Dreams of a Great Small Nation by Kevin J McNamara

Author:Kevin J McNamara
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610394857
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

The Seizure of Siberia

THE SAME DAY that Trotsky issued his threatening order, the legionnaires attacked. Their first priority was to link all the legionnaires in a single chain—especially those around Penza, who were furthest from Vladivostok and the most vulnerable. From Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, and Penza, commandeered trains were directed east and west under full steam to rescue their brothers and defeat the Reds all along the Trans-Siberian. They often ran into Red Army units much larger and better armed than they were.

Two eastbound trains approaching Omsk suffered a surprise attack on the evening of May 25 at the small town of Maryanovka, about twenty-five miles west of Omsk, when a Red train equipped with two machine guns and carrying hundreds of Bolsheviks approached from Omsk. The Bolsheviks opened fire. The legionnaires had few rifles but used the hand grenades they had hidden in their trains with deadly effect. Suffering six to ten dead and eight to ten seriously wounded, they still managed to kill or wound two hundred of the enemy and force their train back toward Omsk. The next day, legionnaires aboard a train outside the town of Zlatoust, about a hundred miles west of Chelyabinsk, jumped from their seats when they watched their carriages being slowly moved in front of a line of armed Reds. Piling out of the train and attacking the enemy’s two flanks in some cases only with rocks, they captured machine guns and rifles and quickly turned them on the other Bolsheviks, causing them to flee. The legionnaires reportedly suffered six dead and ten severely wounded. Trapped by tracks damaged by the retreating Reds, the legionnaires circled Zlatoust on foot and returned to Chelyabinsk.

Defeating Bolshevik forces in almost every encounter, the legionnaires began building an arsenal with captured weapons and trains. At Chelyabinsk, they overpowered Bolshevik guards and seized two improvised flatcars with artillery pieces mounted on them and two freight cars full of Russian rifles and ammunition. Success in combat also brought them weaponry. “Due to our commander’s inexperience,” one Bolshevik said after a defeat, “the retreat was effected in a disorderly fashion. . . . Everything was abandoned to the Czechs.”77 Most railway and telegraph workers cooperated with the legionnaires, giving the Czecho-Slovaks access to all communications between Moscow and its many soviets, none of which realized the fact. The legionnaires were thus able to learn where Reds were concentrated, what their orders were, and when to anticipate attacks.

A series of firefights exploded along the Trans-Siberian across Russia throughout that summer—from Penza in European Russia, to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, and then back westward again to Kazan in European Russia. Day by day, week by week, one city after another fell to the Czecho-Slovaks along the Trans-Siberian Railway and its tributaries:

May 26—Novosibirsk78

May 27—Chelyabinsk

May 29—Penza

May 29—Syzran

June 4—Tomsk

June 7—Omsk

June 8—Samara

June 20—Krasnoyarsk

June 24—Nizhneudinsk

June 29—Vladivostok

July 4—Ufa

July 5—Ussuriysk79

July 11—Irkutsk

July 22—Ulyanovsk80

July 25—Yekaterinburg

August 6—Kazan

August 24—Ulan-Ude81

August 27—Chita

September 5—Khabarovsk

WHILE THE LEGIONNAIRES would soon rivet the world’s attention with their conquest of Siberia, they initially did not try to seize and

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