Armed performance of the Czechoslovak corps. The uprising of the Czechoslovak corps

Uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps- performance of the Czechoslovak troops against the Soviet regime, in May-August 1918 in the Volga region, Siberia and the Urals.

In March 1918, at the request of Germany, the Soviet government banned the sending of Czechoslovak prisoners of war through Arkhangelsk, and insisted on their withdrawal through Siberia and Vladivostok. As a result, the echelons of the first and second divisions went east - to Penza. This decision irritated the Czechoslovak soldiers. They went to the east in 63 military trains, 40 wagons each. The first echelon left on 03/27/1918 and a month later arrived in Vladivostok. The reason for the anti-Soviet uprising was the Chelyabinsk incident. On May 14, 1918, an echelon of Czechoslovaks and an echelon of former captive Hungarians released by the Bolsheviks under the terms of the Brest Treaty met in Chelyabinsk. In those days, between the Czechs and Slovaks on the one hand, and the Hungarians on the other, there were strong national antipathies.

As a result, a Czech soldier Frantisek Duhacek was seriously wounded by a cast-iron leg from the stove thrown from the Hungarian echelon. In response, the Czechoslovaks lynched the prisoner of war who, in their opinion, was guilty - the Hungarian or Czech Johann Malik. He received several bayonet blows to the chest and neck. And the Bolshevik authorities of Chelyabinsk arrested several Czechoslovaks the next day.

May 17, 1918 the Czechoslovaks freed their comrades by force, disarming the Red Guards, and seized the city arsenal (2,800 rifles and an artillery battery).

After that, having defeated the superior forces of the Red Guard thrown against them, they occupied several more cities, overthrowing Soviet power in them. The Czechoslovaks began to occupy the cities that lay on their way: Chelyabinsk, Petropavlovsk, Kurgan, and opened their way to Omsk. Other units entered Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk), Mariinsk, Nizhneudinsk and Kansk. In early June 1918, the Czechoslovaks entered Tomsk.

Not far from Samara, the legionnaires defeated the Soviet units (06/04-05/1918) and made it possible for themselves to cross the Volga. In Samara captured by the Czechoslovaks, the first anti-Bolshevik government was organized - the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch). This marked the beginning of the formation of other anti-Bolshevik governments throughout Russia.

The commander of the First Division, Stanislav Chechek, issued an order in which he specifically emphasized the following:

« Our detachment is defined as the forerunner of the allied forces, and the instructions received from headquarters have the sole purpose of building an anti-German front in Russia in alliance with the entire Russian people and our allies.».

Russian volunteers of the General Staff of Lieutenant Colonel V.O. Kappel is taken again by Syzran (07/10/1918), and Chechek - Kuznetsk (07/15/1918). The next part of the People's Army V.O. Kappel made its way through Bugulma to Simbirsk (07/22/1918) and together they went to Saratov and Kazan. In the Northern Urals, Colonel Syrovy occupied Tyumen, and ensign Chila - Yekaterinburg (07/25/1918). In the east, General Gaida occupied Irkutsk (06/11/1918) and later - Chita.

Under the pressure of the superior forces of the Bolsheviks, units of the People's Army left Kazan on September 10, Simbirsk on September 12, and Syzran, Stavropol Volzhsky, Samara in early October. In the Czechoslovak legions, there was growing uncertainty about the need to conduct exhaustive battles in the Volga region and the Urals. The news of the declaration of an independent Czechoslovakia increased the desire to return home. The decline in the morale of the legionnaires in Siberia could not be stopped even by Milan Stefanik during his inspection in November-December 1918. Since January 1919, the Czechoslovak units began to gather to the highway, and over the next four months, 259 echelons drove off from the Urals to the east, to Baikal. On January 27, 1919, the commander of the Czechoslovak army in Russia, General Jan Syrovy, issued an order declaring the section of the highway between Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk) and Irkutsk the operational area of ​​the Czechoslovak army. This and other circumstances led to a conflict with the White troops of Colonel Kappel, who also retreated along the railway in conditions of 50 degrees below zero.

Kappel challenged Jan Syrovoy to a duel for supporting the Bolsheviks and extraditing Admiral Kolchak in Irkutsk by representatives of the Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik Political Center (after Kappel's death, this challenge was repeated by General Voitsekhovsky). At the same time, the Czechoslovak legionnaires still had to resist the attacks of the Red Army and other military groups that operated east of the Urals. Moreover, contradictions between the command and ordinary soldiers of the legion were growing. The delegates of the banned Second Congress of the Siberian Army, which took place on May 20 in Tomsk, were arrested and sent to Gornostai in Vladivostok. Ultimately, the Czechoslovaks helped the fall of the Kolchak regime in Omsk.

At this time, the last military echelon with the Czechoslovaks left Irkutsk for Vladivostok. The last obstacle was the wild division of Ataman Semenov. The victory of the legionnaires was their final military operation in Siberia.

In the end, they managed to evacuate through Vladivostok.

After long negotiations on financial support for the return of the Czechoslovak army home, in December 1919, the first ships with legionnaires began to sail from Vladivostok. On 42 ships, 72,644 people were transported to Europe (3,004 officers and 53,455 soldiers and ensigns of the Czechoslovak army). More than four thousand people - dead and missing - did not return from Russia.

In November 1920, the last echelon with legionnaires from Russia returned to Czechoslovakia.

The uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps (Czechoslovak revolt) - an armed performance of the Czechoslovakian corps in May-August 1918 during the Civil War in Russia.

The uprising swept the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, the Far East and created a favorable situation for the liquidation of Soviet authorities, the formation of anti-Soviet governments (the Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly, later - the Provisional All-Russian Government) and the start of large-scale armed actions of white troops against Soviet power. The reason for the uprising was an attempt by the Soviet authorities to disarm the legionnaires.

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✪ Intelligence: Yegor Yakovlev on the consequences of the uprising of the Czechoslovak corps

✪ rebellion of the Czechoslovak Corps

✪ The uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps. Part 1.

✪ Admiral A.V. Kolchak and the Czechoslovak Corps in 1919.

