Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion

On 25 May 1918 the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, Leon Trotsky, sent a telegram to all the soviets along the railway line from Penza to Omsk. In it he ordered, under threat of severe punishment, the disarming of the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps, who were travelling across Russia to Vladivostok in order to sail from there to France. “Every Czechoslovak found armed on the railway line is to be shot on the spot,” the order read. That same day the first fighting broke out at stations in Siberia and the Urals. The Czechoslovaks, scattered in several dozen trains over thousands of kilometres, did not give up their weapons and within a few days had taken control of the most important sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The revolt of a legion that only wanted to leave Russia became one of the turning points of the civil war.

An army without a state

The corps had its roots at the beginning of the war. In August 1914 Czechs living in Russia obtained the Tsar’s consent to form their own unit in Kiev, the Czech Druzhina (PL), initially about 700 volunteers strong. In time it began to accept prisoners and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army, and the druzhina grew into a regiment and then a rifle brigade. The Tsarist authorities, however, long distrusted men who had broken their oath to their own monarch. The breakthrough came only with the Battle of Zborov in July 1917, after which the Provisional Government agreed to recruitment in the prisoner-of-war camps. The brigade grew into two divisions, and in the autumn into a corps.

Politically it was led by the Czechoslovak National Council, the émigré representation of the independence movement based in Paris, and by its chairman, Professor Tomáš Masaryk, who had been in Russia since May 1917. After the Bolshevik coup Masaryk declared the corps neutral in Russia’s internal disputes and sought its transfer to the Western Front. In December 1917 a decree of the French government (according to most sources of 19 December) created an autonomous Czechoslovak army in France, and the corps in Russia was recognised as part of it, formally subordinate to the French command. The Czechoslovaks thus became an Allied army, although the state for which they were fighting did not yet exist. Their leaders continued to campaign for it, among other places in Rome in April.

The road across Siberia

At the beginning of 1918 the corps was stationed in Ukraine. When the German offensive began in February, its 1st Division, fighting at Bakhmach in March, held the Germans off until the Czechoslovak trains had passed through the railway junction and got away into Russia. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk obliged Soviet Russia to demobilise and left no room for a foreign army fighting the Central Powers. The shorter route through the northern ports seemed uncertain, so it was decided that the corps would travel across the whole of Siberia to Vladivostok, and from there by ship around the world to France. Masaryk left Moscow by the same route on 7 March.

On 26 March in Penza representatives of the Soviet government and of the Czechoslovak council signed an agreement on the journey. On the Soviet side the agreement bore the name of, among others, the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, Joseph Stalin. Some studies date the agreement to 25 March. The Czechoslovaks were to travel “not as combat units but as a group of free citizens”, with a small quantity of weapons for self-defence. Each train kept an armed company of 168 soldiers and one machine gun; the rest of the rifles and guns were handed over in Penza to a special commission. The first echelon set off on 27 March and reached Vladivostok a month later.

Further on it became ever more difficult. The railway was in ruins, there was a shortage of locomotives, and local soviets held up the trains and demanded the surrender of more rifles. At the same time released German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners, returning home under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, were travelling west with priority. After the Japanese landing at Vladivostok Moscow began to suspect that the corps might serve the Allies for an intervention. On 21 April, under pressure from the German ambassador, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, ordered the movement of Czechoslovak trains eastwards to be halted. The Bolsheviks also urged the legionaries to join the Red Army, but out of several tens of thousands only about 150–200 men volunteered. Among the Czechoslovaks the conviction grew that the Soviet government wanted to disarm them and hand them over to the Germans.

By mid-May about 14,000 soldiers were already in Vladivostok. The rest, by various estimates from 20,000 to more than 30,000 men, were in trains strung out from Penza to Lake Baikal. The largest groups numbered about 8,000 soldiers each: in the Penza area under Lieutenant Stanislav Čeček and in the Chelyabinsk area under Lieutenant-Colonel Sergei Voitsekhovsky, a Russian officer of Polish descent. Further east were smaller groups, among them that of Captain Radola Gajda near Novonikolayevsk. In the spring of 1918 the whole corps numbered, depending on the source, from about 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers.

