral Alexander Kolchak was the Supreme Ruler of anti-Bolshevik Russia between 1918 and 1920 - the most powerful White leader of the Russian Civil War, commanding the largest White government, backed by British gold and Allied weapons, governing from a train depot in Omsk while the Bolsheviks slowly closed the distance. He was also a polar scientist of genuine brilliance, a naval innovator who designed Russia's first Arctic icebreakers, and the man whose correspondence with Anna Timiryova produced one of the civil war era's great love stories.
Ice and Iron is a narrative biography of the full life - the Arctic, the war, the revolution, the White Terror, the gold, the betrayal, the frozen river - told with the urgency and precision the subject demands. This is the story of a man destroyed by the very qualities that made him exceptional.