About this item
"In this strange way," observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, "the deathblow to an empire centuries old was struck far away on the railway platform at Chelyabinsk." On May 23, 1918, the Czecho Slovak Legion was waiting to board a train in Chelyabinsk, then the Western-most terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The hope was that these 50,000 men would then board Allied ships that would circumnavigate the globe and deposit them in the trenches on behalf of the Allies - for whom they would fight in exchange for a country of their own. But, on that day, at the height of the German offensive in the West and on the 300th anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague, a Czech soldier killed an Austrian during a mass brawl. It was a seemingly minor incident, but it would set in motion a series of events that would forever alter the course of 20th century history.
About the Author
Kevin J. McNamara journeyed across eastern Siberia shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where he first learned about the army that exploded onto the world stage in 1918.
Traveling almost 2,000 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway between Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, he happened upon the story of the Czech and Slovak legionnaires, who riveted the world's attention in 1918 by unexpectedly seizing all of Siberia and nearly toppling Moscow's Soviet regime. Their improvised army played a role in the First World War, Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War, Allied Intervention, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the founding of Czecho-Slovakia, and the diplomacy that ended the war and re-wrote the map of Europe.
McNamara subsequently acquired and arranged to have translated from Czech to English more than 100 first-hand accounts by these same legionnaires. Their personal stories were published in Prague in the 1920s in a five-volume work, "The Road to Resistance: How the Czech Legion Lived and Fought," but their accounts were suppressed following the Nazi and Soviet conquests of Czecho-Slovakia. No longer censored following the collapse of communist rule in Prague, these first-hand accounts have never before been rendered into English.
Public Affairs, LLC, a unit of The Perseus Books Group, is the publisher of "Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe," which will appear on March 29, 2016. McNamara's agent is Glen Hartley of Writers' Representatives, LLC.
The book tells the story of 50-65,000 émigrés, deserters, and POWs from Austria-Hungary and its army who are cast adrift inside Russia at the end of the Great War. Lost amidst the Russian Revolution and a Soviet regime that withdraws from the war, these Czechs and Slovaks - long oppressed by the Habsburg rulers of their Austro-Hungarian homelands - are organized by a fugitive philosophy professor from Prague, Tomas G. Masaryk, into an ad hoc army. They turn against Austria-Hungary, which fights alongside Germany, in order to fight for the Allies - in return for an independent nation of their own. Their search for a safe passage to Allied France leads them on a perilous journey across Siberia, where an altercation leads to a brawl that launches one of the wildest mis-adventures in modern history.
A former journalist for Calkins Media Inc. and aide to U.S. Congressman R. Lawrence Coughlin, McNamara is an Associate Scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, and a former contributing editor to its journal, "Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs." He earned a B.A. in journalism and M.A. in international politics from Temple University, where he studied under military historian Russell F. Weigley. He holds a certificate in national security law from the University
