Inaugural Frank A. Belousek Lecture in Czech History

Department of History Author

11/12/2018 Added

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The Inaugural Frank A. Belousek Lecture in Czech History - “Reluctant Warriors…”: A Talk by Kevin J. McNamara (2 Oct. 2018)

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[00:00:18.850]I've been asked to say a few words today
[00:00:20.780]about the very dramatic events that surrounded
[00:00:23.600]the creation or establishment of
[00:00:25.810]Czechoslovakia in 1918, events at
[00:00:28.746]the heart of my book, that one, and the
[00:00:31.993]events which liberated the Czechs and Slovaks
[00:00:35.270]from many hundreds of years, if not
[00:00:38.290]a thousand years, of oppression
[00:00:40.410]under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[00:00:43.160]When I was looking at my notes a minute ago
[00:00:44.630]I realized that some of you might not know
[00:00:46.030]what the Austro-Hungarian Empire is, or was,
[00:00:48.870]so what was that thing called Austria-Hungary?
[00:00:53.200]What it was was a dynasty that controlled the
[00:00:56.988]heart of Europe, about 11 or 12 nationalities.
[00:01:03.850]The dynasty was the Hapsburg Dynasty.
[00:01:07.380]Whose family, over many centuries,
[00:01:09.650]discovered that they were German at one point.
[00:01:12.940]Maybe a thousand years ago one's ethnic
[00:01:16.060]identity was not so important.
[00:01:18.240]They would have called themselves Christians.
[00:01:21.522]In 1914 Austria-Hungary occupied
[00:01:24.194]present day Austria, Hungary of course,
[00:01:28.417]the Czechoslovak Republic, Croatia,
[00:01:32.150]Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina,
[00:01:34.700]Northern Italy, Southern Poland, and the
[00:01:37.750]western regions of Ukraine and Romania.
[00:01:40.850]If that gives you a picture.
[00:01:42.180]If it does give you a picture
[00:01:43.240]give yourself an A for geography.
[00:01:45.750]It entered the war, the Great War, as a great power.
[00:01:48.620]It was only the size of Texas,
[00:01:49.920]but in Europe that's pretty big.
[00:01:52.220]It was a great power, it was the
[00:01:53.540]second largest in size, and the third largest
[00:01:55.980]in population among all the warring parties.
[00:01:59.150]It disappeared in 1918 in the flash of
[00:02:02.622]an eye, and I'll tell you how that happened.
[00:02:06.210]I'll be delighted to answer any questions
[00:02:07.790]you might have at the conclusion of my remarks,
[00:02:10.010]but I will answer your first question right now.
[00:02:13.690]Why is it that an Irish, Scottish,
[00:02:17.094]American, no Czech or Slovak background,
[00:02:20.580]why did I write this book?
[00:02:23.246]I'm glad you asked.
[00:02:25.530]The short answer is that the exploits
[00:02:28.070]of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia,
[00:02:30.821]as well as a parallel political campaign,
[00:02:35.320]waged by Czechoslovak exiles all around
[00:02:39.550]the world, was nothing less than amazing.
[00:02:45.030]I was telling someone earlier today
[00:02:46.460]that I'm almost 61 years old, but I
[00:02:49.695]just haven't completely lost my
[00:02:52.208]appreciation for my sense of awe.
[00:02:55.480]I'm still able to be awed by Olympic athletes
[00:02:58.800]or crazy people who climb mountains,
[00:03:01.100]and I'm really awed by the Czechs and Slovaks
[00:03:03.860]and what they did here in these four years.
[00:03:06.650]The Legionnaires, in particular in Russia,
[00:03:08.530]riveted the world's attention.
[00:03:10.720]World leaders really stood up and took notice,
[00:03:13.290]people like Teddy Roosevelt was
[00:03:14.900]out of office and he was amazed.
[00:03:17.940]They fought very bravely and very
[00:03:19.810]effectively, they were perhaps the most
[00:03:22.060]effective revolutionary army in world history.
[00:03:25.503]And despite having no country of
[00:03:27.780]their own at the time to protect them,
[00:03:31.020]no experienced military leaders.
[00:03:33.200]They didn't have a George Washington,
[00:03:34.700]they didn't have a Napoleon.
[00:03:37.818]And despite being surrounded by hostile armies
[00:03:39.820]in the vastness of Siberia, they defended
[00:03:42.210]themselves, they defeated their adversaries
[00:03:44.190]for a while, they actually created a
[00:03:46.540]better future for themselves and
[00:03:48.743]for their compatriots back in Europe.
[00:03:52.140]And they did this against impossible odds.
[00:03:55.330]If you write down this story at about
[00:03:56.930]25 words, 35 words, and you tell
[00:04:00.200]somebody this is what happened,
[00:04:02.010]most people would have to tell you it
[00:04:03.310]couldn't have happened, it just couldn't have.
[00:04:06.404]Of course all of this, almost all of this,
[00:04:09.060]came to be forgotten in 1938 when
[00:04:11.843]the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia
[00:04:15.483]and wiped out history and wiped out
[00:04:18.020]any memory of these heroes, and again,
[00:04:21.110]of course it happened again in 1948 when
[00:04:23.790]Soviet Russia took its turn absorbing Czechoslovakia.
[00:04:29.070]And in fact the Russians tried to erase
[00:04:31.490]this remarkable story in much the same
[00:04:33.670]way they would erase remarkable people.
[00:04:36.930]And they do that by sending them to Siberia,
[00:04:39.610]so it made some kind of ironic sense that
[00:04:42.160]I first heard about this story
[00:04:44.320]on a trek across Siberia in 1993.
[00:04:48.720]It was only 20 months after the
[00:04:50.480]implosion of the Soviet Union and some
[00:04:53.040]people I know and I, we just were
[00:04:55.410]curious about what that place was like,
[00:04:56.960]it had been closed off, sorta like North Korea,
[00:04:59.270]for decades and everyone was curious
[00:05:03.390]what it looked like, so we went.
[00:05:06.050]I traveled about 2,000 miles in the Trans-Siberian.
[00:05:11.990]It was late summer, so we didn't have to dress like this.
[00:05:17.270]These are two Legionnaires, at the height of winter
[00:05:20.710]of course when the temperature plunges well below
[00:05:23.030]zero pretty much every day, below zero fahrenheit.
[00:05:28.100]Our trip was shortened from the 5,000 miles
[00:05:30.510]you might think you can do to 2,000 because
[00:05:33.230]there's no bathing facilities on the
[00:05:34.730]Trans-Siberian, at least not the train we were on.
[00:05:37.110]So it as an adventure in hygiene.
[00:05:39.900]For the first time in my life I learned
[00:05:41.630]what bed bugs are when I woke up in the
[00:05:44.160]morning and my legs were covered in red welts.
[00:05:47.240]I thought I had a rash, I didn't know.
[00:05:50.500]When we asked for cream for our coffee
[00:05:52.420]at the Soviet hotel we got the Soviet answer.
[00:05:55.150]Which was nyet.
[00:05:57.758]The passenger cabin of our Aeroflot jet
[00:06:00.130]was full of angry flies and broken seats.
[00:06:03.630]I noticed that the Russians in the plane
[00:06:06.548]were incredibly deathly quiet.
[00:06:10.090]Not talking to each other, they just look scared.
[00:06:13.180]I didn't know why, but later on I learned that
[00:06:16.080]Aeroflot Airlines was crashing all the time in '93.
[00:06:21.280]The Soviet Union had fallen apart and
[00:06:23.900]everything was falling apart literally,
[00:06:25.640]and they were killing more passengers,
[00:06:27.310]five times more passengers than any
[00:06:29.320]other airline in the world at that time.
[00:06:32.960]But we were lucky this didn't happen,
[00:06:36.500]so we continued with our journey.
[00:06:39.550]The key point was that there were
[00:06:40.760]some briefing materials for the trip.
[00:06:44.580]It made passing reference to an army of men,
[00:06:47.470]50,000 men, who marched back and forth
[00:06:50.090]across Siberia at the end of World War I.
[00:06:54.630]I know that Siberia is big enough to go
[00:06:57.360]from Honolulu, Hawaii to New York City.
[00:07:00.310]So getting across it just once is remarkable.
[00:07:05.680]Doing it several times is oddly remarkable,
[00:07:08.630]more remarkable, but I also wondered why
[00:07:11.540]these men were in Siberia if the war's in Europe,
[00:07:14.350]if the war is ending why are they fighting,
[00:07:16.370]who are they fighting, what is
[00:07:17.430]this about, so I thought, it sounds
[00:07:19.190]like a dramatic National Geographic
[00:07:21.830]special, so I'll go back home and I'll
[00:07:23.624]buy the book, I'll read the book.
[00:07:26.570]But when I get back home to the states
[00:07:28.150]I really couldn't find any good
[00:07:30.570]history of this, not in English.
[00:07:32.600]I found two English language versions
[00:07:35.710]of the tale that were written in
[00:07:36.730]the 20 to 30s, but neither of them
[00:07:39.303]had a bibliography or any footnotes
[00:07:41.777]or any reference to references at all,
[00:07:43.940]I didn't quite know where they got
[00:07:45.210]their information from, didn't quite trust it.
[00:07:47.680]There was a memoir written by a Legionnaire in 1939.
[00:07:52.230]He moved to London, I think he knew English
[00:07:54.870]really well, he wrote a great memoir and I
[00:07:56.380]used it in my book, but the other two books
[00:07:58.830]and nothing else frankly had any perspective on
[00:08:01.590]what these men were thinking or feeling at the time.
[00:08:04.480]If you read, they're mentioned in history books,
[00:08:07.450]like history of the Russian revolution,
[00:08:09.320]but they're always spoken about objectified,
[00:08:13.293]they did this, they did that, and we
[00:08:15.610]don't like this and we like that,
[00:08:16.900]but you never heard their voices.
[00:08:19.270]So I started to work on this, and I was
[00:08:23.051]really encouraged by the fact that I began
[00:08:26.661]to discover that other people, not just me,
[00:08:30.309]really thought this was a terrific, epic story.
[00:08:37.240]People like a younger Winston Churchill,
[00:08:40.160]who was in office in 1918, he had a long career.
[00:08:43.210]People associate him with World War II, but he
[00:08:45.140]was in the British war cabinet in World War I.
[00:08:48.050]Former President Teddy Roosevelt took notice.
[00:08:50.900]The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
[00:08:53.250]Of course Woodrow Wilson, our President, took notice.
[00:08:55.680]The British novelist and spy Somerset Maugham,
[00:08:58.530]he was in Russia and he got to meet
[00:09:00.070]the Czechs and Slovaks and he was amazed.
[00:09:02.580]He said "They are organized like a department
[00:09:05.727]"store and disciplined like a Prussian regiment."
[00:09:09.020]Thought that was a great quote.
[00:09:09.940]And the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin
[00:09:12.400]and Leon Trotsky, they also spoke in
[00:09:14.840]public in terms of awe about the
[00:09:17.277]Czechs and Slovaks, but they expressed
[00:09:20.430]their awe in a kind of angry way.
[00:09:22.720]They had reason to be angry at the Czechs and Slovaks.
[00:09:25.610]So I spent 23 years of my spare time
[00:09:29.047]to write the book I could not find,
[00:09:31.140]but it only really came together in
[00:09:32.550]2002 when I acquired, discovered on
[00:09:35.750]Ebay of all places, five volumes,
[00:09:38.492]450 firsthand stories in five volumes.
[00:09:43.028]They were published in Prague in the 1920s
[00:09:46.107]and I got them on Ebay from a guy
[00:09:47.810]in Switzerland for like 65 bucks.
[00:09:50.150]Then I hired a really professional
[00:09:53.180]Czech-American translator who had
[00:09:54.780]worked for the White House and the Castle,
[00:09:56.670]and he quoted me a good price and I raised money,
[00:10:00.920]I raised $48,000 to have him translate
[00:10:03.607]400,000 words, and what these stories were were
[00:10:06.740]the firsthand accounts of the men themselves.
[00:10:09.340]Apparently when they got back to Prague
[00:10:10.590]they were sat down and said tell us
[00:10:13.160]what happened to you, in this crazy
[00:10:15.120]four, six year long adventure, what was
[00:10:17.530]the most interesting thing that happened to you?
[00:10:18.890]You have these terrific random firsthand
[00:10:21.930]stories and I incorporated them into the story.
[00:10:27.920]Once I had that, I knew I had a book.
[00:10:31.290]The publishing world disagreed.
[00:10:33.370]Like most new book projects by new authors,
[00:10:36.490]this book was rejected over and over
[00:10:38.670]and over again, at least 12 agents and
[00:10:40.790]24 publishers declined to publish it,
[00:10:42.780]most of them sadly because what they said
[00:10:45.410]repeatedly was that serious works of
[00:10:47.330]non-fiction are rarely profitable.
[00:10:50.340]Sad.
[00:10:51.760]But then I come across this quote from Winston Churchill
[00:10:54.366]which makes me feel that I'm not crazy, I'm not
[00:10:57.200]wasting my time in a weird guy's hobby or something.
[00:11:01.220]Churchill was not only an impressive
[00:11:02.720]leader, he was a very good writer.
[00:11:04.240]People might forget that, perhaps a great writer.
[00:11:07.860]At his death he left behind more
[00:11:09.360]published words than did Charles Dickens
[00:11:12.070]and William Shakespeare combined, and in 1953
[00:11:14.970]he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
[00:11:17.150]Which is not bad.
