The revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion comprised the armed actions of the Czechoslovak Legion in the Russian Civil War against Bolshevik authorities, beginning in May 1918 and persisting through evacuation of the Legion from Siberia to Europe in 1920.[1][2] The revolt, occurring in Volga, Ural, and Siberia regions along the Trans-Siberian Railway, was a reaction to a threat initiated by the Bolsheviks partly as a consequence of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. One major secondary consequence of victories by the Legion over the Bolsheviks was to catalyze anti-Bolshevik activity in Siberia, particularly of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, and to provide a major boost for the anti-Bolshevik or White forces, likely protracting the Russian Civil War.[3][4]
Soon after the outbreak of World War I, ethnic Czechs and Slovaks living in the Russian Empire petitioned Tsar Nicholas II to create a force, in the service of the Russian Empire, to fight against Austria-Hungary. Motivations were mixed. Austria-Hungary, a multi-ethnic empire, included the homelands of the Czechs and Slovaks, but petitioners regarded it as suppressing the nationalism and aspirations of the Czech and Slovak peoples and preferred to fight Austria-Hungary for independence. As enemy aliens in a hostile empire, they risked losing property and being interned, regardless of their opinion of their empire of origin.[5]
Initially, a force of four companies was raised. Russian victories over Austria-Hungary, particularly early in the war, soon yielded a pool of prisoners of war (POW), and in 1916, Russian authorities began to recruit from Austro-Hungarian POW to grow the Czechoslovak Legion, adding two regiments.[6] The Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris promoted these efforts with official French endorsement. As war continued, loyalty to Austria-Hungary by its various minority nationalities weakened. By the end of 1917, the Legion in Russia had more than 60,000 soldiers.
After the February Revolution in 1917, the Russian Republic replaced the Russian Empire. After the October Revolution in 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and signaled an imminent end to Russian belligerency, the situation of the Legion became complex. In January 1918, United States President Wilson issued the Fourteen Points, explicitly articulating in the tenth point American support for the dissolution of Austria-Hungary with self-determination by ethnicity.
In February, Bolshevik authorities in Ukraine granted the Legion permission to withdraw from Russia, by means of a lengthy rail journey to Vladivostok[7] after lengthy negotiations.[8] On 18 February, before the Czechoslovaks had left Ukraine, the Central Powers launched Operation Faustschlag on the Eastern Front to force the Bolsheviks to accept its terms for peace. In early March, the Legion defeated a numerically superior German force attempting to destroy it in the Battle of Bakhmach, fought northeast of Kiev.[7] Defeat likely would have implied summary execution for the soldiers of the Legion, as traitors to Austria-Hungary.
After the Legion succeeded in leaving Ukraine eastbound, executing a fighting withdrawal, representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council continued to negotiate with Bolshevik authorities in Moscow and Penza to facilitate evacuation.[9] On 25 March, the two sides signed the Penza Agreement, in which the Legion was to surrender all but personal guard weapons in exchange for rail passage to Vladivostok.
The Legion and the Bolsheviks distrusted each other.[10][7] Leaders of the Legion suspected the Bolsheviks of seeking favor with the Central Powers, while the Bolsheviks viewed the Legion as a threat, a potential tool for anti-Bolshevik intervention by the Allies,[11] while simultaneously seeking to use the Legion to manifest just enough support for the Allies to prevent them from intervening on the pretext that the Bolsheviks were too pro-German. At the same time, the Bolsheviks, in desperate need of professional troops, tried to convince the Legion to incorporate itself to the Red Army.[12] The slow evacuation by Trans-Siberian Railway was exacerbated by transportation shortages: as agreed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks prioritized the westbound repatriation of German, Austrian, and Hungarian POWs.
