In Siberia, the turmoil leading up to and following the October Revolution had produced a flood of new refugees – some of them ordinary people seeking a haven, others linked to a cause: members of the privileged or educated classes, army officers, moderate Socialists, anti-Communist revolutionaries, conservatives, right-wing extremists, anarchists, Cossacks, and counterrevolutionaries of every stripe. There were reactionary legitimists, who hoped for the restoration, constitutional monarchists willing to accept any figurehead of adequate pedigree, and those who believed that only a military dictatorship could rescue Russia from the morass into which it had sunk. Secret officers’ organizations existed in all the major cities, and intrigue hovered over every encounter in the street. Although Lenin had once thought to locate his fledgling regime behind the Urals (when negotiations with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk had stalled – “from the borders of our Uralo-Kuznetsk Republic,” he had declared, “we will spread out again and return to Moscow and Petersburg”),640 Siberia in general was not fertile ground for the Reds. The area had a very small industrial proletariat, and only a few peasants who were desperately poor. Most peasants – “well-fed, solid, and successful,”641 as Lenin himself had noted – in any case were of no particular political persuasion, and in the cities democratic socialism and a lingering movement for Siberian autonomy were entwined.
In August 1917, even before the October coup, a coalition of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others opposed to Bolshevism had come together in Tomsk as the First Siberian Congress and voted for autonomy. It adopted as its banner a green and white flag, representing the forests and snows of Siberia, and sent delegates to Kiev where another regional government was taking shape. Two months later, the Congress reconvened to lay the groundwork for the creation of a provisional government for Siberia along parliamentary lines. Bolshevik agents, however, broke up the governing committee; subsequently its members regrouped as the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia and transferred from Tomsk to Harbin in Manchuria, where they set up their headquarters in a railroad car. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, moreover, the Bolsheviks had done less well in Siberia than elsewhere, receiving only 10 percent of the vote (and just 20 percent in the Urals), as compared to their 25 percent showing overall. An anti-Bolshevik government was formed by the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly at Samara on the Volga on June 8, 1918; another, the Provisional Siberian Government, in Omsk at the end of June. The former was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionaries; the latter by much more conservative factions. In the Far East, in addition to the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, General Horvath, the manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway, tried to establish the nucleus of a conservative administration based in Manchuria.
The governments at Samara and Omsk jockeyed for jurisdiction over the Urals, and engaged in a minor customs war, with Omsk refusing to ship grain westward and Samara blocking the movement of manufactured goods to the east. But the future of the White (or anti-Bolshevik) movement as it developed in Siberia was principally to depend on one wholly unforeseen event.
This was the uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps at the end of May 1918. And it marked the beginning of the Russian Civil War. The Corps, or Legion, was composed of approximately forty-five thousand Czechoslovak ex-prisoners of war who, at the time of the October coup, had been fighting for the Allies on the Eastern Front. After that front was abandoned, the French government and the Czechoslovak National Council, led by Thomas Masaryk, had arranged to evacuate these men from the Ukraine and dispatch them to the battlefront in France. In so doing, Masaryk hoped to win Allied recognition for the establishment of a new Czechoslovak state. Since German battle-lines prevented the Corps from proceeding overland, it was decided to send it halfway around the world by sea from Vladivostok through the Panama Canal. The Soviets (as the Communists now called themselves) agreed to provide safe passage through Siberia, provided the Czechs surrendered most of their arms at Penza, a town along the route. Joseph Stalin telegraphed the Czech National Council in Paris: “The Czechoslovaks will travel not as fighting units, but as groups of free citizens, who carry with them a specified number of weapons for defense against counterrevolutionary attacks.”642
Toward the end of March 1918, the first of eighty trainloads departed eastward. Twelve thousand men reached Vladivostok by mid-May (fifty-seven days after setting out), but the greater part of the Corps was strung out in groups at broad intervals along the Trans-Siberian line. Progress had been slow, with many inexplicable delays, and misgivings began to arise about the way in which the Corps had been split up. Meanwhile, in consultation with War Commissar Leon Trotsky, the Supreme Allied War Council had decided to more expeditiously evacuate the westernmost units through Arkhangelsk, thus dispersing the Corps to an even greater degree. The Czechs (attributing the idea to the Bolsheviks) suspected it as a scheme to further divide them, with the most malevolent aims. Lenin had made almost every imaginable concession to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and among the Czechs the fear grew that they were being disarmed as a prelude to being handed over to the German government.
The Bolsheviks, of course, had their own apprehensions, and had delayed the Czech anabasis for fear that, among other things, the Corps might be used in an Allied conspiracy with the counterrevolutionaries to seize Siberia. The Czechs had maintained their discipline as a fighting force while the rest of the Russian Army was in disarray, and already in early April 1918 a small Japanese naval contingent had landed at Vladivostok (allegedly to protect the Japanese community there), and counterrevolutionary (or “White”) forces based in Manchuria had begun to operate in the Far East. Although Masaryk himself had originally insisted that the Corps not be used in Russia’s internal conflicts, by the time it got to Penza, many Czechs had begun to hide their arms.
“Under these circumstances,” writes one historian, “a small incident led to big consequences.”643 On May 14 (about the time the first Czech train was pulling into Vladivostok), a westbound convoy of released Austrian and Hungarian prisoners (to be repatriated under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) paused opposite a trainload of restless Czechs at Chelyabinsk in the foothills of the Urals. Insults were furiously exchanged, and as the westbound train began to leave the station, one of the Hungarians hurled a piece of cast iron across the tracks, knocking a Czech soldier to the ground. His enraged companions boarded the train and lynched the culprit on the spot. The local Bolsheviks intervened to arrest the vigilantes, but were in turn disarmed by the other legionnaires, who occupied the station, capturing two thousand Red Guards almost without a fight. The skirmish also yielded a stockpile of weapons, including twelve thousand rifles and thirty pieces of light artillery.
Moscow overreacted and (in an uncoded telegram sent by Trotsky) ordered the local Soviets to disarm the Czechs, remove them from their trains, and disband them as a corps. He added, rather intemperately, that any Czech found with a weapon in his hands should be shot. The Czechs intercepted this message at the telegraph office at Chelyabinsk, and concluded that their only chance to escape entrapment and slaughter was to turn their exodus into an expeditionary campaign. They relayed their intention to their compatriots, and before long the Corps had seized control of the Trans-Siberian line. Fighting their way eastwards, they routed any Bolshevik garrisons that tried to stop them, and within a few weeks had taken several major Western Siberian towns – Novonikolayevsk on the 26th, Penza on the 29th, Tomsk on the 31st. Omsk fell at the beginning of June, and Krasnoyarsk on the 20th. The munitions stockpiled at Krasnoyarsk furnished them with new pistols, rifles, hand grenades, light artillery, and even an armored train.