✪ Digital history: Yegor Yakovlev on the escalation of the Civil War

Subtitles

I wholeheartedly welcome you! Egor, good afternoon. Kind. About what today? Finally, we continue about the Civil War, about its unfolding. We finished on how the Czechoslovak Corps rebelled, and today we’ll talk about the consequences of this uprising, because they were, indeed, a fateful share of the fate of our country, for the fate of the nascent Soviet Republic and for the White movement, too, because without the uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps, the White movement would hardly be able to take shape. The uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps completely turned the situation inside the country, and its consequences were the most tragic. I will recall a little about how this uprising unfolded. I expressed the point of view that it was not that the perpetrators of this uprising ... Of course, the Entente incited, and first of all it was France, and first of all the French ambassador Noulens was a fierce supporter of the performance of the Czechoslovak Corps and education, as they said then, anti-German front, against the German-Bolshevik forces, as it was called in certain circles of the Entente. Of course, the Entente incited, and there is a lot of evidence for this, and I talked about all this last time. But there were also those forces within the Entente itself, which, on the contrary, sought to ensure that the Czechoslovak Corps departed from Russia as soon as possible and arrived on the French front, on the Western Front, in order to defend France from the impending German offensive. And unfortunately, these forces were not sufficiently used by the Soviet leadership, it was not possible to rely on them and propagandize that Czechoslovak soldier mass, which, by and large, became a victim of deception, became a victim of propaganda, because the extremist wing of the Czechoslovaks in fact went on a direct forgery, explaining to his soldiers against whom they would fight in Russia. They explained, of course, that they would fight against the same Germans, because for the Czechoslovaks, the Bolsheviks are some kind of completely alien story. Your internal disassembly, huh? Yes Yes. Czechoslovakia, in general, the Czechoslovak Corps, let me remind you, was formed precisely as a military force that would fight for the independence of Czechoslovakia from Austria-Hungary, i.e. this is their national affair, it is practically almost a Patriotic War being waged, however, in an incomprehensible foreign territory, but nevertheless here they are defending the idea of ​​an independent Czechoslovakia. It is clear that they must fight against the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans. There are no Austro-Hungarians and Germans here, so how to explain who they will fight here against? For this, such a semi-mythical threat was used - prisoners of war from the countries of the Quadruple Union. It was considered and officially proclaimed in this pro-Entant propaganda, which zombified the fighters of the Czechoslovak Corps, that there was a huge number of German prisoners of war in Russia. This was partly true - indeed, there were almost 2 million prisoners of war from the countries of the Quadruple Union. Wow! Let me remind you that the most ... most of the prisoners were Russians during the entire First World War, more precisely, citizens of the Russian Empire, subjects of the Russian Empire. Estimates are very different, by the way, this is an interesting topic: now the estimate of General Golovin is accepted - this is a very famous emigrant historian who estimated the number of prisoners of war in the Russian Empire at 2.4 million people. This estimate is accepted by a significant part of historians, but if we read Golovin himself, we learn that it is based as follows: Golovin, wondering how this number came to be, asked two of his colleagues, an Austrian historian and a German military historian, who checked these data against archives and sent him their results, and he deduced 2.4 from them. But no one has ever verified these figures, in any case, those historians who refer to Golovin, and this, by the way, for example, here is the well-known work of General Krivosheev on the losses of the army in the wars of the 20th century, and here he directly refers to Golovin, and Golovin refers to two historians who sent him these results, but no one checked these figures, they were interned there. But this is not so important for our topic, something else is important - that Austria-Hungary was in second place, which, as we remember, was a patchwork empire in which, as we know, a significant number of nationalities that did not have their own statehood within a dual monarchy , did not want to fight, which, in fact, can be read in the famous novel by Yaroslav Hasek. And now the Russians are there, if you remember how Schweik went to surrender, and towards the Russians, who are also going to surrender. This is approximately a typical story like this, the Austro-Hungarians were not much behind, and it was they who made up the bulk of these 2 million prisoners of war, and the Germans, in fact, there were only about 150 thousand of them ... Not rich, yes. Those. yes, yes, it didn’t work out that way with Germany, i.e. if we take an assessment directly for Germany, then the proportion is strongly not in favor of the Russian Empire. And in general, in terms of scale, these forces, of course, were scattered, unlike the Czechoslovak Corps, and they could not represent any kind of military force. No one was going to organize this military force, and the Germans did not demand it. But the Entente propaganda presented the matter in such a way that military units are formed from these prisoners of war, which, in fact, will be the occupation corps in Bolshevik Russia and, together with the Bolsheviks, they will fight against the Czechs, in particular, and in general, carry out German rule in defeated Russia, and it is with them that you will fight. For these German units, the international units of the army, the Red Guard, were issued, which, indeed, were formed, but I must say that these were numerically insignificant units, i.e., naturally, most of the prisoners dreamed of sitting out until the end of the war in captivity, not was going to continue to fight for nothing, and only the most convinced, the most ardent, the most believing, captured by this Bolshevik idea, joined the international units of the Red Guard. In Penza, for example, there was the 1st Czechoslovak Revolutionary Regiment, or it is also called the 1st International Revolutionary Regiment under the leadership of ... under the command of Yaroslav Shtrombakh, also a Czech. There were 1200 people of all nationalities there, they were prisoners of war, mainly from Austria-Hungary: there were Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, of course. Well, i.e. a mass of people who did not want to die for either the Austrians or the Hungarians? They didn’t want to fight just, yes, and fight and die for this, in this particular war. They enrolled in a revolutionary regiment because they were close to the international ideas of the Bolsheviks. And the Entente propaganda tried to pass off these extremely few international units as Kaiser's battalions, which carry out occupational rule in Russia - it is necessary to fight against them. And in general, this propaganda was successful, but the response propaganda, Bolshevik, was not successful, although I recall that, for example, Jean Sadoul was in the French military mission - this is a captain who was extremely sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, then he will become a member of the Communist Party France, and I must say that recently, by some miracle, I watched a very curious episode from the TV series The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, where Indiana Jones, as an agent of the French military mission, finds himself in revolutionary Petrograd - it feels like some features are visible in it Jean Sadoul. Have you watched this series? No. Well, it's rather curious: he is sent precisely with the task of preventing the Bolsheviks from coming to power, he infiltrates the labor movement in Petrograd, but he infiltrates so well that he begins to sympathize with the young workers who joined the Bolsheviks, and it is precisely there that the action takes place during the July performances in 1917 when his friends are killed. Quite a tragic story, but this biography of Jean Sadoul is clearly seen in the interpretation of the adventures of Indiana Jones here. But let us return, in fact, to the events connected with the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion. It was not possible to rely on Jean Sadoul, and I recall that there was an extremely sharp telegram from Trotsky, which called for the disarmament of the Czechoslovaks by force, and those who did not obey, to be shot and imprisoned in concentration camps. But this telegram was sent to all the Soviets along the route, in fact along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and almost all the Soviets were extremely perplexed by this telegram, since the Soviets simply did not have the Red Guard forces to carry out this task. It is necessary to explain - many do not know what the Sovdep is? Soviets - Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. It's not a swear word. Yes. And here, as an example of how these Soviets were put in a difficult situation, one can cite the Penza Soviet, because, having received Trotsky's telegram, he immediately gathered for a meeting and began to discuss what, in principle, could be done. And first of all, they contacted the military commissar of Simbirsk and requested reinforcements, saying that there were now more than 2 thousand Czechoslovaks with machine guns in Penza, and today they had just gone to the front, just at that time there were still battles with ataman Dutov in the Orenburg region , they sent 800 people to the front, and they have little strength, the Center requires the task to be completed today or tomorrow, a conflict is inevitable, so we ask for help - what can you give? From Simbirsk they answered that they couldn’t give anything special - they also sent companies to the Dutov Front, it is possible to send, however, 90 people from the International. When the Soviet understands that, firstly, they have few people, and secondly, they are not particularly trained, they directly tell Trotsky that they have come to the conclusion that we cannot fulfill the order: “... at a distance of 100 miles there are about 12 000 troops with machine guns. Ahead of us are echelons with 60 rifles for 100 people. The arrest of the officers will inevitably provoke an uprising against which we will not be able to resist.” What Lev Davidovich answers - he answers the following: “Comrade, military orders are given not for discussion, but for execution. I will hand over to the military court all representatives of the military commissariat who will cowardly evade the execution of disarming the Czechoslovaks. We have taken measures to move armored trains. You must act decisively and immediately. I can't add anything more." Basically, do what you want. Well, on the one hand, you can’t argue - Lev Davydovich is right, on the other hand, I don’t know, it only comes to my mind, since they were traveling in trains, only letting the trains derail. But then it is not clear... They stood. They weren't driving anymore, they were standing there. Well, in general, again, the Soviet party bodies consulted, realized that it was just, well, impossible, and therefore, in principle, they made the right decision - they went to engage in propaganda, to negotiate. But the forces of the Penza Soviet were not enough, in order to propagate the case of the Slovaks, other forces were needed here - representatives of the Entente military mission were needed here, i.e., from my point of view, of course, this is such, perhaps, it seems arrogant teaching, how it was necessary to act, we know better, etc., but it seems to me that it was rational to take by the scruff of the members of the Entente military mission, who verbally said that this was an incident, this was an accident, we will explain, etc., take members of the Czech National Council loyal to the Soviet government and lead them directly, lead them and force them to disarm under their cover. Well, the Penza Soviet did not succeed, the legionnaires did not begin to disarm, and as a result a battle took place, as a result of which the legionnaires captured Penza, and since this Czechoslovak revolutionary regiment was just standing there, the battle and subsequent events took place with extreme bitterness, because here the features of the Czechoslovak civil war already appeared - they fought against their own, they perceived each other as traitors, enemies, and since the White Czechs won, they, of course, committed a literally sadistic reprisal against the Red Czechs, which is still remembered in Penza. And in general, it must be said that from the capture of the very first cities it is manifested that the Czechs are in a foreign land, because, for example, the Whites took ... the Yaroslavl uprising won for a short time - there was no terrible pogrom there. Yes, there were ... some people were killed, Soviet party workers were arrested, they were put on a barge there, they were kept under arrest, but there was no such large-scale robbery. And the Czechs, having taken Penza, immediately behave like Landsknechts, who were given the city for plunder - here they are immediately rampant robbery, murder, rape, i.e. absolutely such a horde came. Occupier, yes. Yes, the occupying horde came, and, of course, the classic story begins with the settling of scores, they show the Czechs the objectionable, the objectionable crack down on those whom they were shown, without understanding, a communist, a Bolshevik - it doesn’t matter. Well, in short, a terrible thing began. And I must say that in Penza, by the way, they did not linger, they were very afraid that they would be kicked out of there, and, having simply destroyed the local Council, plundered the city, the Czechs went to Samara, which they would soon take. Samara is a very important moment, the capture of Samara, it was possible to take it very easily, as Lieutenant Chechik, who commanded this Volga group of Czechs, said, "they took Samara like a hay rake." There were no forces, i.e. The Red Army could not just yet ... could not simply organize a competent defense yet. It was Samara that became the capital of an alternative government to the Bolsheviks - it was the government, the so-called. Komuch, i.e. Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly. The Czechs brought the members of the Constituent Assembly in a wagon train. I must say that they were mostly right SRs, with the exception of the Menshevik Ivan Maisky, who later became a Bolshevik, the Russian ambassador to London and an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who left very interesting diaries. The Right SRs, who made up the majority, they knew that the Czechs were going to revolt and expected intervention, and this indicates once again that they had extensive connections with the leadership of the SR party, in particular, in the French military mission. This indicates that the uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps was inspired by the Entente. They waited, and as soon as the Czechs rebelled, immediately 5 members of the Constituent Assembly from the Socialist-Revolutionary Party arrived at the location of the Czechoslovak troops, they were brought in a car to the building of the Samara City Duma and planted there as a government, and they themselves later admitted that they no one supported, no one took seriously, and they were such wedding generals that they planted here - and now they ... manage. How did the Entente countries perceive the events that took place? Well, firstly, here - I remind you, I spoke about this last time - a great role was played by the statement of Guinet, a member of the French military mission, who, having arrived at the disposal of the Czechoslovak troops, said that the Entente countries welcomed the action and the creation of an anti-German front. Sadoul demanded that this statement be disavowed, but the statement was not disavowed, and this testified that the Entente had already made its final choice, i.e. she stakes on the overthrow of the Soviet power and on the Czechoslovak ... on the actions of the Czechoslovaks. Let me remind you that the Czechoslovaks were not on their own, but they were officially considered part of the French army and were subordinate, respectively, to the French commander in chief, so the French began to look at them as their own troops, supposed to act in the interests of the French Republic. In the same way, we meet with the full approval of the British. Lloyd George wrote to the head of the Czech National Council, Masaryk: “I send you my heartfelt congratulations on the impressive successes your troops have achieved in the fight against the German and Austrian detachments in Siberia. The fate and triumph of this small force is one of the most outstanding epics in history." That's it. Well, Masaryk immediately begins to hint to all his, I don’t know, colleagues, major political figures that all this is not just like that, keep your promises. In particular, with the US State Department, Masaryk wrote: “I believe that the recognition of the Czechoslovak National Council has become practically necessary. I am, I would say, master of Siberia and half of Russia. Here. Not bad. Masaryk demands recognition, yes, with an eye to the fact that this whole Czech National Council will move to Prague after the end of the war already as the government of an independent Czechoslovakia - like, we did what you wanted here, let's now pay with the recognition of Czechoslovakia. True, there were also selfish interests that are immediately recorded in the sources, because ... there were generally 3 reasons why the intervention began: the first reason is, of course, of course, an attempt to return Russia to the war, i.e. allies, all this nonsense that England deliberately overthrew the tsar, because the war had already been won - this is complete nonsense, because in the spring of 1918 the situation is such that Germany may well win the war, everything hangs in the balance there. If, say, Germany had taken Paris in 1918, then the American troops would have arrived at the hat show, and in any case, it would have been possible to conclude quite a decent draw at the end of the First World War, so ... But the situation for the British at this moment is very, very such heavy, and even worse for the French. The second reason was that, yes, indeed, it was precisely the Soviet government that was afraid, because the Soviet government had clearly set a course for the elimination of private property, and Western countries, for which private property is sacred and inviolable, naturally feared this. Well, there was a third reason, of course, the third reason is obvious - Russia has weakened, it could be plundered, and all these countries that have long coveted various Russian wealth, they naturally wanted to take advantage of this. And these 3 reasons very often went like 3 in 1, i.e. , without singling out any one, the same figures tried to achieve both the first, and the second, and the third. And what is interesting in this regard is that, for example, how at this moment in the United States it is being discussed whether to participate in the intervention or not to participate. Here is presidential adviser Bullitt writing to Colonel House, this is Wilson's special envoy: “Russian idealistic liberals, self-interested investors who would like the American economy to leave the Western hemisphere, are in favor of intervention. The only people in Russia who profit from this adventure will be landowners, bankers and merchants - they will go to Russia to protect their interests. Those. obviously this third motive sounds, and not only in Bullitt. It is also interesting that the Czechoslovaks are thought of as a kind of force that can hold back imperialist opponents, for the Americans it is Japan, and the American ambassador to China, for example, writes to the president about the Czechs: “They can seize control over Siberia. If they were not in Siberia, they would have to be sent there from the farthest place. The Czechs must block the Bolsheviks and push the Japanese as part of the allied interventionist forces in Russia." And the Americans of the Japanese ... Oh, twisted, listen! Those. everyone has big plans for the Czechs, but what do the Czechs do - the Czechs take city after city, rob and shoot. "Rob, drink, rest," right? Yes Yes Yes. And how many people did they kill? A lot of. On May 26, Chelyabinsk was already captured, all members of the local Council were shot, Penza on May 29, Omsk on June 7, Samara on June 8 - and so on, city after city along the entire route. Do you know, yes, that a monument was erected to them in Samara? I am aware, yes, and I will come to this now - this is extremely unfortunate news, but this is not only Samara, this is generally a whole program of the Czech Ministry of Defense, which, in agreement with the Russian Ministry of Defense, puts up monuments along the entire route. Well, what did the Czechoslovaks do along the way? We have evidence of this: well, for example, “in the early days of the occupation of Simbirsk, arrests were carried out right on the street on denunciations, it was enough for someone from the crowd to point out someone as a suspicious person, as a person was grabbed. Executions were carried out right there without any embarrassment on the street, and the corpses of the executed were lying around for several days. Eyewitness Medovich about the events in Kazan: “It was a truly unbridled revelry of the winners - mass executions not only of responsible Soviet workers, but of everyone who was suspected of recognizing Soviet power. Executions were carried out without trial, and the corpses lay all day in the street.” But the most interesting thing is that the Czechoslovaks were cursed not only by Soviet workers, not only by the communists, the Bolsheviks - later the White Guards also cursed the Czechoslovaks, because the Czechs betrayed them too, they were only engaged in ... i.e. it’s like that there - at first it seems like they were citizens of Austria-Hungary and betrayed Austria-Hungary, then they betrayed the Reds, then they betrayed the Whites, and in the end they left with the stolen goods. Well done! And one of Kolchak's associates, General Sakharov, even wrote an entire book in exile in Berlin, The Czech Legions in Siberia: Czechoslovak Betrayal. This book, well, as I understand it, fans of the White movement erect monuments to the Czechs, and so this book should be read to them first of all, because on behalf of the military general of the White movement it is written with such pain about all Czech arts, I’m here I would like to talk about it and read a little. Well, firstly, Sakharov describes the behavior of the Czechs with great humor and pain, because, of course, no one among the Czechs wanted to die for the White idea, i.e. obviously ... The idealists of the White movement thought like this: agents of Kaiser Germany seized power, we raised the banner of struggle here, we liberate occupied Russia, and our allies help us (well, it’s something like we have the Normandie-Niemen regiment there), we, together with we drive out the occupiers with our allies. But these white idealists were soon to be severely disappointed, because they turned out to be no… allies of the Entente country only in quotation marks, because they indulged in unrestrained robbery and clearly realized their interventionist goals, not caring in the least about the White movement, and this was a terrible disappointment for the whites. And this is what Sakharov writes: during one of the battles they asked for reinforcements, and a Czech armored car was sent to them: “The two-day battle cost us heavy losses, and had only local success. The Czech armored car did not support us, keeping all the time behind the cover of the railway recess and not even going out after our makeshift armored car, which went on the attack and damaged the Bolshevik armored car. The Czechs did not fire a single shot. After the battle, the Czechs announced their departure, but before that, the commander of the Czech armored train asked for a certificate of participation of the Czech armored car in the battle. Lieutenant Colonel Smolin, not knowing what to write to the Czechs, suggested that the Czech commander draw up the text of the certificate, hoping for his modesty. I sat down at the typewriter, and the Czech, dictating to me, included a phrase in the text of the certificate that I remember to this day: “... the people of the Czech armored train fought like lions...” Lieutenant Colonel Smolin, having read the finished certificate, looked intently into the eyes for a long time Czech commander. The Czech didn’t even look down. Lieutenant Colonel Smolin took a deep breath, signed the piece of paper and, without shaking hands with the Czech, walked towards the railway track. A few minutes later the Czech armored train left forever. During the entire offensive struggle at the front, I had no contact with the Czechs, only from the distant rear the popular ditty at that time flew to the front: “The Russians are fighting with each other, the Czechs are trading sugar...”