The Russian Revolution of 1917 occurred during the “ten days that shook the world”, October -November 1917. This left the Bolsheviks in contested charge of the Russian government. Immediately they asked for a cease fire with the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey). The Bolsheviks and the Germans began peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December which were to last almost ten weeks. During these ten weeks Bolshevik Russia was still in a state of war and still in contact with the Allied powers (Britain, France and America). The Allies convinced the Bolsheviks to withdraw the Czech Legion from their crumbling front and ship them via train 6,000 miles across Russia to Vladivostok where they would be transported to the western front and continue the war there. Some 9300 kilometers (5470 miles) of this trip was across the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean.
By the time the Bolsheviks signed the peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the Legion had been pulled from the line and was well on its way, strung out across the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains to Vladivostok on no less than 259 trains. The Germans demanded from the Bolsheviks that the Legion be disarmed and sent back to Austria along with the millions of other Central Powers' prisoners of war that were being returned. When the weak Bolshevik Red Army attempted to detain and disarm the Czechs in May, the Legion acted in self defense and seized the railway. The force, which had swelled to some 50,000 armed men, was the best trained and equipped group in Siberia and they quickly seized most of the sparsely inhabited country along the railway. They captured Vladivostok, Chita, and Omsk in June and began moving towards Moscow, assisting the infant White Army. They captured Yekaterinburg in July, just after the Cheka assassinated the Tsar and his family there. On July 22, 1918 they captured Simbrisk and the “Lenin”- Bolshevik armored train No. 4, which the Czechs pressed into service as the Orlik (Czech for Eagle). They took Perm in December, followed by Glazov and Kazan just miles from the Volga River and stood within a few hundred miles of Moscow . It was the first army to threaten European Russia from Asia since the tartars in the 12th century.
The Czechoslovaks however were mainly worried with getting home. Their war ended in Europe with the surrender of the Central Powers in November 1918 and they quickly lost their will to fight. The independence of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed on October 28, 1918, by the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague and their government called for their Legion’s return. As the Czechs withdrew finally and returned home, the growing Red Army was able to take advantage of this and force the weakened White Army back. An eight month long retreat spelled the end of the White cause in Siberia. Admiral Kolchak, the white dictator, had entrusted the Czechs with both his own escort and with ten railway cars that contained the White government’s gold reserves that they had captured at Kazan. In January 1920 the Czechs, tired of fighting in wars that were not theirs, gave up Kolchak and his ministers and allowed them to be taken prisoners by the Red Army. They also negotiated their way out of Russia with the gold entrusted to them, bartering nine of the ten carloads to the Reds in exchange for safe passage. The Legion- 67,730 people altogether, consisting of 56,459 soldiers and 11,271 civilians, returned to their new country on no less than 42 ships and faded into military history. The arms they left behind went on to equip the Korean independence movement as well as many Chinese warlords (the Orlik was seen shuttling along the railways of Manchuria as late as the 1930s) Many of its officers and men went on to found and organize the new Czechoslovak Army and with their back pay established The Bank of the Czech Legion – (Legiobanka). At least thirty of the legions officers went onto become generals in the regular army including Catloc, Gajda, Viest, Štefanik, Eminger, and Moravec. A half dozen became government ministers. Its most illustrious member, General Jan Syrový (who lost his eye at the Battle of Zborov in 1917 with the Legion), became the 11th Premier of Czechoslovakia.
Sources for this and other articles in this series
Valeri Claving, Civil war in Russia : White Army. Voenno-istorica library. ?., 2003.M., 2003.
Denikin, Anton I. The White Army. Translated by Catherine Zvegintsov. Jonathan Cape, 1930.
Footman, David. Civil War in Russia. Faber and Faber, 1961.
Luckett, Richard. The White Generals: An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War. Longman, 1971.
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. Allen & Unwin, 1987.
AI Deryabin The Russian Civil War (four volumes) by, AST Moscow, Translated by Thomas Hillman.
Chen Edgar and Van Buskirk Emily “The Czech Legion’s Long Journey Home” (pp. 42-53). MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Winter 2001
Bradley, John ., The Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, 1914-1920, East European Monographs, Boulder, 1991
Baerlein, Henry, The March of the 70,000, Whitefriar Press, London 1926
And last but not least - The Great Guys at the Czech Legion Project www.czechlegion.com
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