Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 17 – Nearly 50 years ago during a visit to friends in Detroit, I saw a display for a then-new board game, “The Russian Civil War.” I might have ignored it had the store not decided to put up a sign above a stack of these games reading “In this Game, the Anti-Bolshevik White Russians Can Win.”
I hadn’t thought about that game for many years. I lost it some years back when our house burned. But it all came swimming back into my mind today because Russian prosecutors in St. Petersburg are seeking to can a Czech video game, “Last Train Home,” about the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia during the Russian Civil War.
The prosecutors argue the game must be banned in Russia because it promotes values at odds with “the traditional values of contemporary Russian society,” “sparks hostility and hatred to the authorities of the Russian Federation and the soldiers of the Red Army during the Civil War,”and “’heroizes’ the Czechoslovak Corps (svoboda.org/a/poezd-ne-doehal-v-rossii-hotyat-zapretitj-igru-o-grazhdanskoy-voyne/33080099.html).
Such a Russian prosecutorial effort, one likely to succeed, reflects the absurdities to which Russian jurisprudence has sunk in the Putin era and is likely to do more to attract attention to the complicated history of the Czechoslovak Corps than just ignoring the appearance of such a game would have.
That is all the more counterproductive from Moscow’s point of view because the Czechoslovak Corps went from being an anti-Bolshevik movement that helped make the rise of the Whites in Siberia possible to a force that played an inglorious role in handing over Admiral Kolchak to his eventual execution.
That history is too complicated to recount here, but three especially useful books are Henry Baerlain’s The March of the 70,000 (London, 1926), Peter Fleming’s The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (London, 1963), and David Bullock’s The Czech Legion, 1914-1920 (Oxford, 2008).
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