Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion

The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion was the armed actions of the Czechoslovak Legions in the Russian Civil War against Bolshevik authorities during May - August, 1918, in Volga, Siberia and Ural regions. This event made possible the anti-Bolshevik activity of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly.

During World War I, ethnic Czechs and Slovaks living in the Russian Empire petitioned Czar Nicholas II to set up a national force to fight against Austria-Hungary. In 1916, the Russian military authorities began to form a Czechoslovak Legion. As of the end of 1917, the Legion had more than 60,000 soldiers; many of them were former POW's from the Austro-Hungarian army.

After the October Revolution in 1917, the Czechoslovak Legion was in a very complicated situation. The Bolsheviks did not want to use it on the Eastern Front, and it was very hard to remove Czechoslovak troops to the Western Front. In March 1918, the Soviet government (under pressure from Germany) stopped the transfer of Czechoslovak troops to France through Arkhangelsk and sent them through Siberia to Vladivostok. The slow evacuation by the Trans-Siberian Railway was exacerbated by transportation shortages – as agreed in the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Bolsheviks were at the same time repatriating German, Austrian and Hungarian POWs from Siberia. Around the same time Leon Trotsky, then People's Commissar of War, under intense pressure from the Germans, ordered the disarming and arrest of the Legion, thus betraying his promise of safe passage.

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