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Czech Legion uniforms 1915-17
The Czech Legion was a military force established during World War I in Russia and composed primarily of Czech and Slovak prisoners of war. In its heyday in the spring and summer of 1918, the Czech Legion consisted of some 40,000 POWs who effectively challenged the nascent Red Army.
Formed in August 1914 by orders of the Russian General Staff, the Czech Company (as it was originally known) was intended to be a small intelligence-gathering unit that recruited Czechs and Slovaks who had settled in Russia before the war. However, the capture by the Russian army of an estimated 250,000 Czech and Slovak soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian army created a manpower pool that Czech émigré politicians wanted to use as the nucleus of a future Czechoslovak army. Despite halfhearted support for this project from the Tsarist government, the unit grew into a regiment by February 1916 and a brigade four months later.
Following the first revolution in Russia in March 1917, the chairman of the Czech National Committee, T. G. Masaryk, arrived from Paris and launched a massive recruiting drive among the prisoners. This was helped by the conduct of the Czech Legion during the Kerensky offensive (June 1917), in which the legion outperformed most of the Russian units it fought alongside. The enthusiastic support received now from the Russian Provisional Government resulted in a five-fold increase in the size of the legion, to approximately 40,000 soldiers. However, the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 and the advance of the German army into the Ukraine and the Baltic areas in the winter of 1917–1918 created an extremely precarious situation for the Czech Legion. The Czech National Council (as the committee had been renamed) now decided to transport the legion to the western front, where it would contribute to the military effort of the Entente and gain support for an independent postwar Czechoslovakia. In February 1918, the French government recognized the Czech Legion as part of the French army and approved its transfer to France via the far eastern Russian port of Vladivostok.
Despite Masaryk’s assurance to the Bolshevik leadership that the Czech forces had no wish to intervene in the internal affairs of Russia, the legion clashed in May 1918 with Red Guards in the Ural town of Chelyabinsk and was ordered by Trotsky to disarm completely. The Czech soldiers who were already en route to Vladivostok seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and easily defeated the ill-organized Red Army units sent against them. During the spring and summer of 1918, the Czech Legion constituted the most significant military force within Russia and provided military protection to various anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia and eastern Russia.
Although not an integral part of the White or the allied interventionist forces, the Czech Legion played a crucial role in the Russian Civil War by exposing the initial weakness of the Red Army. It constituted an important bargaining chip for Czech politicians negotiating the postwar settlement, and was instrumental in the establishment in October 1918 of independent Czechoslovakia.
During 1919, the involvement of the Czech Legion in the Russian Civil War became negligible, and the successes of the Red Army forced the legion’s leadership to reevaluate its position. Thus, in February 1920, an armistice agreement was signed between the Czech Legion and the Soviet forces, and the head of the White government in Siberia, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, was handed over to the Bolsheviks to be executed. The Czech Legion finally sailed from Vladivostok in September 1920 and became the core of the Czechoslovak army.
