In December 1917, the Allies recognized the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia as a separate army serving under the Supreme Allied Council. The following month, Masaryk returned to Russia to negotiate once again, this time with the Bolsheviks, the troops’ evacuation to France. By now, the matter had acquired considerable urgency because the conclusion of a treaty between the Central Powers and the Ukraine made it likely that the Germans would occupy the Ukraine, where most of the Czechoslovaks were interned. The Bolsheviks delayed their decision until after the signing of the Brest Treaty: finally, in mid-March, when relations with the Allies were at their warmest, they gave their consent.57
Masaryk and the Allied command had originally intended to evacuate the Czechoslovaks through Archangel and Murmansk. But because the railroad lines to the northern ports were threatened by Finnish partisans and there was the additional danger of German submarines, it was decided to embark them at Vladivostok. Masaryk instructed the commanders of what became known as the Czech Legion to adopt a policy of “armed neutrality”58 and under no circumstances to interfere in domestic Russian affairs. Because the territory which the Czechoslovaks had to traverse en route to Vladivostok was in a state of anarchy, Masaryk arranged with the Bolshevik authorities that his men would carry enough weapons to defend themselves.
The Czechoslovaks were well organized and eager to leave. As soon as the Bolsheviks gave them permission, they formed battalion-sized units, 1,000 men strong, each to fill a special train or, as it was known in Russia, echelon. When the first echelon reached Penza, it received a telegram from Stalin, dated March 26, 1918, which listed the conditions under which the evacuation was to proceed. The Czechoslovaks were to travel not as “combat units” but as “free citizens” carrying such arms as were required for their protection from “counterrevolutionaries.” They were to be accompanied by commissars provided by the Penza Soviet.59 The Czechoslovaks were unhappy over this order, behind which they suspected German pressure, because they had no confidence in the ill-trained and radicalized pro-Bolshevik forces, prominent among whom were fanatical Communists recruited from Hungarian and Czech POWs. Before leaving Penza, they reluctantly surrendered some weapons, kept a few openly, and concealed the rest. The evacuation then resumed.
Although they were strongly nationalistic and, therefore, unhappy with the Bolsheviks for signing a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, in their political views the Czechoslovaks stood solidly to the left of center: one historian estimates that three-quarters of them were socialists.60 Following Masaryk’s orders, they ignored the approaches of both the Volunteer Army and the Bolsheviks, the latter using Czech Communists as intermediaries.61 They had a single purpose in mind: to get out of Russia. Even so, they could not entirely avoid becoming entangled in Russian politics because they were traversing a territory in the grip of a civil war. As they passed towns along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, they established contact with local cooperatives, which provided them with food and other necessities: these happened to be largely in the hands of SRs, Siberia’s dominant party. At the same time, they had occasional altercations with the urban soviets and their “international” military units, composed mostly of Magyar POWs, who wanted the Czechoslovaks to join the Revolution.
85. Armored train of Czech Legion in Siberia: June 1918.
The involvement of the Czech Legion in Russian affairs at the end of May 1918 was not a deliberate reversal of the policy of neutrality. It began when the Germans, displeased at the prospect of tens of thousands of fresh and highly motivated Czechoslovaks reinforcing Allied troops on the Western Front, asked Moscow to halt their evacuation. Moscow issued an order to this effect, but it had no way of enforcing it and the legion continued on its way.62 Next, the Allies became involved. Following the understanding reached in early April about the formation of an Allied force on Russian territory, they concluded there was no point in transporting the Czech Legion halfway around the world to France when it could remain in Russia and join this force, for which the Japanese were to furnish the bulk of the manpower. On May 2, the Allies, largely on British insistence, decided that the units of the legion located west of Omsk would not continue to Vladivostok but would proceed north, to Murmansk and Archangel, and there await further orders.63 Moscow did not object, but the decision caused great unhappiness among the Czechoslovaks.
