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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.80: The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion

Last time we pivoted from revolution to civil war by talking about the peripheral crescent off to the west and south that would become major centers of conflict over the next several years. This week, we are going to start by returning to the Russian heartland to cover how the Soviet government in Moscow navigated their own pivot from revolution to civil war, which for the record, Lenin and the gang didn’t really see much of a distinction between the two. For them, class war was civil war, and civil war was class war. They were not two peas in a pod, they were literally just the one pea, going by two different names. But though Lenin expected and even embraced civil war, I don’t think he suspected how big that civil war was going to get. Because no one expected a wildcard called the Czechoslovak Legion to blow the whole thing sky high.

So given everything we’ve discussed over the past few episodes with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its humiliating abandonment of huge swaths of territory, I might have tempted you into believing Lenin’s government was only left in charge of a small chunk of territory, some little blob connecting Moscow to Petrograd that amounted to a little more than a glorified city state. But this is really super not the case. Soviet Russia was huge. It encompassed about a million square miles and contained more than 60 million people. It was, in fact, still the largest single political entity in the European orbit, both in area and population. Soviet Russia was bigger than France, was bigger than Germany, it was certainly bigger than any of the individual peripheral bits they had renounced at Brest-Litovsk. And, spoiler alert, it’s going to be one of the big reasons they ultimately win the civil war.

But here in the spring of 1918, the potential resources and manpower the Soviet government could harness from this vast territory was just that: it was potential. The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 did not magically solve all the social, economic, and political dysfunction that had plagued Russia since the start of the war — and also, I suppose, the several centuries before that. Inflation and scarcity, the two big problems that had sparked the February Revolution in the first place, remained ongoing issues. The only difference after October was the Bolsheviks could no longer blame the powers that be for the dysfunction, because they now were the powers that be. They would need a solution, or they would follow the governments of Tsar Nicholas, Prince Lvov, and Alexander Kerensky into the dustbin of history.

By far the biggest immediate problem in Soviet Russia was food scarcity in the cities. One year earlier, food scarcity had been so bad that people overthrew a 300 year old monarchy. Now, it might even be worse. Because though the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left Soviet Russia with a great deal of territory, it still costs them the produce from major agricultural centers like Ukraine and the Trans-Caucuses. And then, as we’ll talk about here in a minute, they are also about to be cut off from the additional fertile regions around the Volga River.

Meanwhile, inside Soviet Russia, the Decree on Land led local villages to absorb and parcel out the huge land estates in their neighborhoods, whereupon they imported their traditional systems of agriculture, small plots worked by individual families oriented toward subsistence farming, without much care or concern for producing the amount of grain needed to fill empty bellies in the city. And even when and where there was a surplus of grain, it was a challenge to procure and transport it. The rail system had fallen into a state of acute disrepair, and was presently running at like a quarter of its potential capacity. Plus, there was a problem of acquisition. The peasants didn’t want to sell their grain for worthless paper money, and any attempt to force them to sell for worthless paper money led them to simply hide their grain, rather than give it away for nothing. The food scarcity problem was exacerbated by another acute economic problem the Soviet government had to grapple with: a manufacturing crisis. Since the war started in 1914, factories, plants, and mines had all been oriented towards wartime production: guns, munitions, and uniforms replaced regular old consumer goods. And as we talked about in Episode 10.blank, industrial production also massively ramped up when the war started, so the ranks of the urban working class has exploded by like blank percent. This is where so much of the energy and momentum of the Revolution in 1917 had come from. But now the war was over, leading to three interrelated problems.

First, factories were shutting down as war time demand collapsed.

Second, factories repurposed for wartime production could not return to manufacturing regular old consumer goods just at the drop of a hat, and

Third, even those factories that could have remained open were often idle on account of ongoing shortages and fuel and raw materials.

So this led to a growing unemployment and underemployment crisis. In the spring of 1918, unemployed workers either lingered, hungrily and dangerously in the cities, or they decamped back to their home villages.