. In the rear, behind the backs of the Siberian army, there was an orgy of speculation, insubordination, and sometimes outright robbery. Officers and soldiers arriving at the front talked about the capture by the Czechs of trains with uniforms en route to the front, about the use of weapons and firearms supplies for their benefit, about their occupation of the best apartments in the cities, and the best cars and locomotives on the railways.” We didn’t hold ourselves back, right? Yes. Well, what is Sakharov’s conclusion, this is a white general, what does he write about the allies: “They betrayed the Russian White Army and its leader, they fraternized with the Bolsheviks, they, like a cowardly herd, fled to the east, they committed violence and murder against the unarmed, they They stole hundreds of millions of private and government property and took it from Siberia with them to their homeland. Not even centuries, but decades will pass, and humanity, in search of a fair balance, will more than once encounter struggles, more than once, perhaps, change the map of Europe; the bones of all these good people and Paul will rot in the ground; the Russian values ​​they brought from Siberia will also disappear - in their place humanity will extract and make new ones, others. But betrayal, Cain’s affair, on the one hand, and the pure suffering of Russia on the cross, on the other, will not pass, will not be forgotten and will be passed on from posterity to posterity for a long time, for centuries. And Blagosi and Co. firmly established the label on this: This is what the Czechoslovak corps did in Siberia! And how should Russia ask the Czech and Slovak peoples how they reacted to the Judas traitors and what they intend to do to correct the atrocities inflicted on Russia?” Well, now General Sakharov received the answer to his question - they erected monuments to them along the entire route of the trains of the Czechoslovak corps. The monuments should have consisted of this sign, if you think about it. Shameless, eh! Absolutely agree, absolutely! Those. The Czechoslovak corps was noted here for robbery, murder, and violence. To erect monuments to them - I don’t know... they’ve gone completely crazy, simply. Well, someone was already there, I saw the photographs, someone had already painted there with a spray can, writing in red paint over the monument: “They killed Russians.” What do the people who erect such monuments think? What do they think and what do they want to get in the end? What do the unfinished Reds write on these monuments, right? Has your power come now? Well, what did your government say about this? Well, maybe it's some kind of wrong white? What's in your head? In addition to the fact that the Czechs robbed, killed, raped, they, of course, in principle, gave impetus to a full-scale civil war in Russia, and one can absolutely agree with Ivan Maisky, who, let me remind you, is a member of the Komuch, and later he would become a very large and prominent Soviet diplomat academician And here he gives an absolutely accurate, in my opinion, definition of what happened: “If Czechoslovakia had not intervened in our struggle, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly would not have arisen, and Admiral Kolchak would not have come to power on the shoulders of the latter. For the forces of the Russian counter-revolution itself were completely insignificant. If Kolchak had not strengthened himself, neither Denikin, nor Yudenich, nor Miller would have been able to expand their operations so widely. The civil war would never have taken such fierce forms and such grandiose proportions as they were marked by; perhaps there would not even have been a civil war in the true sense of the word.” This is an absolutely accurate definition, in my opinion. But a few words about Komuch: naturally, the formation of an alternative government to the Bolshevik attracted all the anti-Bolshevik forces, well, first of all, of course, the Socialist Revolutionaries, they all began to gather in Samara, and soon Viktor Chernov, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, ended up there. The policy was peculiar - they immediately declared that now was not the time for socialist experiments, and already on July 9, the denationalization of enterprises and a timid policy of compensating losses to former owners, and a very incomprehensible policy with the land began. This, by the way, seriously worried the peasants, because the Bolshevik slogan “Land for the peasants!” no one canceled it, everyone was worried about the question of whether the landowner citizens would return, who, in fact... would they claim rights to their former land. But for now Komuch announced that the main task was to eliminate the power of the Bolsheviks. To eliminate the power of the Bolsheviks, an army is needed, and so far everything rests on Czech bayonets, and as, by the way, the French consul in Samara wrote quite correctly to the French ambassador Noulens, “there is no doubt for anyone that without our Czechs the Committee of the Constituent Assembly would not have existed and one week." They felt very insecure, and the Socialist Revolutionary Brushvit wrote: “Support was only from the peasants, a small group of intelligentsia, officers and bureaucrats, everyone else stood on the sidelines.” This is what I was saying - no one wants war. Yes, and there was such support from the peasants, because the Socialist Revolutionaries were known in this environment, but it is impossible to say that they had some kind of super support there. Well, first of all, Komuch creates an army, he calls it the People’s Army, forms a volunteer Samara squad, but it cannot be said that there was a huge number of people willing to do so. The only thing that could be noticed in this was that Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Oskarovich Kappel was arriving in Samara from the General Staff - he was a very big man for the White movement, well, Kappel was also a veteran of the First World War, after he was demobilized in the fall of 1917, he lived In Perm. By conviction, Kappel is an extreme monarchist, a talented man as a military man, and naturally, he... well, the Bolsheviks are not his power, he does not want to have anything to do with them, and as soon as an alternative arises, he immediately rushes to Samara. True, Komuch is also not his power, the Social Revolutionaries are also practically the same for him as the Bolsheviks, and subsequently that is why he will support Admiral Kolchak, who, so to speak, is a classic military dictatorship, but at the moment, since all forces are at suppression of the Bolsheviks, Kappel arrives, since there are no others willing to lead this squad, he... he is appointed. And this was the right decision on Komuch’s part, because such a talented military man at the head of the forces, indeed, for some time turns the tide of military operations in favor of the anti-Bolshevik movement, in favor of the whites. Subsequently, Kappel will take Kazan, and this will be a very strong blow to the positions of the Reds, because in Kazan: a) part of the gold reserves will be captured, part of which the Czechs will then take with them, and the second important point is that the Military Academy of the General Staff was evacuated to Kazan in full force, and she in full force went over to the side of the whites. But that’s not all that’s interesting in this situation, because the Bolsheviks – this is probably a unique case in world history – will completely rebuild this Military Academy, again using personnel from the old tsarist army. And as a result of all these events, a united anti-Bolshevik front begins to form, i.e. The Bolsheviks find themselves in a very difficult situation. And here we move on to such an important topic as the relationship of the Bolsheviks with the peasantry, because in addition to the White movement, which consists of officers, intelligentsia and the middle urban strata, gradually the White movement begins ... well, I would not say that the peasantry provides support to the White movement , but, let’s say, the peasants are beginning to act in favor of the White movement, their spontaneous peasant uprisings are an important moment. The fact is that, having come to power, the Bolsheviks were faced with the same problem that the tsarist government and the Provisional Government had unsuccessfully solved - it was the problem of buying grain from the peasants. Let me remind you that by the end of 1916 a food crisis arose; it was due to the fact that the state established fixed food prices for the purchase of grain in the countryside. Prices were low; peasants did not want to sell anything at low prices. The invisible hand of the market immediately began to work, right? Yes, the invisible hand of the market immediately began to work, and in connection with this, on December 2, 1916, Minister of Food Rittich introduced food appropriation. This surplus appropriation was voluntary, i.e. peasants had to hand over their surpluses to local authorities themselves. As a result, nothing was handed over, nothing was received, and the food crisis intensified. The Provisional Government, realizing that things smelled like kerosene, introduced the so-called. grain monopoly, but, again... i.e. all surpluses must be handed over to the state, but the Provisional Government did not have any strength to confiscate these surpluses, and, naturally, no one carried them on a silver platter. Moreover, what was the problem: the fact is that the trade turnover between the city and the countryside was disrupted, the peasants could not buy anything in particular - not nails... the peasants could not buy any goods ranging from nails to tea, so instead of money they held back grain , they believed that we didn’t really need money now, it would be better if we stored the grain. Well, the Bolsheviks, having come to power, the Soviets, or rather, having come to power, inherited this whole problem, but they didn’t just inherit this problem - it seriously worsened, why - yes, because under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty Russia lost Ukraine, i.e. essentially a granary, and there was less and less grain, in general, the country was on the verge of famine. Famine primarily occurs in the cities, naturally, because grain does not flow from the villages to the cities. What to do? Well, naturally, the wealthy peasants, the kulaks, just as they didn’t want to give the grain to the state, they still don’t want to. Well, you have to understand that it was these people who set the tone for public opinion in the villages, and whoever wanted to sell bread would have burned their hut. Yes, and they even have the opportunity to either promote themselves to some local Soviets or promote proteges there, and such a village conflict begins. Well, does the city need to be fed somehow? And in this sense, the Bolsheviks begin to act quite energetically and harshly - they introduce a policy of effective surplus appropriation, sending food detachments to the villages. But so that the food detachments are not perceived in the villages as some misplaced Cossack women who came and took everything out, separate committees are created in the villages. Poor People's Committees. Yes, committees of the poor, i.e. class politics begins to be implemented in the village. So that the kulak does not hide grain from the state, he needs constant supervision. The food detachment came and went, who will look after it - their own, the poor. The poor have a direct goal of looking after the fist. And so committees of the poor are created in the village, which, in fact, should provide support to the food detachments and show that this one has grain hidden, this one has it here... Well, that is, for those who don’t understand, it is completely obvious - what if this 10 hectares of arable land, then on average it will grow this much, and then they will come and ask the question: where are ours, there, I don’t know, 1000 poods? And he says: I only have 20. 20 won’t work, I’ll have to give it all. And these people, accordingly, will show. This is a field for settling scores, grievances and all that. Well, colossal, of course, all this is happening, the result is that peasant uprisings break out, and the village begins to polarize, i.e. the poor are drawn to the Bolsheviks, to the Red Army, the kulaks are drawn to any anti-Bolsheviks in general and to the White Army, but who is the middle peasant for? That's who the middle peasant will be for, he'll win, and so will the slippers. The struggle for the middle peasant begins: agitation, violence, but in any case, since the summer of 1918, we have recorded more than a hundred peasant uprisings, large and small, throughout the country, because the peasantry cannot like this policy, because it provokes... reveals an internal conflict. Well, in general, here, it seems to me, it makes no difference whether you are a fist or not a fist - from the point of view of me, as a peasant: I raised this with my sweat, blood, and for as much as I want, I will sell it for as much - and then they will come and take it away Just. Yes. Peasant psychology, in general, sharply rejected all this. And after all these... well, almost parallel to all these events, the Soviet government makes another decision, which sharply, so to speak, polarizes the peasants, firstly, and secondly, is not generally popular: since the enemy does not sleep, gathers forces, you need to create an army. Let me remind you that the Red Army already exists, but it is voluntary, whoever wants it can come. Something on a voluntary basis, not very many people join there for obvious reasons - the war has been going on for 4 years, everyone is tired, they want a peaceful life, etc., well, it’s not popular, the war is basically not popular. But since the enemies are mobilizing, the Bolsheviks are forced to announce mobilization, or rather, the forced recruitment of workers into the Red Army, this happens by decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on May 29, 1918. Mobilization begins on June 12, 5 ages of workers and peasants who do not exploit the labor of others in 51 districts of the Volga, Ural and West Siberian military districts, located in close proximity to the theater of military operations. And the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July already consolidated the transition from the volunteer principle of forming the Red Army to the creation of a regular army of workers and toiling peasants on the basis of military service. The peasants don’t want to join the army, they disrupt mobilization - well, it seems like they fought for 4 years, they just returned, here’s the land... and again they demand to fight, it’s not clear against whom or why. There is a well-known song: “The Red Army will have bayonets and tea, the Bolsheviks will manage without you.” Yes, this is Demyan Bedny. Everything, he doesn’t want to, the mobilization fails, and now we have such a document as the report of a member of the Higher Military Inspectorate of Nikolaev, who reports to the Council of People’s Commissars: “Mobilization has no chance of success, there is no enthusiasm, faith, desire to fight.” All this is happening against the backdrop of, well, not so much the failure of this food policy, but this food policy, it is clear that even on paper, in the plans, it looked normal: here are the food detachments, they come, here they are met by the committees of the poor, they show , where the fists have the grain, the fist has nowhere to go, it gives away the grain - and everything is fine. When all this begins to be put into practice, it inevitably leads to some colossal excesses: in the same Penza province an uprising begins, because there was a woman commissar of the food detachment, Evgenia Bosh, who, after all, was apparently not particularly balanced lady, she personally shot one peasant who refused to hand over grain - this caused... led to an uprising, well, there is a war going on, essentially a peasant war. We have data on how these attempts to take away grain took place in different places: for example, in some places food detachments were simply dispersed by peasants. On the other hand, in some places, food detachments consisting of workers behave in national villages, completely ignoring local national customs and traditions: for example, “one of the national traditions of the Udmurt peasants was laying stacks of grain in honor of the birth of their daughter. Such stacks, called maiden ones, were placed every year before the wedding, as a dowry for the daughter. Therefore, every owner who had daughters had untouchable supplies of bread before their wedding. The food detachments, who did not know this, threshed the girls’ stacks and, according to the peasants’ standards, dishonored their houses. Such tactlessness created favorable conditions for nationalist agitation and armed uprisings against food detachments.” But, nevertheless, the author notes that in the Vyatka province there was a very effective commissar of the food detachment, Schlikhter, who used a system of agreements with peasant Soviets and paid for part of the grain in goods, i.e. he managed to fulfill the grain procurement plan. But nevertheless, let’s just note for ourselves that this policy caused sharp discontent among the peasantry, and the peasants swung at that moment towards the whites. And in principle, these problems with the peasants will remain until the end of the Civil War, all subsequent events, all subsequent famous peasant uprisings will be caused by the same reasons. But, in principle, the same problem that faced the Bolsheviks, it faced... became inevitable in general for any government that was organized in the space of the former Russian Empire, and this government had to do the same thing - the cities needed to be fed. Therefore, in any government, let’s say the Germans come to power, Ukraine is occupied - food detachments must be seized, grain must be confiscated, and also sent to Germany and Austria-Hungary, Kolchak comes - the same thing. Therefore, in principle, this problem was the same for all authorities. And we see the same thing in relation to mobilization, because when Komuch strengthened, the first thing he announced was mobilization. “You will go unwillingly or willingly, Vanya-Vanya, you will disappear for nothing.” On June 8, already on the day of the capture of Samara, Komuch, having announced the creation of the People's Army, emphasizing the non-class character, announced mobilization - the same thing, no one wants to fight. One of the organizers of the army, Shmelev, writes that former officers, student youth, and intelligentsia joined the ranks of the volunteer units, but the people did not want to join it, the peasants of 5 of the 7 districts of the Samara province did not support volunteerism for the Komuch army, only the most The rich districts of the province gave volunteers. But they also sent tens of thousands of poor and underpowered middle peasants to the Red Army, and the right-wing Social Revolutionary Klimushin was forced to admit in September 1918 that “despite the general rejoicing, real support was negligible - not hundreds, but only dozens of citizens came to us.” Well, as a result, almost forced mobilization begins, parts of the formed people’s army travel to the villages, trying to find people there, but nothing works out for them. And in those places where Komuch’s army is already passing, on the contrary, sympathy for the Bolsheviks is already beginning. This is how Shmelev writes - that the population, who was impatiently awaiting the arrival of the people's army, was often bitterly disappointed in their expectations almost from the first days. In the Menzelinsky district, populated by Tatars, during the period of the Czechoslovak offensive, there was a wave of peasant uprisings against Soviet power. But it was enough for Colonel Shch. to “walk” around the district for several days with his fellows, when the mood completely changed in the opposite direction. When the Menzelinsky district was again occupied by Soviet troops, almost the entire male population of the district, capable of bearing arms, without waiting for forced mobilization, joined the ranks of the Soviet troops. Strongly! A very typical confession. So, we note that the peasantry as a whole is quite passive and does not want to fight at the moment. But nevertheless, the confrontation is determined, the fronts are determined, and at this moment - mid-1918 - the prospects for a white victory begin to emerge, why - because, firstly, they enjoy the support of the Entente countries, and secondly, alternative authorities are created, around which armies can be built, etc., all forces unite, flock, and thirdly, the Bolsheviks are losing their social base, they are losing the social base of the peasants, and they are losing their allies - the left Socialist Revolutionaries, who blame the wrong policies of the Bolsheviks for everything that is happening . Let me remind you that in tandem, in this alliance, in a coalition of Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks are still the leaders, and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries are the followers, but the Left Socialist Revolutionaries don’t really like this, and the left Socialist Revolutionaries, firstly, extremely disapprove of the Brest Revolution peace, they believe that everything that is happening is all because they signed the obscene Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Now, if the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had not been signed, we would have continued the revolutionary war, a world revolution would have already happened in Germany, in general, a world revolution would have already taken place, we would already be, in general, on horseback. And now we have only strengthened the German army, hence we are forced, after the occupation of Ukraine we are forced to start putting pressure on the peasants, and this means peasant uprisings - the Bolsheviks are to blame for all this, they created the whole mess. Therefore, by this time the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were already thinking about a rebellion with the aim of a coup and coming to power. This is one problem of the Bolsheviks, in addition to this, the so-called so-called in historiography it is known as a conspiracy of ambassadors, because the Entente, outwardly maintaining diplomatic politeness towards the power of the Bolsheviks, although not recognizing it, is clearly aiming at the overthrow of the Council of People's Commissars and the restoration of some kind of provisional government capable, firstly, of renewing the war against Germany, and secondly, accountable to the forces of the Entente, controlled. Well, thirdly, in parallel, officer performances are being prepared, which are secretly conducted by Boris Savinkov, a Socialist Revolutionary, probably the most energetic person in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who, having received a mandate to organize underground officer organizations from the commander of the Volunteer Army Alekseev, really created them, not just spoke and he really created. And all this surrounds the Bolsheviks in a ring, i.e. knots are tightening everywhere around them, and it seems that it is impossible to cope with it, because there are such enormous problems there, such an onslaught is coming at them that it is not clear how to cope with it, but nevertheless they managed. That's how it happened, we'll talk next time. Into the plot! Thank you, Egor. That's all for today. Until next time.