And now an unexpected event upset everyone’s plans. On May 14, at the western Siberian town of Cheliabinsk, an altercation occurred between Czech soldiers and Hungarian POWs who were being repatriated. As best as can be reconstructed, a Hungarian threw an iron bar or some other metal object at Czechs standing on the railway platform, seriously injuring one of them. A fight broke out. When the Cheliabinsk Soviet detained some Czechoslovaks involved in the disturbance, others seized the local arsenal and demanded the immediate release of their comrades. Bowing to superior force, the soviet yielded.64
Up to this point, the Czechoslovaks had no intention of taking up arms against the Bolshevik Government. In fact, the whole trend of Czechoslovak politics had been one of friendly neutrality. Masaryk was so sympathetic that he urged the Allies to grant the Soviet Government de facto recognition. As for the troops of the legion, the Communist Sadoul wrote that their “loyalty to the Russian Revolution was incontestable.”65
All this would now change because of one mindless act of Trotsky’s. As the newly appointed Commissar of War, Trotsky wanted to act the part, although he had virtually no troops under his command. This ambition in no time transformed a body of well-disposed Czechoslovaks into a “counterrevolutionary” army which in the summer of 1918 presented the Bolsheviks with the most serious military threat since they had taken power.
As soon as Trotsky learned what had transpired at Cheliabinsk and that the Czechs had convened a “Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army,” he ordered that the representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council in Moscow be placed under arrest. The frightened Czech politicians agreed to all of Trotsky’s demands, including complete disarmament of the legion. On May 21, Trotsky ordered that all further movement of the legion eastward must cease: its men were to join the Red Army or be pressed into “labor battalions”—that is, become part of the Bolshevik compulsory labor force. Those who disobeyed were to be confined to concentration camps.* On May 25, Trotsky followed with another order:
All soviets along the railroad are instructed, under heavy responsibility, to disarm the Czechs. Any Czech along the railroad line found in possession of weapons is to be executed on the spot. Any military train [
echelon
] containing a
single
armed Czech is to be unloaded and [its personnel] placed in a prisoner-of-war camp.
66
It was a singularly inept command, not only because it was unnecessarily provocative but because Trotsky had no means of enforcing it: the Czech Legion was far and away the strongest military force in Siberia. At the time, it was widely believed that Trotsky acted under German pressure, but it has been established since that the Germans bore no responsibility for these May orders.67 It was Trotsky’s very un-Bolshevik disregard of the “correlation of forces” that sparked the Czechoslovak rebellion.
The Czechoslovaks on May 22 rejected Trotsky’s order to disarm:
The Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army, assembled at Cheliabinsk, declares … its feelings of sympathy with the Russian revolutionary people in their difficult struggle for the consolidation of the Revolution. However, the Congress, convinced that the Soviet Government is powerless to guarantee our troops free and safe passage to Vladivostok, has unanimously decided not to surrender its arms until it receives assurance that the Corps will be allowed to depart and receive protection from counterrevolutionary trains.
68
In communicating this decision to Moscow, the Czechoslovak Congress said that it had “unanimously decided not to surrender arms before reaching Vladivostok, considering them a guarantee of safe
travel.” It expressed the hope that no attempts would be made to impede the departing Czechoslovak troops, since “every conflict would only prejudice the position of the local soviet organs in Siberia.”69 The Allied instructions for units of the legion to be rerouted to Murmansk and Archangel were simply ignored.
When Trotsky’s instructions became known, 14,000 Czechoslovaks had already reached Vladivostok, but 20,500 were still strung out along the length of the Trans-Siberian and railroads in central Russia.* Convinced that the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to the Germans and threatened by the local soviets, they seized control of the Trans-Siberian. But even while so doing, they reaffirmed that they would have no dealings with anyone fighting the Soviet Government.70