In response to the disorganized and hungry chaos of the winter of 1917-1918, a spontaneously self-organized phenomenon appeared. This was the bag men. The bag men were individuals who filled bags with small tradable goods, hopped on trains to rural areas, and then bartered and exchanged those goods for food. Then they came back to the cities to either sell what they had acquired, or as often as not, make deliveries to the people who had given them the tradable goods to go out and exchange for food. Now, one single bag man was just one guy, carrying some bags. He was limited to what a single person could carry. But as this became the most reliable way for an urban family to get food, the ranks of the bag men grew exponentially and soon hundreds of thousands of them were swarming back and forth from city to country and back. Over the weeks and months, the phenomenon took on a bit of organized cohesion. Bag men started traveling in groups, usually armed, co-ops sprouted up in both town and country to reliably facilitate exchange and delivery. Inside the factories, which were now controlled by worker committees, the hungry workers abandoned whatever they were supposed to be doing and turned to off the books manufacturing of tradable goods that the household peasants actually wanted. They made stoves, knives, work tools, candle holders, axes, plows, and especially cigarette lighters, a much coveted novelty. To make these goods, they often cannibalized the machinery in the factory itself.

So over the winter of 1917-1918, the people self-organized a chaotic, if passably effective, barter economy under the rubric of the initial decrees that had been issued by the Bolsheviks. Worker run factories were deciding to produce goods for trade, that they would then trade for food, from peasants who owned their own land. Co-ops and bag men sprouted up serving as the means of exchange and delivery.

But there was one small hiccup: this is not exactly the Bolshevik vision for what post-revolutionary socialism is meant to look like. The Bolsheviks were, after all, not anarchists. They had always advocated nationalization of both land and industry. They tended to argue in favor of large scale national collectivization of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. That is how they would take a backward medieval society like Russia and turn it into a modern and advanced socialist society, without the prolonged period of boardwalk capitalist rule demanded by their rivals, the Mensheviks and SRs. The Bolsheviks also tended to be very hostile to the idea of market activity in general, assuming that it was an exploitive feature of capitalism that would have no place in the society they were building. They portrayed the bag men, for example, as greedy parasites and speculators, exploiting the food crisis for their own selfish advantage.

So the policies the Soviet government started rolling out in the spring of 1918 thus aimed to bring organization and control to an anarchistic system growing up organically under their feet. And we call this collection of policies, war communism.

Now, just to be clear, no one called it war communism at the time, this is a term we use to retroactively describe the system. Other thing we need to be clear about, it’s barely a system at all. The term war communism encompasses several different policies enacted by different commissars as the Soviet government improvised responses to simultaneous crises on multiple fronts. One thing we know about Lenin is that practical improvisation is going to trump rigid doctrine every time. So as war communism gets going, it’s not like they’re out there systematically implementing a color coded timetable they had dreamed up back in Switzerland. It also gets called war communism because it’s so closely linked to the Soviet mobilization for civil war. They needed to turn all those potential resources and manpower into actual resources and manpower, and the blunt instrument of war communism is how they decided to do it. Now, there is a big ongoing historical debate about the nature of war communism, and its relationship to Bolshevik ideology, whether it represents an aberration, a culmination, a detour, a mistake, a necessity, random flailing, or Machiavellian plotting. The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

So for today, I want to talk about two big parts of war communism. First, on May 9th, 1918, the government declared a food dictatorship. The food dictatorship blew up the peasants’ claim to ownership over the grain they were now selling. The government appointed by the Soviet of Worker Soldiers and Peasant Deputies representing the workers, soldiers, and peasants of Russia, claimed the responsibility for acquiring and delivering food to the cities.

Food was a right. Food belonged to everyone, not merely the peasants who grew it. To implement the food dictatorship, the Soviet formed food detachments, armed companies who would travel out to the rural areas and simply take surplus grain and bring it back to the cities. There’d be no more buying and selling, no more trading, no more bag men. But, you can imagine what happened when these food detachments started fanning out. They used incredibly heavy handed tactics to extract grain and food they believed the selfish peasants were withholding. There are tons of stories about food detachments trashing houses, burning buildings, assaulting people, raping women, and murdering people who stood in their way. And then as they loaded up the quote unquote surplus, they often did not care whether or not they were taking actual surplus. Most of the time they were taking the food the peasants needed to feed themselves. So the brief honeymoon period of peace between the urban and rural populations after the October Revolution is now over, and it is going to get very messy from here on out.

