A large
number of people living in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire living in the provinces of Bohemia and Slovakia, wanted
their own national state. On the outbreak of the First
World War, some men from this region joined a brigade attached
to the Russian
Army.
In 1917
the Czech Nationalist leader, Tomas Masaryk,
visited Russia and helped increased the size of the Czech Legion.
He did not by recriuting Czechs from Russian prisoner of war camps.
After the
November Revolution it became clear
to Tomas Masaryk that Vladimir
Lenin wanted to make a separate peace with the Central
Powers. He therefore decided to move the Czech Legion to France
to rejoin the fighting. The state of the Russian Railway made this
a slow process.
In May,
1918, a group of soldiers in the Czech Legion were falsely accused
of killing a man in Chelyabinsk, in Siberia. The rest of the Czech
unit marched into town and freed their comrades being held by local
Red Guards.
When Leon
Trotsky heard the news he gave orders for the Czech Legion to
be disarmed. The 100,000 strong Czech Legion responded by joining
in the war against the Red Army. Over the
next four months the Czechs took a vast area of land east of the Volga.
By June,
1918, most of the Czechs had fought their way through to Vladivostok,
where a small Japanese force landed to cover their retreat. Another
group remained and supported Alexander Kolchak
in Omsk during 1919 before leaving the country in the spring of 1920.
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