86. General Gajda, Commander of the Czech Legion.
Once the Czechoslovak troops took over the railroads Bolshevik authority in the cities along them crumbled; and as soon as that happened, the Russian rivals of the Bolsheviks moved in to fill the vacuum. On May 25, the Czechoslovaks occupied the railroad junctions at Mariinsk and Novonikolaevsk, which had the effect of cutting Moscow off from rail and telegraph communications with much of Siberia. Two days later, they took over Cheliabinsk. On May 28 they seized Penza, on June 4 Tomsk, on June 7 Omsk, and on June 8 Samara, the latter of which was defended by the Latvians. As their military operations expanded, the Czechoslovaks centralized the command, choosing as their chief the self-styled “General” Rudolf Gajda, an ambitious adventurer, whose considerable military talents were not matched by political sense. His men had unbounded confidence in him.†
Although not directed against it, the Czechoslovak rebellion presented the Bolshevik Government with its first serious military challenge since the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Despite months of talk, the Red Army existed largely on paper. Bolshevik effectives in Siberia consisted of a few thousand “Red Guards” and a like number of pro-Communist German, Austrian, and Hungarian POWs. This motley force, without central command, was no match for the Czechoslovaks. Desperate, the Soviet Government asked Berlin at the end of June for permission to arm German prisoners of war in Russia for use against them.71
It was the Czechoslovak rebellion that finally forced the Bolsheviks to tackle the formation of an army in earnest. The ex-tsarist generals on the Supreme Military Council had been urging them all along to give up the idea of an all-volunteer force composed exclusively of “proletarian” elements and go over to general conscription. Given Russia’s population structure, in a conscript army peasants would constitute the overwhelming majority. Lacking any realistic alternatives, Lenin and Trotsky now overcame their aversion to a regular army with a professional officer corps and a mass of peasant conscripts. On April 22 the government ordered all male citizens aged eighteen to forty to undergo an eight-week course of military training. The ruling applied to workers, students, and peasants not engaged in “exploitation”—i.e., not employing hired labor.72 This was the first step. On May 29 Moscow ordered general mobilization to be carried out in phases. First to be called to colors would be workers from Moscow, Don, and Kuban, born in 1896 and 1897; they were to be followed by workers from Petrograd; then the turn would come for railroad workers and white-collar employees. They were to serve six months. Peasants were as yet unaffected. In June, soldiers’ pay was raised from 150 to 250 rubles a month, and the first attempt was made to outfit them with standard uniforms.73 At the same time, the government began the voluntary registration of ex-officers of the Imperial Army and opened a General Staff Academy.74 Finally, on July 29, Moscow issued two further decrees, which laid the foundations of the Red Army, as it has been known since. One introduced compulsory military service for all males aged eighteen to forty.75 Under the provisions of this decree, over half a million men were to be conscripted.76 The second ordered the registration of all officers of the old army (born in the years 1892 to 1897 inclusive) in designated areas, under threat of punishment by Revolutionary Tribunals.77
Such was the origin of the Red Army. Organized with the assistance of professional officers, and soon commanded almost exclusively by them, in structure and discipline it not unnaturally modeled itself on the Imperial Army.78 Its only innovation was the introduction of political “commissars,” posts entrusted to dependable Bolshevik apparatchiki, who were to be responsible for the loyalty of the command at all levels. Addressing the Central Executive Committee on July 29, Trotsky, with the bluster that made him so unpopular, assured those worried about the reliability of the former tsarist officers, now called “military specialists,” that any who contemplated betraying Soviet Russia would be shot out of hand. “Next to every specialist,” he said, “there should stand a commissar, one on the right and another to the left, revolver in hand.”79
The Red Army quickly became the pampered child of the new regime. As early as May 1918, soldiers were receiving higher pay and bread rations than industrial workers, who loudly protested.80 Trotsky reintroduced spit and polish along with traditional military discipline. The first parade of the Red Army, held on May 1 at Moscow’s Khodynka Field, was a dispirited affair, dominated by Latvians. But in 1919 and the years that followed, Trotsky staged on Red Square meticulously organized and ever more elaborate parades that brought tears to the eyes of the old generals.
