Cesta Revoluce
The Path of Revolution

Author(s): Jaroslav Kratochvíl
Subject(s): Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919)
Published by: CEEOL Digital Reproductions / Collections
Keywords: Czech Legions in Russia; Czechoslovak Legionnaires ;
Summary/Abstract: The Czechoslovak volunteer army in Russia, called the Russian Legions at home, was created and lived under completely exceptional conditions. Its germs grew into the old pre-revolutionary Russian army, and if it had not been for the Russian Revolution, it would have returned ideologically poorer than the Italian and French legions. But the Russian Revolution, having dissolved the environment in which the Russian legions were born, released them as a foreign body, a fetus grown from other times and non-Russian conditions, and allowed them to live an almost completely independent life of a closed entity, different from their surroundings. The Russian legions were born and lived, developed and suffered, had their own history, their own political life, their own crises and upheavals. Their life was a difficult school, an experiment in social life, and therefore they are also of sociological significance. Against the gray background of the human sea, raised from the bottom by the explosion of the revolution, the characteristic features of our nature and our home education stood out sharply. But under the hammer of naked creative fate, they yielded to the laws of all mankind. Some were thrust into the workshop of a great era by fate, others emerged. Having returned, they no longer fit into the deposit from which the explosion of the world war had lifted them. The surrounding people looked at the legionnaires incomprehensibly; the fathers did not understand their children. Then they themselves, having grown up in the world, were cramped and uncomfortable at home in their children's coats.

• Details
• Contents