The film's political commissar demands her dismissal due to her aristocratic background, but director Sergei Bondarchuk is adamant that she stays.

In 1916, Captain Alexander Kolchak's ship is laying naval mines in the Baltic Sea when they are blocked by SMS Friedrich Carl of the Imperial German Navy.

At the naval base in the Grand Duchy of Finland, Kolchak is promoted to rear admiral and introduced to Anna Timiryova, the wife of subordinate officer and close friend Captain Sergei Timirev.

Tsar Nicholas II personally promotes Kolchak to vice admiral and commander of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.

Shortly after, his wife and son are rescued from their home in Crimea and whisked away to a British ship, just before the house is attacked by Red Guards.

Kolchak learns the Red Army is advancing on Omsk, he orders an evacuation and seizes Irkutsk as the new capital of anti-communist Russia.

Anna is recognized by a White officer who informs Kolchak; they meet and he vows never to leave her again, explaining he has asked Sofya for divorce.

Their bodies are dumped into an opening in the ice, hewn up by the local Orthodox clergy for the Great Blessing of Waters on Theophany.

As she witnesses a rehearsal for one of the film's ballroom scenes, she recalls her first meeting with Kolchak, and her dreams of the formal dance she was never able to share with her beloved.

In the United States, Leslie Felperin of Variety wrote: "Strictly as a film, however, Admiral is entertaining enough in a retro Doctor Zhivago/War and Peace sort of way, with its big setpieces, lavish costumes and string-laden orchestral score.

For all intents and purposes, pic reps a virtual mirror image of those old patriotic Soviet-era movies wherein the Reds were the heroes and the White Army the baddies.

[13][14] For example, the scene in which a shell from the 102-mm gun of the destroyer Sibirsky Strelok hits the German cruiser Friedrich Karl is fiction.

The main original song for the film, "Anna", is performed by Russian singer Victoria Dayneko and composed by Igor Matvienko.