The Czechoslovak revolt presented the Bolsheviks with not only a military challenge but also a political one. The cities of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia were crowded with liberal and socialist intellectuals who lacked the courage to stand up to the Bolsheviks but were prepared to exploit any opportunity provided by others. They concentrated in Samara and the Siberian city of Omsk. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly some seventy SR deputies traveled to Samara to proclaim themselves Russia’s rightful government. Omsk was the headquarters of more centrist elements, led by the Kadets: the politicians here were content to isolate Siberia from Bolshevism and the Civil War. As soon as the Czech Legion had cleared the Bolsheviks out of the principal towns along the central Volga and in Siberia, these intellectuals began to stir.
After the legion had taken Samara (June 8), the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, who under the Bolsheviks had led a conspiratorial existence, emerged into the open and formed a Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komitet Uchreditel’nogo Sobrania, or Komuch), headed by a five-person directorate. Its program called for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” and the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In the weeks that followed, Komuch issued edicts that conformed to the program of Russian democratic socialism, including the abolition of limitations on individual liberty and the dissolution of Revolutionary Tribunals. Komuch reinstated, as organs of general self-government, the old zemstva and Municipal Councils, but it also retained the soviets, ordering them to hold new elections. It denationalized the banks and expressed a readiness to honor Russian state debts. The Bolshevik Land Decree, copied from the SR agrarian program, was kept in force.81
While Komuch saw itself as a replacement of the Bolshevik regime, the Siberian politicians in Omsk had more modest regional objectives. They organized in areas which the Czechoslovaks had cleared of Bolsheviks, and on June 1, 1918, proclaimed themselves the Government of Western Siberia.
The Czechoslovaks at first showed no sympathy for the Russian opponents of the Bolsheviks.82 When the SRs approached them for support, they refused, on the grounds that their sole mission was to ensure safe and prompt transit to Vladivostok. Wish it or not, however, they could not avoid becoming involved in Russian politics because to realize their objective they had to deal with the local authorities, which meant increased relations with Komuch and the Siberian Government.83
When the Czechoslovaks rebelled, Moscow believed that they were acting under instructions from Allied governments. Communist historians have adhered to this version, although there is no evidence to support it. On the French side, we have the word of a historian who had seen all the pertinent archival materials that “nothing indicates the French were the instigators of
the [Czechoslovak] uprising.”84 This confirms the view of Sadoul, who tried at the time, without much success, to convince his friend Trotsky that the French Government bore no responsibility for the Czechoslovak armies.85 In fact, initially at least, the Czechoslovak rising was a disagreeable surprise for the French because it upset their plans to bring the legion to the Western Front.86 Nor is there evidence of British involvement. Communist historians later tried to pin the blame on Masaryk, who actually was the unhappiest of all, because the Czechoslovak entanglement in Russian affairs interfered with his plan to assemble in France a national Czech army.*
But whatever the historical truth, in the heat of events it was as natural for Moscow to see the Allied hand behind General Gajda as it was for the Czech Legion to see German pressure in the orders to have it disarmed. The Czechoslovak affair destroyed such chance as existed of Bolshevik economic and military cooperation with the Allies and pushed Moscow—not entirely unwillingly—into German arms.
Until June 1918, the generals were the only influential party in Germany that demanded a break with the Bolsheviks. They were overruled by the industrialists and bankers who worked hand in glove with the Foreign Office. But now the generals found an unexpected ally. After the Czechoslovak uprising, Mirbach and Riezler lost all faith in the viability of Lenin’s regime and urged Berlin still more strongly to seek an alternate base of support in Russia. Riezler’s recommendations were based not only on impressions; he had firsthand knowledge that the forces on which the Bolsheviks counted to stop the Czechoslovaks were about to desert them. On June 25, he advised Berlin that although the Moscow Embassy was doing all it could to help the Bolsheviks against the Czech Legion and domestic opponents, the effort seemed futile.87 What he had in mind became known only years later. To persuade Lieutenant Colonel M. A. Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the civil war to fight the Czechs, Riezler had to bribe him.† Even more troubling was the growing reluctance of the Latvians to continue fighting for the Bolsheviks. Sensing that the fortunes of their Bolshevik patrons were on the decline and afraid of being isolated, they contemplated switching sides. It took more of Riezler’s money to persuade them to help suppress Savinkov’s uprising in Iaroslavl in July.88
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