background

The Czechoslovak corps was formed as part of the Russian army in the autumn of 1917, mainly from captured Czechs and Slovaks who expressed a desire to participate in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The first national Czech unit (the Czech squad) was created from Czech volunteers who lived in Russia at the very beginning of the war, in the autumn of 1914. As part of the 3rd Army of General Radko-Dmitriev, she participated in the Battle of Galicia and later performed mainly reconnaissance and propaganda functions. Since March 1915, the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, allowed the admission of Czechs and Slovaks from among the prisoners and defectors into the ranks. As a result, by the end of 1915, it was deployed to the First Czechoslovak Infantry Regiment named after Jan Hus (with a staff strength of about 2100 people). It was in this formation that the future leaders of the rebellion began their service, and later - prominent political and military figures of the Czechoslovak Republic - lieutenant Jan Syrovy, lieutenant Stanislav Chechek, captain Radola Gayda and others. By the end of 1916, the regiment turned into a brigade ( Československá strelecká brigada) consisting of three regiments, numbering approx. 3.5 thousand officers and lower ranks, under the command of Colonel V.P. Troyanov.

Meanwhile, in February 1916, the Czechoslovak National Council was formed in Paris ( Československá národní rada). Its leaders (Tomas Masaryk, Josef Dyurich, Milan Stefanik, Edvard Benes) promoted the idea of ​​creating an independent Czechoslovak state and made active efforts to obtain the consent of the Entente countries to form an independent volunteer Czechoslovak army.

1917

The representative of the ChSNS, the future first president of independent Czechoslovakia, Professor Tomasz Masaryk spent a whole year in Russia, from May 1917 to April 1918. As a prominent figure in the White movement, Lieutenant General Sakharov, writes in his book, Masaryk first contacted all the "leaders" of the February Revolution, after what " entered entirely at the disposal of the French military mission in Russia". Masaryk himself in the 1920s called the Czechoslovak Corps " autonomous army, but at the same time an integral part of the French army", because the " we were financially dependent on France and on the Entente» . For the leaders of the Czech national movement, the main goal of continuing to participate in the war with Germany was the creation of a state independent of Austria-Hungary. In the same year, 1917, by a joint decision of the French government and the ČSNS, the Czechoslovak Legion was formed in France. The ČSNS was recognized as the sole supreme body of all Czechoslovak military formations - this put the Czechoslovak legionnaires(and now they were called that way) in Russia, depending on the decisions of the Entente.

Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak National Council (CSNC), which sought to turn the Czechoslovak corps created by Russia into a “foreign allied army located on Russian territory,” petitioned the French government and President Poincaré to recognize all Czechoslovak military formations as part of the French army. Since December 1917, on the basis of a decree of the French government of December 19 on the organization of an autonomous Czechoslovak army in France, the Czechoslovak corps in Russia was formally subordinate to the French command and was instructed to send to France.

1918

Nevertheless, Czechoslovaks could only get to France through the territory of Russia, where at that time Soviet power was established everywhere. In order not to spoil relations with the Soviet government of Russia, the Czechoslovak National Council categorically refrained from any action against it, and therefore refused to help the Central Rada against the Soviet detachments advancing on it.

During the unfolding offensive of the Soviet troops on Kiev, they came into contact with units of the 2nd Czechoslovak division, which was on formation near Kiev, and Masaryk concluded an agreement on neutrality with commander-in-chief M. A. Muravyov. On January 26 (February 8), Soviet troops captured Kyiv and established Soviet power there. On February 16, Muravyov informed Masaryk that the government of Soviet Russia had no objection to the departure of the Czechoslovaks to France.

With the consent of Masaryk, Bolshevik agitation was allowed in the Czechoslovak units. A small part of the Czechoslovaks (a little over 200 people), under the influence of revolutionary ideas, left the corps and later joined the international brigades of the Red Army. Masaryk himself, according to him, refused to accept offers of cooperation that came to him from Generals Alekseev and Kornilov (General Alekseev in early February 1918 turned to the head of the French mission in Kiev with a request to agree to send Ekaterinoslav - Alexandrov - Sinelnikovo to the area, if not the entire Czechoslovak corps, then at least one division with artillery in order to create the conditions necessary for the defense of the Don and the formation of the Volunteer Army... P. N. Milyukov addressed Masaryk directly with the same request). At the same time, Masaryk, in the words of K. N. Sakharov, “strongly connected with the Russian left camp; in addition to Muravyov, he strengthened his relations with a number of revolutionary figures of the semi-Bolshevik type. Russian officers were gradually removed from command posts, the CHSNS in Russia was replenished with "leftist, ultra-socialist people from prisoners of war."

In early 1918, the 1st Czechoslovak division was stationed near Zhytomyr. On January 27 (February 9), the delegation of the Central Rada of the UNR in Brest-Litovsk signed a peace treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary, enlisting their military assistance in the fight against Soviet troops. After the entry of German-Austrian troops into the territory of Ukraine, which began on February 18, the 1st Czechoslovak division was urgently redeployed from Zhytomyr to the Left-Bank Ukraine, where from March 7 to March 14, in the Bakhmach region, the Czechoslovaks had to act jointly with the Soviet troops, holding back the onslaught of the German divisions to ensure evacuation.

All the efforts of the CHSNS were aimed at organizing the evacuation of the corps from Russia to France. The shortest route was by sea - through Arkhangelsk and Murmansk - but it was abandoned because of the Czechs' fears that the corps could be intercepted by the Germans if they went on the offensive. It was decided to send legionnaires along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok and further across the Pacific Ocean to Europe.

The former tsarist army had already ceased to exist by the summer of 1918, while the Red Army and the White armies were just beginning to form and, often, did not differ in combat readiness. The Czechoslovak Legion turns out to be almost the only combat-ready force in Russia, its number grows to 50 thousand people. The attitude of the Bolsheviks towards the Czechoslovaks was wary because of this. On the other hand, despite the consent expressed by the Czech leaders to the partial disarmament of the echelons, this was perceived with great discontent among the legionnaires themselves and became an occasion for hostile distrust of the Bolsheviks.

In the meantime, the Soviet government had become aware of secret allied talks about a Japanese intervention in Siberia and the Far East. On March 28, in the hope of preventing this, Leon Trotsky agreed to Lockhart for an all-Union landing in Vladivostok. However, on April 4, Japanese Admiral Kato, without warning the allies, landed a small detachment of marines in Vladivostok "to protect the life and property of Japanese citizens." The Soviet government, suspecting the Entente of a double game, demanded to start new negotiations on changing the direction of the evacuation of the Czechoslovaks from Vladivostok to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk.

The German General Staff, for its part, also feared the imminent appearance of a 40,000-strong corps on the Western Front, at a time when France was already running out of its last manpower reserves and the so-called colonial troops were hastily sent to the front. Under pressure from the German Ambassador to Russia, Count Mirbach, on April 21, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G.V.

Fearing a Japanese offensive in Siberia, Germany resolutely demands that an emergency evacuation of German prisoners from Eastern Siberia to Western or European Russia be started. Please use all means. Czechoslovak detachments must not move east.
Chicherin

The legionnaires took this order as the intention of the Soviet government to extradite them to Germany and Austria-Hungary as former prisoners of war. In an atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion, incidents were inevitable. One of them happened on May 14 at Chelyabinsk station. A Czech soldier was wounded with a cast-iron leg from a stove thrown from a passing echelon with Hungarian prisoners of war. In response, the Czechoslovaks stopped the train and lynched the culprit. Following this incident, the Soviet authorities of Chelyabinsk arrested several legionnaires the next day. However, their comrades freed the arrested by force, disarmed the local Red Guard detachment and destroyed the weapons arsenal, capturing 2,800 rifles and an artillery battery.

Course of events during the uprising

In such an atmosphere of extreme excitement, a congress of Czechoslovak military delegates gathered in Chelyabinsk (May 16-20), at which, to coordinate the actions of disparate groupings of the corps, the Provisional Executive Committee of the Congress of the Czechoslovak Army was formed from three echelon chiefs (lieutenant Chechek, captain Gaida, colonel Voitsekhovsky) under chaired by CSNC member Pavlu. The congress resolutely took the position of breaking with the Bolsheviks and decided to stop the surrender of weapons (by this moment the weapons had not yet been surrendered by the three rear guard regiments in the Penza region) and move "in their own order" to Vladivostok.

On May 21, Maxa and Chermak, representatives of the ČSNS, were arrested in Moscow, and an order was given for the complete disarmament and disbandment of the Czechoslovak echelons. On May 23, Aralov, head of the operations department of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs, telegraphed to Penza: “... I propose to immediately take urgent measures to delay, disarm and disband all echelons and units of the Czechoslovak corps as a remnant of the old regular army. From the personnel of the corps, form Red Army and workers' artels ... "The representatives of the Chess Socialist Union, arrested in Moscow, accepted Trotsky's demands and on behalf of Masaryk ordered the Czechoslovaks to surrender all weapons, declaring the incident in Chelyabinsk a mistake and demanding an immediate cessation of all kinds of speeches that impede the implementation of the" national cause ". Legionnaires, however, were already subordinate only to their "Provisional Executive Committee", elected by the congress. This emergency body sent an order to all echelons and parts of the corps: “Do not hand over weapons anywhere to the Soviets, do not cause clashes yourself, but in case of an attack, defend yourself, continue moving eastward in your own order.”

May 25 was followed by a telegram from Commissar Trotsky "to all Soviet deputies along the line from Penza to Omsk", which left no doubt about the decisive intentions of the Soviet authorities:

... All railway councils are obliged, under pain of heavy responsibility, to disarm the Czechoslovaks. Every Czechoslovak who is found armed on the railway lines must be shot on the spot; each echelon in which there is at least one armed person must be unloaded from the wagons and imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp. Local military commissariats undertake to immediately carry out this order, any delay will be tantamount to treason and will bring down severe punishment on the guilty. At the same time, I send reliable forces to the rear of the Czechoslovak echelons, who are instructed to teach the disobedient a lesson. Honest Czechoslovaks, who surrender their weapons and submit to Soviet power, should be treated like brothers and given them all possible support. All railroad workers are informed that not a single wagon with Czechoslovaks should move east ...
People's Commissar for Military Affairs L. Trotsky.

Quoted from the book. Parfenov "Civil War in Siberia". Page 25-26.

On May 25-27, at several points where the Czechoslovak echelons were located (Maryanovka station, Irkutsk, Zlatoust), skirmishes took place with the Red Guards, who were trying to disarm the legionnaires.

On May 27, Colonel Voitsekhovsky's division took Chelyabinsk. The Czechoslovaks, having defeated the forces of the Red Guard thrown against them, also occupied the cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway Petropavlovsk and Kurgan, overthrowing the power of the Bolsheviks in them and opened their way to Omsk. Other units entered Novonikolaevsk, Mariinsk, Nizhneudinsk and Kansk (May 29). In early June 1918, the Czechoslovaks entered Tomsk.

On June 4-5, 1918, not far from Samara, the legionnaires defeated the Soviet units and fought through the possibility of crossing the Volga. On June 4, the Entente declared the Czechoslovak Corps part of its armed forces and declared that it would consider its disarmament as an unfriendly act against the Allies. The situation was aggravated by pressure from Germany, which did not stop demanding from the Soviet government the disarmament of the Czechoslovaks. On June 8, the first anti-Bolshevik government, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), was organized in Samara, captured by the legionnaires, and on June 23, in Omsk, the Provisional Siberian Government. This marked the beginning of the formation of other anti-Bolshevik governments throughout Russia.

In early July, as commander of the 1st Czechoslovak division, Chechek issued an order in which he emphasized the following:

Our detachment is defined as the forerunner of the allied forces, and the instructions received from headquarters have the sole purpose of building an anti-German front in Russia in alliance with the entire Russian people and our allies..

The October Revolution of 1917 dismayed a significant part of Russian society and at the same time caused a rather sluggish reaction from the opponents of the Bolsheviks. Although the wave of uprisings began almost immediately, the Soviet authorities managed to localize and suppress the rebellions quite quickly. The white movement at first remained scattered and did not go beyond dull discontent.

And then the Czechoslovak corps rebelled - a large, well-armed and well-knit formation, which, moreover, stretched from the Volga region to the Pacific Ocean. The Czechoslovak revolt revived the anti-Bolshevik forces in eastern Russia and gave them time and reason to consolidate.

Czech squad

From the very beginning of the First World War, the Czechs on the territory of the Russian Empire showed an enviable organization. The most socially and politically active of them formed the Czech National Committee. Already on the day of the official declaration of war, this committee adopted an appeal to Nicholas II, announcing the duty of the Czechs to help their Russian brothers. On September 7, the delegation even obtained an audience with the emperor and handed him a memorandum stating, among other things, that “the free and independent crown of St. Wenceslas (the prince and patron saint of the Czech Republic, who lived in the 10th century) will soon shine in the rays of the Romanov crown ...”

At first, the enthusiasm of the Slavic brothers was greeted rather coolly. The military leadership of Russia was wary of movements organized "from below", but still allowed the Czechs, as the order of the Minister of War V.A. Sukhomlinov, "to form in Kyiv one or two regiments or, depending on the number of volunteers, a battalion of at least two companies." They were not going to throw them into battle - it was too valuable a propaganda card. The Czechs were supposed to demonstrate in every possible way the unity of the Slavic peoples in the struggle against the Germans.
Already on July 30, the Council of Ministers decided to form the Chesh squad in Kyiv - because it was there that the center of the Czech diaspora in Russia and its largest part were located. Throughout August, volunteers eagerly enrolled in the ranks. The unit included Russian Czechs, primarily from the Kyiv province, but also from other regions, too. At the same time, the Czech Squad Foundation was established, which was engaged in supply, hospitals and caring for the families of the soldiers.

