From Siberia To Freedom: The Odyssey Of The Czechoslovak Legion
- By Amos Chapple
How an army without a nation fought its way across Russia and on to independence.
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Legionnaires guarding a railway tunnel in Siberia. At the behest of the Western Allies, the Czechoslovaks were asked to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and assist the White Army in its fight against the Bolsheviks.
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But the Russian Civil War was not their fight, and by the beginning of 1920, the legionnaires just wanted to go home.
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In January of that year, in the face of a resurgent Red Army, the Czechoslovaks handed over the White Army’s commander to the Reds (he was executed shortly afterward) and headed en masse to Vladivostok, where Allied boats were waiting to evacuate the legion.
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Legionnaires boarding at Vladivostok. The Czechoslovaks left behind some 4,000 dead but took with them more than 1,000 local women whom they had married.
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After weeks at sea, the legionnaires of Russia finally returned to their independent homeland under its new president, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (visible inside car during his 1918 inauguration in Prague).
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A century later, the Czechoslovak Legion’s travails in Russia are remembered with a traveling museum and immortalized in monuments and in reliefs on a Prague building (pictured).
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Czech and Slovak fighters on the Eastern Front in 1916.
From the safety of Czechoslovakia, and after the Communists had seized full control of Russia, one legionnaire recalled, “The brotherhood of the Czechoslovak Legion was a thing at which to marvel. Nothing could shake the confidence of the legionnaire in himself and in his brothers. And so we were able to stand firm in the heart of the Bolshevik ruin, and for all practical purposes, remain untouched by its doctrines.”
