# The Czechoslovak anabasis across Russia and Siberia/Chapter 5

V
The end of the great war and the incapacity of Russian democracy
THUS the autumn of 1918 arrived.
The impetuous German offensive in Northern France came to a standstill. All the reserves of men and materials were exhausted. The hopes built upon the consequences of the peace of Brest-Litovsk had proved delusive. The plan of the German General Staff, which depended upon Russian aid, failed. General Ludendorff frankly admits in his Memoirs that the activity of the Czechoslovak Legions in Russia was a crushing blow to the Central Powers and their plans.
Then the Allies determined upon a general counter-offensive in the West. Great reserves and much material help had arrived from America and were ready for immediate utilization. By a carefully worked-out attack Marshal Foch, in collaboration with Sir Douglas Haig, broke through the Hindenburg Line.
On the Salonika front the enemy’s lines were broken through by Marshal Franchet d’Esperey and the regenerated Serbian army. Bulgaria was the first of the confederate Central Powers to recognize its mistake and by unconditional capitulation tried to avert its doom. Then the hitherto unbroken concord of the monarchies of Central Europe was shaken, and indeed ​shattered. Franchet d’Esperey chased the routed and demoralized Austro-Hungarian troops. Mackensen’s army retreated, harassed day and night, until it was finally defeated and Mackensen taken prisoner. Turkey surrendered and the Allied navies entered Constantinople.
In Northern Italy the Austro-Hungarian army broke down under the great Italian offensive on the Piave. The dispatches of the Commander-in-Chief of the Italian army mentioned the Czechoslovak Legions and their share in the victory. For in Italy and France, just as in Russia, troops of Czech and Slovak volunteers were organized during the war and fought for the revival of their country on the side of the Allied armies. The “great and glorious” battles of Doss’ Alto and the Piave in Italy, and of Terron and Vouziers in France, bear witness that an element just as energetic and ardent as the Czechoslovak army in Russia was fighting here also for its ideal. The Austro-Hungarian infantry rifle division No. 21, on the Piave, was composed almost entirely of soldiers of Czechoslovak nationality. Their answer to the attack of the combined forces of the Italians and the Czechoslovak Legions was a mutiny, and thus they hastened the catastrophe which overtook the Austrian armies at the foot of the Alps.
In Czechoslovakia itself the civil element was not idle. On October 28, Prague and all the territories inhabited by Czechoslovaks revolted from Vienna. The National Committee, which was the forerunner of the later Czechoslovak Government, proclaimed Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia as an independent State. The Austro-Hungarian garrisons in ​these countries were disarmed, a national defence of the country was organized, all connections with Vienna and Budapest were severed and obedience was refused to the Habsburgs. Their ancient, senile Monarchy fell to pieces after the example of the Czechoslovaks, the Croats, Slovenes and Austrian Serbs, as well as the Italians of Southern Tyrol, proclaimed their independence. Trieste and the Dalmatian Littoral, the Rumanians in the Transylvanian districts of Hungary and in the Bukovina, the Poles in Galicia, all joined their national majorities. The German provinces of Austria and the Magyar territory of Hungary were abandoned and thus punished for the tyranny which they had for centuries exerted over their peoples. Even so there was to be no place for them. Amid general riots the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Charles, and his family fled from Vienna to Switzerland. On November II the German commissioners for negotiating a truce arrived at the central head-quarters of the Allies in Northern France. Their request was granted, hostilities were suspended and peace negotiations opened. The German confederation, whose Emperor took refuge in the Netherlands, writhed in revolution and became a republic. The Great War came to an end.
Of the Powers who had joined in the war, Russia alone did not participate in the Peace Conference. The Soviet Government kept aloof. The Great War had ended, but the Soviet Government represented by the Communist International proclaimed the “Universal Revolution.” In truth, it was at that time at war with the Czechoslovak Legions, the national Russian armies, and with Allied troops in Siberia. Its ​desperate situation forced it to devote itself entirely to the organization of a strong Red Army. Gradually the revolutionary institutions which undermined discipline were abolished. The Soviets showed full appreciation of the needs of Russian militarism when they restricted the absolute power of the army commanders, introduced a system of ranks, founded the Order of the Red Flag and Star, abandoned the system of volunteers and mercenaries and introduced compulsory military service. The Western world, engrossed with its own affairs at Versailles, lost for a time all interest in what was going on in Russia. The future will show whether this was to its own advantage. It will also show whether or not it would have been better for the world and its development to complete the regeneration of a national and democratic Russia begun by the Czechoslovak army during the first part of the Siberian anabasis. As already pointed out, the Bolshevist régime in Russia was within a hairbreadth of being replaced by a more human, less fantastic régime, in closer contact with life and realities and better adapted for the peaceful development of mankind. There was a time when energetic assistance afforded by the Allies to the Czechoslovak army would have sealed the fate of Red Moscow and Petrograd and of the whole Soviet régime in Russia. That, however, was not to be.