The Czechs experienced a genuine and quite sincere national enthusiasm: it seemed that a little more, and the mighty Russian brother would give them independence. Own armed forces, albeit recruited from the subjects of the Russian tsar under Russian command, gave serious grounds for creating their own state. The head of the military department of the Czechoslovak legions, Rudolf Medek, later said: “The existence of the Czech army would definitely play a decisive role in resolving the issue of restoring the independence of the Czech Republic. It should be noted that the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 directly depended on the existence of a combat-ready Czech-Slovak army.

By September 1914, the Czech squad (one battalion) was already operating as a military unit within the Russian armed forces. In October, it numbered about a thousand people and soon went to the front at the disposal of the 3rd Army under the command of General R. D. Radko-Dmitriev.

The officers were Russian - in Russia there simply were not enough Czechs with experience and higher military education. This situation will change only during the years of the Civil War.

POW Corps

Throughout the war, Czechoslovaks on the other side of the front surrendered en masse. The idea of ​​the Austro-Hungarian government to distribute weapons to the people, who considered themselves oppressed, was not the most successful. By 1917, out of 600 thousand prisoners of war from all over the Russian-Austrian front, about 200 thousand were Czechoslovaks. However, many continued to fight on the side of the Austro-Hungarians, including the future Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Klement Gottwald and the son of the future first president of Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk.

The Russian command treated the prisoners with suspicion. In addition, at the beginning of the war, the imperial army did not really need manpower. But in March 1915, at the direction of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and at the numerous petitions of various public organizations, Czech and Slovak prisoners of war began to be accepted into the Czech squad. By the end of 1915, the formation doubled its strength and turned into the First Czechoslovak Infantry Regiment named after Jan Hus. A year later, the regiment grew to four thousand people and turned into a rifle brigade. There were also disadvantages: a motley mass of subjects of Austria-Hungary blurred the squad, which until then consisted of ideological supporters of Russia. It will come out later.

After the February Revolution, the Slavic brothers became noticeably more active. In May 1917, a branch of the Czechoslovak National Council appeared in Russia. The Council met throughout the war in Paris under the leadership of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. Let's talk about this person in more detail - it is difficult to overestimate his role in the formation of an independent Czechoslovakia. University professor Masaryk was a member of the Austrian parliament before the First World War, and then became an active member of the underground organization "Mafia", striving for the independence of Czechoslovakia.

The future father of the nation was married to Charlotte Garrig (he took her last name as a middle name), a relative of the successful American businessman Charles Crane, a great connoisseur of Eastern European culture. In his political views, Masaryk was a liberal nationalist, oriented towards the countries of the West. At the same time, he had enough diplomatic flair and the ability to use the real situation to his advantage. Thus, in a letter to British Foreign Secretary E. Gray in May 1915, he, as if yielding to Slavophil public opinion, notes: “The Czech Republic is projected as a monarchical state. Only a few radical politicians advocate for a republic in the Czech Republic... The Czech people - this must be emphatically emphasized - are a completely Russophile people. A Russian dynasty in whatever form would be the most popular... Czech politicians would like to create a Czech kingdom in full agreement with Russia. Russia's desire and intention will be decisive." After the overthrow of the Russian autocracy, the situation changed dramatically. The Romanov dynasty leaves the political scene, and democratic forces of various kinds and orientations come to power. Under the new conditions, the Czechoslovaks (despite all the statements, mostly democrats) receive more support from the government than under the Tsar.

The Czechoslovak troops performed well during Kerensky's June offensive (perhaps you can't say that about anyone else). During the Zborovsky (in Galicia) battle on July 1-2, 1917, the Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade defeated the Czech and Hungarian infantry divisions, which were almost 2 times larger in number. This victory could not change the deplorable democratic situation at the front, but it made a splash in Russian society. The interim government decided to remove the previously existing restrictions on the formation of military units from prisoners. The Czechoslovak brigade received recognition, honor and glory - as one of the few combat units that achieved at least some success in that shameful year.

Soon the overgrown brigade was deployed into the 1st Hussite Rifle Division. Already on July 4, 1917, under the new commander-in-chief Lavr Kornilov, the 2nd Hussite division appeared. Finally, in September-October 1917, by order of the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Dukhonin, the Czechoslovak Corps began to be created from 3 divisions, one of which, however, existed only on paper. It was a serious connection - about 40 thousand bayonets. The Russian Major General Vladimir Shokorov was placed at the head of the Czech units. In August 1918, all Czechoslovaks in Russia were mobilized, and the corps grew to 51 thousand people.

The October Revolution dramatically changed the situation. The leadership of the Czechoslovak National Council, on the one hand, declared its support for the Provisional Government and its readiness to continue the fight against the Germans, and, on the other hand, decided not to interfere in the political affairs of Russia. The Bolshevik government did not have any special love for the allies of the former regime, it was not going to fight the Germans, and the Czechoslovaks had to ask for help from the Entente. In December, the Poincare government decided to organize an autonomous Czechoslovak army ("legion"). Chekhov was reassigned to the French command, and the French immediately ordered them to go to the Western Front by sea: either through Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, or through Vladivostok.

It took several months for the Bolsheviks and Czechoslovaks to establish permanent relations (this was done through separate detachments in the field, the vertical of power at that moment was rather illusory). In order not to quarrel with the Reds, the Czechoslovak leadership allows communist agitation and refuses the proposals of the White generals and Milyukov to oppose the Bolsheviks. Some Czechs generally decided to support the Reds in the Russian civil strife (for example, Yaroslav Gashek, the future author of Schweik) - 200 people wished to fight for the world revolution.

At the same time, many socialists from among the prisoners of war appeared in the Czechoslovak National Council, which to a large extent predetermined the political face of this body in subsequent years. The main task of the council is the evacuation of the corps from Russia to France by sea and transfer to the Western Front. The route through Murmansk and Arkhangelsk was considered too dangerous because of the threat of a German offensive, so they preferred the circuit route, through the Far East. It was problematic to disarm an organized delegation of Czechoslovak guests, so the agreement concluded on March 26, 1918 bashfully allowed the legionnaires to keep some of the weapons "for self-defense against assassination attempts by counter-revolutionaries", and the military personnel formally moved not in battle order, but "as a group of free citizens". In return, the Bolsheviks demanded the dismissal of all Russian officers as a counter-revolutionary element. For this, the Council of People's Commissars undertook to provide the legionnaires with all possible assistance along the way. The next day, a telegram arrived with an explanation: “part of the weapon” meant one armed company of 168 people, one machine gun and several hundred rounds of ammunition per rifle. Everything else had to be handed over to a special commission in Penza against receipt. In the end, the Reds received 50 thousand rifles, 1200 machine guns, 72 guns.

True, according to the commander of the western group of the corps, Stanislav Chechek, many soldiers hid their weapons, and he himself, like many other officers, approved of their actions. Three regiments of the corps were not disarmed at all, because by the beginning of the uprising they simply did not have time to reach Penza. With the demand for the resignation of Russian officers, about the same thing happened: only 15 people were fired, and the majority (including, for example, the corps commander Shokorov and his chief of staff Diterichs) remained in their previous positions.

At the forefront of the counterrevolution

Despite the interest of the Bolsheviks in the speedy transfer of the corps to the sea, the Czech echelons were constantly detained and driven into dead ends - trains full of Hungarians and Germans, after Brest, were going back to their armies from captivity. This was the logic: the prisoners had already been pumped up with red propaganda by agitators, the Council of People's Commissars hoped that at home they would kindle the fire of the world revolution.

By April, the movement of the corps had completely stopped: the Japanese landed in Vladivostok, Ataman Semyonov advanced in Transbaikalia, the Germans demanded their prisoners back as soon as possible, the general chaos reached the last degree. The Czechs began to fear (not unreasonably) that the Reds would betray them to the Germans. By May 1918, Czechoslovak trains were stretched along the entire Trans-Siberian Railway from Penza to Vladivostok.

And then there was the Chelyabinsk incident. The Russians took the most indirect part in it: some Hungarian at some station threw some iron object at some Czech. The comrades of the offended fighter removed the Magyar from the train and lynched him. For this they were arrested by the local red authorities. The legionnaires did not appreciate this treatment and began to smash the Soviet institutions: they freed the captives, disarmed the Red Guards and seized the weapons depot. Artillery was found in the warehouse, among other things. The stunned friends of the workers offered no resistance. And then, realizing that since such fun had already begun, it was necessary to cut the last Bolshevik, the rebellious Czechs contacted their comrades-in-arms in other sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway. There was a full scale uprising.

The legionnaires elected the Provisional Executive Committee of the Congress of the Czechoslovak Army, which was headed by 3 group commanders - Stanislav Chechek, Radola Gaida and Sergei Voitsekhovsky (a Russian officer, then he will become the fourth person in the military hierarchy of independent Czechoslovakia). The commanders decided to break off relations with the Bolsheviks and move to Vladivostok, if necessary, then with battles.

The Bolsheviks did not immediately react to the events - on May 21, representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council, Max and Cermak, who were in Moscow, were arrested. They had to order the legionnaires to disarm. However, the Czechoslovak executive committee ordered the troops to continue moving. For some time, the parties tried to find a compromise, but to no avail. Finally, on May 25, Trotsky gives a clear order to disarm the corps. Railway workers are ordered to detain his echelons, armed legionnaires are threatened with executions on the spot, and "honest Czechoslovaks" who lay down their arms are threatened with "fraternal help." The most insane Red Guards sincerely tried to fulfill the instructions of the people's commissar, but it was useless. Legionnaires have crossed their Rubicon.

From the tactical side, the position of the legion was quite vulnerable - there was no established connection between the echelons, the Reds could easily cut the Czechs and break them into parts. The Slavic brothers were saved by revolutionary chaos and the general uselessness of the Red Army commanders: the Bolsheviks were simply confused - they had neither a plan, nor an organization, nor any reliable troops. In addition, the local population had already managed to taste the delights of war communism and were not eager to help the friends of the workers. As a result, the Soviet government, which triumphantly marched across the country after the October Revolution, turned around and began to retreat just as triumphantly. The Czechoslovaks took (or actively helped to take) Penza, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Petropavlovsk, Novonikolaevsk, in early June - Samara and Tomsk, in July - Tyumen, Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk. Officers' circles and other anti-Bolshevik organizations were awakening everywhere. At the very end of August, parts of the Czechoslovak corps connected with each other and thus secured control over the Trans-Siberian from the Volga region to Vladivostok.

Of course, political life immediately swelled in full swing. All sorts of governments and committees began to spring up like mushrooms. In the Volga region, the Committee of Members of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which consisted mainly of Socialist-Revolutionaries, creates the People's Army, at first similar to the armed forces of the Kerensky era - with soldiers' committees and without shoulder straps. They put a Czech in command - Stanislav Chechek. The Czechoslovaks are fighting side by side with this army, advancing, capturing Ufa, Simbirsk, Kazan. In Kazan - a huge success - part of the gold reserves of Russia falls into the hands of the Whites. The Eastern counter-revolution meets almost no resistance: the Reds just pulled off everything more or less combat-ready against Denikin, who, after the Second Kuban campaign, turned into a serious threat. The worst enemies of the Czechs (this is noted by several authors at once) were the Austrians and Hungarians - they did not take these prisoners at all. As a rule, the Russian Red Army soldiers were treated somewhat more humanely.

Russian society reacts indifferently to the glorification of the Czechoslovak Corps, primarily because of ignorance. As it turned out from a survey conducted in 2013, in Chelyabinsk 64% of respondents did not know the history of the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia

The uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps, which took place during the Civil War, from May 1918 to March 1920, had a huge impact on the political and military situation in Soviet Russia. This uprising affected more than half of the country's territory and a number of cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway: Maryinsk, Chelyabinsk, Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Syzran, Tomsk, Omsk, Samara, Zlatoust, Krasnoyarsk, Simbirsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Kazan. At the time of the beginning of the armed uprising, units of the Czechoslovak Corps stretched along the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Rtishchevo station in the Penza region to Vladivostok, at a distance of about 7 thousand kilometers.

In Soviet historical science, the uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps was interpreted as a planned armed anti-Soviet uprising, provoked by counter-revolutionary officers and the Entente countries. .

In Western literature, on the contrary, the notion of the independence of the Czechoslovak Corps and the extraordinary fatefulness of its performance was imposed. The Czechs were presented as "true democrats" who fought against the "terrible Bolsheviks who threatened the world." The situation in which the corps found itself in Russia was portrayed as a tragedy. And the bandit actions of the White Czechs - the hijacking of locomotives, the seizure of provisions, violence against the population - as forced by circumstances and the desire to quickly reach Vladivostok and go to France, and from there to the front, fight under the command of the French for the freedom of Czechoslovakia.

These same ideas are actively broadcast in modern Russian society.
For example, the head of the White Russia Research Center in Yekaterinburg, N. I. Dmitriev, stated that the Czechoslovaks, fighting the Bolsheviks, "made a sacrifice in the name of defending democracy and freedom of the Russian people".

As a result of Dmitriev's efforts, on November 17, 2008 in Yekaterinburg, a monument to Czechoslovak legionnaires was erected at the cemetery where the soldiers of the corps were buried.

October 20, 2011 in Chelyabinsk solemnly, with the participation of Czech, Slovak and Russian officials, a monument to Czechoslovak legionnaires was opened on the square near the station, in the city center. The inscription on this monument reads: “Czechoslovak soldiers are buried here, brave fighters for the freedom and independence of their land, Russia and all the Slavs. In brotherly land, they gave their lives for the revival of mankind. Bare your heads before the grave of heroes". These lines do not reflect anyone's private opinion, but a very ingenious general policy of recent times, according to which Kolchak is portrayed as "just" a polar explorer, Mannerheim as a "simple" tsarist general, and the Czechoslovak Corps as "just" volunteers and patriots of the Russian empires that responded to the call of Nicholas II for the liberation of the Slavs. Why not heroes worthy of monuments?