[00:11:18.670]He personally followed the exploits of
[00:11:20.450]the Legion in office, in fact he took
[00:11:23.770]a special interest in them, shall we say.
[00:11:26.350]So he knew of what had happened, but more
[00:11:28.450]important to me, he also knew what a good story was.
[00:11:31.861]What Churchill said about this tale,
[00:11:34.298]when I saw this I said wow, I have my first blurb.
[00:11:38.847]"The pages of history recall scarcely
[00:11:40.917]"any parallel episode at once so romantic
[00:11:44.097]"in character or so extensive in scale."
[00:11:48.530]And Churchill was not an easy guy to impress.
[00:11:52.320]I still wonder why he didn't write this book.
[00:11:55.510]He thought it was interesting and worthwhile.
[00:11:59.410]A.J.P. Taylor, another British historian,
[00:12:02.967]really put together in one quote my whole book
[00:12:07.519]in a sense, so I read his History of World War I.
[00:12:10.950]I was always looking in all kinds of books,
[00:12:12.520]I must have read 10,000 books to
[00:12:14.310]look through fragments of this story.
[00:12:18.110]So in his History of World War I, which is not
[00:12:20.230]that thick, but it's kinda a classic, so I read it,
[00:12:23.360]he takes an odd interest in a minor,
[00:12:26.240]if violent, skirmish among former prisoners
[00:12:29.630]of war at a train station at a place
[00:12:32.830]called Chelyabinsk, Siberia, on May 14th, 1918.
[00:12:38.090]I thought that's really strange, so why
[00:12:39.420]would a British history of World War I bother
[00:12:41.580]to describe a fight among POWs in Siberia?
[00:12:45.560]What's the connection, what's the point?
[00:12:48.440]Well the Czech and Slovak Legionnaires
[00:12:49.930]were at the center of this incident
[00:12:51.500]on May 14th, 1918, which is pretty
[00:12:54.560]critical, it's at the center of the story.
[00:12:57.070]There was a fight.
[00:12:59.200]Two men were left dead, but it lit
[00:13:01.420]a fuse to a series of explosions
[00:13:03.290]across Siberia, Russia, and Europe,
[00:13:05.660]and among them was the collapse of
[00:13:07.340]Austria-Hungary and its Habsburg dynasty.
[00:13:11.022]A.J.P. Taylor's quote was this.
[00:13:14.420]He said "In this strange way, the deathblow
[00:13:17.207]"to an empire centuries old was struck far away
[00:13:20.867]"on the railway platform at Chelyabinsk."
[00:13:25.410]This made my day when I saw this.
[00:13:27.770]This is what it looks like to connect the dots in history.
[00:13:32.490]You have to read and go through a lot
[00:13:33.910]of dots to find the right ones, but that's
[00:13:36.060]what it looks like, and this is
[00:13:36.990]how I pieced together the story.
[00:13:40.600]So a little background on how we
[00:13:42.500]came to this situation, so World War I.
[00:13:46.190]About 7.8 million soldiers were
[00:13:49.571]sent by Austria-Hungary to the
[00:13:52.470]eastern front, which we in America tend to
[00:13:54.340]ignore, we tend to focus on the western front.
[00:13:56.950]On the eastern front Austria-Hungary
[00:13:59.150]fought for the most part Russian and Serbia.
[00:14:02.060]On the western front, for the most part,
[00:14:04.030]Germany fought Britain and France.
[00:14:07.000]We arrived in this war at the 11th hour,
[00:14:10.512]but it goes on for a long time without us.
[00:14:14.370]These men suffer a great deal in battle,
[00:14:16.740]almost unspeakable conditions, but what
[00:14:20.470]was different about the eastern front
[00:14:22.650]was that there were these vast
[00:14:23.900]movements of armies back and forth,
[00:14:26.220]just like the old days, they would say.
[00:14:28.550]The western front is locked into
[00:14:30.970]muddy trenches where not much happens
[00:14:33.630]except that people have to get out and die.
[00:14:36.320]And that's it.
[00:14:38.390]On the eastern front, the size of the
[00:14:40.460]Russian army, and the fact that they were mostly
[00:14:42.910]illiterate peasants, they would just charge.
[00:14:45.970]Many of them would die, but the fact
[00:14:47.590]is the fronts moved back and forth.
[00:14:49.450]What that means is that there's prisoners.
[00:14:53.890]2.1 million Austro-Hungarian soldiers
[00:14:57.930]are taken prisoner by Russia, 2.1 million.
[00:15:00.989]Keep in mind too this was a war
[00:15:02.440]that was gonna be over in six months.
[00:15:05.580]They're spread out over 300 POW camps,
[00:15:08.650]most of them in Siberia or Central Asia,
[00:15:10.831]what we call Central Asia today.
[00:15:14.640]About 210 to 250,000 were Czech or Slovak.
[00:15:18.920]I think 30,000 were Slovak.
[00:15:21.420]Of course Russia was completely unprepared
[00:15:23.910]to shelter, feed, or care for these prisoners.
[00:15:26.420]Completely unprepared, meaning they
[00:15:28.540]had no plans to take hardly any prisoners.
[00:15:32.210]They had 2.1 million people.
[00:15:35.320]So results, epidemics of course break out in
[00:15:38.330]these camps, disease spreads, wounds, infections,
[00:15:41.300]and fevers go untreated, and there's no food.
[00:15:45.080]At one camp in Omsk, Siberia 16,000
[00:15:47.852]POWs died in just the first year.
[00:15:50.920]At another camp, the Russian staff fled
[00:15:53.560]the camp due to a disease that was
[00:15:56.007]spreading and left the men to die.
[00:15:58.280]Final estimates for Austro-Hungarian soldiers
[00:16:00.720]who survived the war, but didn't survive
[00:16:03.670]the camps, ranges from 375,000 to 450,000
[00:16:08.919]men who died, in effect, from neglect.
[00:16:15.350]After they survived that period,
[00:16:18.167]what happens to them, but a professor of
[00:16:21.100]philosophy of all things shows up in Russia.
[00:16:26.520]The czarist regime had collapsed,
[00:16:28.230]the provisional government took control,
[00:16:30.360]the Bolsheviks are conspiring, getting ready
[00:16:32.730]to take over, but they're not in power yet.
[00:16:36.130]This wild-eyed professor from Prague
[00:16:39.990]shows up, Tomas Masaryk, and he has
[00:16:42.810]a wildly ambitious plan, and a
[00:16:46.190]wildly ambitious pitch for these men.
[00:16:50.410]He's a fugitive now, in exile, and when
[00:16:53.530]he went into exile he thought he could
[00:16:55.884]get in touch with the Allies without
[00:16:58.712]getting caught, he got caught right away,
[00:17:00.800]in effect he could not go home again.
[00:17:02.780]He was a fugitive, he would absolutely
[00:17:05.010]be imprisoned, high chance, high likelihood
[00:17:07.790]he'd be executed, and he's now, in 1915
[00:17:12.170]he's 65 years old, which today is like 70, 75 I think.
[00:17:17.940]He's not young, but now he's in a
[00:17:19.870]death struggle because he can't
[00:17:21.150]go home again, he can't go home.
[00:17:22.970]He's never gonna see his wife and four kids again.
[00:17:26.420]He's always gonna be on the run
[00:17:28.372]unless he destroys Austria-Hungary.
[00:17:32.630]So he says to the men look, join my army,
[00:17:35.950]I have an army, the French are gonna support us.
[00:17:38.090]Join this army.
[00:17:39.280]We're gonna organize ourselves under
[00:17:40.990]a French flag, we're gonna cross Siberia,
[00:17:43.490]we're gonna get on ships in Vladivostok,
[00:17:45.360]we're gonna circle the globe, we're gonna
[00:17:47.070]land in France, we're gonna go to the
[00:17:48.830]western front, and if we do all
[00:17:51.750]this they might give us a country.
[00:17:54.510]That was the pitch.
[00:17:55.870]So 50,000 men initially signed up
[00:17:59.382]and said yes, which is remarkable.
[00:18:03.033]They become the co-founders,
[00:18:04.859]these men, of Czechoslovakia.
[00:18:09.210]But Masaryk of course had a few other friends.
[00:18:12.450]Chief among them a former student Edvard Benes
[00:18:15.956]who is maybe 30 years old, a former
[00:18:19.205]student of his, who joined him in exile.
[00:18:23.200]Another former student, the Slovak
[00:18:24.990]Milan Stefanik who is now a dashing
[00:18:28.110]French army officer and pilot.
[00:18:30.480]He helped out.
[00:18:31.430]Emanuel Voska, a Czech-American businessman,
[00:18:34.650]who deserves his own book, who during the war,
[00:18:37.470]he owned a stone quarry and he owned
[00:18:39.700]a Czech-American newspaper, he had
[00:18:42.100]six kids, but he turns into one of
[00:18:45.160]the most effective American spymasters,
[00:18:48.880]I guess you call them, in American history.
[00:18:51.750]He is in charge of espionage.
[00:18:54.380]Charles Crane, a very wealthy industrialist
[00:18:58.150]from Chicago who met Masaryk at random
[00:19:01.779]for some random reason back in
[00:19:03.550]the 1890s and became a supporter.
[00:19:05.870]Very wealthy guy.
[00:19:09.890]Crane is the largest single contributor to
[00:19:12.160]Woodrow Wilson's first presidential campaign in 1912.
[00:19:16.010]Then his son, forget his name, Richard Crane,
[00:19:21.161]his son, Harvard educated, becomes an
[00:19:24.900]aid to Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
[00:19:27.430]So Crane is really wired into Washington.
[00:19:30.976]He's a good friend to have.
[00:19:34.960]Without the efforts of these other people,
[00:19:37.010]the Legionnaires in Siberia would have
[00:19:38.530]achieved little or nothing, so they're
[00:19:41.200]both equally important though because
[00:19:42.770]without the Legionnaires, as I'll explain
[00:19:44.730]in a minute, or show you, Masaryk probably would
[00:19:47.850]have failed in his efforts to get his own country.
[00:19:52.230]There could be no doubt that the liberation
[00:19:54.100]of the Czechs and Slovaks would not have
[00:19:55.720]begun in earnest, and probably would not
[00:19:58.350]have been achieved, without the drive,
[00:20:00.960]determination, and dedication of Tomas Masaryk.
[00:20:07.430]While he was not the only important person,
[00:20:09.520]the only person important to this effort,
[00:20:11.910]this cause, I believe he was, as Americans say
[00:20:14.740]about George Washington, the indispensable man.
[00:20:21.110]When war broke out, before the war he and
[00:20:24.240]his fellow Czechs, and the Slovaks actually
[00:20:27.160]separately, were trying to get what we
[00:20:30.160]might call equal rights inside the empire,
[00:20:32.920]autonomy and equal rights inside the empire
[00:20:35.370]to be equal to the Austrians and the Hungarians.
[00:20:38.150]But once the war broke out,
[00:20:39.520]there's a couple things that happened.
[00:20:41.400]Masaryk became convinced that if Austria-Hungary
[00:20:43.830]won the war, or even just survived the war,
[00:20:46.720]that they would become much more arrogant,
[00:20:50.120]and much more powerful, and less likely to
[00:20:52.030]grant the Czechs and Slovaks their autonomy.
[00:20:56.160]But Masaryk also developed a guilty
[00:20:57.870]conscience which might have been
[00:20:59.130]more motivating, so for many years
[00:21:01.090]he taught students, and many of the
[00:21:02.810]students he taught of course were
[00:21:03.940]Czechs, also Slovaks, but also even
[00:21:06.445]Croatians and Slovenian students,
[00:21:08.730]Serbian students who would find their way to Prague.
[00:21:11.570]He admitted later on that he encouraged
[00:21:14.630]them to think of a better life and
[00:21:16.920]a different way, to live a different
[00:21:18.930]way, maybe a different county.
[00:21:21.820]Now they're on the front and they're
[00:21:24.390]dying for this regime they all hate,
[00:21:27.120]but then he hears, and I corroborated this,
[00:21:29.530]this actually happened, Czechs in the army,
[00:21:33.930]in the Austro-Hungarian army, tried to
[00:21:36.290]defect to the Russian lines as early
[00:21:39.020]as September 1914, so September 1914,
[00:21:43.230]the war is still young and it's barely begun.
[00:21:47.260]It means that the Czechs are trying
[00:21:48.780]to defect almost immediately.
[00:21:52.250]They put up a white flag and they
[00:21:53.780]tried to talk to the Russians and they
[00:21:55.620]started to walk across some field or land,
[00:21:57.930]and the Russians just mowed them all down.
[00:22:00.800]And they all died.
[00:22:02.370]Later on, when I was going through
[00:22:03.420]my research, I read a story from
[00:22:05.407]the guy who said, who corroborated this.
[00:22:08.470]He said yeah, we wanted to defect
[00:22:10.070]to the Russians, so in other words a guy
[00:22:12.140]who survived this incident had a story in
[00:22:14.780]those volumes that I had gotten off of Ebay.
[00:22:19.280]So this horrified Masaryk, but then there was
[00:22:21.520]one further thing that really horrified him
[00:22:23.440]and this is something that remains an issue today.
[00:22:29.030]He encouraged the spirit of independence in his students.
[00:22:33.290]But many Czechs and Slovaks, if not a majority,
[00:22:35.770]thought that independence would come from Russia.
