Penza Agreement

A bargain of rail passage for disarmament

The agreement was signed at Penza in March 1918 between representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council and the Bolshevik government. The signature date is given differently by the sources: the English Wikipedia account and the Czechoslovak Legion history place it on 25 March, while the Russian Wikipedia account gives 26 March. Either way the terms were the same. The Legion was guaranteed rail passage to Vladivostok in exchange for surrendering most of its weapons, keeping only those for personal guard. The text provided that the Czechoslovaks would move 'not as fighting units but as a group of free citizens carrying a certain quantity of weapons for their own defence against attempts by counter-revolutionaries', and that the Council of People's Commissars was ready to give them every assistance on Russian territory on condition of their honest and sincere loyalty. Stalin was among the Soviet signatories.

The concrete arms limits were fixed in Legion Order No. 35 of 27 March. Each echelon was to keep one armed company of 168 men including NCOs and one machine gun, with 300 rounds per rifle and 1,200 rounds per machine gun. All remaining rifles and machine guns and all artillery were to be handed to a special commission at Penza made up of three Legion and three Soviet representatives. Most artillery had already gone to the Red Guards during the withdrawal from Ukraine.

Why disarmament became a rupture

The two sides distrusted each other. Legion leaders suspected the Bolsheviks of sacrificing them to secure peace with the Central Powers, while the Bolsheviks saw the Legion as a potential tool of Allied anti-Bolshevik intervention. At the same time the Bolsheviks, short of professional troops, tried to draw the Legion into the Red Army. Within the Legion even partial disarmament was received with great resentment and became grounds for hostile distrust of the Bolsheviks. Transport shortages worsened the slow evacuation: under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks prioritised the westbound repatriation of German, Austrian and Hungarian prisoners.

The Legion moved east in 63 trains of 40 carriages each; the first left on 27 March and reached Vladivostok a month later. By May the transports stretched for thousands of kilometres from Penza to Vladivostok in six groups, the largest among them the Chelyabinsk group of more than 8,000 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Voitsekhovsky.

On 14 May came the clash at Chelyabinsk. An eastbound Legion train met a westbound train of Hungarian prisoners loyal to the Central Powers, and rival nationalisms produced a close-range firefight. The Legion defeated the Hungarians; local Bolsheviks then intervened and arrested some Legion troops, whereupon the Legion stormed the station, freed its men, effectively took over the city and cut the Bolshevik rail link to Siberia. The incident was settled peacefully in the end, but it was used by the Bolshevik government to order the Legion's disarmament, since it had threatened Yekaterinburg and sparked wider hostilities across Siberia.

Collapse of the agreement and the revolt

Czechoslovak leaders had consented to the partial disarmament of the echelons, but the legionnaires themselves took it as surrender and repatriation to a hostile empire. On 21 April Chicherin telegraphed the Krasnoyarsk Soviet to halt the eastward movement of Legion trains, under German pressure; after learning of Allied plans for Japanese intervention the Soviet government also demanded that the evacuation route be switched from Vladivostok to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. Legionnaires read these orders as an intention to hand them over to Germany and Austria-Hungary as former prisoners of war.

After the Chelyabinsk clash, Trotsky ordered the Legion disarmed and declared that the legionnaires would either surrender their weapons or be shot. Despite the National Council's opposition they refused to disarm and demanded passage to Vladivostok. By early June the roughly 40,000 men had overthrown Soviet power along the line from Penza to Krasnoyarsk, opening the Siberian front of the Russian Civil War; on 8 June the SR-led Komuch government was set up at Samara.

Assessment

The Penza Agreement is a document that fell apart before its disarmament clause could be carried out. The Bolsheviks tried to manage the eastbound Legion as a manageable threat; the Legion tried to secure a corridor to France. Each misread the other. The Bolsheviks underestimated how far a disarmament demand would turn the whole Legion against them, and the Legion and the National Council were slow to grasp how far Soviet distrust would go. Where the agreement broke down, the Civil War widened into the Volga, the Urals and Siberia.