Although local officials do not think too much whether they erect monuments to the worthy. After all, as the now disgraced ex-governor of the Chelyabinsk region Mikhail Yurevich noted: “To be honest, I found out about it on the Internet myself. Apparently, the municipality gave permission. Here I can’t say anything: in the history of the passage of the Czech Legion through our region, I am not strong. When I was at school, they explained to us that the Czechs were beating the Red Army, and then other information came out: that they, on the contrary, helped our soldiers, that they helped Chelyabinsk with something specific. In such trifles, believe me, as a governor I simply do not interfere. If the municipality decides to erect this monument, for God's sake, let them erect monuments to anyone.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Czech Ministry of Defense has developed the Legions 100 project, which involves the installation of 58 monuments to soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia. At the moment, monuments have already been installed along the entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway: in addition to Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk - in Vladivostok, Krasnoyarsk, Buzuluk, Kungur, Nizhny Tagil, Penza, Pugachev, Syzran, Ulyanovsk, the village of Verkhny Uslon in Tatarstan and the village of Mikhailovka in the Irkutsk region.

It is obvious that Russian society reacts indifferently to the glorification of the Czechoslovak Corps, primarily because of ignorance. As it turned out from a survey conducted in 2013 in Chelyabinsk by the Agency for Cultural and Social Research (AXIO), only 30% of respondents knew about the existence of the monument. At the same time, 64% of the respondents did not know the history of the stay of the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia.

What actually was the armed action of the Czechoslovak Corps?

Let's turn to history.

The history of the creation of the Czechoslovak Corps

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slavic peoples, including Czechs and Slovaks, were subjected to national and religious persecution. Not having strong loyal feelings for the Habsburg Empire, they dreamed of creating independent states.

In 1914, about 100,000 Czechs and Slovaks lived in Russia. B O Most of them lived in Ukraine, not far from the border with Austria-Hungary.

At the beginning of the First World War, the bulk of Czech and Slovak settlers found themselves in a difficult situation in Russia. Most of them were not Russian subjects. As citizens of a country at war with Russia, they faced strict police control, internment and confiscation of property.

At the same time, the First World War gave the Czechs a chance for national liberation.

On July 25, 1914, the organization of Russian Czech colonists, the Czech National Committee (ChNK), adopted an appeal to Nicholas II which said, “that the duty falls on the Russian Czechs to give their strength to the liberation of our homeland and to be side by side with the Russian brothers-heroes ...” And on August 20, the delegation of the Czech diaspora handed over a letter to Nicholas II, in which the idea of ​​liberation expressed by him was warmly supported. "of all Slavs". The Czechs expressed the hope that it would work out “to pour into the family of Slavic peoples also our Czechoslovak people within its ethnographic boundaries, taking into account its historical rights.” The letter ended with the phrase “Let the free, independent crown of St. Wenceslas shine in the rays of the crown of the Romanovs!” hinting at the possibility of Czechoslovakia joining the Russian Empire in the event of a Russian victory and the defeat of Austria-Hungary.

On July 30, 1914, the Russian Council of Ministers approved the project for the formation of the Czech squad from volunteers of Czech and Slovak nationalities. - subjects of Russia.

By mid-September 1914, 903 Czech citizens of Austria-Hungary accepted Russian citizenship and joined the Czech squad. On September 28, 1914, in Kyiv, the Czech squad was solemnly presented with a battle banner and sent to fight at the front.

However, the Czechs linked their hopes for national liberation not only with Russia. Since 1914, national associations began to emerge in Paris, with the ultimate goal of establishing Czech (later Czechoslovak) statehood.

Czech and Slovak volunteers went to the French army, where national formations were also created. As a result, the center of the national liberation struggle of the Czechs and Slovaks was formed not in Russia, but in France. In February 1916, the Czechoslovak National Council (CNC) was established in Paris. The CNS acted as a unifying center for all Czechs and Slovaks fighting for independence, including those fighting in the Russian army.

Czechoslovak Corps from Galicia to Chelyabinsk

Gradually, the number of the Czech squad in Russia grew, including through volunteers from among the prisoners of war. The Czechs, who did not want to fight for Austria-Hungary, from the very beginning of the war massively surrendered to Russian captivity.
By the end of March 1916, there was already a Czech brigade of two regiments with a total of 5,750 people.

After the February Revolution, the number of Czech formations began to grow again. The "democratization of the army" by the Provisional Government led to the loss of the principle of unity of command in the armed forces, lynching of officers and desertion. The Czechoslovak units have passed this fate.

In May 1917, the chairman of the ChNS Tomas Masaryk sent a request to the Minister of War of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky for the departure of Czechoslovak units to France. But the land route was closed. Only later, in the autumn, about 2 thousand people were taken out on French ships through Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.

The situation at the front became more difficult. Soon the Russian command suspended the dispatch of combat-ready Czech units, not wanting to weaken the front. On the contrary, they began to actively replenish. The Czechs and Slovaks continued to fight, but did not abandon their intention to go to the Western Front - to France at the first opportunity.

In July, the second Czech division was formed, and in September, a separate Czechoslovak corps consisting of two divisions and a reserve brigade. The French charter was in force in the corps. There were many Russian officers in the higher and middle command staff of the corps.

By October 1917, the number of personnel of the corps amounted to 45,000 people. Further, according to various estimates, it will range from 30,000 to 55,000 people.

Among the soldiers and officers of the corps were both communists and monarchists. But most of the Czechoslovaks, especially among the leadership, were close in their views to the Social Revolutionaries, supported the February Revolution and the Provisional Government.

The leaders of the ChNS concluded an agreement with representatives of the Provisional Government in Kyiv. This agreement contained two clauses that contradicted each other in practice. On the one hand, Masaryk said that the corps would adhere to a policy of non-interference in Russia's internal affairs. On the other hand, the possibility of using the corps to suppress unrest was stipulated.
So, one of the regiments of the corps was involved in the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv in October 1917 by the commissar of the South-Western Front from the Provisional Government N. Grigoriev. Having learned about this, the leadership of the Russian branch of the ChNS protested about the use of corps units that was not coordinated with it and demanded that the regiment stop participating in the suppression of the uprising.

For some time, the corps did not really interfere in the internal affairs of Russia. The Czechs refused both the Ukrainian Rada and General Alekseev when they asked for military assistance against the Reds.

Meanwhile, the Entente countries already at the end of November 1917, on military conference in Iasi began to make plans to use the Czechs to invade Russia. This meeting was attended by representatives of the Entente, White Guard officers, the Romanian command and delegates from the Czechoslovak Corps. The representative of the Entente raised the question of the readiness of the Czechoslovaks for an armed uprising against the Soviet regime and the possibility of occupying the region between the Don and Bessarabia. This region, in accordance with the "French-British Agreement of December 23, 1917" concluded in Paris on the division of Russia into spheres of influence, was defined as a French sphere of influence.

On January 15, 1918, the leadership of the ChNS, in agreement with the French government, officially proclaimed the Czechoslovak armed forces in Russia "an integral part of the Czechoslovak army, which is under the jurisdiction of the French High Command". In fact, in this way the Czechoslovak Corps became part of the French army.

The situation is very ambiguous. On the territory of Russia at the moment when the army of the Provisional Government collapsed, and the Red Army was just beginning to form, there was a fully equipped foreign unit with training, discipline and combat experience of about 50 thousand people. “Only one thing is clear, that we had an army and in Russia we were the only significant military organization,” Masaryk will write later.

The French General Staff almost immediately ordered the corps to depart for France. According to an agreement reached in February 1918 with the Soviet government, the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps were to travel by rail from Ukraine to Vladivostok and transfer there to French ships.

On March 3, the Soviet government concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Under the terms of the treaty, all foreign troops were to be withdrawn from Russian territory. This was another argument in favor of sending the Czechs out of the country as soon as possible.

But for the transfer of thousands of people to Vladivostok, trains, wagons, food, etc. were required. The Soviet government could not quickly provide all this in the right amount in the conditions of the Civil War. Then the Czechs began to "supply" themselves on their own.

March 13, 1918 At the Bakhmach station, Czech troops captured 52 steam locomotives, 849 wagons, into which units of the 6th and 7th regiments boarded and, under the guise of echelons with the wounded, went east. In order to prevent such incidents, in mid-March in Kursk, with the participation of representatives of the ChNS, the corps and the Soviet command, an agreement was reached on the surrender of weapons by the Czechoslovaks. They were also promised assistance in the unimpeded movement of the corps to Vladivostok, provided that its soldiers did not support the counter-revolutionary uprisings in the Far East.

A 26 March in Penza, representatives of the Council of People's Commissars and the Czechoslovak Corps signed an agreement guaranteeing the dispatch of the corps to Vladivostok. At the same time, it was stipulated that the Czechs were moving not as members of military formations, but as private individuals, but to protect them from counter-revolutionary elements, a guard company of 168 people was allowed to be in each echelon. Guard companies were supposed to have 300 rounds of ammunition for each rifle and 1,200 rounds for each machine gun. The Czechs had to hand over the rest of the weapons. In fact, the agreement on the surrender of weapons was far from being fully implemented.
There were still not enough trains, and the Czechs did not want to wait. The seizures of trains, food and fodder began again. The echelons moved slowly, with stops. The corps gradually stretched along the railroad for thousands of kilometers.

April 5, 1918 of the year Japan launched an intervention in Vladivostok. Fearing support for the interventionists by the Czechoslovak Corps, the Soviet government revised its agreement with the Czechs. Now we could only talk about their complete disarmament and evacuation in small groups.

These fears were not unfounded. Yes, in April 1918 at a meeting at the French embassy in Moscow representatives of the Entente decided to use the corps for intervention inside Russia. The French representative at the corps, Major A. Guinet informed the Czech command that the allies would launch an offensive at the end of June and consider the Czech army, together with the French mission attached to it, as the vanguard of the allied forces ...

And on May 11, 1918, the first Lord of the British Admiralty, J. Smuts, and the chief of the imperial general staff, G. Wilson, presented a note to the military cabinet, which stated the following: “It seems unnatural that at a time when great efforts are being made to ensure intervention by Japan ... Czechoslovak troops are about to be transferred from Russia to the Western front”. The note suggested that the Czechoslovak troops already in Vladivostok or on their way to it be "headed, organized there into effective military units... by the French government, which must be asked to until they are delivered to France, use them as part of the Allied interventionist forces...»

On May 16, British Consul in Vladivostok Hodgson received a secret telegram from the British Foreign Office, which indicated that the body "can be used in Siberia in connection with the Allied intervention..."

May 18 the French ambassador to Russia, Noulens, directly informed the military representative at the corps, Major Guinet, that “ the allies decided to intervene at the end of June and consider the Czech army as the vanguard of the allied army».

The Czechoslovak corps, as part of the French army, was obliged to obey the orders of the command, besides, it depended on France and, in general, on the Entente countries, not only formally, but also financially. At the same time, not only representatives of France, but also representatives of other countries were already present in the corps, for example, there are references to American carriages.

Communist Czechs mostly left the echelons and joined the Red Army. Among those who remained, anti-Bolshevik sentiments prevailed.

Armed rebellion of the Czechoslovak Corps

Throughout the route of movement to Vladivostok, conflicts periodically broke out between the Czechs and prisoners of war Germans, Austrians and Hungarians, who were returning home according to the Brest Treaty, in which there was a clause on the exchange of prisoners. During one of the conflicts that took place May 14, 1918 years at the station Chelyabinsk, a Hungarian prisoner of war was killed by the Czechs.

May 17 the commission of inquiry arrested ten Czechs suspected of murder, and then a delegation that came to demand their release.
Then the Czech units entered the city, surrounded the station and captured the arsenal with weapons. The Chelyabinsk Council, not wanting to aggravate the situation, released the detainees.

The day after the incident, the Czechoslovak command assured the Russian authorities of its peacefulness by issuing an appeal to the population signed by the commander of the 3rd Czechoslovak regiment. The appeal stated that the Czechs "they will never go against the Soviet regime".

May 20 at a meeting of the corps command with members of the CHNS branch, a Provisional Executive Committee (VEC) was created, which included 11 people, including the commanders of the corps regiments; 3rd - Lieutenant Colonel S. N. Voitsekhovsky, 4th - Lieutenant S. Chechek and 7th - Captain R. Gaida.

May 21st in Moscow, deputy chairmen of the Russian branch of the ChNS, P. Maksa and B. Chermak, were arrested. On the same day they ordered the corps to disarm.

22nd of May The Congress of Delegates of the Czechoslovak Corps, held in Chelyabinsk, expressed no confidence in the leadership of the ChNS branch and decided to transfer control of the transportation of the corps to Vladivostok to VIK. The general command of the corps was entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Voitsekhovsky.

The congress decided not to carry out the disarmament order, but to keep the weapons all the way to Vladivostok as a guarantee of their safety. In other words, after the congress, the corps obeyed only the orders of its officers. And those, in turn, carried out orders coming from the French command, that is, from the Entente countries, whose leaders firmly decided to intervene in Russia.

May 25 Trotsky's order No. 377 was transmitted by telegram, obliging all local soviets to " disarm the Czechoslovaks under pain of heavy responsibility. Each echelon in which at least one armed person turns out to be thrown out of the car and imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp ... Honest Czechoslovaks who surrender their weapons and submit to Soviet power will be treated like brothers ... All railway units are informed that no one wagon with Czechoslovaks should not move to the East.

Trotsky's order is often justifiably criticized for being harsh and hasty. The Bolsheviks, who at that time were weaker than them, in fact could not disarm the Czechs. Several disarmament attempts made by local councils ended in clashes and did not lead to the desired result.

However, to blame Trotsky alone for the revolt of the Czechoslovaks, as is sometimes done (see, for example, the book of the American ideologist Richard Pipes), is very strange, given that the Czechs, in any case, in a month, according to the decision of the Entente countries, would raise an uprising, finding any other convenient reason for this.

On the same day that Trotsky's order came out, May 25 Czech units captured the Siberian city of Mariinsk, on the 26th - Novo-Nikolaevsk.

Commander of the 7th regiment, member of the VIK R. Guy-da ordered the echelons to seize the stations at which they were currently located. May 27 he telegraphed all along the line: « To all echelons of Czechoslovaks. I order you to attack Irkutsk if possible. The Soviet power to arrest. Cut off the Red Army operating against Semyonov» .

May 27, 1918. The Czechs captured Chelyabinsk, where all members of the local Soviet were arrested and shot. The prison, designed for 1,000 places, turned out to be overcrowded with supporters of the Soviet regime.