[00:22:39.712]That Russia was going to invade Austria-Hungary,
[00:22:43.080]and move into Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia,
[00:22:46.642]and liberate the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:22:50.800]This idea horrified Masaryk because he
[00:22:54.280]knew Russia better than they did.
[00:22:59.900]A much more famous and accomplished and
[00:23:02.400]well known Czech politician was this guy.
[00:23:07.600]Karel Kramar, he was a very prominent Czech politician.
[00:23:13.750]He was active in the Pan-Slavic movement, meaning where
[00:23:17.090]all Slavs would get their independence together.
[00:23:20.020]He married the daughter of a wealthy
[00:23:22.040]Russian industrialist, and until 1917 he
[00:23:25.480]and his wife owned a villa in the Russia Crimea.
[00:23:30.490]What was more threatening to the Czechoslovak
[00:23:34.100]Legion however, I mean to the Czechs and
[00:23:36.390]the Slovaks and the cause of independence,
[00:23:38.400]was that the Legion actually originated
[00:23:40.330]as a unit inside the Russian imperial army.
[00:23:45.150]A small unit built around emigrates,
[00:23:47.800]Czech emigrates and Russia-Slovak emigrates,
[00:23:50.680]they volunteer for the Russian army
[00:23:51.683]because they pretty much have to, and they
[00:23:53.860]form this special reconnaissance unit.
[00:23:56.750]So it begins in Russia in a sense.
[00:24:00.810]It was led by Russian officers, but these
[00:24:03.010]volunteers were very useful to Russia, and so
[00:24:05.740]really the action is taking place in Russia.
[00:24:09.234]Over time the unit began accepting
[00:24:11.582]Czech and Slovak POWs, so it begins to grow.
[00:24:15.230]By the time Masaryk gets to Russia
[00:24:17.410]in 1917, has about 10,000 men in it.
[00:24:21.550]Also, something in Russia called
[00:24:22.810]the Union of Czechoslovak Organizations
[00:24:25.920]was a potential rival to the global
[00:24:27.950]organization Masaryk was trying to create.
[00:24:31.710]They were doing a lot of work working
[00:24:33.550]with the Russians and it looked like an
[00:24:35.130]independence movement was being born inside Russia.
[00:24:40.450]And finally, he responds to a request from
[00:24:42.083]Masaryk that others join him in exile,
[00:24:44.470]he's out there alone living out of suitcases.
[00:24:48.220]The people in Prague, the Czechs in Prague,
[00:24:50.810]send a guy to Russia, but it turns out
[00:24:53.810]he's pro-Russian too, he undermines
[00:24:56.010]Masaryk and turns against him and is turning
[00:24:59.150]the movement into a Russian movement basically.
[00:25:01.990]So Masaryk knew Russia better than most people.
[00:25:07.520]I found this, I thought this was hilarious.
[00:25:10.170]That's Russia over there of course.
[00:25:12.403]Masaryk had visited Russia many times.
[00:25:15.080]Many of its cities, down to Odessa, St. Petersburg, Moscow.
[00:25:20.520]He had three separate, long,
[00:25:23.910]personal meetings with Leo Tolstoy
[00:25:26.490]in which the two of them began arguing.
[00:25:28.460]He wrote a book, a really serious,
[00:25:31.510]acclaimed, intellectual history
[00:25:34.560]of Russia called The Spirit of Russia,
[00:25:37.090]that's the English translation.
[00:25:39.100]The German, it was published in Germany, it was
[00:25:40.790]called Russia and Europe basically in German.
[00:25:44.120]It was a very serious book, two volumes,
[00:25:46.330]but it was widely acclaimed as the first
[00:25:48.360]book that taught westerners about Russia.
[00:25:52.400]When he was working on the book he took
[00:25:53.950]the manuscript to the isle of Capri
[00:25:56.240]off the coast of Naples and met there
[00:25:58.468]with the writer Maxim Gorky, another Russian.
[00:26:02.430]He read the language, he read the literature.
[00:26:05.500]He knew that Russia would never liberate
[00:26:08.270]the Czechs and Slovaks because Russia
[00:26:10.430]had never liberated the Russians.
[00:26:13.040]So Masaryk was opened to western ideas.
[00:26:18.530]He was that rare Slovak scholar who
[00:26:21.154]discussed with his students western philosophy.
[00:26:27.222]Then he turned that theoretical preference
[00:26:30.530]for the west into a tangible American
[00:26:33.400]presence in his life when he met and married a
[00:26:36.010]young woman from Brooklyn, Charlotte Garrigue.
[00:26:42.380]So this is where he is when he goes out into exile.
[00:26:46.050]He's done a lot of work, but he really thinks
[00:26:51.070]that the independence movement has
[00:26:52.810]to be directed towards the west,
[00:26:54.860]at the west, and supported by the west.
[00:26:59.870]So the whole movement begins for him,
[00:27:02.010]it begins badly, just like the soldiers,
[00:27:03.820]so the soldiers are dying on the
[00:27:05.130]eastern front and Masaryk makes his move.
[00:27:08.490]So in December of 1914, he's 64 at
[00:27:10.810]this point, he decides to reach out
[00:27:13.110]to Allied officials and explore his idea
[00:27:15.908]that they might help to liberate his peoples.
[00:27:19.180]He sneaks across the border and meets,
[00:27:21.320]secretly he thinks, with Allied diplomats in Rome.
[00:27:26.920]The Czechs and Slovaks, he tells them, are willing
[00:27:29.120]to help the Allies defeat Austria-Hungary.
[00:27:32.230]Most Ally diplomats at that time would not
[00:27:34.290]know a Slovak if they tripped over him.
[00:27:36.790]They knew nothing about the Czechs
[00:27:38.010]and Slovaks, but he has this story to tell.
[00:27:41.840]So he makes his pitch, he gets the word out.
[00:27:44.260]Returning to Prague, he gets a message
[00:27:46.300]that his meetings had been entirely discovered
[00:27:49.506]and he can't come back to Prague
[00:27:51.897]where the police are looking for him.
[00:27:54.840]If he returns, of course he'd be punished.
[00:27:57.560]So he's living out of a suitcase, he's cut off
[00:27:59.740]from his family and his contacts in Prague,
[00:28:01.890]he's technically unemployed, has no income,
[00:28:05.060]and is a fugitive wanted for treason.
[00:28:08.530]He now faced the possibility that he
[00:28:10.050]would die in exile for an independence movement
[00:28:13.410]that most people would have seen as hopeless.
[00:28:16.590]Hopeless because, as I said, the world
[00:28:18.510]knew nothing about the Czechs and Slovaks,
[00:28:20.700]which I found surprising, but people just didn't
[00:28:23.150]know a lot about the rest of the world back then.
[00:28:26.670]Allied leaders knew virtually nothing about them.
[00:28:29.290]Even academic specialists on Austria-Hungary
[00:28:32.130]and its nationalities were very rare.
[00:28:35.030]Masaryk had the good sense to know both of them.
[00:28:38.490]The French of course long mistook
[00:28:40.050]the Gypsies in Paris for Bohemians.
[00:28:43.740]Converting a geographic error into
[00:28:45.670]a halo for the artists and drifters
[00:28:47.480]immortalized in Puccini's La Boheme.
[00:28:50.530]The Slovaks were even less well known.
[00:28:53.040]Independence, if it came, would take
[00:28:54.530]years and Masaryk was not young.
[00:28:57.530]If he were not to die in obscurity,
[00:28:59.650]lost to his family, forgotten at home,
[00:29:02.620]he would have to travel the world
[00:29:04.510]to educate the Allied countries
[00:29:06.660]about his peoples, he would have to
[00:29:08.410]secure a series of meetings with
[00:29:10.070]the leaders of the world's most
[00:29:11.810]powerful countries, and then he'd
[00:29:14.230]have to use languages that he
[00:29:15.680]knew only secondhand to convince them
[00:29:18.670]first that his peoples actually existed,
[00:29:21.720]and second that they had to draw up an
[00:29:24.280]entirely new map of Europe to liberate them.
[00:29:29.070]No big deal.
[00:29:30.810]So he threw himself to work and he
[00:29:34.500]created this espionage network of
[00:29:37.180]volunteers, some of them young, some old,
[00:29:39.240]some married, some single, who learned, they did
[00:29:42.220]the stuff you see in old fashioned movies,
[00:29:43.930]they write something down, roll it up,
[00:29:46.580]and put it inside a pen, or open up the seams
[00:29:49.370]of a coat and stuff stuff in the seams.
[00:29:52.230]So they had these worldwide intelligence agents
[00:29:55.585]all around the world because Masaryk had
[00:29:57.940]to know what's going on in Vienna,
[00:29:59.800]what's going on in Prague, what's going
[00:30:01.860]on at the front, oh and what's going on with
[00:30:04.600]the Allies, what are they thinking, what are
[00:30:05.870]they doing, so Paris, London, eventually Washington.
[00:30:08.530]He has to know all this.
[00:30:11.080]He also started to raise money, including raising
[00:30:13.440]some money in the United States,
[00:30:14.930]including no doubt here in the great
[00:30:16.610]state of Nebraska, among Czech Americans.
[00:30:21.450]And things began to break.
[00:30:23.640]So Milan Stefanik, who I admire a lot.
[00:30:27.910]This is, I saw this, I thought of
[00:30:30.394]Masaryk in exile, an old man in
[00:30:32.910]exile with not much time left.
[00:30:34.713]It's a great picture, this is Milan Stefanik.
[00:30:37.190]He's Slovak.
[00:30:39.410]As a kid he had found his way to Prague,
[00:30:41.320]was a student of Masaryk's, was fascinated
[00:30:44.090]with astronomy, so he got his PhD in
[00:30:46.310]astronomy at Charles University in Prague.
[00:30:49.220]He was wildly ambitious and energetic.
[00:30:52.560]I think he was all of five foot five.
[00:30:55.800]He goes to France and he ends up exploring
[00:30:57.990]the world as an astronomer for France.
[00:31:00.900]So the French love him for this.
[00:31:04.110]He gets a lot of medals and promotions,
[00:31:06.120]so he's now an officer in the
[00:31:07.210]French army and he's also a pilot.
[00:31:09.030]That becomes important later.
[00:31:11.090]So he had the first of several crashes
[00:31:13.210]on the eastern front, I think Serbia he crashed.
[00:31:16.850]These are the old biplanes, this is
[00:31:18.160]the first time planes are being used in war
[00:31:20.110]and the planes are not real reliable.
[00:31:22.870]So he crashes, he makes his way all the way back
[00:31:25.780]to Paris, he has major surgery of some kind.
[00:31:31.210]As far as I could tell he never got completely better.
[00:31:34.380]There was something wrong with him
[00:31:36.530]physically for the rest of the war.
[00:31:39.780]But he comes out of surgery, and Masaryk
[00:31:42.390]and Benes go to see him, and he goes I'll get
[00:31:44.980]you a meeting with the French
[00:31:45.850]Prime Minister Aristide Briand.
[00:31:48.860]And he does.
[00:31:50.250]And Aristide Briand was one of those
[00:31:51.890]rare, rare people who actually knew
[00:31:54.160]who the Czechs and the Slovaks were.
[00:31:56.140]And Briand at some point asked the
[00:31:58.126]generals why don't we invade Europe
[00:32:00.890]up through Italy or the Balkans because
[00:32:03.849]if we get to Austria-Hungary, the Czechs
[00:32:05.897]and the Slovaks might help us.
[00:32:08.320]People don't know what he's talking
[00:32:09.400]about so they just ignore him,
[00:32:10.750]but he knew who they were, so Briand
[00:32:12.760]meets with Masaryk, it's the first meeting,
[00:32:15.210]and after the meeting, better yet,
[00:32:16.790]Briand steps out into public and
[00:32:18.750]issues a communique that says the
[00:32:21.080]French have a lot of sympathy for the
[00:32:23.500]aspirations of the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:32:25.860]That's not a promise of anything,
[00:32:27.070]but that's pretty darn good.
[00:32:30.380]The big break came in early '17 though,
[00:32:32.740]1917, when Czar Nicolas II abdicated.
[00:32:40.610]Masaryk could then slip into Russia,
[00:32:42.900]so his book about Russia was banned
[00:32:46.010]by the Russians, he was not liked
[00:32:47.470]in Russia, he couldn't go to Russia
[00:32:49.280]when the Czar was still in power.
[00:32:51.240]Now he can.
[00:32:52.640]And he has another key friend, he had
[00:32:55.440]these key friends around the world
[00:32:56.850]in key places, so another historian,
[00:32:59.540]politician, joins the provisional
[00:33:02.820]government as the foreign minister.
[00:33:06.512]So he has a friend in Russia at this point.
[00:33:09.760]He gets to Russia, he gets the permission
[00:33:13.070]of the Russians to let his Czechs
[00:33:14.960]and Slovaks come out of the POW camps.
[00:33:16.940]He just happens to run into a French
[00:33:18.810]minister in St. Petersburg, he says
[00:33:22.126]I can give you 30,000 warm bodies.
[00:33:25.850]This is really important because the French
[00:33:27.197]and the British are running out of young men.
[00:33:31.160]Quite literally there's a demographic
[00:33:33.090]death struggle between young men
[00:33:35.670]born when, in the 1890s, and young men
[00:33:38.950]killed in the 19 teens, and the number of
[00:33:41.710]kills are exceeding the number of births.
[00:33:44.590]They're literally running out of young men.