The other part of war communism I want to talk about today is the increasing nationalization and centralization of manufacturing. Unhappy workers went out organizing strikes not on behalf of the Bolsheviks, but against them. In their opinion, nothing had changed since October and in many real ways, things had only gotten worse. So they started forming what were called Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives who worked outside the system of Soviets of workers deputies. Menshevik and SR activists were happy to enter this movement to stir up trouble against the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1918, one striking group declared, “the Soviet government has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the worker socialism and instead has brought them empty factories and destitution.”

In response, the Soviet government started implementing wider nationalization and central administration of factories. Controversially, they granted the need to bring back many of the experienced managers and restore the old top-down structures of authority. Worker mismanagement was seen by the government as one of the primary causes of the empty factories and the destitution they complained about. So, after about six months, the brief experiment of worker controlled factories gave way to the return of centralized hierarchy, with old plant managers offered high salaries to come back and run the factories, only now their salary would be paid by the state rather than a private owner.

So the food dictatorship and nationalization of industry are two big pillars of war communism, and they are going to lay the groundwork for what the October Revolution ultimately means for Russia.

But now I want to transition away from the communism part of war communism, and back to the war part of war communism. Because in May 1918, the Soviet government found itself besieged on all sides and facing a very real military threat to its existence, most especially as a result of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion.

So what the heck is the Czechoslovak Legion? The Czechoslovak Legion was formed at the beginning of World War I by Czechs and Slovaks living in Russian territory, eager to go fight the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They harbored nationalist dreams that had been kindled in the springtime of the peoples in 1848, and they hoped 1914 would prove to be the winter of empire, and they were hoping to join their brethren living under Austro-Hungarian rule as an independent nation. Initially it was just a couple companies of volunteers, but the Czechoslovak Legion turned out to be as dependable a fighting unit as existed on the Russian side. This proved, especially true as the Russian side collapsed in the summer of 1917. The Czechoslovak Legion was one of the few groups involved in the Kerensky Offensive to perform with anything resembling heroic determination. After their success, Kerensky’s government gave permission to representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council, a political lobbying group advocating their national cause, to go recruit Czech and Slovak prisoners of war being held in Russian POW camps. It was not a hard sell, and in short order, the Czechoslovak Legion ballooned to more than 40,000 men, most of them stationed in Ukraine.

After the failure of the Kerensky offensive, the Russian army of course plunged into terminal decline. But unlike the Russian soldiers, whose revolutionary hopes and military disillusionment were leading them to desert the army in droves, the one overriding hope of the Czechs and Slovaks — that is, national independence — remained unfulfilled, so they wanted to keep fighting. When the Central Powers invaded Ukraine in late February 1918 to force the Russians to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Czechoslovak Legion was again, like, the only military force, opposing them with anything resembling energetic discipline. They fought with particularly stubborn tenacity, because all of those who had been recruited out of the POW camps were considered deserters guilty of treason by the Austro-Hungarian military. They would be summarily executed if captured. After Brest-Litovsk, the Legion still had high morale and discipline cohesion, and they wanted to figure out a way to stay in the war against the Central Powers, because it was still their war, even if the Russians had now bailed. So they decided they wanted to provide reinforcements for the Allies on the western front. But, small problem, they couldn’t go west by heading west, there were enormous enemy army standing between them and France. So they settled on a very ambitious plan: go west by heading east. First, they would travel 6,000 miles east of Vladivostok. Then they would board ships that would take them across the Pacific, then they would traverse the Americas, then cross the Atlantic and land in Western Europe, completing a near total circumnavigation of the globe. Now the Soviet government and the legionaries didn’t trust or like each other, but on March the 25th, the Soviet government granted them safe passage to Vladivostok. Berlin and Vienna would not be happy to learn that the Russians were letting a formidable opponent of the Central Powers move on to fight them on a different front, but Lenin and Trotsky and the other Soviet leaders balance this with the knowledge that the Czechoslovak Legion also post a threat to them. So they decided it was safer to see the Legion off, rather than force them to stay.