Chronology
"Quarter" of the Czechoslovak Legion
In late April, the Bolsheviks moved the Russian royal family to Yekaterinburg. In May, as Legion troops slowly traveled eastward by rail under insecure, tense conditions, former POW who remained loyal to the Central Powers, including even a few Czechs and Slovaks, traveled westward with priority under explicit Bolshevik protection. On 14 May at Chelyabinsk, an eastbound train bearing Legion forces, Czechs and Slovaks who favored the Allies and who sought independence from Austria-Hungary, encountered a westbound train bearing Hungarians, who were loyal to Austria-Hungary and the Central Powers and who regarded Legion troops as traitors.[13][10]
An armed conflict ensued at close range, fueled by the rival nationalisms.[14] The Legion defeated the Hungarian loyalists. In response, local Bolsheviks intervened, and arrested some Legion troops.[14] The Legion then attacked the Bolsheviks, storming the railway station, freeing their men, and effectively taking over the city of Chelyabinsk while cutting the Bolshevik rail link to Siberia.[15]
This incident was eventually settled peacefully but it was used by the Bolshevik regime to order the disarmament of the Legion[14] as the episode had threatened Yekaterinburg, 140 miles away, and sparked wider hostilities throughout Siberia, in which the Bolsheviks steadily lost control over the railway and the region:[15] the Legion quickly occupied more cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway, including Petropavl, Kurgan, Novonikolaevsk, Mariinsk, Nizhneudinsk, and Kansk.[16]
Though the Legion did not specifically seek to intervene on the anti-Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War and sought only to secure safe exit from Russia,[10] Bolshevik defeat in Siberia enabled anti-Bolshevik or White Russian officers' organizations to seize the advantage, overthrowing Bolsheviks in Petropavl and Omsk.[17] In June, the Legion, having informally sided against the Bolsheviks for protection and convenience, captured Samara, enabling the first anti-Bolshevik local government in Siberia, the Komuch, formed on 8 June. On 13 June, Whites formed the Provisional Siberian Government in Omsk. The Commander of the 1st Legionary Division Stanislav Čeček gave an order:
...Our detachment – a vanguard of Allied Forces, our only goal – to rebuild anti-Germany front in Russia in collaboration with Russians and our allies...
The opposing fronts which grew up during the summer of 1918 from Perm, in the Northern Urals, to Orenburg, where the steppes of Asia begin, presented a curious checkerboard appearance in August. The forces engaged were very small in proportion to the area; there were apparently about 65,000 Red troops as against approximately 50,000 Czechoslovaks and anti-Bolshevik Russians.[18]
Retreating
Czechoslovak troops in Vladivostok
On 3 August, Japanese, British, French, and American troops landed at Vladivostok. The Japanese sent about 70,000 into the country east of Lake Baikal. By the autumn of 1918, the legion no longer played an active part in the Russian civil war. After the coup against the Provisional All-Russian Government, and the installment of Alexander Kolchak's military dictatorship, Czechoslovaks were withdrawn from the front, and assigned the task of guarding the Trans-Siberian Railway.[18]:10–12,182
In the autumn, the Red Army counterattacked, defeating the Whites in western Siberia. In October, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed newly independent. In November, Austria-Hungary collapsed and World War I ended, intensifying the desire of Legion members to exit Russia, particularly as the new Czechoslovakia faced opposition by, and armed conflict with, its neighbors. In early 1919, Legion troops began to retreat to the Trans-Siberian Railway. On 27 January 1919, Legion commander Jan Syrový claimed the Trans-Siberian Railway between Novonikolaevsk and Irkutsk as a Czechoslovak zone of operation, interfering with White Russian efforts in Siberia.
Early in 1920 in Irkutsk, in return for safe transit eastward for Czechoslovak trains, Syrový agreed to hand over Aleksandr Kolchak to the representatives of the Red Political Centre, who executed Kolchak in February. Because of this, and also because of an attempted rebellion against the Whites, organized by Radola Gajda in Vladivostok on 17 November 1919, the Whites impotently accused the Czechoslovaks of treason.
Between December 1919 and September 1920, the Legion evacuated by sea from Vladivostok.
See also
Ten Thousand - A force of 10,000 Greek mercenaries who found themselves trapped deep in hostile territory and had to fight their way back to their homeland after fighting for a losing side in a civil war of the Achaemenid Empire.
Related Research Articles
The Far Eastern Republic, sometimes called the Chita Republic, was a nominally independent state that existed from April 1920 to November 1922 in the easternmost part of the Russian Far East. Although nominally independent, it largely came under the control of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which envisaged it as a buffer state between the RSFSR and the territories occupied by Japan during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. Its first president was Alexander Krasnoshchyokov.
The Czechoslovak Legion were volunteer armed forces comprised predominantly of Czechs and Slovaks fighting on the side of the Entente powers during World War I and the White Army during the Russian Civil War until November 1919. Their goal was to win the support of the Allied Powers for the independence of Lands of the Bohemian Crown from the Austrian Empire and of Slovak territories from the Kingdom of Hungary, which were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the help of émigré intellectuals and politicians such as the Czech Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and the Slovak Milan Rastislav Štefánik, they grew into a force over 100,000 strong.
Jan Syrový was a Czechoslovak general who was the prime minister of Czechoslovakia during the Munich Crisis.
Radola Gajda, born as Rudolf Geidl was a Czech military commander and politician.
Polish 5th Siberian Rifle Division was a Polish military unit formed in 1919 in Russia during the aftermath of World War I. The division fought during the Polish-Soviet War, but as it was attached to the White Russian formations, it is considered to have fought more in the Russian Civil War. Its tradition was continued in the Polish Army as the 30th Infantry Division.