The Chelyabinsk incident

On 14 May at the station in Chelyabinsk, where the trains of the 3rd and 6th Regiments were standing, a westbound train carrying Hungarian and German prisoners stopped. As it was pulling out, someone in a wagon threw a piece of iron, according to some accounts a stove leg, and seriously wounded a Czech soldier. The enraged legionaries stopped the train and lynched the culprit, a Hungarian. The local soviet opened an investigation and arrested ten Czechoslovaks, and then also the delegates who came to intercede for them. On 17 May the legionaries entered the town, freed those arrested, disarmed the Red Guards and took weapons from the arsenal. Sources give very different figures for the rifles seized, from about 800 to almost 3,000. The soviet gave way and the Czechoslovaks returned to their trains.

The matter could still have been smoothed over, but in Moscow it was taken as proof of insubordination. On 20 May a congress of delegates of the Czechoslovak army met in Chelyabinsk. On 21 May the council’s representatives in Moscow, Prokop Maxa and Bohumil Čermák, were arrested and forced to send a telegram ordering the surrender of all weapons. The delegates in Chelyabinsk were no longer willing to obey such instructions. They elected a provisional executive committee, on which Čeček, Gajda and Voitsekhovsky sat alongside the council member Bohdan Pavlů, and resolved not to give up their weapons and not to provoke clashes, but to defend themselves if attacked and to continue east “by their own means”. On 23 May the head of the operations department of the War Commissariat, Semyon Aralov, instructed the soviets to stop and break up the Czechoslovak trains and to draft their soldiers into the Red Army or into labour battalions.

Fighting on the railway

Trotsky’s telegram of 25 May settled the matter. It ordered that every train containing even a single armed soldier be unloaded and its men shut up in a prisoner-of-war camp, and announced that “reliable units” would be sent to the Czechoslovaks’ rear. Not a single wagon with Czechoslovaks was to move east.

That day Red Guards attacked a Czechoslovak train near Maryanovka station close to Omsk and were beaten off. At Mariinsk Captain Eduard Kadlec (PL), on Gajda’s prearranged signal, took the station in the afternoon almost without a fight. On the night of 25–26 May Gajda’s units took Novonikolayevsk, today’s Novosibirsk, where an anti-Bolshevik organisation of Russian officers seized power. In the following days there were also clashes near Zlatoust and Irkutsk. On 27 May Voitsekhovsky’s men took control of Chelyabinsk. Čeček’s group, the furthest west, took Penza after a day of fighting in the last days of May, and then Syzran. According to various sources Penza fell on 29 or 30 May.

The legionaries, often poorly armed, seized weapons in the enemy’s barracks and depots. The Red Guard and the Red Army, still being formed, were unable to stop them. Many local soviets simply fled. By mid-June the Czechoslovaks, together with Russian anti-Bolsheviks, controlled the railway from the Volga to the area of Krasnoyarsk, cutting Moscow off from Siberia.

What came next

On 8 June the Czechoslovaks took Samara, where an anti-Bolshevik Socialist Revolutionary government, Komuch, was set up. At the end of June the legionaries took over Vladivostok, and on 25 July they entered Yekaterinburg. Eight days earlier the Bolsheviks, fearing their arrival, had murdered the imperial family there. The plight of the Czechoslovaks persuaded President Wilson, who had until then opposed intervention. In August Japan and the United States sent troops to Siberia, officially to help the legionaries in their withdrawal, and the Entente powers one after another recognised the Czechoslovak National Council as the representative of the future state. The corps, which had only wanted to get out of Russia, became for two years one of the main participants in its civil war. In its shadow Polish units were also formed in Siberia, from which the 5th Polish Rifle Division was created at the beginning of 1919. The last legionaries left Vladivostok only in September 1920.