As the Legion started to move east along the Trans-Siberian railway over the course of April and early May 1918, they did not simply move as one giant force of 42,000 men. They traveled in separate smaller groups, depending on the capacity of the railroad at any given moment. By May 1918, the company’s furthest along had reached Vladivostok, while those furthest behind had barely left European Russia. In his very good book on the Russian civil war, Evan Maudsley illustrates the scope of the spread for an American audience — and if you’re not a part of the American audience, just bear with me, and also, probably you’ll find this interesting too. But if you were to put a pin where New York City is on a map of North America and say, this is where the legionary group that’s furthest east is, then their western most comrades would be at a point 1300 miles west of San Francisco. West of San Francisco. 1300 miles out into the middle of the Pacific. That is the scope of the distance we’re talking about here.

Now so far, there’s no problem. The 42,000 legionaries are departing peacefully. But, problems erupted in mid May. Despite the deal with the government in Moscow, local Soviet authorities were suspicious and hostile of these heavily armed Czechs and Slovaks passing through town. Sometimes the legionaries were delayed for long periods while they waited for trains. This led to a great deal of irritated frustration and impatience on both sides. Finally, on May 14th, 1918, a group of legionaries moving east encountered a group of Hungarian prisoners of war traveling west. The legionaries were obviously on their way to Vladivostok, the Hungarians were being repatriated by the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They ran into each other in the city of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains. The Hungarians considered these Czechs and Slovaks to be traitors, while the legionaries were like, traitors to what? It may be your empire, but it’s not our empire. Insults were hurled, fighting broke out. The municipal Russian authorities then stepped in and arrested some of the Czech leaders. Outraged legionaries then staged an armed attack to rescue their brothers from jail, and in the process wound up taking effective military control of the city.

Now this might have not been a big deal, but for the response of the Soviet government. Trotsky has by now resigned as commissar of foreign affairs and taken up his job as commissar of the army and navy. Believing the revolt of the Czechoslovak legionaries was part of a wider effort by anti-Soviet elements to foment counter-revolutionary uprisings along the critical Trans-Siberian railway Trotsky sent out an order on May 25th demanding the immediate disarmament of the Legion. His order was blunt:

“Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot.”

This turns out to have been something of a blunder. Local Soviet forces were going to find themselves inferior to the Czechoslovak legionaries whenever and wherever they encountered each other. And in fact, for all of 1918, wherever the Czechoslovak Legions were, they were the best trained, most disciplined, and most effective fighting force in the field. That’s why they’re uprising is such a big deal. So at the moment, anybody who tried to implement Comrade Trotsky’s order was not going to shoot armed Czechoslovaks on the spot, they were going to get shot by armed Czechoslovaks on the spot.

After the seizure of Chelyabinsk, word went up and down the Trans-Siberian railway to other Legionnaire units, and wherever they happen to be, they pulled out their rifles and machine guns and took over. The Legion soon controlled almost the entire length of the Trans-Siberian railway. This is a very big deal.

Now, the point that links the revolt of the Czechoslovak legions to the Russian civil war is the city of Samarra, situated about 600 miles southeast of Moscow, where the Volga River meets the Samarra River. The city in particular and the Volga region in general had been one of the main bases of SR popular peasant support, and a group of SR delegates to the constituent assembly had regrouped there in the aftermath of the closing of the constituent assembly back in January. Here, they hoped to plug themselves into a large and hostile reaction to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and they dreamed of establishing a rival government to the Soviets by claiming the superior sovereign authority of the constituent assembly. But they spent the first couple months of 1918 supremely disappointed, because as we’ve seen, even areas where there was a real SR population? They didn’t care much about the constituent assembly per se. They just wanted land and local autonomy, both of which the Bolsheviks had promised.