The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War consisted of a series of multi-national military expeditions that began in 1918. The initial impetus behind the interventions was to secure munitions and supply depots from falling into the German Empire's hands, particularly after the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and to rescue the Allied forces that had become trapped within Russia after the 1917 October Revolution. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the Allied plan changed to helping the White forces in the Russian Civil War. After the Whites collapsed, the Allies withdrew their forces from Russia by 1925.
The American Expeditionary Force, Siberia was a formation of the United States Army involved in the Russian Civil War in Vladivostok, Russia, after the October Revolution, from 1918 to 1920. The force was part of the larger Allied North Russia intervention. As a result of this expedition, early relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were poor.
The Russian Civil War spread to the east in May 1918, with a series of revolts along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the part of the Czechoslovak Legion and officers of the Russian Army. Provisional anti-Bolshevik local governments were formed in many parts of Siberia and other eastern regions during that summer. The Red Army mounted a counter-offensive in the autumn, and in 1919 defeated the White commander Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia. Smaller-scale conflicts in the region went on until 1923.
The Siberian intervention or Siberian expedition of 1918–1922 was the dispatch of troops of the Entente powers to the Russian Maritime Provinces as part of a larger effort by the western powers, Japan, and China to support White Russian forces and the Czechoslovak Legion against Soviet Russia and its allies during the Russian Civil War. The Imperial Japanese Army continued to occupy Siberia even after other Allied forces withdrew in 1920.
Mikhail Konstantinovich Diterikhs served as a general in the Imperial Russian Army and subsequently became a key figure in the monarchist White movement in Siberia and the Russian Far East area during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923.
The Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force (French: Corps expéditionnaire sibérien) (also referred to as the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Siberia) or simply the C.S.E.F.) was a Canadian military force sent to Vladivostok, Russia, during the Russian Revolution to bolster the allied presence, oppose the Bolshevik Revolution and attempt to keep Russia in the fight against Germany. Composed of 4,192 soldiers and authorized in August 1918, the force returned to Canada between April and June 1919. The force was commanded by Major General James H. Elmsley. During this time, the C.S.E.F. saw little fighting, with fewer than 100 troops proceeding "up country" to Omsk, to serve as administrative staff for 1,500 British troops aiding the anti-Bolshevik White Russian government of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Most Canadians remained in Vladivostok, undertaking routine drill and policing duties in the volatile port city.
During the Russian Civil War, the Far Eastern part of the former Russian Empire was a battleground for violence between the Russian SFSR and the remnants of the Russian State. The fighting in this front expanded from Outer Mongolia, through Eastern Siberia, and in the Ussuri and Amur districts of Russian Manchuria in Russia.
Kazimierz Rumsza was a Polish general.
The Japanese Siberian Intervention of 1918–1922 was the dispatch of Japanese military forces to the Russian Maritime Provinces as part of a larger effort by western powers and Japan to support White Russian forces against the Bolshevik Red Army during the Russian Civil War. The Japanese suffered 1,399 killed and another 1,717 deaths from disease. Japanese military forces occupied Russian cities and towns in the province of Primorsky Krai from 1918 to 1922.
The Legione Redenta was an Italian military formation that participated in the Siberian intervention during the Russian Civil War. It was formed from 2500 prisoners of war who had been captured by the Russians from the Austro-Hungarian Army.
The People's Army of Komuch was an anti-Bolshevik army during the Russian Civil War that fought in the Volga Region from June to September in 1918. It was established by the Socialist Revolutionary Party and led by Vladimir Kappel.
The Siberian Army was an anti-Bolshevik army during the Russian Civil War, which fought from June 1918 – July 1919 in Siberia – Ural Region.
Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak was a Russian admiral, military leader and polar explorer who held the title of Supreme Ruler of Russia from 1918 to 1920 during the Russian Civil War, though his actual control over Russian territory was limited. Previously, he served in the Imperial Russian Navy and fought in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.
The Battle of Lake Baikal was a naval battle undertaken by Czechoslovak forces.
The Russian State was a White Army anti-Bolshevik state proclaimed by the Act of the Ufa State Conference of September 23, 1918, “On the formation of the all-Russian supreme power” in the name of “restoring state unity and independence of Russia” affected by the revolutionary events of 1917, the October Revolution and the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany.
↑ Bradley, J.F.N. (1 September 1996). "The Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, 1914-1920". Studies in East European Thought. Springer. 48 (2): 311–312. ISSN0925-9392.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Russian SFSR 
Czechoslovak Legion 
White Movement 