[00:33:46.660]So when this guy comes along and says
[00:33:48.230]I can give you 30,000 combat veterans to the
[00:33:51.940]French, the answer's obviously oui right away.
[00:33:55.490]So the French promise money for this army that Masaryk
[00:33:58.793]says he can somehow get to the western front.
[00:34:04.250]His aids, Masaryk and his aids visit the camps
[00:34:06.810]all across Russia and deliver their audacious
[00:34:09.710]sales pitch for this wildly ambitious plan.
[00:34:17.707]And like I said, 50,000 men said yes remarkably.
[00:34:21.310]Now granted, easily 175, 200,000 said no,
[00:34:25.640]and some people have pointed out that at
[00:34:27.850]the end of the war more Czechs and Slovaks
[00:34:30.270]died fighting for Austria-Hungary than
[00:34:33.160]joined this Legion, but the fact is that
[00:34:35.230]these Legionnaires were the co-founders of
[00:34:37.280]a new country that destroyed Austria-Hungary.
[00:34:40.299]They made their choice and they
[00:34:41.999]apparently made the right choice.
[00:34:44.660]The men had no nation they could call home,
[00:34:47.010]they had no recognized or experienced
[00:34:48.700]military leaders, they had no evident means
[00:34:50.830]of support, they had few supplies,
[00:34:52.940]ad hoc organization, uncertain legal status,
[00:34:55.760]questionable loyalties, and at various moments
[00:34:58.410]in the battles to come, too few weapons.
[00:35:02.290]And the last piece of the puzzle falls into
[00:35:04.640]place in October of 1917 when the Bolsheviks
[00:35:07.110]seize power and withdraw Russia from the war.
[00:35:10.110]But by now Masaryk has his 50,000,
[00:35:13.240]he just needs to get them out of Russia.
[00:35:15.140]They're all gathered in the Ukraine,
[00:35:17.160]what we call Ukraine today which was
[00:35:18.560]then part of Russia, but not for long.
[00:35:23.070]And they're gonna go by train from Ukraine
[00:35:25.660]to Vladivostok which is well over 5,000 miles.
[00:35:29.020]They assemble 72 trains, and each train
[00:35:31.960]is 10 to 20 cars, and they manage to
[00:35:35.702]gather a lot of material, so when the
[00:35:37.313]Russian army disintegrates all around them,
[00:35:39.950]it just melts away, the men just leave
[00:35:41.730]their post, they're able to grab a lot of weapons.
[00:35:44.970]When they start out of Ukraine they
[00:35:46.770]actually have an airplane or two.
[00:35:48.410]They have vehicles in these trains,
[00:35:50.120]they have artillery, massive quantities
[00:35:53.578]of weapons, they are really well armed.
[00:35:56.790]The Russian army's gone basically, just disappeared.
[00:36:00.420]So it looks good, it looks good.
[00:36:02.800]The minute the trains start to enter
[00:36:04.580]Russian territory, the red army units and the
[00:36:08.250]Bolsheviks start demanding these weapons back.
[00:36:11.610]And they also want the locomotives,
[00:36:13.270]locomotives are falling scare, becoming scarce.
[00:36:16.170]They want the locomotives and they want
[00:36:17.610]the weapons, and of course if you lose
[00:36:19.370]those you pretty much have lost everything.
[00:36:25.210]But the Bolshevik regime, the new regime,
[00:36:27.060]the Soviet regime that had moved the
[00:36:29.840]government to Moscow, they gave permission
[00:36:32.460]for the Legion to cross Russia,
[00:36:33.960]it's important to know that.
[00:36:35.430]Personally Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
[00:36:37.890]they were all in the room, they said yes.
[00:36:40.060]They mostly wanted the Legionnaires
[00:36:41.290]to get the heck out of their country,
[00:36:42.720]they saw them as wildly dangerous perhaps,
[00:36:46.360]they weren't threatening anyone,
[00:36:48.400]but they wanted this foreign army off their
[00:36:49.700]soil, so they got permission to do this.
[00:36:52.070]That's important to know because
[00:36:54.652]10 minutes later they're being told they
[00:36:57.040]can't leave and they can't keep their weapons.
[00:36:59.380]So they started off on this journey in March
[00:37:03.190]of 1918, and it didn't take long, by April
[00:37:07.084]the first trains are arriving in Vladivostok.
[00:37:10.620]Which sounds good, but the problem is
[00:37:12.870]the last trains are around Penza,
[00:37:15.501]which is not too far over the Ukraine border.
[00:37:18.560]Russia's in total chaos, so it's
[00:37:20.510]very hard to move trains, they move
[00:37:22.310]very slowly, and there's a lot
[00:37:23.980]of things that are going wrong.
[00:37:26.620]So they're stretched out well over let's
[00:37:29.260]say 5,000 miles, and they're in groups.
[00:37:33.060]There might be 5,000 here, 8,000 here, 15,000 here,
[00:37:36.600]and inbetween them are these red army
[00:37:38.810]factions, they're surrounded by the red army.
[00:37:43.360]The key event takes place, as I
[00:37:44.860]said earlier, on May 14th, 1918.
[00:37:48.840]It had all the dignity of a barroom brawl.
[00:37:51.970]A brief but furious altercation
[00:37:53.940]leaves two men lying dead on the
[00:37:56.430]train platform at the sleepy railroad station
[00:37:58.990]outside the frontier town of Chelyabinsk.
[00:38:03.320]Chelyabinsk, like every city at that time,
[00:38:04.760]was governed in effect by a committee,
[00:38:08.460]which was called a Soviet, and so at the
[00:38:13.350]station a still loyal Hungarian soldier is in
[00:38:17.320]a train full of Austro-Hungarian soldiers,
[00:38:19.920]and they're going west back home.
[00:38:22.100]Back to the front, back to the war,
[00:38:23.480]back to Austria-Hungary, and of course
[00:38:25.560]the train going in the other direction
[00:38:27.540]strikes them as odd because these guys
[00:38:29.190]also have tattered, some of them have
[00:38:31.160]tattered Austro-Hungarian uniforms on,
[00:38:33.150]but they're going in the wrong direction,
[00:38:35.670]they're going to the Pacific Ocean,
[00:38:37.100]they're going, where are they going?
[00:38:38.930]The men stop at the station in these two trains,
[00:38:42.150]they stop, they get out, they share food,
[00:38:43.730]they talk, it was all pretty peaceful.
[00:38:46.640]The Hungarians knew what the Czechs and Slovaks were doing.
[00:38:49.520]Mostly they would disapprove of it.
[00:38:51.840]Many of them might have been
[00:38:53.490]angry, but nothing had happened.
[00:38:55.910]But when the Hungarian train takes off,
[00:38:58.410]starts leaving the station, a big chunk
[00:39:00.560]of metal comes through one of the windows.
[00:39:02.680]It hits one of the Czechs in the head
[00:39:04.130]apparently and by all accounts kills him.
[00:39:07.510]The Czechs and Slovaks run after this train,
[00:39:10.675]fistfights break out, a lot of yelling
[00:39:14.080]and cursing, they demand to know who
[00:39:16.300]threw the metal, and eventually
[00:39:18.040]the Hungarians point to a guy.
[00:39:21.100]The Czech soldiers leaped on him and killed him.
[00:39:24.460]Beat him to death and shot him right away.
[00:39:28.070]Officers tried to intervene, they did intervene,
[00:39:30.240]but they couldn't stop it before this guy was dead.
[00:39:35.030]The local Soviet is eight or 10 or 12 people
[00:39:39.320]who have been elected to be the governors
[00:39:42.270]of the city, they don't have any experience.
[00:39:44.880]They wanna be good little Bolsheviks,
[00:39:46.800]but communications to Moscow is very,
[00:39:49.270]it takes forever, nobody knows what's going on.
[00:39:53.930]What they decide to do is they take everybody
[00:39:57.047]to the city, and take them all in for
[00:40:00.370]questioning, but they let the Hungarians go.
[00:40:03.270]And the Hungarian train takes off.
[00:40:05.850]The Czechs, there's maybe 10 of them, are not let go.
[00:40:09.730]So at the station where the Czechs are
[00:40:11.830]headquartered, about two and a half
[00:40:13.370]miles from the city, at the station
[00:40:16.100]the commander sends two or three more
[00:40:17.930]Czechs in the town to find out what's going on.
[00:40:20.780]They get arrested.
[00:40:22.030]They don't come back, nothing happens,
[00:40:23.410]so he sends in again two or three
[00:40:25.360]more people, find out what's going on.
[00:40:27.340]They get arrested.
[00:40:28.540]Apparently he knows now, a few days
[00:40:30.780]later, that this is what's happening.
[00:40:32.420]So he organizes 3,000 men, they march
[00:40:35.190]into Chelyabinsk with the weapons they had,
[00:40:38.467]and by the way they had given up a lot
[00:40:41.160]of weapons by now to the Bolsheviks,
[00:40:42.760]they thought that would get them out of there.
[00:40:44.940]So they didn't have any weapons now.
[00:40:46.690]They go into town, they manage to
[00:40:48.330]free their comrades, they do it at gun point.
[00:40:51.480]They don't kill anybody or actually
[00:40:53.190]shoot anybody because they didn't want to,
[00:40:55.683]they didn't wanna go to war with Russia.
[00:40:57.950]Two or three of their men were killed,
[00:40:59.924]but they get the guys out, they do
[00:41:01.910]take a bunch of weapons from the town's armory,
[00:41:04.430]and they tell the commissar and the Soviet
[00:41:07.252]we're not at war with Russia, we're not
[00:41:09.260]gonna try to take over your town,
[00:41:11.110]we just want one of our men out,
[00:41:12.540]we're leaving, we're going, we're leaving.
[00:41:16.700]The commissar was pretty much okay with that,
[00:41:18.710]he didn't know what else to do, but he
[00:41:20.680]did send a report to Moscow, and when
[00:41:22.840]Trotsky hears about this, I guess he
[00:41:24.500]was having a bad day, he loses his cool.
[00:41:29.610]I guess from the perspective of Moscow
[00:41:31.470]he sees these Legionnaires taking over his
[00:41:33.580]country or something, he loses his cool.
[00:41:37.260]One of the things he forgets is that
[00:41:39.130]the Legionnaires are all along the
[00:41:40.460]Trans-Siberian and the only telegraph line
[00:41:43.440]across Siberia is next to the Trans-Siberian.
[00:41:47.630]It's right there.
[00:41:48.463]The telegraph operators are in the train stations.
[00:41:50.750]That's how it is.
[00:41:52.600]That's all there is in Siberia at this point,
[00:41:53.970]there's train tracks and a telegraph
[00:41:55.930]line and that's civilization.
[00:41:57.870]So the Czechs, along at various station stops,
[00:42:00.480]had made friends with the telegraph operators,
[00:42:02.460]and so Trotsky starts issuing these really
[00:42:06.190]violent orders, and of course the Czechs
[00:42:08.150]are reading them, so they get a heads up.
[00:42:13.510]He issued many telegrams and orders,
[00:42:15.220]but basically it was in effect, if you see a
[00:42:17.260]Czech with a weapon shoot him dead on sight.
[00:42:20.400]And if you see a Czech without a weapon,
[00:42:22.643]take them prisoner and we'll put them in camps.
[00:42:25.680]So these men, they're gonna either die or go to camps,
[00:42:28.820]and remember they had been in the camps before.
[00:42:32.790]So they break out into a revolt in late May.
[00:42:39.820]In short order, they attack every
[00:42:42.844]city along the entire Trans-Siberia,
[00:42:45.370]so imagine you're here in one city, but you're
[00:42:48.450]surrounded by red army people, and then
[00:42:50.490]your comrades are down to this city,
[00:42:52.590]and others are over here, so when the revolt
[00:42:55.030]breaks out, the Czechs and Slovaks
[00:42:57.057]advance and race in both directions.
[00:43:01.420]They all wanna link up.
[00:43:02.760]The only unit that didn't have to go
[00:43:04.080]two directions was the one way out in Penza.
[00:43:06.970]They only wanted to go, they went one direction.
[00:43:09.530]So there's a lot of furious
[00:43:10.680]fighting over the summer of 1918.
[00:43:15.320]By the way, this is Masaryk there
[00:43:16.880]recruiting the men for the Legion.
[00:43:20.100]That's him with the X on his jacket.
[00:43:22.730]In Kiev.
[00:43:24.780]This is the Trans-Siberian.
[00:43:26.660]You see Chelyabinsk, you see Samara.
[00:43:29.700]Penza is southwest of Samara.
[00:43:32.870]So the men are southwest of Samara
[00:43:35.360]all the way across to Vladivostok
[00:43:37.750]where the fighting breaks out.
[00:43:41.362]And these are the cities, the major cities
[00:43:43.960]along Trans-Siberia and the dates
[00:43:45.700]they fell to the Czechoslovak Legion.
[00:43:48.630]So the fighting broke out on May 25th
[00:43:50.390]and they took Novosibirsk the next day.
[00:43:53.890]They officially took Chelyabinsk two days later,
[00:43:57.483]they had to go back into town.
[00:43:59.682]There was a lot of fighting, there was one battle
[00:44:01.610]where the Czechs had no weapons, they had none.
[00:44:05.100]At one point they were down to one rifle
[00:44:07.040]I think for every 10 men, and that
[00:44:09.561]wasn't enough, so there was one battle
[00:44:11.820]actually where the Czechs and Slovaks
[00:44:13.910]filled their hands and their pockets with rocks.
