Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/291

Rh new Red Army. It was an International Army. All peoples were represented, including platoons of Czechs and Koreans. Around the camp-fire the Koreans would say: "We will fight for you now, for your liberty: some day you will fight with us against Japan for our liberty." Among the officers were the Czech Captain Murovsky, Lenin's nephew Popov, and Abramov, who had served two years with the British.

In discipline the Red troops were inferior to the regular national armies. But they had an Han which the others lacked. I talked much with these peasants and workers, who for weeks had been lying out on the rain-drenched hillsides.

"Who made you come, and what keeps you here?" I asked.

"Well—millions of us dark people had to go out and die for the government of the Czar in the old days," they replied. "Surely we should be cowards if we didn't go out and fight for a government that is all our own!"

There were certain gentlemen who didn't have this view of the Soviet. Quite the opposite. They wanted the Russian peasants and workers to have a very different sort of government. In fact they themselves claimed to be the one true and only government of Russia.

In grandiose phraseology they laid claim to sovereignty over the territory extending from the Golden Horn of the Far East to the Finnish Bay in the