The Czechoslovak army, exhausted by incessant fighting, and without reserves and assistance, nevertheless defended the Siberian Railway throughout 1919 and the greater part of 1920. It had well earned the right not only to rest but also to return to its now liberated motherland which was yearning for her sons. ​This was still more the case when it became clear that the Allies inclined more and more strongly to the principle that Russia was to be left to herself, that is to say, to her fate. The peculiar psychological conditions in Russia and Siberia began to tell on foreign armies unused to the stifling and chaotic atmosphere of a war which after all was a civil war. The Czechoslovaks alone did not succumb to this disorganization, and seeing the hopelessness of further enterprise in Russia they, too, set out for home. It was a way which took them across seas and continents, around the world to Central Europe, from the port of Vladivostok to European ports. The ships of the Allies which carried the Czechoslovaks from Siberia sailed thither round India and through the Suez Canal to Mediterranean or Adriatic ports, or took the route to the coasts of America and across the Atlantic. After hard struggles, 70,000 Czechoslovak Legionaries were returning to their motherland, thus affording evidence of the vast energy of the sons of a small nation prepared to sacrifice all for its freedom. Though their work in Russia remained incomplete through no fault of their own, they were conscious of having done their utmost to save their brother nation and its vast empire, whose present exclusion from European and universal harmony is a latent danger to peace, civilization and economic reconstruction.
The end of the Great War on the battle-fields of Europe raised the hopes of the Soviet Government, which felt that the Peace Conference would divert the attention of Europe from the situation in Russia. But the end of the Great War and the indifference of Europe to the fate of Russia made an equally deep ​impression upon the anti-Soviet Russian elements. To many, and especially to the military leaders in the liberated regions of the Volga district and in Siberia, the Directory elected in Ufa seemed to be a weak organ, incapable of a big effort to renew the Russian commonwealth and put an end to Bolshevism. There were dreams of a dictatorship, which actually materialized in November, 1918. With the help of a handful of troops stationed in Omsk, the short reign of the Dictatorship was overthrown and Admiral Kolchak was placed in supreme command. But this appointment, which was accompanied by a number of political murders, especially of members of the Socialist parties, irritated even people who hitherto had shut their ears to Bolshevism. His rule was a series of disastrous mistakes and was signalized by corruption and violence. By an incessant oppression of the working classes his ill-starred adventure revived in the people their fading sympathy for Bolshevism and roused their spirit of resistance, which soon manifested itself in numerous riots. Instead of pacifying the country the reign of Kolchak contributed to still more chaotic conditions; the arbitrary Hetmans of the Cossacks refused to obey him, and the regions of Siberia became the harassed satrapies of petty tyrants. In not preventing the military dictatorship of its gallant but politically inexperienced general, Russian democracy showed for the second time (the first was the case of Kerensky) its extreme weakness in the Great War and during the revolution. The whole vast anti-Soviet Russian world (from the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to the Constitutional Democrats, not to mention the small group of Monarchists), which included ​therefore the overwhelming majority of the Russian nation and population, was unable, notwithstanding its deep-rooted animosity to Bolshevism, to agree upon a simple and united plan of action against the Soviets, who represented but an insignificant part of the Russian people. It is therefore not a matter for surprise that after the departure of the Czechoslovaks, who had represented the only moral force and disciplined physical power in the country, the soldiers of Kolchak were stricken with doubt, which soon turned into panic, when the reorganized Red Army, encouraged by his suicidal policy, attacked the White Army. The resulting catastrophe frustrated all efforts to overthrow the rule of the Soviets, not only in Siberia, but soon also in Southern Russia, on Denikin’s front and later on that of Wrangel.
Russia was left to her fate, that is to say, she became the property of the Russian Communistic Party and of its leaders. And she became also a centre of unrest and propaganda, a menace to the whole world.
The Czechoslovak soldiers fighting against this chaos for ideals of peace and order had been well aware that they were not fighting against the Russian people, nor against the interests of “workers and peasants,” for whom little was to be gained by the dictatorship of a proletariat whose one song is a song of hatred. The time will come when the Czechoslovak volunteers will receive their reward for the moral and physical courage with which they sided with the principles of law, order and concord against those of destruction. The genius and instinct that guided them in their struggle enabled them to see not only the danger, but also the way out to an honourable and creative life.