[00:44:18.400]I guess they thought they had nothing
[00:44:19.360]to lose, they attacked the Bolsheviks
[00:44:21.190]with rocks and took their weapons.
[00:44:24.970]That's how it went.
[00:44:26.750]Although with time they start to
[00:44:29.453]gather weapons from these battles.
[00:44:32.230]So they're getting armed again.
[00:44:33.970]It goes until about early September
[00:44:36.300]when they take Khabarovsk on September 5th.
[00:44:41.500]And during this fighting, about 15,000
[00:44:44.720]more Czechs and Slovaks joined the Legion,
[00:44:46.804]bringing it up to about 65,000.
[00:44:53.420]So they only wanna get out of Russia,
[00:44:54.873]they're doing this to defend themselves,
[00:44:56.920]they think if they clear the line then
[00:44:58.980]finally they can just move those trains
[00:45:00.890]again and just resume their journey.
[00:45:03.300]But during the fighting there
[00:45:04.133]were some untended consequences.
[00:45:07.090]When the Legion advances on the city where
[00:45:10.660]the Romanov family was secretly held in July
[00:45:14.329]of 1918, they don't know the Romanovs are there.
[00:45:18.850]Nobody knows where the Romanovs are.
[00:45:20.750]The people in the city, Yekaterinburg,
[00:45:24.720]suspect that they're in this house that's
[00:45:27.423]been surrounded by a stockade fence and
[00:45:29.120]there's like 300 guards or something,
[00:45:30.776]so people suspect that they know who's
[00:45:32.020]in there, and the guards drink at night
[00:45:33.860]and talk too much, and so the people
[00:45:36.360]in the city or town know that the Romanovs
[00:45:38.560]are in this house, but the world does not know.
[00:45:42.550]The Legion advances on the city and
[00:45:45.320]Lenin decides that they're not gonna
[00:45:47.100]fall into anybody's hands, and so he
[00:45:49.920]issues a direct order to the locals to
[00:45:53.396]execute both the Czar and his entire family.
[00:45:58.110]They denied this for decades, but it's
[00:46:01.220]been confirmed since the Soviet Union collapsed.
[00:46:05.570]It was an unintended consequence, after the war,
[00:46:08.570]after this is over, Masaryk still has
[00:46:11.230]a tendency to get angry that people
[00:46:13.532]thought it was their fault, and I
[00:46:16.328]don't think it's his fault, but there's
[00:46:19.200]things in his memoirs about he's
[00:46:20.650]kinda grumpy about this topic because
[00:46:22.220]he doesn't wanna be blamed for the
[00:46:23.920]murder of the Czar and his family.
[00:46:28.560]And of course this rebellion also
[00:46:30.870]gives Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, the direct impetus
[00:46:34.450]to send US troops into Russia for the first time.
[00:46:37.778]And the last time, we can hope.
[00:46:40.670]US troops were sent into Siberia
[00:46:42.310]in the Allied intervention explicitly
[00:46:45.010]to aid the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:46:47.500]That's not something you'd learn if you
[00:46:48.920]read a superficial history of that episode.
[00:46:53.700]And this becomes absolutely critical and
[00:46:55.960]it becomes the last thing that has to
[00:46:58.560]happen to get the Czechs and Slovaks,
[00:47:00.840]to get their independence, but first
[00:47:02.480]I wanted to say a few worlds about
[00:47:03.730]the global political campaign that
[00:47:05.170]was waged for independence because
[00:47:07.150]the two things come together, the fighting
[00:47:09.180]in Siberia and the politics comes together,
[00:47:11.580]and it comes together inside the White House.
[00:47:14.030]So Masaryk's single most important
[00:47:15.890]supporter was this man, Charles Crane.
[00:47:19.240]He loved Russian culture, Slavic music,
[00:47:21.820]Orthodox church rituals, he was actually
[00:47:24.970]invited as an American to the coronation
[00:47:27.231]of Czar Nicholas II in 1896, I can't
[00:47:30.666]imagine there were many other Americans invited.
[00:47:34.690]And this is 1896, and on the return journey home
[00:47:38.280]is when he meets Masaryk, he stops in Prague,
[00:47:40.740]and he's heard about this great Slavic professor
[00:47:43.070]and writer, and so he wants to meet him.
[00:47:45.700]The two hit it off right away.
[00:47:48.440]Crane becomes a big fan of Masaryk.
[00:47:50.510]He actually pays for Masaryk to come
[00:47:52.670]to America twice for speaking tours.
[00:47:56.670]And Masaryk spoke everywhere, on the
[00:47:58.380]east coast, big cities, small towns.
[00:48:00.690]He probably was in Nebraska, I know
[00:48:02.760]he was in Iowa, so twice he comes to
[00:48:05.100]America, and newspapers interview him.
[00:48:07.430]So Czech-Americans and Slovak-Americans
[00:48:09.753]figure out who this guy is and he looks like
[00:48:12.189]their George Washington, there's nobody
[00:48:14.220]else like him doing this kind of work.
[00:48:18.260]And of course as I said earlier Crane was a big
[00:48:20.130]supporter of Woodrow Wilson's campaigns for President.
[00:48:23.760]Another important supporter was this guy, this is
[00:48:26.450]Emanuel Voska, and I wish I had a better photo.
[00:48:29.160]This is the guy who starts the espionage
[00:48:31.990]network for, he does it for Masaryk,
[00:48:34.838]but he ends up getting such great intel
[00:48:36.784]that the British want it, and then they
[00:48:38.820]start funneling this intel to the British,
[00:48:40.705]and then to the American government as well,
[00:48:43.480]and it turns out that he's uncovering plots
[00:48:46.410]and other things that the British
[00:48:48.470]and the Americans don't know about.
[00:48:52.320]I can't get into it today, but it actually,
[00:48:55.500]Voska's work might have been a contributing
[00:48:57.820]factor to the Americans getting into the war
[00:49:00.450]because he's the one who uncovers a lot
[00:49:01.960]of this sabotage, you might have heard
[00:49:04.320]about the Germans in this country and the
[00:49:06.550]Austrians are doing sabotage at defense plants
[00:49:09.180]and ships and all that, and he uncovers this
[00:49:11.900]because guess what, he finds Czechs and Slovaks
[00:49:14.930]on these ships, or he finds them in these
[00:49:16.440]factories, and he gets a relationship with them.
[00:49:18.930]He also turns chauffeurs and maids at the
[00:49:23.328]Austro-Hungarian embassy into his spies.
[00:49:26.930]He does amazing work.
[00:49:29.680]He was actually ended up as a US
[00:49:31.090]Army captain because of his work.
[00:49:34.140]Then Masaryk arrives in the US in May
[00:49:37.210]of 1918, this is two pictures from Chicago.
[00:49:42.020]They say that 100,000 people met him in Chicago.
[00:49:46.470]That looks credible by this picture here.
[00:49:49.180]That's him in the top photo, that's him
[00:49:51.440]at the center right leaning a little
[00:49:53.520]bit, and of course at the bottom
[00:49:55.240]he's on the right with prominent
[00:49:57.100]Czech-Americans, prominent Slovak-Americans.
[00:50:02.930]And so in America, the Czech and Slovak
[00:50:05.340]independence movement, which in Europe
[00:50:07.540]is entirely about diplomacy, meetings,
[00:50:10.770]money, propaganda, communiques, but it's all,
[00:50:14.710]you can miss it, you can live in France
[00:50:15.980]your whole life and miss this whole campaign.
[00:50:17.990]In America it becomes a political campaign,
[00:50:20.590]it becomes this wildly democratic,
[00:50:22.920]enthusiastic thing because of the
[00:50:25.910]many Czechs and Slovaks who live here.
[00:50:30.190]So Masaryk comes to America primarily
[00:50:34.590]to meet with Wilson, he's met top people
[00:50:37.656]in London, top people in Paris.
[00:50:41.210]Now he needs to get the Americans.
[00:50:42.800]Because America declared war in April 1917,
[00:50:46.267]we're kinda late to the actual war, it takes
[00:50:49.060]a while to build the army that we didn't have.
[00:50:53.010]But anyway, Masaryk's now gonna have a seat
[00:50:55.040]at the table at the end of the war, so he
[00:50:56.800]needs to get to Wilson because he wants
[00:50:58.940]there to be an independent Czechoslovak country.
[00:51:06.460]But Masaryk had two bad habits when it came to the Slovaks.
[00:51:12.840]So he's touring the country waiting for
[00:51:14.720]a meeting with Wilson, he's not
[00:51:15.810]getting that meeting right away.
[00:51:18.670]Things are actually not looking
[00:51:19.840]good for his meeting with Wilson at all.
[00:51:22.100]So he tours the country and wants to
[00:51:23.690]talk to his Czechs and Slovaks and
[00:51:25.080]get them excited, but he had two
[00:51:26.870]bad habits when it came to the Slovaks.
[00:51:29.820]His first habit was to claim, at this point he
[00:51:32.610]claims that Czechs and Slovaks are the same people.
[00:51:35.640]That Slovaks quote "Belong to our nationality."
[00:51:39.830]And that quote "The Slovaks are Bohemians."
[00:51:43.650]It's just not true.
[00:51:45.520]They are distinct people and he knew it.
[00:51:49.020]His other habit was, this was kinda weird because
[00:51:51.920]he's in America and keep in mind there are probably
[00:51:54.696]more Slovak-Americans than Czech-Americans.
[00:51:59.620]It's not like they're a small group you can forget.
[00:52:01.800]There are at least as many Slovaks as Czechs,
[00:52:04.260]maybe more, but he still had this other
[00:52:06.440]habit of failing to mention the
[00:52:08.810]Slovaks at all in his speeches.
[00:52:11.090]He would talk about the Czechs, the Czechs,
[00:52:13.092]and half the audience is Slovak.
[00:52:16.050]So he does this at a big public meeting somewhere
[00:52:20.989]and the Slovaks in the audience get
[00:52:23.347]really angry and they demand to see him
[00:52:26.477]and they put in front of him something that
[00:52:28.930]came to be known as the Pittsburgh Agreement.
[00:52:31.400]It was based on something known as the
[00:52:33.380]Cleveland Agreement, but basically the
[00:52:34.967]Czechs and the Slovaks in America had
[00:52:36.930]come together and decided yes, we can be we,
[00:52:40.999]our compatriots back home can be in their
[00:52:43.430]own country, but the Slovaks want autonomy.
[00:52:47.340]The Cleveland Agreement, it's brief, but it's clear.
[00:52:51.130]The Slovak, what they had in mind, 'cause they're
[00:52:53.190]Americans, so what they have in
[00:52:54.280]mind is Nebraska and Wisconsin.
[00:52:57.550]Or California and New York.
[00:53:00.110]Czechs and Slovaks.
[00:53:01.920]To an American that's so simple and
[00:53:03.470]so obvious, it's not complicated.
[00:53:05.980]Masaryk either didn't appreciate it or didn't
[00:53:07.700]want to, but he signs the agreement anyway.
[00:53:13.160]He's handed this agreement in Pittsburgh
[00:53:14.560]on May 30th, 1918, he's in the meeting.
[00:53:16.910]He's got no choice, he signs the agreement.
[00:53:19.630]He signed it actually a second time in
[00:53:21.300]November before he left his country to
[00:53:23.090]go back home and become president.
[00:53:24.910]He signed it twice, and as we all know,
[00:53:28.129]those promises for autonomy were never met.
[00:53:34.970]I can talk about that later if you like.
[00:53:37.060]But the Russian revolution, for one thing,
[00:53:39.350]America's declaration of war for another,
[00:53:41.830]and growing Allied support for the
[00:53:43.410]Czechs and the Slovaks, encouraged even
[00:53:45.920]the Slovaks to think this is winning,
[00:53:47.710]we're winning, we're finally gonna get what we want.
[00:53:49.940]So if things would be going badly they
[00:53:53.220]might have had a worse time with Masaryk,
[00:53:55.330]but they're winning basically, so they put it aside.
[00:53:58.330]After the war we can fix this.
[00:54:03.690]And the Czechs and the Slovaks are
[00:54:05.540]just doing all kinds of things, at one
[00:54:06.880]point so many telegrams went to the
[00:54:09.060]White House from Czechs and Slovaks
[00:54:10.770]that the Associated Press filed a story
[00:54:12.810]about it, they're testifying before
[00:54:14.530]Congress, they're having rallies and
[00:54:16.170]they're raising a lot of money.
[00:54:17.890]Czechs and Slovaks in this country
[00:54:19.320]raised at least a million dollars
[00:54:21.210]for the cause if not two million.
[00:54:24.950]So finally Masaryk gets to Washington,
[00:54:29.059]when he arrives at Union Station,
[00:54:31.210]27 members of the House and Senate
[00:54:33.156]walk to the station in the summer in DC
[00:54:36.360]to greet his train which is pretty amazing.
[00:54:40.320]So everything looks good.
[00:54:44.660]But the problem was this.
[00:54:47.780]Masaryk had already given interviews
[00:54:50.036]to newspapers, he couldn't take them back,
[00:54:52.916]where he wanted his Legionnaires out of Russia
[00:54:56.100]which is always what he wanted, but he also
[00:54:58.120]didn't want any other intervention in Russia.
[00:55:00.960]If there was gonna be an intervention in Russia
[00:55:02.490]he figured they would make the Czechs and
[00:55:03.810]the Slovaks fight, he didn't want that,
[00:55:06.160]so he said he's against intervention of Russia.
