MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · July 17 · 1918
ON THIS DAY · 17 JULY 1918
Ekaterinburg
17 Jul 1918 — As anti-Bolshevik forces close in, the Tsar, his wife, their five children and four servants are shot in a cellar and their bodies hidden. A memorial to eleven murdered people, remembered here soberly.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
The civil war’s opening act was lit almost by accident, and its fuse ran the whole width of Asia. Some 40,000 soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion — former prisoners of war who had agreed to fight for the Allies and were being shipped out via Vladivostok — were strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railway when a scuffle and a Bolshevik order to disarm them turned into a revolt. Follow the great arrow: in a matter of weeks a foreign legion seized the railway across 8,000 kilometers of Russia, and with it the spine of Siberia. Wherever the Legion cleared the Bolsheviks out, anti-Bolshevik governments sprang up in its wake.
From Chapter 6 — The Ring of Fire of The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924 (JUL 1918).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The accident of the Legion. Nobody planned the event that started full-scale civil war. A stranded foreign army, a botched disarmament order, a railway that was the only thing…
- The turn — Trotsky’s train at Sviyazhsk, August 1918. The moment the Reds stopped running. With Kazan lost and the road up the Volga to Moscow open, Trotsky arrived at the front in the armoured train…
- What it changed — Full civil war, on every front. By late 1918 the fronts the map will show for two years are set: the Whites in Siberia (soon under Kolchak), in the south (Denikin), in the…
Then ask the room: How did a stranded foreign legion turn a simmering conflict into a full civil war — and what does that say about contingency in history? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT
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