May 28 Miass was captured. A resident of the city Alexander Kuznetsov testified: « Fedor Yakovlevich Gorelov (17 years old), who was taken prisoner, was hanged, he was executed by a platoon of Czechs for rudeness with the convoy, threatened to avenge his comrades killed in battle».

On the same day, the corps captured Kansk and Penza, where most of the captured 250 Czechoslovak Red Army soldiers were killed.

The CHNS and the Soviet government took several steps towards reconciliation. Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G. Chicherin offered his assistance in the evacuation of the Czechs. May 29, 1918 Max telegraphed to Penza:
“Our comrades made a mistake speaking in Chelyabinsk. We, as honest people, must accept the consequences of this mistake. Once again on behalf of the professor Masaryk I urge you to stop all speeches and maintain complete calm. The French military mission also advises you...<...>Our name will be covered with indelible disgrace if we shed even a drop of fraternal Russian blood and prevent the Russian people from arranging their affairs as they wish in the difficult time of the most intense revolutionary struggle in our homeland ... "

However, no reconciliation took place. Yes, it couldn't happen.

May 30 taken Tomsk, June 8— Omsk.
By the beginning of June, Zlatoust, Kurgan and Petropavlovsk were captured, in which 20 members of the local Soviet were shot.
June 8 Samara was taken, where on the same day 100 Red Army soldiers were shot. In the first days after the capture of the city, at least 300 people were killed here. By June 15, the number of prisoners in Samara reached 1,680 people, by the beginning of August - more than 2 thousand.
TO Jun 9 I the entire Trans-Siberian Railway from Penza to Vladivostok was under the control of the Czechs.

After the capture of Troitsk, according to the testimony of S. Moravsky, the following happened:
“At about five in the morning on June 18, 1918, the city of Troitsk was in the hands of the Czechoslovaks. Mass killings of the remaining communists, Red Army soldiers and sympathizers of the Soviet government immediately began. A crowd of merchants, intellectuals and priests walked the streets with the Czechoslovaks and pointed to the communists and Soviet workers, whom the Czechs immediately killed. At about 7 o'clock in the morning on the day of the occupation of the city, I was in the city and from the mill to the Bashkirov hotel, not more than one mile away, I counted about 50 corpses tortured, mutilated and robbed. The killings continued for two days, and according to the staff captain Moskvichev, an officer of the garrison, the number of those tortured numbered at least a thousand people. ».

IN July Tyumen, Ufa, Simbirsk, Yekaterinburg and Shadrinsk were captured.
August 7 Kazan fell.

It would seem that the Czechs are eager to Europe with all their hearts, but for some reason they do not go to Vladivostok along the Trans-Siberian Railway, but interfere in the internal affairs of Russia. It is easy to see that Kazan, taken on August 7 by parts of the corps in cooperation with Kappel's troops, is clearly somewhat away from Vladivostok.

Not only foreigners, but also local anti-Soviet forces took part in the preparation and implementation of the rebellion.
Thus, the Czechoslovak leadership had connections with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (the Czechs, among whom there were many socialists, considered them "real democrats"). Socialist-Revolutionary Klimushkin said that the Samara Socialist-Revolutionaries "Another week and a half to two" learned that a performance of the Czechs was being prepared in Penza. “The Samara group of Socialist-Revolutionaries, then already definitely preparing an armed uprising, found it necessary to send their representatives to the Czechs ...”

According to Major I. Kratochvila, battalion commander of the 6th Czechoslovak regiment,
“Russian officers, with whom Western Siberia was overflowing, aroused and supported in us distrust of the Soviet government. Long before the action, at the stations where we lingered for a long time .., they persuaded us to violent action ... Later, just before the action, they contributed to successful actions with their help, as they delivered plans of cities, the deployment of garrisons, etc. .".

In June, after the first successes of the Corps, the US Ambassador to China Reinisch sent a telegram to the president in which he proposed not to withdraw the Czechoslovaks from Russia. With minimal support, the message said, “They can seize control over the whole of Siberia. If they were not in Siberia, they would have to be sent there from the farthest distance..

June 23, 1918 US Secretary of State R. Lansing offered to help the Czechs with money and weapons, expressing the hope that those “perhaps they will initiate the military occupation of the Siberian Railway”. A July 6 President of the U.S.A wilson read out a memorandum on intervention in Russia, in which he expressed hope "to achieve progress by acting in two ways - by providing economic assistance and assisting the Czechoslovaks."

British Prime Minister D. Lloyd George June 24, 1918 year informed the French about his request to the Czechoslovak units not to leave Russia, but « form the core of a possible counter-revolution in Siberia » .

Finally, in July the American leadership sent an admiral to Vladivostok Knight instructions on providing military assistance to the Czechoslovaks.

After the Czechs captured large cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway, about a dozen anti-Bolshevik governments were formed in them. The most significant of these governments are the Komuch (Committee of Members of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly), the rival Provisional Siberian Government (VSP), and the Czech puppet Provisional Regional Government of the Urals (VOPU). These governments were constantly in conflict with each other, which did not contribute to restoring order. And in September, a unified Provisional All-Russian Government (Directorate) was created. However, conflicts continued inside the Directory, it also turned out to be incapacitated.

After the formation of the independent Czechoslovak Republic, the majority of Czechs, who were a significant support of the Directory, completely lost their understanding of why they were in Russia. There were cases of units refusing to go to the front.

Already on the third day after the proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic, October 31, 1918, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Soviet Russia Chicherin addressed with a radiogram to the provisional government of Czechoslovakia:
"The Soviet government, despite the success of its weapons, - it said in it - seeks nothing so ardently as the end of the useless and regrettable shedding of blood and declares that it is ready to give the Czechoslovaks a full opportunity, after they lay down their arms, to proceed through Russia in order to return to their native country, with full guarantee of their safety.

However, even after the creation of the Czechoslovakian independent state, the Czechs in no way deviated from the former course of the CNS towards cooperation with the interventionists.

Czechoslovak Corps and Kolchak

November 1918 came to power in Siberia Kolchak.
Three days after the establishment of his rule, the CNC stated that "the Czechoslovak army, fighting for the ideals of freedom and the rule of the people, cannot and will neither promote nor sympathize with violent coups that run counter to these principles" So what "The coup in Omsk on November 18 violated the beginning of legality". Soon, obeying the orders of the Entente, the Czechs nevertheless began to cooperate with Kolchak.

However, the soldiers of the corps fought for Kolchak reluctantly, and used their position for robbery and looting.
Minister of War of the Kolchak government, General A. P. Budberg writes later in his memoirs:
“Now the Czechs are dragging about 600 loaded wagons with them, very carefully guarded ... according to counterintelligence, these wagons are filled with cars, machine tools, precious metals, paintings, various valuable furniture and utensils and other good things collected in the Urals and Siberia”.

CHNS in Paris handed over to the commander of the Entente in Siberia M. Janenu the authority to use the Czechoslovak Corps for the purposes of the interests of the allies. Together with Janin, the Minister of War of the Czechoslovak Republic M. R. Stefanik. Stefanik tried to raise the morale of the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps, but soon became convinced that they did not want to fight in Russia. The Allies and Kolchak agreed to send the corps home. Until the shipment, the Czechs undertook to protect the railways.

On the railway, the soldiers of the corps encountered sabotage by partisans. Here the Czechs often acted with the cruelty of real punishers.
« In the event of a train crash and an attack on employees and guards, they are subject to extradition to the punitive detachment, and if the perpetrators are not clarified and extradited within three days, then for the first time the hostages are shot through one, the houses of the persons who left with the gangs, regardless of the remaining families, are burned , and the second time, the number of hostages to be shot increases several times, suspicious villages are burned entirely » , - said in the order of the commander of the 2nd Czechoslovak division, Colonel R. Kreichi.

November 13, 1919 Czechs tried to distance themselves from politics Kolchak. The memorandum they issued stated: “Under the protection of the Czechoslovak bayonets, the local Russian military authorities allow themselves actions that will horrify the entire civilized world. The burning of villages, the beating of peaceful Russian citizens by hundreds, the execution without trial of representatives of democracy on a simple suspicion of political unreliability - is a common occurrence, and the responsibility for everything before the court of the people of the whole world falls on us. Why did we, having military force, not resist this lawlessness. Such our passivity is a direct consequence of the principle of our neutrality and non-interference in internal Russian affairs. We ourselves do not see any other way out of this situation, as only in the immediate return home ". At the same time, as we have already seen, the Czechs themselves were more than once noticed in the same thing, which they rightly accused the Kolchakites of.

Finally, the Czechs were allowed to go home. However, the way to Vladivostok was blocked by red partisans. Fulfilling the order of General Zhanen, Commander-in-Chief of the Czechoslovak Corps Jan Syrovy gave Kolchak to the Irkutsk Political Center in exchange for free passage to Vladivostok. Many white historians would then call this the "Czech betrayal".
Later, some members of the corps, including Yan Syrovy, would betray not an ally, but their own people and state. As Minister of National Defense and Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak Republic, Jan Syrovy accepted the terms of the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938. Considering the resistance to the Nazis "desperate and hopeless", he ceded the Sudetenland belonging to the Czechs and handed over a significant part of the weapons of Nazi Germany. Later, in March 1939, during the offensive of the Wehrmacht on Czechoslovakia, General Syrovy, who at that time held the post of Minister of Defense, ordered the army not to resist the Germans. After that, all army warehouses, equipment and weapons of the "military forge of Europe" were handed over to the Nazis safe and sound. Until the autumn of 1939, the Syrovs worked in the Ministry of Education of the Government of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

In 1947, Jan Syrovy was convicted by a Czechoslovak court for 20 years for cooperation with the German invaders.
Another well-known Czech collaborator who served as an officer in the Czechoslovak Corps is Emmanuel Moravec. In 1919, he was an employee of the Political and Information Department of the military representation of the Chechen Republic in Siberia. Returning from Russia to his homeland, Moravec held high positions in the Czechoslovak army, was a professor at the Higher Military School, and a well-known publicist. After the Munich Agreement, Moravec wrote the book In the Role of the Moor, in which he urged the Czechs not to resist the Germans in order to save themselves. The Nazis published the book in large numbers, and Moravec was appointed Minister of Schools and Public Education in the government of the Imperial Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In this post, Moravec launched a large-scale propaganda campaign, calling on the Czechs to cooperate with the occupation regime in every possible way. Moravec was also the initiator of the creation in the Czech Republic in 1943 of the Czech League Against Bolshevism (ČLPB) and a youth fascist organization.

The sons of Moravec, Igor and Jiří, having received German citizenship, went to serve in the Wehrmacht. The eldest son Igor served in the SS units (he was executed in 1947), and Jiri was a front-line artist in the German army.
During the Prague uprising on May 5, 1945, Emmanuel Moravec shot himself.

Here's how " fighters for the freedom and independence of their land, Russia and all Slavs” erect monuments in Russian cities today.

On September 2, 1920, sea transport departed from the pier in Vladivostok, on board of which the last unit of the Czechoslovak Corps was returning home. With them, the Czechs took away a lot of stolen property.
white emigrant A. Kotomkin recalled:
“Newspapers published cartoons - feuilletons on the departing Czechs in this way: Caricature. The return of the Czechs to Prague. The legionnaire rides on a thick rubber tire. On the back is a huge load of sugar, tobacco, coffee, leather, copper, cloth, fur. Manufactories, furniture, triangle tires, gold, etc.

Hyde will call this return "anabasis", that is, "ascent", by analogy with the historical return of 10,000 Greeks under the command of Xenophon after the battle of Cunax. However, the great Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek, an eyewitness and participant in those events, had every reason to doubt such an interpretation, ironically reflected by him in one of the chapters of his book entitled “Svejk’s Budějovice Anabasis”.

So, the performance of the Czechoslovak Corps was part of the intervention of the Entente powers in Russia. Russia as such interested the Czechs and Slovaks from a very pragmatic point of view - first as a country capable of fighting the Austro-German alliance and thereby contributing to the liberation of the Czechoslovak lands, and then as an object of robbery. Having got involved in the Civil War, the Czech legionnaires acted on our territory with the harshness of the invaders.
And to call them heroes, erecting monuments to them in Russia, means to indulge in the blatant falsification of history.

In the post-Soviet period, many myths about the revolution and the Civil War of the early 20th century began to multiply in Russia. In addition to stories about "German gold" and "the dominance of Jews in the Bolshevik government," quite surreal stories surfaced about a certain "Finnish special forces" that allegedly played a major role in the October Revolution.

“Our position is hopeless. The population not only does not support us, it is hostile to us.”

There was indeed foreign interference in the revolutionary events in Russia. The civil war would not have been so bloody and would have ended as early as 1918, if not for the tens of thousands of foreigners who saved one of the parties to the conflict from complete defeat.

On February 11, 1918, he shot himself in Novocherkassk. one of the founders of the White movement Ataman Kaledin. At his last meeting, he declared that only 147 bayonets were found at the front to protect the Don region from the Bolsheviks. “Our position is hopeless. The population not only does not support us, it is hostile to us. We have no strength and no opportunity to resist. I don’t want unnecessary sacrifices and bloodshed, so I am resigning from the powers of the ataman, ”Kaledin said, after which he committed suicide.

No matter how wary different sections of society were towards the Bolsheviks, there was even less confidence in the White Guards. Despite the collapse of the army, the forces that the Bolsheviks could rely on were enough to suppress the White Guard uprisings.

But a force called the Czechoslovak Corps came to the aid of the fading anti-Bolshevik resistance.

Volunteers, defectors and prisoners of war

Back in 1914, the Czech squad was formed in Kyiv, made up of Czech volunteers living in the Russian Empire. The Czechs, who dreamed of recreating their independent state, were eager to go to war with Austria-Hungary. Subsequently Supreme Commander of the Russian Army Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich allowed to accept into the ranks of the squad of Czechs and Slovaks from among the prisoners and defectors.

By the end of 1916, the unit had grown to a brigade of 3,500 men.

After the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government recognized the Czechoslovak National Council established in Paris, which advocated the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state. The leaders of the ČSNS believed that they would achieve their goal if the Czechoslovak military would conduct active hostilities against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

In France, the Czechoslovak Legion was created, which was subordinate to the French military command and the CSNS. The formations created in Russia also came under the control of the Czechoslovak National Council.

By October 1917, two Czechoslovak divisions with a total number of about 39,000 soldiers and officers were formed in Russia. Permission was given to form a third division.