[00:55:08.440]Actually there was many good reasons
[00:55:09.730]not to intervene in Russia because as we
[00:55:11.690]all know it was tried and it failed miserably.
[00:55:15.150]But Wilson is under enormous moral pressure
[00:55:18.820]from the French and the British.
[00:55:20.450]Keep in mind now we're in the summer of 1918
[00:55:23.640]and I don't know how many hundreds of
[00:55:25.050]thousands or millions of British and
[00:55:26.500]French have died, Paris was evacuated
[00:55:28.820]twice, and what have we got right?
[00:55:33.000]We didn't have much of an army in 1917,
[00:55:34.960]it was pathetic, and we had to build
[00:55:37.344]the army and create it, then we have to
[00:55:38.177]get it to Europe, it's an enormous
[00:55:40.590]enterprise and it's taking a while.
[00:55:42.700]So Wilson wants to do something to answer
[00:55:45.770]these pleas, he wants to appease
[00:55:47.712]the British and the French at least.
[00:55:51.030]So he sits down and figures out
[00:55:53.500]that this is what he'll do, and of
[00:55:54.510]course he's hearing about the Czechs
[00:55:55.343]and the Slovaks and they want independence.
[00:55:57.860]So what he decides to do, he decides
[00:55:59.670]to send US troops to Russia.
[00:56:02.370]And what he says though is that
[00:56:03.977]they're not going there to intervene.
[00:56:06.570]They're going there to rescue the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:56:09.750]He makes this decision in July when the
[00:56:12.780]Czechs and the Slovaks were still fighting.
[00:56:15.960]As it turns out, our US troops cannot
[00:56:18.380]get there altogether with their general,
[00:56:20.720]William Graves, until September 1st.
[00:56:23.350]That's when the general's there,
[00:56:24.470]the troops are there and they're all ready to go.
[00:56:27.393]Which is ironic because September 1st, 1918
[00:56:29.240]was the day that somewhere in the middle
[00:56:31.460]of Siberia when the last Czech and the
[00:56:33.150]last Slovak actually joined up and
[00:56:35.420]they controlled the whole railway,
[00:56:37.190]all 5,000 miles, they didn't need to be rescued.
[00:56:41.270]When our troops get to Siberia
[00:56:42.755]there's nothing for them to do.
[00:56:46.510]The General, Graves, was under strict
[00:56:48.410]orders to do nothing other than
[00:56:49.720]rescue the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:56:51.500]And he arrives and find that he does
[00:56:53.080]not need to do that, and so he and
[00:56:55.070]the troops more or less sit in Siberia
[00:56:56.964]doing a whole lot of nothing for a few years.
[00:57:03.900]So Masaryk though is making little headway in Washington.
[00:57:07.440]He has a meeting with Lansing, the Secretary of State,
[00:57:09.820]Lansing says we need intervention in Russia,
[00:57:12.070]Masaryk says no, he finally has a meeting with Wilson,
[00:57:14.770]same uncomfortable, inconclusive discussion, no.
[00:57:18.510]But something else is happening.
[00:57:20.790]American newspapermen and other newspaper people
[00:57:23.010]are in Siberia and they're writing about
[00:57:24.680]the Legion, so even though that was a
[00:57:26.680]difficult thing to do a hundred years ago
[00:57:28.010]there were actual correspondence in Siberia
[00:57:30.047]filing these stories, and the exploits of
[00:57:32.610]the Legion is filling American newspapers.
[00:57:35.530]And Americans, not just Czech-Americans
[00:57:38.170]or Slovak-Americans, but all Americans
[00:57:39.670]are amazed by this story like I was.
[00:57:43.800]It's creating a sensation in this country
[00:57:47.220]about wow, who are these people,
[00:57:48.820]what are they doing, and aren't
[00:57:50.240]they helping our cause and all this.
[00:57:53.082]Editorial support turns out for Czechoslovak
[00:57:56.250]independence and this affects of course Wilson.
[00:58:01.540]But then there was one more thing about all this.
[00:58:03.600]It's very publicized, it's very popular,
[00:58:06.030]the Legion, and now Wilson has put his
[00:58:09.920]foot in it because he now has sent
[00:58:12.140]US troops to Russia, and what he said is that
[00:58:16.470]they're there to rescue the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[00:58:19.320]It doesn't matter almost now that
[00:58:21.630]they don't need to be rescued,
[00:58:23.410]because now Wilson has, it's unclear
[00:58:26.958]whether he realizes at the time,
[00:58:28.740]but he's actually committed himself
[00:58:30.540]now to independence for the Czechs
[00:58:32.527]and the Slovaks, and the reason is,
[00:58:35.141]and I've never seen anybody actually
[00:58:36.050]put this on paper, but he couldn't
[00:58:38.890]easily rescue the Czechs and the
[00:58:41.610]Slovaks and use US troops to do that.
[00:58:45.030]And then when he was done rescuing them,
[00:58:47.300]turn them back over to Austria-Hungary.
[00:58:51.006]They wouldn't have any other place to go.
[00:58:54.450]So he's really crossed the line here.
[00:58:58.490]He already was thinking about supporting independence
[00:59:01.730]for all the nationalities in Austria-Hungary.
[00:59:04.690]He says he hadn't committed to that position yet,
[00:59:06.870]but by putting our troops in, these are
[00:59:11.070]the US troops, the calvary in Vladivostok,
[00:59:13.421]by doing this he's really committed himself.
[00:59:16.400]'Cause in many countries a Vladimir Putin
[00:59:18.370]could get away with this, but an American
[00:59:20.220]President can't use US troops to rescue
[00:59:23.130]people and then throw them into jail
[00:59:24.409]and have them hung or executed.
[00:59:26.790]It's not gonna happen.
[00:59:28.000]So the Legion really does, in many ways,
[00:59:32.824]help the independence movement because
[00:59:36.500]the publicity behind it, even though
[00:59:37.333]they're kinda stuck there fighting the
[00:59:39.360]wrong people, the publicity around it
[00:59:41.640]drew attention to the independence movement
[00:59:43.720]and now Masaryk is knocking on the
[00:59:45.710]White House door, and so finally Wilson comes
[00:59:49.070]around and decides that he would support
[00:59:52.082]Czech and Slovak independence, and at the same
[00:59:56.205]time the British and the French do it as well.
[01:00:01.010]And the declaration of independence
[01:00:03.710]is drafted by Masaryk in Washington DC,
[01:00:06.994]and it all happens as you know it did happen,
[01:00:10.960]but I wanted to show you some pictures
[01:00:12.930]of the Legionnaires themselves.
[01:00:14.840]So this is them with a collection of weapons
[01:00:18.210]that they had captured no doubt from Russians.
[01:00:21.130]I don't know when it was, I don't
[01:00:22.080]know if it was early on from the
[01:00:24.460]Russian imperial army or from the Bolsheviks,
[01:00:27.050]but they're pretty proud of this collection.
[01:00:30.620]This is the guys posing in front of a train.
[01:00:33.060]If you notice they have the Russian hats on.
[01:00:35.810]This was pretty early on when there was
[01:00:38.120]a lot of Russian uniforms dropped on
[01:00:39.720]the road, just dropped behind, and they
[01:00:41.520]were I guess free, but also some of these
[01:00:44.320]guys had actually served in the Russian army.
[01:00:46.540]I like the kid in the front and center,
[01:00:48.100]the really, this kid down here.
[01:00:50.250]He looks like he's 14.
[01:00:53.440]It's either scary or cute, I'm not sure which.
[01:00:56.710]This is them marching, you can see how
[01:00:58.170]long this column is, if you look off to the
[01:00:59.940]upper right, I mean it's a huge column of men.
[01:01:03.540]This is them on the march.
[01:01:05.760]These are some of the war dead after one of their battles.
[01:01:08.710]This is some of the men who survived, the wounded.
[01:01:13.180]And that's all I got.
[01:01:16.512]Thank you.
[01:01:17.565](applause)
[01:01:24.189]We good on time?
[01:01:30.960]Don't be shy.
[01:01:32.500]Yes sir.
[01:01:36.450]Can you talk a little bit about how
[01:01:38.377]they made the transition actually into Czechoslovakia?
[01:01:41.015]Yeah, it was sorta the downside of the whole story.
[01:01:46.770]So there really was a shortage of ships worldwide.
[01:01:51.520]As a result of the war, as a result of
[01:01:53.200]German submarines sinking any ship
[01:01:55.880]that moved across the Atlantic.
[01:01:57.450]I sometimes think that the Jolly Green Giant
[01:01:59.360]could run across the Atlantic without getting
[01:02:02.090]his feet wet by hitting the hulls of ships,
[01:02:04.740]I mean there's at least hundreds of
[01:02:07.010]ships at the bottom of the Atlantic.
[01:02:09.030]So there's a worldwide shortage of ships.
[01:02:13.150]The Czechs and Slovaks were skeptical about that.
[01:02:16.420]Long story short, they were stuck in
[01:02:18.610]Siberia for up until about 1920.
[01:02:24.050]Some of them were duped into fighting
[01:02:26.160]the Bolsheviks in remote places for no apparent
[01:02:28.490]purpose, they were bitter about that.
[01:02:30.940]They started to mutiny.
[01:02:34.640]Stefanik was sent to Siberia at one point
[01:02:36.540]and he was visibly sick and he's sent there
[01:02:39.000]to tell the men in effect A, I'm sorry, B, it's not
[01:02:42.380]gonna change, and C, you just have to hang in there.
[01:02:45.950]One officer at least, one Legionnaire officer,
[01:02:48.572]ordered his men into battle and the men
[01:02:51.050]refused and he went to his cabin and shot himself.
[01:02:55.630]It was a bitter, bitter period.
[01:02:57.600]Part of the problem, there was many problems,
[01:02:59.610]but part of the problem is that Versailles
[01:03:02.600]starts to get organized and now the leaders
[01:03:04.650]of the free world had to sit there and
[01:03:06.160]figure out who all these people are
[01:03:07.770]around the world who want their own country,
[01:03:09.160]there's a lot of work to be done.
[01:03:11.160]So they're really really busy.
[01:03:13.340]There are no ships, there really aren't.
[01:03:16.980]Then Wilson has his stroke which doesn't help.
[01:03:20.560]He's completely out of the picture for months if not longer.
[01:03:27.140]So basically the men ended up there,
[01:03:28.970]most of them, a lot of them, the last ship
[01:03:31.010]taking the last Legionnaires was 1920.
[01:03:35.962]So these various ships, at one point the
[01:03:39.220]Legionnaires actually got a ship to go
[01:03:41.430]to Tokyo where they bought a used ship,
[01:03:43.540]they named it the Leegee, they took it back
[01:03:46.460]across to Vladivostok, and the first
[01:03:49.480]ship that went out was owned by them.
[01:03:52.130]But then they were out of money and that was it.
[01:03:55.140]They eventually made it all the way over,
[01:03:56.870]so these ships took all kinds of
[01:03:59.180]journeys back, so some went south
[01:04:01.250]around Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean,
[01:04:04.010]Suez Canal, Mediterranean, Triste maybe
[01:04:07.990]or some other port, other ships went
[01:04:10.184]the other way across the Pacific.
[01:04:12.700]Panama Canal, some went to San Diego
[01:04:15.470]and took a railroad, some went to
[01:04:17.250]Vancouver, Canada, the railroad,
[01:04:19.753]across new ship in the Atlantic,
[01:04:22.200]across Potsdam, I mean all these
[01:04:24.640]journeys took place, and some of the stories
[01:04:26.560]I have is about these wild journeys home.
[01:04:29.620]The last ship was Slovaks, some people
[01:04:33.020]would find that ironic, the last guys
[01:04:35.630]out are Slovak, and that ship was met
[01:04:37.800]in Potsdam by a minor diplomat in Potsdam,
[01:04:42.640]1920, and that minor diplomat later on
[01:04:46.237]became Vaclav Havel's grandfather.
[01:04:50.890]It was his grandfather.
[01:04:53.490]So yeah, it was tough and it was bitter.
[01:04:55.930]Some of the stories you'll read from
[01:04:57.080]the Legionnaires is full of bitterness,
[01:04:59.350]I think justifiably so, about that period.
[01:05:02.870]Keep in mind they're still fighting
[01:05:04.250]and doing something in Siberia,
[01:05:05.700]they're not sure what it is, but they're
[01:05:06.880]cold, they're hungry, and sometimes they're
[01:05:08.277]fighting, and back home everyone celebrated.
[01:05:11.650]They have their country.
[01:05:13.240]So they would ask why am I in Russia.
[01:05:16.190]There wasn't a good answer.
[01:05:20.830]Yes.
[01:05:22.810]In your research on
[01:05:24.260]Masaryk, if I'm pronouncing the name right.
[01:05:26.380]I think so.
[01:05:28.490]Was there any talk
[01:05:29.530]about when Czechoslovakia, finally the
[01:05:32.826]geography of it's settled upon, was there
[01:05:36.360]any trepidation about the ethnic Germans
[01:05:38.480]being included in that?
[01:05:40.020]I think they were the second largest ethnicity.
[01:05:43.540]Did they think okay that's great,
[01:05:45.070]more people, more resources, or were
[01:05:47.180]they thinking this could be a challenge?
[01:05:50.810]Well I think Masaryk was both a good man
[01:05:53.607]and a great man, but he was a politician
[01:05:55.370]and he did a lot, and if you spend a lot
[01:05:58.059]of times doing a lot on the world's
[01:05:59.550]stage you're gonna fib once in a while.
