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By Brian Pearce
1960The NewsletterBrian Pearce Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
as the soldiers were assembled to listen to a band concert. Hundreds were killed and many hundreds more were wounded. After the surrender of the survivors, over 200 were shot in cold blood. The rest were sent to Africa. Thas was in September, 1917. After the October Revolution, the French Army authorities shipped some of them to the Black Sea as recruits for the White Army. There a number of these men were executed by the Tsarist officers under French imperialist ‘protection’ for insubordination and attempted desertion to the Reds.
That is the true story of the Russian soldiers in France during the First World War. Clearly, only a Trotskyist would contemplate recalling such a story in the France of De Gaulle. But was it necessary for Khrushchev to invent this legend of Russian soldiers gladly serving French Imperialism?
Perhaps it should also be mentioned that when the French authorities began their moves against the Russian brigades in the Spring of 1917, they suppressed a Russian Socialist paper, Nashe Slovo, published in Paris, which they said had got into the soldiers’ hands and corrupted their military morals. The editor was deported to Spain. His name was L. D. Trotsky, and it would be surprising if either Malinovsky or Khrushchev has forgotten the role hé played in those stirring times.