Czechoslovak Corps in Vladivostok. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Neutrality and a ticket to the West

After the October Revolution, a delicate situation developed around the Czechoslovak Corps. The Bolsheviks declared a course towards a "World without annexations and indemnities", while the leaders of the CSNS oriented their soldiers to continue the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary as part of the Entente.

In December 1917, the French government by its decree subordinated the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia to the French military command, declaring the need to send Czechoslovak soldiers and officers to the Western Front.

The main forces of the Czechoslovak Corps at that time were in Ukraine, where they tried to maintain neutrality in the internal Russian civil strife. The head of the Czechoslovak National Council, Tomasz Masaryk, concluded an agreement with the commander of the Bolshevik detachments in Ukraine, Mikhail Muravyov. The latter, on behalf of the government of Soviet Russia, told Masaryk that the Bolsheviks had nothing against sending the Czechoslovaks to France. It is worth noting that some of the Czechoslovaks even joined the Red Army. Among them was the famous Yaroslav Gashek, author of "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik".

Despite the conclusion of the Brest Peace, nothing has changed in the fate of the Czechoslovak Corps. On March 26, 1918, in Penza, representatives of the Council of People's Commissars, ChSNS in Russia and the Czechoslovak Corps signed an agreement that guaranteed the unimpeded dispatch of Czechoslovak units to Vladivostok. From there they were to be transported by ship to France.

The main force on the Trans-Siberian

Such a long route was explained by the fact that hostilities continued in Europe. The dispatch of soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk did not take place due to fears that the Germans would launch a large-scale offensive and intercept the Czechoslovaks.

The agreement on the transportation of Czechoslovaks to Vladivostok stated: “The Czechoslovaks are advancing not as combat units, but as a group of free citizens who take with them a certain amount of weapons for their self-defense against attempts by counter-revolutionaries ... The Council of People's Commissars is ready to provide them with any assistance on the territory Russia on the condition of their honest and sincere loyalty...”.

It was envisaged that the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps would hand over their weapons, but in each echelon there would remain an armed company of 168 people with rifles, as well as one machine gun.

It was necessary to transfer 63 trains to Vladivostok, each of which had 40 wagons. In post-revolutionary conditions, this task was not the easiest. Despite the fact that the first echelon left almost immediately after the conclusion of the agreement, it reached Vladivostok only a month later. By May 1918, the echelons of the Czechoslovak military were stretched along the Trans-Siberian Railway in a vast area from Samara to Vladivostok. The number of the Czechoslovak Corps exceeded 50 thousand people.

As already mentioned, the old imperial army did not de facto exist by this time. The Red Army was taking the first steps in its formation, and its basis was the Red Guard detachments, whose capabilities were seriously inferior to regular units. For the Whites, the situation was even worse.

The Soviet government in this situation was extremely interested in the fact that the Czechoslovaks left Russia as quickly as possible. Their involvement in the fighting threatened to turn the situation on its head.

The entry of Czechoslovak troops into Irkutsk, 1918. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

A clear threat

The same prospect was considered by the French military command. Paris categorically did not suit Russia's withdrawal from the war. To return the Russian "cannon fodder" to the front, French strategists were ready to help the anti-Bolshevik forces in changing power in the country. The Czechoslovak corps in this situation turned into the main striking force.

The situation was extremely unfavorable for the Bolsheviks. The Japanese landed in Vladivostok, and the question of the possibility of evacuating the Czechoslovaks through this port hung in the air. At the same time, Germany began to exert pressure, not interested in the arrival of the Czechoslovaks on the Western Front. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin sent a telegram to the Krasnoyarsk Soviet: “Fearing a Japanese offensive in Siberia, Germany resolutely demands that an emergency evacuation of German prisoners from Eastern Siberia to Western or European Russia be started. Please use all means. Czechoslovak detachments must not move east."

The transportation of the Czechoslovak Corps stopped completely. Among the Czechoslovaks, rumors immediately spread - the Bolsheviks want to extradite them to the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. In reality, the Bolsheviks did not have such intentions, just as they did not have the strength to even theoretically solve such a problem. But someone skillfully supported the rumors, and the situation heated up more and more.

Legionnaires of the Czechoslovak Corps. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Cast iron kick

In order for the explosion to occur, it remained only to strike a match. On May 14, 1918, an echelon of Czechoslovaks and an echelon of former captive Hungarians released by the Bolsheviks under the terms of the Brest Treaty met in Chelyabinsk. Czechoslovaks and Hungarians, to put it mildly, did not like each other. A skirmish broke out, during which a cast-iron leg from the stove thrown from the Hungarian echelon was seriously wounded Czech soldier Frantisek Duhacek. Enraged Czechoslovakians lynched the one they considered guilty - a certain Johann Malik.

What were the local Bolshevik authorities supposed to do in this situation? That's right, arrest the perpetrators of the massacre. Which is what was done.

However, the arrest even more agitated the Czechoslovaks. On May 17, 1918, they freed the arrested by force, disarmed the Red Guards and seized the city arsenal. After that, 2800 rifles and an artillery battery were at their disposal.

Representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council in Russia tried to settle the incident, but the soldiers in Chelyabinsk created their own Provisional Executive Committee, which decided to break completely with the Bolsheviks.

Knowing what's going on, People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the RSFSR Lev Trotsky gave the order: “All railway councils are obliged, under pain of heavy responsibility, to disarm the Czechoslovaks. Every Czechoslovak who is found armed on the railway lines must be shot on the spot; each echelon in which there is at least one armed person must be unloaded from the wagons and imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp.

Local military commissariats undertake to immediately carry out this order, any delay will be tantamount to treason and will bring down severe punishment on the guilty.

On the ground, they asked in response: with what and by whom to disarm? There were simply no forces to fight thousands of Czechoslovak soldiers. Trotsky's promises to send "reliable forces" did not help in the rapidly changing situation. Attempts to disarm the rebels, undertaken by detachments of the Red Guard, failed.

Czechoslovak counter-revolution with the knowledge and at the instigation of the Entente

Soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps began to capture city after city. Especially bloody battles took place in Penza, where the defense was held by the Czechoslovak revolutionary regiment, which consisted of former soldiers of the corps who had gone over to the side of the Bolsheviks. After the capture of Penza, the rebels staged a mass execution of compatriots who were captured.

The Czechoslovak Corps rapidly took the cities - Petropavlovsk, Kurgan, Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk), Mariinsk, Nizhneudinsk, Kansk. In early June, the rebels captured the crossings across the Volga and took Samara. Anti-Bolshevik forces followed in the footsteps of the Czechoslovaks. On June 8, 1918, the first anti-Bolshevik government was organized in Samara - the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch). On June 23, the Provisional Siberian Government was created in Omsk.

Captain of the Czech army Stanislav Chechek. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Thanks to the Czechoslovak Corps, the Civil War in Russia rapidly began to gain momentum. One of the leaders of the Czechoslovaks, Stanislav Chechek, who in the summer of 1918 managed to visit the Commander-in-Chief of all the troops of the People's Army of KOMUCH and the mobilized units of the Orenburg and Ural Cossack troops, stated: “Our detachment is defined as the predecessor of the allied forces, and the instructions received from the headquarters have the only goal - to build an anti-German front in Russia in the union with the whole Russian people and our allies."

In fact, we are talking about direct intervention in the internal Russian conflict, and Chechek almost openly says that these actions are supported by the Entente.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in a telegram Head of the Czech National Council Masaryk wrote: “I send you my heartfelt congratulations on the impressive successes that your troops have achieved in the fight against the German and Austrian detachments in Siberia. The fate and triumph of this small force is one of the most outstanding epics in history." Where did the German and Austrian detachments come from in Siberia? This is how the British Prime Minister calls the Bolsheviks.

“The Czechs began to take everything that fell into their hands”

It is necessary to mention one more aspect. The "honeymoon" in relations between the Czechoslovaks and representatives of the White movement did not last long. In September 1918, the Bolsheviks came to their senses and, having concentrated large forces, began to regain city after city. Kazan was recaptured on September 10, Simbirsk on September 12, Syzran, Stavropol-Volzhsky and Samara in early October.

The enthusiasm of the Czechoslovaks decreased sharply, and then the whites began to pay attention to the robberies, rapes and executions that their allies committed. All this happened during a successful offensive, but then the supporters of the White idea preferred to simply turn a blind eye to this. Although the Czechoslovaks shot not only the Bolsheviks, but in general everyone who was considered suspicious.

Homeless children after the end of the Civil War in the Urals and Siberia, asked for bread, singing the following song:

And then the evil Czechs attacked,
the native village was set on fire.
Mother and sister were killed
and I was left an orphan.

The scale of the robberies was especially evident during the retreat. Witnesses from among the participants of the White movement described what was happening something like this: “Having retreated to the rear, the Czechs began to pull their military booty there. The latter amazed not only by its quantity, but also by its diversity. The Czechs didn't have anything! Their warehouses were bursting with a huge amount of Russian uniforms, weapons, cloth, food supplies and shoes. Not satisfied with the requisition of state warehouses and state property, the Czechs began to take everything that fell into their hands, completely disregarding who the property belonged to. Metals, various kinds of raw materials, valuable cars, thoroughbred horses were declared by the Czechs as military booty. They took some medicines worth more than three million gold rubles, rubber - for 40 million rubles, a huge amount of copper was taken out of the Tyumen district, etc. The Czechs did not hesitate to declare their prize even the library and laboratory of Perm University. The exact amount of loot by the Czechs cannot even be counted. According to the most conservative estimate, this kind of indemnity cost the Russian people many hundreds of millions of gold rubles and significantly exceeded the indemnity imposed by the Prussians on France in 1871. Part of this production became the subject of an open sale and was released to the market at inflated prices, part was loaded into wagons and destined for shipment to the Czech Republic. In a word, the celebrated commercial genius of the Czechs flourished in Siberia. True, this kind of commerce was more likely to approach the concept of open robbery, but the Czechs, as a practical people, were not disposed to reckon with prejudice.

"Few managed to escape from this hell"

Having received a rebuff from the Red Army, the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps remembered that they were not actually going to fight, but intended to leave for Europe. Moreover, in October 1918, an independent Czechoslovakia was proclaimed. By January 1919, the Czechoslovaks had practically left the front, leaving the territories adjacent to the Trans-Siberian Railway under their control. In the conditions of the offensive of the Bolsheviks at the end of 1919, this would turn into a large-scale catastrophe for the Whites in general and for Admiral Kolchak personally.

“In a long ribbon between Omsk and Novonikolaevsk, trains with refugees and hospital trains stretched out, heading east ... Many defenseless old people, women and children ... froze in unheated wagons and died of exhaustion or became a victim of typhus. Few managed to escape from this hell. On one side the Bolsheviks were advancing, on the other lay the endless, cold Siberian taiga, in which it was impossible to find shelter or food. Gradually froze life in these echelons of death. The groans of the dying died away, the crying of children broke off, the sobbing of mothers ceased. Red sarcophagus wagons with their terrible cargo stood silently on the rails ... The main, if not the only, culprits of all this indescribable horror were the Czechs. Instead of calmly remaining at their post and letting the trains with refugees and hospital trains through, the Czechs began to take away the locomotives by force, drove all the whole locomotives to their sites and detained everyone heading west. Thanks to such arbitrariness of the Czechs, the entire western section of the railway was immediately put in a hopeless situation, ”the members of the White movement, already in exile, will remember what happened.

"They betrayed the White Army and its leader"

The trains of Admiral Kolchak, who was evacuated with his headquarters in November 1919 from Omsk, literally ran into trains on which the Czechoslovaks were taking out looted property. Kolchak's attempts to get his trains through out of turn failed. As a result, the admiral got in the “traffic jam” to the point that, upon arrival in Irkutsk, he fell into the hands of his political opponents, who managed to take power in the city during this time.

The subsequent transfer of Kolchak to the Bolshevik Irkutsk Military Revolutionary Committee also took place with the knowledge and tacit consent of the Czechoslovaks, as was his execution on February 7, 1920.

A prominent figure in the White movement in Siberia, General Konstantin Sakharov wrote: “They betrayed the Russian White Army and its leader, they fraternized with the Bolsheviks, they, like a cowardly herd, fled to the east, they committed violence and murder against the unarmed, they stole hundreds of millions of private and government property and took it out of Siberia from yourself to your homeland. Not even centuries, but decades will pass, and humanity, in search of a fair balance, will clash more than once in the struggle, more than once, perhaps, change the map of Europe; the bones of all these Good Ones and Pavel will rot in the ground; the Russian values ​​they brought from Siberia will also disappear, after all, in their place, humanity will extract and make new, different ones. But betrayal, Cain’s work, on the one hand, and Russia’s pure suffering on the Cross, on the other, will not pass, will not be forgotten, and will be passed on from posterity to posterity for a long time, for centuries.”

In his despair, the general misses an important point - without the Czechoslovaks in Siberia there was neither the White Army nor its leader. It turned out practically according to Gogol - they themselves gave birth, they themselves killed, along the way bringing innumerable misfortunes to civilians who did not take part in the Civil War.

Monuments in Russia

In December 1919, the first ships with soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps finally began to depart from Vladivostok. In February 1920, a truce was concluded between the Red Army and the Czechoslovaks. Under its terms, the parties exchanged prisoners of war, after which the Czechoslovaks received the right to unhindered evacuation through Vladivostok in exchange for the transfer of part of the gold reserves of the Russian Empire to the government of the RSFSR. At the same time, according to historians, the Czechoslovak Corps took part of the Russian gold from Russia.

Some of the veterans of the Czechoslovak Corps will return their debts to the Soviet people. Ludwik Svoboda, who fought with the Bolsheviks in the rank of battalion commander, will again be on the territory of the USSR as a prisoner of war in 1941, and will be able to achieve the right to form a national unit to fight the Nazis. In 1943, the 1st Czechoslovak separate infantry battalion will enter the battle, and the 1st Czechoslovak army corps will end the war under the command of General Svoboda.

However, in 1999, the governments of Russia and the Czech Republic signed an agreement under which dozens of monuments to the soldiers of the Czechoslovak Corps are to be erected on the territory of the Russian Federation. Monuments not to Ludwik Svoboda and Yaroslav Hasek, but to those who were equally cursed for robberies and murders by both Reds and Whites.