[01:06:01.950]So in 19, I think it was in '06, before the war,
[01:06:06.280]he writes an article saying we can't be independent.
[01:06:09.850]He's telling the Czechs and Slovaks we
[01:06:11.220]can't be independent, and one of the
[01:06:12.840]reasons is all those Germans among us.
[01:06:15.720]And he means the Sudeten Germans.
[01:06:20.130]Later on he doesn't talk about it anymore.
[01:06:23.830]Woodrow Wilson, after it's all over,
[01:06:26.560]Wilson is going to Paris on a ship,
[01:06:28.370]and he's talking to somebody, and this
[01:06:31.070]topic comes up with the Germans, and Wilson
[01:06:33.000]says to this other person, it might
[01:06:34.330]have been Lansing, Masaryk never told me.
[01:06:39.230]But it turns out that Wilson was also fibbing.
[01:06:41.780]So Wilson had written a book called
[01:06:43.160]The State, it was a political science book.
[01:06:45.470]It was published in I think the 1880s,
[01:06:47.870]maybe 1888, and in the book he describes
[01:06:50.255]a lot of countries around the world.
[01:06:52.640]Sure enough, get the book, open it up.
[01:06:55.610]He knows about them, it's just the Germans
[01:06:57.690]and Bohemian, Moravian, how they're a problem.
[01:07:01.040]A real problem, not just that they
[01:07:02.250]happened to be there, but they're a problem.
[01:07:04.270]So Wilson's fibbing, Masaryk's fibbing a little bit.
[01:07:07.730]I think that Masaryk was, well first of all,
[01:07:10.380]the map of Slovakia was drafted by Masaryk himself.
[01:07:15.690]I know he probably had some help,
[01:07:17.610]some support, but he literally left Prague
[01:07:19.840]with a drawing of what Slovakia
[01:07:21.400]would be because it didn't exist.
[01:07:23.500]Literally it's made up.
[01:07:25.370]It's not that it's wrong, but I'm
[01:07:26.380]saying it's completely the first map of
[01:07:29.290]Slovakia ever ever ever, so it's kinda made up.
[01:07:33.081]Bohemia and Moravia though, Bohemia and Moravia
[01:07:36.687]actually existed in some prior
[01:07:38.638]iteration of the Holy Roman Empire.
[01:07:41.280]Bohemia, it was called then, was an
[01:07:43.240]elector of the Holy Roman Emperor
[01:07:45.760]in the early '7 or '8, so it was a
[01:07:47.570]real place, it had dynasty, it was real.
[01:07:50.900]And what Masaryk insisted upon was
[01:07:53.290]that the borders of that kingdom
[01:07:55.553]would be the Czech half of his country.
[01:08:01.290]He could have excluded the Germans
[01:08:02.830]maybe and then had just the Czech
[01:08:04.958]part with the Slovaks, but he always
[01:08:08.140]insisted that that kingdom was what
[01:08:10.080]he was fighting for his restoration.
[01:08:12.550]He did know there were Germans there.
[01:08:14.410]So the new republic has three million Germans
[01:08:17.440]and two million Slovaks and about
[01:08:20.117]three quarters of a million Hungarians.
[01:08:23.460]The borders were drawn, in some cases
[01:08:25.378]the Hungarians mostly came because
[01:08:27.570]Bratislava, which becomes the capital
[01:08:30.140]of Slovakia, is right on the Danube.
[01:08:34.500]They don't feel comfortable looking across
[01:08:36.300]the river at any other country like Hungary.
[01:08:39.390]The relations among these people are not friendly.
[01:08:42.860]The Pols, the Hungarians, the Czechs,
[01:08:44.077]the Slovaks, they're not friendly with each other.
[01:08:47.529]So Wilson convinces, and Benes himself,
[01:08:50.990]convinces the Allies to go across
[01:08:53.240]the river and take the southern banks
[01:08:55.591]of the Danube there where they
[01:08:58.730]pick up all these Hungarians because they
[01:09:00.350]wanted to control some section of the Danube.
[01:09:03.410]Bottom line is the Czechs comprise
[01:09:06.410]slightly less than 50% of Czechoslovakia,
[01:09:09.910]it's like 49.7%, which is not enough
[01:09:14.041]to say that we Czechs are the natural
[01:09:17.930]rulers because we're the majority.
[01:09:20.090]After all, everyone talks about
[01:09:21.510]self-determination, democracy, and that
[01:09:23.860]means majority rule, so who's the majority?
[01:09:27.110]So in order to hold it together, in order
[01:09:30.290]to hold off the Germans in some fashion,
[01:09:33.830]they start to pretend that the Czechs
[01:09:35.147]and the Slovaks are one people,
[01:09:37.290]there's one language, and what they
[01:09:39.150]do is they drop, I'm a big grammarian
[01:09:41.960]as an editor, they drop the hyphen.
[01:09:44.630]The hyphen is just so important,
[01:09:45.890]you could tell a whole story about
[01:09:46.830]this history with taking about the hyphen.
[01:09:49.790]Everyone had hyphenated Czechoslovak up until this point.
[01:09:53.370]The Czechoslovak National Council in Paris, hyphenated.
[01:09:57.000]The Czechoslovak Legion, hyphenated.
[01:09:59.530]There's correspondence by Masaryk,
[01:10:01.050]there's correspondence by Wilson,
[01:10:02.590]hyphenated, hyphenated, hyphenated.
[01:10:04.320]Then suddenly in 1918, 1919, the hyphen disappears.
[01:10:09.550]It's like a detective story, where did the hyphen go?
[01:10:12.240]Yeah, the hyphen went, and they started to say
[01:10:14.260]that there was one Czechoslovak language,
[01:10:16.500]one Czechoslovak people, but anybody who
[01:10:18.920]knew anything knew that it wasn't really true.
[01:10:21.680]And the Slovaks of course proved it
[01:10:24.030]over the next however many decades.
[01:10:26.930]They did this out of fear, it's not like
[01:10:29.560]they did it out of a desire, lust for conquest.
[01:10:33.370]It wasn't that.
[01:10:35.400]I do think they could have given the
[01:10:36.610]Slovaks autonomy and still kept them loyal,
[01:10:40.376]but there was a question about if you give
[01:10:42.280]someone autonomy do they then go to
[01:10:43.630]the next stage and want independence.
[01:10:46.150]At that point the Czechs would've been doomed.
[01:10:49.470]But anyway, so it got complicated.
[01:10:52.090]They didn't fix the Slovak problem,
[01:10:53.680]they didn't fix the German problem,
[01:10:55.620]and they never really were able to
[01:10:57.100]defend themselves against Germany and Russia
[01:10:59.586]until they joined NATO 10 years ago.
[01:11:05.230]Yes sir.
[01:11:06.240]So if the Legion had never been
[01:11:10.707]formed, what would have conceivably happened then?
[01:11:17.003]I think...
[01:11:20.411]It's a great question.
[01:11:22.050]So Masaryk's work and Benes' work,
[01:11:24.063]Stefanik's work, was really quite effective.
[01:11:28.721]At one point Stefanik comes to America
[01:11:30.390]and approaches Teddy Roosevelt.
[01:11:33.890]Teddy Roosevelt is a sworn enemy of Woodrow Wilson.
[01:11:37.380]Now Masaryk's strategy is, well were
[01:11:39.650]in effect the Democrat's Wilson.
[01:11:42.540]Masaryk would never have gone to Roosevelt.
[01:11:44.770]Roosevelt humiliates Wilson in every
[01:11:47.590]public comment and every speech.
[01:11:50.510]Stefanik thinks we're not getting
[01:11:51.800]enough help around here, so he goes
[01:11:53.810]to see on his own Teddy Roosevelt.
[01:11:56.057]And Teddy Roosevelt then starts making
[01:11:57.710]speeches in favor of Czechoslovak independence.
[01:12:01.560]Although when he does so he makes a jab at Wilson.
[01:12:06.090]Masaryk might not have appreciated that,
[01:12:08.100]but the three of them did a lot of things
[01:12:09.910]like that, they raised a lot of money,
[01:12:11.180]they had a lot of great connections,
[01:12:12.490]they had a lot of powerful friends.
[01:12:16.010]They still might have secured independence
[01:12:18.340]for the Czechs and the Slovaks, but I don't know.
[01:12:21.620]When Wilson got into this, had this idea
[01:12:24.260]in his head about self-determination
[01:12:25.760]of peoples, I get the sense sometimes
[01:12:27.900]that he thought there were three more
[01:12:29.020]peoples in Europe and we'll just give
[01:12:30.240]them countries and that's the end of it.
[01:12:32.230]He had no idea of the intermixture of
[01:12:34.210]populations that even today still exists.
[01:12:36.900]There are Hungarians in Romania and
[01:12:38.790]there's Germans in Hungary, still to this day.
[01:12:42.021]And he had no idea of how many other
[01:12:43.970]peoples there were and what the problems were.
[01:12:47.840]It might have worked.
[01:12:49.100]It might have worked because they did
[01:12:50.340]things other than the Legion and the fighting.
[01:12:52.720]They did things that almost no other group did.
[01:12:55.410]The Kurds, I tell people, the Kurds
[01:12:56.890]got wind of what was going on in
[01:12:58.940]Versaille and they sent two people to Paris.
[01:13:01.613]They said hey, we want our own country too.
[01:13:06.360]And nobody paid any attention to them.
[01:13:08.660]But they hadn't really worked it either,
[01:13:10.080]they hadn't worked the process.
[01:13:12.020]100 years later they're still asking for their own country.
[01:13:16.672]It's a good question.
[01:13:19.010]One thing that's really important to keep
[01:13:20.250]in mind is that when you fight for
[01:13:21.740]your independence literally, so the
[01:13:23.050]American colonial war against Great Britain,
[01:13:25.810]when you fight for something, people take you seriously.
[01:13:29.730]The Czechs and the Slovaks in Europe were not fighting.
[01:13:33.230]There were some demonstrations, but there were
[01:13:34.860]no riots and there was no insurrection
[01:13:37.070]and there was no revolt, and it's kinda,
[01:13:40.010]it's like a deafening silence from
[01:13:41.310]Prague and Bratislava almost.
[01:13:43.430]And at one point the emperor pressures
[01:13:46.450]the leading Czech politicians to swear loyalty.
[01:13:49.290]This is 1916, 1917, and they swear loyalty.
[01:13:53.650]What the Legion does or is is it's
[01:13:56.122]the revolt, it's the insurrection
[01:13:58.144]of the Czechs and the Slovaks.
[01:14:00.170]It just so happens that it's taking place in Siberia.
[01:14:03.920]And arguably it's helping the Allies
[01:14:05.884]kinda weirdly, maybe, so that was
[01:14:08.606]decisive and both the political
[01:14:12.372]and the military were then decisive.
[01:14:15.690]The political stuff was still really
[01:14:17.050]good though, I mean it as really good.
[01:14:19.240]Really effective.
[01:14:21.390]The fact that Masaryk was married to
[01:14:22.720]an American, I don't know, maybe it made him
[01:14:24.690]more comfortable understanding how America
[01:14:27.931]is because it's not like Europe at the time.
[01:14:32.418]That's a great question.
[01:14:34.317]Yes, James?
[01:14:35.407]I have a question about the
[01:14:36.300]five or six volume set that you had translated.
[01:14:39.930]Where were those stories collected?
[01:14:42.027]Did they they have an ethnographer,
[01:14:44.254]a journalist collecting these, who did that?
[01:14:46.483]I read, I had them translated, and I spent a lot
[01:14:50.190]of time trying to track down the editor,
[01:14:52.190]the guy who was listed as the editor, Adolf Zeman.
[01:14:55.320]Zeman's a pretty common name in the Czech Republic.
[01:14:58.140]I couldn't find anything on him.
[01:15:01.430]The book itself doesn't tell you, but the way it
[01:15:03.910]reads, so most people, especially 100 years ago.
[01:15:08.160]Literacy 100 years ago, the Czech and Slovak lands was not
[01:15:12.360]anywhere near 100%, and even today when people
[01:15:14.820]are literate they're not always great writers.
[01:15:17.000]So when you read these stories in English,
[01:15:19.750]it's clear that the persons, or person who wrote them,
[01:15:22.760]probably more than one person, had an education,
[01:15:26.140]at least to an eighth or 10th grade
[01:15:27.610]level which is pretty good back then,
[01:15:30.010]and could write coherent sentences
[01:15:32.010]and tell a coherent story, so my only guess,
[01:15:34.680]and I'm guessing the soldiers, most of
[01:15:37.840]them wouldn't or couldn't write that story,
[01:15:39.760]so my guess is they sat them down when
[01:15:42.110]they got back, they were like celebrities,
[01:15:44.320]so they sat them down I think, it looks
[01:15:46.700]like they sat them down and said
[01:15:47.770]tell me your most amazing story.
[01:15:50.070]And some of them told more than one story
[01:15:52.250]because the stories are completely
[01:15:54.380]idiosyncratic and all over the map.
[01:15:57.240]Some of them are crazy, some of them
[01:15:59.260]are kinda irrelevant, they're silly,
[01:16:00.800]they're very personal, but that tells
[01:16:02.820]me that this was the wide open
[01:16:04.720]way in which they probably did this.
