# The Czechoslovak anabasis across Russia and Siberia/Chapter 2

II
A government of workers and peasants?
OF the many bodies of national volunteers that had been organized in Russia, especially in 1916 and 1917, the Czechoslovak army corps was the only one to remain united to the last. The bodies of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes established in Odessa in 1916 were disbanded after the fighting in the Dobrudja at the end of 1917; those of the Transylvanian Roumanians organized at the same time, were taken prisoners by the Germans in their advance to Petrograd in the spring of 1918; while the Polish forces of General Dowbor-Musnicki evaporated. After the November revolution the Lithuanian levies joined the army of the Soviet Government. But the Czechoslovaks thought only of one thing of serving their own people. And it was this force that made them harmonious, well disciplined and incorruptible.
It then occurred to the Soviet Government to endeavour to induce them to join the Red Army, after the example of the Lithuanians. For this purpose it organized an intensive propaganda in their ranks, but with very small effect. The Czechoslovak soldiers did not join Lenin’s colours; they remained loyal to Masaryk, who, in the spring of 1918, left Russia for America, there to work for the national ideal and to ​prepare in the West for the transport of his troops from Vladivostok to the French battle-fields.
This unsympathetic attitude towards the Soviet régime made a bad impression upon the leaders of Russian Bolshevism in Moscow, and especially upon Army-Commissar Trotsky, who, seeing the discipline maintained by the legionaries, had hoped that they would become the picked troops of the Red Army. In addition to difficulties of an international character, the existence in Russia, which had made peace with the Central Powers, of military forces marching eastward and intent on fighting later against these same Powers, produced a hostile attitude on the part of the Soviets towards the Czechoslovaks. The German ambassador in Moscow, Count Mirbach, and the commanders of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, resented the fact that there was, on Russian territory, a military body openly hostile to the two Central Powers, a body whose picked troops were formed from rebellious citizens of these very same Powers. No doubt their diplomatic representatives remonstrated in Moscow. In March and April, 1918, Russia was, in consequence of the peace of Brest-Litovsk, already full of German and Austro-Hungarian repatriation commissions, eager to recover at the earliest possible opportunity the million reserve troops of Germany and Austria-Hungary, represented by the war-prisoners in Russia and Siberia. In the eyes of these commissions the Czechoslovak army corps was but an armed band of rebel Austro-Hungarian war-prisoners.
Will the Government of Workers and Peasants in Russia be willing to act as a policeman for German imperialism and militarism? Will it hand over to the Austrians, ​Magyars and Germans those Czechoslovak volunteers who had decided to fight for the freedom of their country? These were the questions put to the Soviets by many Czechoslovaks who had heard of the Bolshevist revolutionary watchwords and of their oath in favour of the self-determination of nations. All they asked was that the Soviets should allow the Czechoslovak convoys to pass through their territory to Vladivostok and so to leave Russia.
The Soviet Government, however, turned an increasingly deaf ear to their requests, and in every possible way tried to avoid carrying out the agreements made for free transit through Russian territory. Along the whole railway line on which the Czechoslovak trains ran, the Soviet officials, intent on provoking conflict, exasperated and harassed the volunteers. They asked for complete disarmament and for the surrender even of the few arms which the trains carried as a protection against the revolutionary mob ravaging the country. Finally, at the end of May, on the pretext of a local conflict in the station at Chelyabinsk between a Magyar enlisted in the Red Army and a party of legionaries, the instant disarmament and disbandment of all the troops of the Czechoslovak army corps was ordered, and the railway management contrived to spread their convoys over the whole length of the Trans-Siberian line from Penza to Vladivostok. It was evidently expected that the Czechoslovak army, when once scattered in small bodies over a line many thousand miles in length, could be overpowered in detail, and that the unwelcome guest could thus be got rid of. It was also hoped that the majority of the legionaries would then join the ranks of the Red Army, which ​would thus be reinforced by picked soldiers. The remainder were to be sent into prisoners’ camps and handed over to their respective governments, while the staff were to be dealt with in the well-known Bolshevist manner, as “centres of reaction” and of counter-revolution.
The Government of “Workers and Peasants” had very quickly forgotten that the Czechoslovak volunteers had fought, as early as 1914, by the side of the Russian armies on the German front, that at the time of Kerensy’s offensive in July, 1917, they had defended the “Russian Revolution” against the reactionary and imperialistic armies of Wilhelm II in the great battle of Zborov, and that finally at Bakhmach in March, 1918, as the only disciplined army corps, they had even defended the Soviet State against German invasion. The fanatical Sovnarkom gave orders, in the diabolical and bloodthirsty decrees of Trotsky, Aralov and others, that all Czechoslovaks who would not submit to the Soviets were to be shot at sight. Red Army forces fell upon the unsuspecting and unarmed legionaries at Zlatoust in the Urals (the boundary between Europe and Asia), at Marianovets near Omsk in Siberia, and in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk.
Soon, however, all the calculations and plans of the Soviets were upset. Contrary to the expectations of Trotsky and Lenin, the Czechoslovak army did not surrender, but took up the gauntlet flung down to them. At the conference of Chelyabinsk late in May, 1918, their representatives decided to fight their way through to the East, even against the wish of the Soviets and at the price of a military conflict with the Red Army. They could not allow their army corps, ​which had been built up under the greatest difficulties and was the only visible and clear symbol of their desire for liberty at a time when the whole world stood in arms, to be treacherously destroyed by a usurping Power which, though calling itself a Government of Workers and Peasants, was then but a secret ally of the Central Powers. Nothing could be more convenient, especially to Austria-Hungary, than the disbandment of the Czechoslovak troops in Russia, as they were a living proof of the discontent of the Austro-Hungarian peoples with Vienna and Budapest, and their very existence proclaimed the imminent fall of the Danubian Monarchy.