Czechoslovaks in Yekaterinburg

The British chronology of the war records under 9 November 1918 that the Czechoslovak troops in Yekaterinburg in the Urals “proclaimed national independence”. In reality nobody proclaimed anything there. The Czechoslovak state had come into being in Prague on 28 October, and the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia solemnly celebrated its birth. The main ceremony took place in Yekaterinburg, where the regiments of the 2nd Czechoslovak Rifle Division received consecrated colours. The British consul in Yekaterinburg, Thomas Preston, sent out invitations to it for 9 November, but according to the Czechoslovak Legionaries’ Association the ceremony took place on 10 November.

The ceremony on the square

Guests came to the town from Omsk. Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward, commander of the British battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, which had reached Omsk in October, brought a band and a hundred picked men as a guard of honour. On the same train travelled Vice-Admiral Alexander Kolchak, for a few days minister of war and the navy of the Provisional All-Russian Government, who was setting out for the front. Ward recalled that the departure from Omsk was delayed all night by supposed breakdowns of the admiral’s carriage, and suspected that someone wanted to obstruct them. On arrival the guests walked past the house in which the Bolsheviks had held the imperial family before murdering them in July.

The ceremony took place on Shchepnaya Square, also called Monastyrskaya Square, beneath the walls of an old monastery. Czechoslovak infantry, artillery and cavalry units lined the square. As General Radola Gajda, commander of the troops in the Yekaterinburg area, entered it with his staff and the colours, the British band, at the hosts’ request, played the British national anthem, and the whole army presented arms. Ward wrote that he had the feeling that “we were celebrating the birth of a nation”. A priest blessed the colours and presented them to the regimental commanders. Ward, who in the summer had fought alongside the Czechoslovaks on the Ussuri, recognised among them an officer he knew from those days, now a colonel. At the banquet Kolchak made his first important speech as minister, and Ward spoke of Britain’s joy at the birth of new nations. Immediately after the ceremony Kolchak and the British left for the front near Kungur.

A weary legion

Behind the pageantry lay weariness. The legionaries had been fighting the Bolsheviks along the Trans-Siberian Railway and on the Volga since May, and in the autumn they suffered defeats. Most of them now wanted only to go home, especially since the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary was just ending and their state already existed. Politically they were led by the branch of the Czechoslovak National Council in Russia, based in Yekaterinburg. Its members, brought up on democratic ideas, did not trust the right-wing Russian officers.

After the coup in Omsk, in which a week later Kolchak took power as Supreme Ruler, the Council’s branch came out against him. According to Ward, at the end of November the Czechoslovaks finally refused to take part in the planned offensive on Perm, which was led in December by Gajda, soon taken into Russian service. In December the Czechoslovak minister of war, Milan Rastislav Štefánik, came to Yekaterinburg. He was unable to raise the soldiers’ spirits, and soon the legion was withdrawn from the front to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway. Its soldiers had to wait more than another year for their return home.