[01:16:06.400]I'm guessing that the people who had
[01:16:09.240]an education sat down with typewriters
[01:16:10.893]and just recorded the stories and
[01:16:13.531]probably polished them up and cleaned
[01:16:15.540]them up a little bit, but there's
[01:16:16.900]clearly a first person voice in all of them.
[01:16:19.648]There's no sense of a narrator at all.
[01:16:22.060]They're very personal and they're very,
[01:16:24.820]yeah, they're just very personal,
[01:16:26.100]it's hard to describe them otherwise.
[01:16:27.660]And some of them are kinda silly and
[01:16:29.260]not relevant, but when you read hundreds
[01:16:31.200]of stories, you really then begin to get
[01:16:33.613]a real sense of what the guys were thinking.
[01:16:39.490]They confessed to, they were honest about
[01:16:42.220]how they treated that guy in Chelyabinsk,
[01:16:44.030]they killed him, they were honest about
[01:16:46.150]their fears all the time, about all
[01:16:48.620]the issues they have, and this is
[01:16:50.630]what I wanted to hear because they themselves
[01:16:52.680]made decisions that nobody else made for them.
[01:16:55.230]When they went into revolt, keep in mind,
[01:16:57.450]they had already now committed treason
[01:16:59.270]against Austria-Hungary, but when Masaryk
[01:17:01.210]left them behind in Russia he said
[01:17:02.980]above all don't get involved in Russia affairs.
[01:17:05.660]So when they go into a revolt they can't
[01:17:08.240]speak to Masaryk, he's out of touch, so they're
[01:17:11.550]actually revolting against Masaryk technically.
[01:17:15.250]Masaryk, when he first learned about what
[01:17:16.770]had happened he had no problem with it,
[01:17:18.250]but they technically were revolting
[01:17:20.120]even against their own independence movement.
[01:17:22.290]So they were in control of their actions.
[01:17:27.430]But they only spoke of fear all the time mostly,
[01:17:30.510]of fear and desperation to get out.
[01:17:33.730]So the stories are really interesting and the
[01:17:37.103]volumes gathered dust for many many years in Prague.
[01:17:43.220]Yes sir.
[01:17:44.120]Yes, you mentioned that
[01:17:45.430]they didn't have a lot of professionals officers,
[01:17:48.493]well obviously they had to develop some
[01:17:50.470]kind of working (mumbles) officers, were any
[01:17:53.570]of those, did it go by voting, did they
[01:17:56.610]actually have a command structure at the end?
[01:17:59.610]How did it actually work?
[01:18:00.960]Well how they organized themselves is
[01:18:03.580]kind of funny because what they did is
[01:18:06.140]the Soviet army came apart when the
[01:18:07.750]Bolsheviks infiltrated the army and
[01:18:10.090]created these little committees
[01:18:11.300]which they called Soviets right, but what
[01:18:12.890]they were there to do was undermine.
[01:18:15.716]Well this committee business was getting popular,
[01:18:17.907]so the Legionnaires created committees.
[01:18:21.640]A committee structure, and they
[01:18:22.490]had meetings and they took notes.
[01:18:25.610]So they were organized that way,
[01:18:27.540]like the novel said, they were
[01:18:29.430]very organized, but it was as a
[01:18:31.200]result of committee, so I think
[01:18:32.990]committees appointed, there were
[01:18:34.740]three guys especially, or four,
[01:18:36.370]who were appointed as their first generals.
[01:18:38.670]They ranged in age from 26 to 32, and one
[01:18:42.470]of them had been a dental or medical
[01:18:44.754]person in the Austro-Hungarian army.
[01:18:47.560]None of them had any promise because they had no experience.
[01:18:51.140]Czechs were not promoted into the senior ranks
[01:18:53.346]of the Austro-Hungarian army, so there wasn't
[01:18:56.230]much chance to learn, but anyway,
[01:19:00.010]they were either good or great.
[01:19:03.160]But again, if you're surrounded by enemies
[01:19:05.670]who you think are gonna try to kill you
[01:19:06.940]or put you in jail, everyone's motivated.
[01:19:09.878]Initially, at least in the initial battles,
[01:19:12.960]everyone knew what they had to do
[01:19:14.480]because the alternative was unspeakable.
[01:19:17.760]It did get dicey later on when things
[01:19:20.860]got more difficult, there was a lot
[01:19:22.490]of dissatisfaction, there were moments
[01:19:24.210]of mutiny inside the Legion, but no,
[01:19:27.769]they appointed three or four young guys
[01:19:30.680]who turned out to be good at how they worked.
[01:19:36.450]Yes ma'am.
[01:19:37.283]Who paid for the
[01:19:39.438]transportation across the oceans because
[01:19:42.420]some of them went through Japan I understand.
[01:19:44.829]Yes.
[01:19:45.662]In fact there were even
[01:19:46.650]units which went through Omaha and people
[01:19:49.695]were fleeing, but who paid for these transportations?
[01:19:54.870]The Brits paid for about 25%
[01:19:56.557]and the Americans paid the other 75%.
[01:19:59.180]I think one of the 12 different reasons
[01:20:01.470]why the whole thing was delayed was that
[01:20:02.870]I think we were going hat in hand around,
[01:20:05.060]come on, everybody cough up some money.
[01:20:07.670]The French had pointed out that
[01:20:08.890]they had paid for everything else.
[01:20:10.450]They had.
[01:20:12.410]And no one else was interested.
[01:20:14.370]So getting however many nos it was
[01:20:16.710]out of the US government took a while.
[01:20:19.670]Again in part because of Wilson's incapacity.
[01:20:22.720]So yeah, we had the British pay for it.
[01:20:24.940]Which becomes something you hear a lot
[01:20:26.650]about for world history, like we had
[01:20:28.480]the Brits doing the lion's share of work.
[01:20:32.110]Yeah, so some of the trains landed
[01:20:33.960]in San Diego and across the country,
[01:20:35.850]and yeah, they came through Washington
[01:20:37.530]at one point, at one point they came
[01:20:39.020]through Washington so they did a little
[01:20:40.230]parade in front of the White House in
[01:20:41.910]the pouring rain, but Wilson came out,
[01:20:43.830]and he was recovered by now and spoke.
[01:20:47.870]Yeah, and then some of them wanted to come back here.
[01:20:51.137]And a handful of these people went to Prague,
[01:20:53.028]turned around, and came back here and lived here in America.
[01:20:59.230]Now the professor of Czech,
[01:21:02.549](mumbles), he was in the region, in France.
[01:21:06.890]Oh yeah.
[01:21:07.814]When he came back.
[01:21:09.237]Yeah, very quickly, so Americans were
[01:21:10.520]recruited for another Legion in France,
[01:21:12.650]it was much smaller on the western front.
[01:21:16.010]That also helped because we actually did
[01:21:18.250]get to the western front and fight,
[01:21:19.950]the Czechs and Slovaks did, so a lot of them died.
[01:21:23.600]Then there's a tiny Legion in Italy
[01:21:26.240]that's formed from among POWs.
[01:21:29.020]Didn't have a lot of chance to fight, but again
[01:21:30.660]they show up, they volunteer, and they say they're
[01:21:33.060]for the Allies and that makes an impression.
[01:21:38.810]Yes sir.
[01:21:39.643]Just in curiosity, what would
[01:21:41.082]be the relationship between the general Slovak
[01:21:42.867]region and the other aging Bolshevik white parties?
[01:21:46.750]Yeah, real complicated.
[01:21:50.860]One of the reasons the Bolsheviks were able
[01:21:52.230]to take power is that there's 37 factions
[01:21:55.810]and when there's 37 factions you don't have
[01:21:59.701]to be very big to win right, it's a numbers game.
[01:22:04.130]People think about and write about a lot
[01:22:06.730]about the whites, the so called whites.
[01:22:08.760]Mostly I think they're thinking about
[01:22:10.200]the Russian imperial army officers
[01:22:12.850]who obviously weren't gonna be Bolshevik
[01:22:15.200]and were in Siberia, and people said they
[01:22:18.840]wanted to bring back the Czar, but they didn't.
[01:22:21.330]But really the most effective and
[01:22:23.670]the most numerous opponent to the
[01:22:25.430]Bolsheviks were other revolutionaries.
[01:22:27.970]There was one big party called the
[01:22:30.150]Social Revolutionary Party or something,
[01:22:32.120]the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
[01:22:33.620]It was so big that it also split into two.
[01:22:37.810]There was the left Socialist Revolutionary Party
[01:22:40.380]and the right Socialist Rev, and they would
[01:22:42.540]assassinate people, one of them shot
[01:22:44.360]Lenin at one point, didn't kill him.
[01:22:46.490]A lot of the opposition to the Bolsheviks
[01:22:48.400]anyway was coming from the left.
[01:22:51.780]When the Legion would clear a city, a lot of
[01:22:55.010]these opponents of Bolsheviks would come
[01:22:56.910]out into the sunshine and applaud the Legion,
[01:22:59.718]but they also had a very revolutionary agenda.
[01:23:03.840]The white Russians mostly didn't wanna fight.
[01:23:07.345]They were officers and they fought,
[01:23:09.480]other peasants fought, they don't fight.
[01:23:11.440]So they were egging the Legionnaires on,
[01:23:13.310]but they would sit back in the city
[01:23:14.964]at the hotels with female company
[01:23:18.160]and dinners waiting for the Legionnaires
[01:23:21.520]to overthrow the Bolsheviks or something,
[01:23:23.210]it was very convoluted, and then there
[01:23:25.010]was the Japanese, so the Japanese wanted
[01:23:27.980]to go into Siberia basically, to be honest,
[01:23:30.170]just to take timber and gold and whatever.
[01:23:34.050]Nobody admits this, but they would have
[01:23:35.313]been to Siberia, and Wilson reaches a deal.
[01:23:39.770]We're gonna send 7,000 men, and you'll
[01:23:42.110]send 7,000 men, it'll be even and we'll
[01:23:44.300]watch each other and play nice.
[01:23:46.530]So we agree, we're gonna send
[01:23:48.550]our 7,000 and they send 70,000.
[01:23:53.340]So, and the Japanese are, they're there
[01:23:56.580]not for any apparent reason, you have
[01:23:58.410]to know what the real agenda is because
[01:24:00.160]otherwise you look at them, 70,000 men
[01:24:01.637]and you wonder what are they doing here.
[01:24:03.950]Except that they're engaging in fights,
[01:24:06.350]fistfights, random attacks on everybody else.
[01:24:09.890]There were more than a few Americans who were killed
[01:24:12.270]by Japanese in Siberia just for being Americans.
[01:24:16.840]Shot down on the street, at one point the
[01:24:19.070]Japanese attacked an American train,
[01:24:20.720]killed a lot of guys, again unclear why.
[01:24:24.440]They gave money to the worst
[01:24:25.750]white elements to cause trouble.
[01:24:29.670]You see a lot of aggression in this
[01:24:31.280]story from the Japanese which really
[01:24:33.550]is like a harbinger of things to come.
[01:24:36.110]There is a viral aggressiveness among
[01:24:40.100]the Japanese down to the level of privates.
[01:24:42.780]Just wildly aggressive and violent.
[01:24:47.140]But they don't have a particular goal
[01:24:48.890]that they feel free to enunciate,
[01:24:51.810]so they're just there causing trouble.
[01:24:54.640]So there's a lot of factions, a lot of them.
[01:24:58.850]The Americans should never have been
[01:25:00.030]a part of it, it was never gonna be successful.
[01:25:03.340]Masaryk himself knew that if he wanted to,
[01:25:05.552]the whole point of the Allied intervention
[01:25:08.230]was to get Allied troops into Siberia,
[01:25:11.250]but then have them go 5,000 miles in
[01:25:13.497]the other direction, somehow cross all
[01:25:15.560]of Russia without Russia minding,
[01:25:17.740]that would be remarkable, and somehow cross
[01:25:20.260]Ukraine and cross Belarus and keep going
[01:25:22.640]until you meet a German and then kill him.
[01:25:25.464]They were gonna reopen the eastern front that way.
[01:25:28.390]Well it was never gonna happen.
[01:25:29.830]It would take two million troops to do that.
[01:25:32.340]It would take hundreds of thousands of
[01:25:33.700]troops just to watch your railroad behind you.
[01:25:36.120]It would never happen, so sending 7,000
[01:25:39.570]or 700,000 wasn't gonna do it either, and so
[01:25:42.670]the Allied intervention is a colossal failure.
[01:25:47.270]Wilson's explanation of it is
[01:25:49.470]hilarious and sad at the same time.
[01:25:52.760]He keeps talking about how we're gonna help the Russians.
[01:25:55.779]People would look at him and go well
[01:25:58.110]this group of Russians wants to kill
[01:25:59.470]this group of Russians, so would you tell us
[01:26:02.010]which group of Russians we're gonna help,
[01:26:03.460]and he wouldn't, so it was a real mess.
[01:26:09.270]The Legionnaires got caught up in it.
[01:26:11.020]Some say that civil war, that Allied intervention
[01:26:12.997]and civil war would not have been as violent
[01:26:15.810]and not as extensive if the Legion hadn't
[01:26:17.820]been there because they really were
[01:26:19.430]the most effective fighting force,
[01:26:21.350]but they didn't wanna be there.
[01:26:24.180]You could write a comic opera
[01:26:25.550]about the Allied interventions.
[01:26:30.330]Anyone else?
[01:26:34.030]Well thank you, thank you.
[01:26:35.788](applause)

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Inaugural Frank A. Belousek Lecture in Czech History

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