Engineering:Trotsky's train
During the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), Leon Trotsky, the Soviet People's Commissar of Defense from 1918 to 1925, used an armored train to travel between Red Army fronts and as a secure command and propaganda center. In the course of the conflict, the train made 36 such trips and traveled at least 75,000 miles (121,000 km). The train saw action against White and other forces on 13 occasions during the civil war and suffered 15 casualties (with 15 more "missing"), and was itself awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its part in deflecting the advance on Petrograd by General Nikolai Yudenich in October 1919.[1]
Trotsky's train, officially the "Train of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic" (Russian: Поезд председателя Реввоенсовета Республики), set out for the first time from Moscow on 7 August 1918. It consisted of 2 armored engines and 12 wagons, and was dispatched for Sviyazhsk on the Volga Front with a unit of Latvian Riflemen on board. By late 1919, the train's configuration had evolved to two separate echelons which included several armored wagons (with turrets and embrasures for machine guns and cannons), flatbed trucks for transporting armored cars and other vehicles (including Trotsky's own command car, a Rolls-Royce commandeered from Tsar Nicholas II's garage), a telegraph station, a radio station, an electricity-generating wagon, a printing house (with presses), a library, a secretariat wagon, a kitchen, a bathhouse wagon, and even a special wagon with a small collapsible aircraft.[1]
On board the train were a special guard unit of some 100 elite troops (mostly Latvians) who dressed in special red uniforms and budenovka hats, cooks and other staff, mechanics, technicians, political agitators, and secretaries. By 21 January 1921, there were 407 personnel attached to the armored train, doing 80 different jobs. As one assistant to Trotsky put it, the train served as "a real school for Communism", with the "militant brotherhood" of its highly-disciplined staff acting as an example to the army. Trotsky wrote in his memoir My Life that: "The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October Revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement".[1] A special newspaper, titled En Route, was published exclusively on the train.[2][3]
See also
- North Korean leaders' trains
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Smele, Jonathan D. (2015). History Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916–1926. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 1181. ISBN 978-1-4422-5280-6.
- ↑ Trotsky, Lev Davidovich (1930). "XXXIV - The Train". My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography. Pathfinder Press. ISBN 978-0-87348-144-1.
- ↑ "Leon Trotsky: My Life (34. The Train)". https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch34.htm.
Further reading
- Heyman N. M. Leon Trotsky and the Birth of the Red Army // Army Quarterly and Defence Journal. 1975. Vol 105, No. 4. pp. 407–418.
- Heyman N. M. Leon Trotsky : propagandist to the Red Army // Studies in Comparative Communism: Trotsky and Trotskyism in perspective. Los Angeles, Cal.: Univеrsity of Southern California, 1977. Vol. 10, No. 1–2. pp. 34–43. DOI:10.1016/S0039-3592(77)80073-2.
- Leon Trotsky's Armored Train // Russia in war and revolution, 1914—1922 : a documentary history / ed. J. W. Daly, L. T. Trofimov. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2009. ISBN:978-0-87220-987-9.
- Tarkhova N. S. Trotsky's Train. Unknown Page in the History of the Civil War // The Trotsky Reappraisal / ed. by T. Brotherstone and P. Dukes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. ISBN:978-0-7486-0317-6.
- Winsbury R. Trotsky's War Train // History Today Magazine. 1975. August, Vol. 2, No. 8. pp. 523–531.
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