The other problem for the SR leadership was that they couldn’t rally anybody to fight for them. They couldn’t even rally enough armed supporters to take over Samarra, which at the moment was only tenuously held by a Soviet aligned municipal government defended by about 2000 Red Guards. And not for nothing, but if you’re claiming to be the legitimate government of a country and you can’t get anybody who’s willing to kill or die for you, well, how legitimate are you? Because one of the unspoken tests of political legitimacy is, can you find enough people willing to kill or die for you.

In early June 1918 though, after the revolt in Chelyabinsk, a large cluster of about 8,000 Czechoslovak legionaries started rolling east to meet up with their brothers on the far side of the Urals. Now the legionaries had never been keen to stick around in Russia, nor did they really want to get caught up in a civil war, but the SR leaders in Samarra made the point that they all agreed on one thing, that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a humiliating disaster. If the SR government reclaimed power from the Bolsheviks — who were, after all, probably on the German payroll — they might be able to reopen the eastern front and fight on the same side again. The SR leaders made some extravagant claims about already securing French support, and they convinced the 8,000 legionaries to roll into Samarra on June 8th and take over the city from the meager force of Red Guards, practically without firing a shot.

I mean, they fired a few shots, but it was practically without firing a shot.

With the legionaries standing behind them with rifles and machine guns, the SR leadership then declared themselves to be the committee members of the constituent assembly, ever after called by the Russian abbreviation, the Komuch. The Komuch called upon all constituent assembly delegates to convene in Samarra to reconstitute a quorum in order to stake a claim to being the true, legal government of Russia. Initially, the Komuch was just a small five man committee, but it would grow over the next several months as many delegates did in fact, heed the call, including the chairman of the constituent assembly, Victor Chernov, whose name still counted for something. And also, old Breshkovskaya, who had long since shed her most radical and violent tendencies, but she showed up to lend the Komuch her impeccable revolutionary aura. Their simple stated goal was the restoration of constitutional democracy, which had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks in January.

These events then directly influenced events in the far east in Siberia. With a north/south frontline of a civil war being drawn down the length of the Volga, coupled with the fact that the Czech legionaries now controlled the Trans-Siberian railroad, most of Siberia fell out of Soviet control. Shortly after the canceling of the constituent assembly, some SRs had set up what they called the provisional Siberian government in Vladivostok, while more conservative monarchist and nationalist elements had set up a rival Siberian organization in Omsk. The Vladivostok SRs refused to recognize the more conservative Whites in Omsk, and that nonrecognition was mutual. To the extent that there remained an officer corps and remnants of the old imperial army out in Siberia, they all naturally gravitated towards Omsk, where they hoped to rebuild not just an anti-Bolshevik force, but an anti-Red force, to drive out all the hated socialists, and restore something like dignity to the Russian Empire.

The group in Omsk would soon be joined by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who is presently in the midst of his own odd sojourn around the world towards his date with historical destiny. But that’s for later.

By June 1918, Soviet Russia was now surrounded. With the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the formation of the Komuch on the Volga, and an alternate Siberian government down in the far east, their eastern border now fell well short of the Ural Mountains. Down south, General Denikin’s volunteer army was growing alongside a Don Cossack army. In the Caucuses, the Menshevik led Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic was presently ascendant. And then obviously along their western border, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic, and Finland were all teaming with armies of the Central Powers. And this is to say nothing of the Allied Powers, who were making their first concerted efforts to influence events inside Russia, using the Czechoslovak Legions and other White Armies to maybe get rid of the communists, and reopen the eastern front.

So that brings us to the other big thing that emerges out of Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918, the Red Army. Now of course the old Imperial Army had been demobilized and simply ceased to exist, so in the first phase of their conflict after the October Revolution, the Soviets had relied on enthusiastic Red Guard detachments and regiments of soldiers who had been brought into the framework of the military revolutionary committee. Technically the government had issued its first decree forming a new Red Army back in January, but that force was still entirely reliant on volunteers. Lenin himself personally enjoyed a brief moment of hope in April 1918, that after Kornilov was killed, the civil war that necessarily accompanied the revolution was maybe already over. But instead, it came roaring back to life with a dangerous vengeance. The Red Army was not recruiting volunteers fast enough to wage the multi-front and multinational war that was now confronting Soviet Russia, especially as foreign powers were probably backing the sides arrayed against them.

