A review of a book about the creation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War
“Dreams Of A Great Small Nation” by Kevin J McNamaraI have been visiting Prague regularly since 1988 and I have often crossed the Legion’s Bridge opposite the National Theatre, but it was only in 2023 when I visited a charity shop in Manchester that I found that there was a recent (2016) English-language work on this piece of history. McNamara, a scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in the United States, asserts at the start of his bibliography that “Very few books on the exploits and significance of the Czecho-Slovak [he always hyphenates the term] Legion have ever been published in English and fewer of those remain in print.” He claims that this is the first English-language book to make extensive use of collections of eye-witness testimony. So this is a welcome work.
It is the story of how, in the First World War, as many as 55,000 Czechs and Slovaks defected from the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to form their own legion in Russia which, at the time, was undergoing a revolution, followed by withdrawal from the world war, and then a brutal and messy civil war. The Czechs and Slovaks wished to fight alongside the Allies, but any route west would take them back to Austro-Hungary or to German-occupied territory, so the plan was that the Czecho-Slovaks would travel via the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way east to Vladivostok where Allied ships would somehow transport them to the Western Front.
It did not work out like this at all. In fact, the Czechs and Slovaks found themselves in the middle of Red, White and other forces, requiring them to fight a whole series of battles and skirmishes as they effectively took control of the railway and with it much of Siberia. They were stranded in Russia long after the Germans surrendered and the last ship transporting the legionnaires did not leave Vladivostok until September 1920. Most estimates say that just over 4,000 legionnaires died in Russia.
It was a confusing campaign and McNamara tells it in a rather confused way with much back and forth in terms of chronology and personages. However, the central theme is very clear: the bravery and sacrifice of the Czecho-Slovak Legion in Russia, and the substantial publicity which this experience received in Western (especially American) newspapers, played an important role in persuading the Allies to recognise and grant the demand for the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia which, between 1918 and 1938, was the only democratic state in the region.
The political architects of this independence were Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik. Masaryk – who was married to an American and added her surname to his own name – was especially influential in the USA and credited the exploits of the Legion as giving him valuable leverage in his campaign. Štefánik – the only wholly Slovak member of the trio – was killed in a flying accident in May 1919 and so was not around to urge the implementation of the promise in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 that Slovakia would have full autonomy. In the end, the Czechs and Slovaks settled for separate nations in 1993.
As an American, McNamara provides the viewpoint of events largely from the United States, but the political campaign for Czechoslovak independence was understandably focused on President Woodrow Wilson and it was the Americans who could have sent earlier and in larger numbers supporting troops and then rescuing vessels. McNamara is balanced though and opines that “America’s policy towards the legionnaires at times reached such chilling levels of indifference to their lives that it seemed almost as hostile, if not homicidal, as Moscow’s.”