I've just finished reading John Keegan's "the first world war" and a short passage near the end ("the war in the east continues", in the last chapter, "america and Armageddon") deals with the troubles in Russia after the fall of the Tzar and the rise of the Bolsheviks. Among the many points of conflict, it mentions a group of
[...]Czechoslovak prisoners of war released by the november armistice from captivity in the Ukraine.
who then go out and fight some Hungarians, then some Bolsheviks, then take the Trans-Siberian Railways and begin to get aid from the allies to join the efforts in the western front.
It reads like a modern version of Xenophon's Anabasis, and I'm looking to find a bit more about them; what happened, what was their stance regarding allied, german and russian states, what became of them, were did they come from, etc.
Any context would be welcome.
Hi there! The Czech-Slovak Legion is a favorite topic of mine, and I wrote a previous answer about it here! You can find it here. If you have any follow ups, I'd be glad to answer them best I can.
I've answered this before too, but here's on answer just on their train.
Others have provided you with great answers, I will just chime in with a tiny tidbit – funny you should mention Anabasis, as the story of the Legion in Siberia has been quite frequently called exactly that in Czechoslovak history and culture, and continues to be labelled that way to this day.
However, it was not the Czechs who made the comparison first. Supposedly it was the French president Raymond Poincaré in a 1918 speech to Czechoslovak volunteers, who is said to have called the Legion's actions in Siberia "an even greater story than that of Xenophon's Greeks". At least according to a Czechoslovak political pamphlet from the 1920s, so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.