With the defeats and setbacks of May and June, most especially the Czechoslovak revolt, the Soviets needed a more professional and disciplined army. A handful of enthusiastic volunteers were no longer enough to save the revolution, they needed a million man army.

Trotsky was one of the key architects of the new Red Army. He abandoned all pretense of democratization and volunteerism, and instead set about building a very traditional army. After resigning as commissar of foreign affairs, Trotsky had become commissar of the army and navy, a position he would hold until 1925. And for all of Trotsky’s historical reputation as like Brainy Smurf, the intellectual, the writer, the orator, his role as the organizer and leader of the Red Army and the Russian Civil War was probably his greatest contribution to the Russian Revolution. And that’s saying a lot. Alongside Trotsky at this early phase was an old Imperial officer, named Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, who served as chief of field staff and military director of the Supreme Military Council of the Soviet government. Bonch-Bruevich may not have been a dyed in the wool communist, but his younger brother was. His younger brother had served for years as Lenin’s private secretary, and so General Bonch-Bruevich was trusted enough to organize a real army. And he did a pretty decent job of it, developing both the logistical and strategic architecture of the Red Army.

Several controversial decisions went into the formation of the Red Army. First, the reintroduction of conscription. The Red Army needed men, a lot of men, and they needed them right now. Continuing to try to fill the ranks on an all volunteer basis was not going to work. In April 1918, the Soviet government decreed universal military training for all men of military age. Then, on May 29th, after the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, the government ordered their first major levée of troops. To fill this levée, they relied on the conscription lists of the tzars, and simply put it to work for the Red Army. Conscription triggered a lot of resistance out there, but it was not wholly resisted. Economic conditions were pretty bad out there. Unemployment was high, many former soldiers returned to their old villages and found nothing to return to. They saw the Red Army offering wages and coats and boots, they shrugged their shoulders, and went back to war.

But perhaps an even more controversial decision was the aggressive recruitment of former imperial military officers. These guys were generally considered a bulwark of the old regime, but they were also the only ones who knew how to organize, lead, and run an army. So setting aside ideological objections, Trotsky and Bonch-Bruevich threw open the doors for the old officer corps, pitching the Red Army as a force being mobilized to defend Russia from foreign threats, which any patriotic Russian officer could get behind. Of course, it didn’t hurt that with mass demobilization in the end of the war, most of these officers had lost their wages, careers, pensions, and sense of purpose. So even if they too had ideological objections to the Soviet government — and many of them did — they were basically being offered their old jobs back, and they took them. In the first month of the civil war, nearly 10,000 such officers signed up; by the end of 1918, there were 22,000. Now, you might be asking yourself, how on earth can the Communists trust these people with their Red Army? And the answer is, they didn’t. Which is why at the same time you get the further development of political commissars. The political commissars would be assigned to keep an eye on the officers and countersign all their orders to ensure political reliability. Trotsky also let it be known that the family and friends of these officers would be kept under watch. He said, “let the turncoats realize that at the same time they are betraying their own families, their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children. He was deadly serious about this, as were the Cheka, the organization tasked with ensuring everyone’s political reliability. Not just officers, everybody. By any and all means necessary.

Next time, we will advance into the summer of 1918. With opposition to Soviet authority in Russia growing, the government systematically outlawed all political parties — not just the Kadets, but also the Mensheviks and the right SRs. And with their own hopes and dreams getting tossed aside by Lenin’s government, the left SRs, who had joined the Bolsheviks in October, broke with the regime and attempted to stage a new October 1917 in July 1918. And when it failed, one party Communist rule in Russia would be permanently cemented.

But I say next time, because Saturnalia is upon us once again, and I will be taking the next two weeks off for the holidays. Now, if you need a last minute gift idea, by all means Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette and the age of revolution is right there, just saying. But other than that, I hope everyone out there is happy and healthy, and I wish you a very happy Saturnalia, and a very happy new year, and I will see you in 2022. .