Trotsky's train
트로츠키의 열차
The armoured train that Trotsky, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, used to travel between fronts as a mobile headquarters and propaganda base in the Russian Civil War. Formed in Moscow on 7 August 1918, it left first for Sviyazhsk on the Volga front and made 36 trips to the fronts during the war. It was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its part in stopping Yudenich's advance on Petrograd in October 1919, and was disbanded a few months after the Crimean campaign ended in November 1920.
In depth
At first it had two armoured engines and twelve wagons and carried a unit of Latvian Riflemen. By late 1919 it included armoured wagons with turrets, flatcars carrying armoured cars and Trotsky's Rolls-Royce command car, a telegraph station and a radio station, a power wagon, a printing house, a library, a secretariat, a bathhouse wagon and even a small collapsible aircraft, and it printed the train newspaper En Route. About 100 guards in red leather uniforms rode on it, and on 21 January 1921 the train had 407 personnel. It was in action 13 times, losing 15 killed and 15 missing. Near Kazan in August 1918 it was attacked by a White force of 1,200, but its guard held out until reinforcements arrived. The distance it covered is given as at least 121,000 km in the English source and, in the Russian source, as 105,000 km by Trotsky's own count and 200,000 km by Volkogonov's estimate. In My Life Trotsky wrote that "the strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October Revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement".