The Legendary Story of the Czechoslovak Legion
01:16:52 Share

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. ♪

Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness, available on MetaQuest. Isn't that right, Jane Fonda? Cardio will never be boring again. Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart-topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes. Bet your stationary bike can't do that. Visit GetSupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness, only on MetaQuest. Wait a team for team.

Hello, my friends. Ducker, you here? And I'm Gabby. And welcome back to the podcast, my hoes, my friends. We are back and we are back with a full deep dive episode in here, though. I love the responses that a lot of you gave to our previous one that we did. That was the random questions that came from, I mean, you, the people, the people who actually listen to us here on Instagram. Thank you for all of that.

We're going to be doing future episodes like that about once a month or so on like Patreon as well as, well, Instagram. Mainly Patreon though.

Yes. For the people who are listening and supporting us, thank you. I really do appreciate it. And if you want to add free episodes or anything like that of the podcast, make sure to go and check out Patreon because we also have exclusive episodes that go out there on as well. Also, my friends, I'm going to go ahead and interject this right now, but we have a series of things that are happening. First off, there are only six spots left for our trip to Turkey. So if you want to go with us to that, please, by all means, go and click the link down in the description. On

On that note, we are actually getting ready to launch another trip, which is to Mongolia. So if you're interested in that one, also make sure to watch for upcoming announcements because that's going to be big.

Along with that, I have actually just gotten ready to launch a merch line that starts here on November 1st. And for that, we are going to have four shirts, one hoodie, and one sticker with ideas that we've been bouncing off of people here in Patreon. And using Ural's input, we've come up with some very fun designs. Yes, for those of you who have seen this on Patreon, you know exactly what it is that I am talking about. But this is going to be big, and I appreciate all of you. Either way, let's get into this.

What we're doing right now is not a patron exclusive, but it is something that specifically does come as a request from one of my patrons on Patreon, Pavel Spustov. What we're going to be talking about today is the legendary Czechoslovak Legion and their escape to freedom in the aftermath of World War One.

As I said, this is not a patron exclusive, but I want to take more of your ideas, the people who actually go and support this show, and I want to turn them into episodes specifically for you. Not just whatever random thing ends up popping into my head in the middle of the week, which Gabby, you know this. You know how things typically operate when we're working at literally the last second. At the time that we're recording this, this episode is already a day late as it is. It is. Yeah. So...

I'm sorry about that. But either way, with that, my friends, let's go ahead and dive in. When I talk about this, the Czechoslovak Legion occupies an almost legendary place in Czech history. It is truly something that is impressive. They comprise the armed forces that fought during and after World War One on the Allied side, where there was a common cause and pursuit of an independent Czechoslovakia, which is not a state that actually existed.

It's kind of funny when we think about it. Czechoslovakia, which was a state that would exist in the aftermath of World War One, would exist all the way going into what was it? Nineteen was eighty nine.

I actually forget. I thought it was the 90s. I think it was the 90s. Yeah. And it was dissolved. I think the Velvet Revolution that led to the Czech Republic and Slovakia being created, which is a fascinating tale in and of itself because it was such a peaceful breakup of a country that normally when you talk about breakups in countries, especially in the 90s, that is not something that usually ends up happening. A little bit more bloody, a little bit more messy. Oh, very dramatic breakup. Yeah. The Balkans is a prime example of that. Exactly. Exactly.

But in this case, when we're talking about all this, the biggest force that we're going to focus on centers on the Russian force, something which became embroiled in the civil war that broke out in the aftermath and collapse of the empire of Russia, spending three years fighting and traveling thousands of miles before returning home to the land they fought to make.

If you have not seen the game on Steam, which was really big last year, it absolutely blew up the last train home. I highly recommend that you go and check it out as this is a beautiful creation that depicts these events. It is really impressive. It sounds like a really depressing game. It kind of is, but it's complicated. The Czechoslovak Legion and their story is something that

It's filled with heroes, hardship, tragedy, greatness, everything that you can think of. It has all of it. So sit back, my friends, and let's go ahead and dive into a story that a number of people who are listening to this right now probably have never even heard of. Now, of course, to begin, we're going to talk about this. You all know, first and foremost, that I'm going to have to explain some context about the origins of the Legion in the first place. You're looking at me right now here, Gabby, with so much like, oh, God, what is he going to do? I just want to know how far back.

300 years, 400, maybe 500. Oh, my God. OK, look, it's quick, guys. I promise you. I don't don't. I'm not going to lose you initially here. That's why they're here for the context. So go for it. And this is important. It's important that I go and explain this part.

So originally, parts of the old Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms, the Czech and Slovak peoples, would eventually become subjects of the Habsburg Archdukes of Austria starting around the 16th century. Yes, I know, we are starting literally 400 years before any of this stuff actually happens. But it's important because you need to understand that the Czech and Slovaks

After this time period, did not have their own state. They were part of the overall greater entity of where you had the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Eventually, I'm not going to go into details of all that. And obviously, I'm skipping over a lot of details, but we would get way too bogged down if I address that.

300 years later, pretty much all the territories which now form the modern Czech Republic and Slovakia were then parts of the Austrian Empire, which was one of the great powers in Europe whose map games between each other would end up spelling the end of the lives of millions of people.

But we're not quite there yet. First, we needed a sparking catalyst, one that would come in the form of a young horsekin artillery officer who, by the way, on that note, we did an entire series on Patreon about for the rise and fall of Napoleon. We'd actually know we did that as a regular episode, too, didn't we? We did the French Revolution as a whole series, and then we had Napoleon. Yes. OK, that's exactly what. Yeah, guys. Yeah, we're talking about Napoleon. I'm sorry. This is important.

I swear to you, it really is. I'm trusting the process. Go. All right. So speed running through all this, right? The rise of Napoleonic France would have a very severe and profound effect on the states and people of Europe, especially with the minorities that would live in varying different states under the rule of foreign powers.

So what would happen, right, is that France would go and support the minorities in these entities and allow them to create their own little semi subservient states. It was a strategy that Napoleon would use to weaken his opponents and secure foreign territory under puppet sister republics and stabilize his rule. Basically, if you go and look at a map of France,

Napoleonic Europe and you notice, hey, okay, so all this territory is covered blue, but then there's all these little lines that seem to segment up the entirety of Western and going into Central Europe like a jigsaw puzzle. That's because that was all these separate little political entities of different ethnicities that were being created in order to serve as buffer states where they were independent, quote unquote, but they weren't. They were subservient to the French emperor who would save them

So they can rule themselves, but they had to actually just listen to the more powerful emperor. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

So it was just like the facade of independence. Correct. Exactly. The ideas of revolutionary France would ignite the early fires of Slavic independence movements in pretty much all of Central Europe. And this is something that even after the fall of Napoleon would persist. During the 19th century, Czech, Slovaks, and other minorities that lived under the Habsburg hegemony would rise in rebellion again and again and again against their rulers, demanding their own nations repatriated.

within their ancestral lands that they had controlled before in previous centuries. But no longer was the case. By the year 1848, as various revolutions would erupt all around Europe in what is remembered today as the Springtime of the Peoples, the Slavs, Romanians, Hungarians, and other people that were subjected to Vienna would go and overthrow Emperor Ferdinand I. Look, I'm saying this right now. I know I'm spinning this off.

I understand that. You're looking at me now, Gabby. I am sorry. Well, no, it makes a lot of sense. Like, I'm not. It's painting a picture of exactly where they existed in the chaos of that entire geopolitical sphere. Yes. And that is a time that honestly, that should be another episode. So I'm probably going to end up writing that after this to just explain that whole thing, because, oh, dear God, was that a mess? There was genuinely thoughts during this time in the 1800s that the monarchies of Europe were

were going to collapse, that it was going to turn into a widespread revolution that was going to result in a system almost like what you see with America, except it was going to be different European states. Monarchy as a whole was going to end, but no, that did not happen. Instead, counter-revolutionary forces would end up crushing the varying different revolutionary movements, and then after that, you would have the cementing of not

authoritarian rule. You would have the centralization of power under different monarchies, and that would result in monarchical rule for the next half century or so until largely that would collapse after World War I. This was a point that would have been a tipping point, but instead it just swung right back the other way than it originally was. Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year, and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions.

A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging a** and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.

Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness, available on MetaQuest. Isn't that right, Jane Fonda? Cardio will never be boring again. Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart-topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes. Bet your stationary bike can't do that. Visit GetSupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness, only on MetaQuest. Wait a team for team.

Anyway, even with that failure, the minorities in these different places would gain some victories, such as the abolition of serfdom and censorship, at least to a degree. It would still happen, but it was more rights than they previously had.

Additionally, the Empire of Austria would change to Austria-Hungary because of a very complicated issue involving sharing a power between the Austrian system and Hungarian system. And that that is a whole other mess in and of itself that I would have to explain. But I'm so curious. Yeah. So they merged. They were already the same. But instead of the Austrian Empire, it became a dual monarchy.

Where what that means is that they were two separate states, so to speak, but still the same. So they were the same empire, but two different states. Yes. So they had an emperor and maybe two kings. So both had their own kind of legislative bodies that were ruled by the emperor. So the emperor was the same for both of those. OK. Right. It was in this case, it was Franz Joseph I.

And that is something that they had different laws pertaining to education, taxes.

all the other different kinds of domestic policy that you could potentially have. And that was something that the emperor would dictate foreign policy. But all the little domestic things, those were controlled by the individual spheres of the Austrian side and you have the Hungarian side. So it was kind of like how we have like a president, but each state has a governor. Sort of. Yes. Except imagine that the governor has way more authority than it does here. OK, OK.

Makes sense. Why do they make it so complicated? Like at this point, just get rid of like kings and just become, as you said, state. Gabby, it is fascinating that you actually said that because there was a genuine plan at this or later that would happen here. Not that would happen, but there was an idea to reform the ultra Hungarian empire and break it apart into the like a federal system where all the varying different minorities and ethnicities under it.

the Slovaks, the Croatian, the Bosnians, the Serbs, like all the different entities. There was this idea of

federating it so that they were separate, but still under that same rule in order to stabilize things. Separate but equal. Here's the thing, though. They have such superiority complexes all over Europe. No offense. I love you guys, but you do. It would be terrible. Oh, yeah. No, it was. And that's one of the key reasons as to why Austrian leadership under that was very overbearing and specifically wanted to Germanize the population.

Oh, my God. See, it's always somebody wanting to Germanize the population. Yeah. Hey, interestingly, on that note, we talk about this and people don't really associate this very much because they think, oh, no, everyone was being oppressed by just the Austrians. The Hungarians tried to do the same thing. Oh, my God. So in their side, Hungary, if you notice and you actually look at a map of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and how the whole thing is split in two.

Hungary controlled many different territories as part of the greater Hungary that encompassed its own large amounts of minorities like Croatia and others. Yeah. So Hungary wanted to hungerize, Hungarianize. Hungarianize. Yeah, Hungarianize. They wanted to do that to those people. Okay.

They have got to chill with that. Oh, my God. Yes. So, again, I'm probably doing a horrible job explaining this because this is a tangent of a tangent in and of itself. But that is something that we're definitely going to address in the future. It was a relevant tangent. It was. The short of it, which is a long explanation, is that the reforms of 1849 were not enough to stop the fires of nationalism among the different kinds of peoples. It just it wasn't.

During the entire second half of the 19th century, various different minority groups would continue to plot for independence. And this could get really vicious. But...

Additionally to the domestic issues, Austrian neutrality during the Crimean War, which opposed Russia to a coalition made up of Great Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. This would end up pushing the Tsar to break his alliance with Habsburgs. It was a very contentious point in which later on there was like this idea of the alliance of the three emperors between Austria, Germany and Russia. Like the not our topic. I keep on using the term Ottoman.

autarkies but the imperial powers with centralized authority under a strong monarch there's this idea of preserving that conservative thought and that alliance ended up falling apart as time went on which is ultimately one of the things that ended up contributing to world war one but they wanted to stabilize their rule and hold on to the old ideals and resist progressive developments

In the 1870s, Russia threatened Austrian interest in the Balkans because, as it turns out, both sides wanted the same land, or if not the same land, influence over the peoples who lived there. In 1877, the Tsar would intervene in favor of Slavic minorities and the Ottomans, decisively defeating Turkish armies and barely hiding any kind of intentions that he had due to the same in Austro-Hungarian lands should the, um...

All the varying different Slavic minorities that existed in those territories want to call out for aid and independence because Russia was seen as the God, how do I put this without sounding horribly inappropriate? I was going to use the term Slavic daddy.

See, that's the problem with you. Yeah. That was actually kind of funny. But that's pretty much what it was, right? Russia wanted to be the great mother country or fatherland. I need Slavic daddy on a shirt. Slavic daddy. Slavic daddy.

Just the imperial Russians insignia on it that just says Slavic daddy. Pitch that to bunker. They're going to look at you like you're a Nazi. I would do it. I would do it. Except, of course, now a lot of people would probably think in the first place that because I would be using the Russian imperial eagle that people would associate things with Russian Ukraine, which might go very poorly with the idea that Putin wants to basically recreate the Russian empire in his image.

Actually, it's the holding on to the empire. So it's kind of ruining the vibes for everyone, you know? Yeah, it's a really messy thing. Either way, emboldened by Russian support, Czechoslovak minorities would continue to try to get their own independence. But that wouldn't happen. Despite all the desire among the varying different minorities, nothing would really come about until the entirety of Europe decided to pour gasoline on itself and just strike a match in the early 1910s. As they do. Yeah.

The famous assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Sorry, Sarajevo. Sarajevo. Why did I say that like that? I don't know, but it just, it gave me the ick. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sarajevo. Okay. You're still saying weird. Sarajevo. You're gone. When the assassination happened in the first place by the Serbian nationalists in 1914 in June, this ended up triggering World War I. So,

Now you have the question of what is going to happen with all the varying different minority entities that have been crying out for freedom. Well, promising independence for Czechoslovakia, Russia managed to secure more than 40,000 volunteer soldiers under the banner of the Czechoslovak Legion, which would be the focus of our story today. So we are finally back.

Finally getting to it. I am sorry, but that is the context that you all have to understand for why we are here in the first place. It did actually help us realize how we got here. And boy, was it a journey. Yes. Yes, it was. And you understand why this whole thing is so messy. Either way, at the same time, there were many Czechs and Slovaks who were drafted to the armed forces of Austria, which, of course, actually control the majority of the lands of their people. And that is where things get a bit dicey.

See, the Czech situation within Austria-Hungary was not exactly ideal at the start of the war. They hadn't received the recognition that Hungary did, even though this region, what we would call kind of Bohemia, was easily the biggest industrial heart of the empire. And it was its third largest nationality, some 8 million Czech people.

And yet when I say the industrial heartland, I mean that the majority of the best war potential for the empire, like the places that were producing its guns, its artillery, like all the things that you actually need to operate a war that came out of this region, which was not necessarily the most loyal to the crowd. Well, that's not going to go well for them. No, but you can.

probably then understand why this was such a crucial region for Austria to try to keep a hold of, because if they lost it, they'd have no weapons and they would have nothing to help fuel their war. Exactly. As you can imagine from the description that I have here, Austria was quite a fragile state and Slavs, as it was, was about half of the empire because Hungary and the Balkans and all the varying different entities.

Not stable, especially when you are, as I said before, about to fight Papa Slav. You mean Slavic daddy. I know, but I wanted to say that in a less inappropriate way, considering what we're doing. Papa Slav also sounds like a sounds like a Christmas figure, like a drunk uncle. I know. Which is Russia. OK, continue. A drunk, abusive uncle.

Continue. Anyway, the Bohemian Crown lands were actually as well developed as what you would see in the industrial heartlands of Germany and France. Unlike a lot of Austria-Hungary, which was

Arguably very backwards. So morale was pretty low amongst the Czechs when war broke out. And with the outbreak of that war, it meant that soon they would be set to fight their fellow Slavs and even Czechs and Slovaks that were fighting for the Entente forces. Because remember, they had a bunch of volunteers. It was almost like their own border state situation that you had in the United States where they would end up fighting their own potential cousins because they were drafted into opposing sides of the war.

Those men in the Untaught Nations weren't yet the Czechoslovak Legion, but they are worth mentioning because these volunteers in Serbia, the Rota Nazdar in France, and the Czechoslovakia in Russia would all play their own parts. Wherever possible, their battalions were dispatched to the Italian front on the Austrian side in order to reduce the likelihood that, well, they were going to desert and join the Russians and the Serbians as their fellow Slavs.

This was crucial for Austria. But as the need for troops in the Eastern Front grew ever more urgent, this principle could no longer be maintained. They literally did not have men, and so everyone had to fight. By 1915, many of these men found themselves deployed in Russian Poland, fighting their fellow Czechs and Slovaks. But that being said, let us go over then to the different groups and their stories, as that is still part of this epic, though I'm going to be brief when I describe this here.

First up, we have the Rottennessdar. This is the first Czechoslovak military unit that would be operating in France, and it was formed on August 31st, 1914. Although recruitment had begun a week earlier, it would not actually come into existence until August 31st. It consisted of 341 Czech and two Slovak volunteers who became an integrated company in a Moroccan division of the French Foreign Legion. Because, you know, that's where all the foreigners would end up pretty much serving.

In June 1915, at Arras, they would suffer huge casualties, and the company was disbanded because they literally did not have anyone to replace them. And so they were dispersed amongst other foreign legion regiments. However, they had laid the foundations for independent Czechoslovak armed forces. And over the next couple of years, Thomas Masaryk, who was the future Czechoslovakian president, and General Milan Stefanik would begin to organize Czech and Slovak troops in France. These would be the...

What is the term? The political intellectuals that would argue for freedom. They were the ones who were pushing to try and get independence recognized. French President Raymond Poncaire would sign the decree that would allow autonomous Czechoslovak units within the French army in December of 1917, and the 21st and 22nd Rifle Regiments would soon be established, forming the 1st Czechoslovakian Brigade, which would fight over the summer of 1918 on the Western Front.

In Italy, the situation was a bit different. See, the Italian army did not warm up to the idea of Czechoslovak legions because before the war, there had only been a few hundred Czechs and Slovaks that were living in Italy, far fewer than existed in France, Russia, and many of the soldiers that were fighting against the Italians along the Alpine Front, as I explained earlier, these were Czechs themselves in the beginning because that's where Austria had them in order to avoid a revolt.

So for Italy to commit to the formation of Czechoslovak Legion would mean committing to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They didn't want this. Italy actually entered later in on the war because they ended up being swayed out of the idea of gaining territory. This was one of the big things is that Italy specifically wanted some land from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they didn't want to destroy it.

Many of the POWs that Italy took were Czechs and Slovaks, and they had to be held onto for some time.

By January of 1917, there were Italian POW camps that would be set up by nationality. And during that same month, the Czechoslovak Corps of Volunteers would be created, and these men were first used as scouts for the Italian army since they spoke both German or Hungarian, and they knew Austro-Hungarian tactics. They were great for gathering intelligence, though they didn't have their own separate autonomous units that acted independently.

until after the Italian defeat at Caporetto and intense negotiations. In April of 1918, Czechoslovak military forces in Italy were finally approved, but that means that they were only really going to be active for months.

What, at that point, the next like five months, six months? By the end of the summer, there would end up being over 13,000 soldiers and over 480 officers in the Legion, and the division would see some heavy fighting in the last several months of the remaining part of the year. The big one, however, my friends, that is the focus of the story. That is the Russian side.

On the 5th of August, 1914, a battalion of Czechs and Slovaks known as the Česká Druzina, which is the Czech Panions, this would be organized within the Russian army to fight against the Austrians and their allies. There, the Druzina soldiers would serve in scatter patrols, performing a number of their own kind of separate specialized duties. They weren't the frontline fighters. They mostly were involved in things like reconnaissance, interrogating prisoners, because, again,

Once the Czechs were largely in the Austrians fighting against the Russians in 1915, this meant that you needed to have people that would be able to speak the language in order to be able to interrogate said soldiers. The thing is, as time went on, more regiments would be added as the war continued, but that was going to take a while to happen.

From its start, Czech and Slovak political leaders wanted to expand the Druzina in order to improve their potential for getting a separate state to help the war effort. And to achieve this goal, they understood that they would need to recruit from Czech and Slovak prisoners of war in Russian camps, which at first did seem like something that was possible. In late 1914, Russian military authorities did permit the Druzina to enlist Czech and Slovak POWs from the Austro-Hungarian army.

But after a few weeks, because of opposition from the branches of the Russian government, this was stopped. And so ultimately, forces would remain small for quite some time.

Despite continuous efforts to persuade the Russian authorities to change their mind and actually allow the recruitment of prisoners, Czechs and Slovaks were officially barred from recruiting POWs until the summer of 1917, almost three years later. Right as things within Russia were becoming very desperate.

The state was basically on its last legs by this point. Still, some Czechs and Slovaks were able to sidestep this ban and enlist POWs through local agreements. And if you can't see this, I'm looking at Gabby right now and I'm making air quotes, local agreements with Russian military authorities.

In other words, corruption. Oh, great. Yeah. Gabby, we're talking about Russia. And at any given point in its history, you could probably just discount things to corruption. You really could. Like that's just something that's going to end up coming up. Anyway, under these conditions, the Czechoslovak unit in Russia would grow pretty slowly from 1914 to 1917.

But in early 1916, Ruduzhina would be reorganized as the 1st Czechoslovak Rifle Regiment. During that year, two more infantry regiments would be added, which would create the Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade. The greatest moment and the thing that would end up changing the mind of many Russians and advance their cause was the fighting of the 1st Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade at the Battle of Zborov in July of 1917.

3,500 men under Russian Colonel Prozhenov were in the trenches holding a 6-kilometer or 3.7-mile line opposite of a force of largely Czech and Slovaks in the Austro-Hungarian army.

On July 2nd, the second day of the new Kerensky offensive, the Legionnaires would go and attack as shock troops. They would breach the barbed wire, advance deep into enemy territory, and took four lines of trenches along with 3,300 prisoners and 20 big artillery guns that day.

That's about as many prisoners as the entire unit size. So as many men as they had, they captured. It was a pretty big victory, especially for the size of their forces. Legion losses for that day were only 167 killed and 900 wounded. But still, if you want to think about it, that's almost like a 30% or 33% casualty rate. But still, it was a victory. And this is World War I statistics that we're talking about. So hey, small gains. Good for them.

The brigade would gain international attention and the battle did wonders for new recruiting as people wanted to sign up in droves. And it would really help Masaryk's negotiating position for the future independent Czechoslovak state.

An enlargement of the brigade would follow, and by October of 1917, the Czechoslovak Army Corps was formed with two divisions and two artillery brigades. There were so many volunteers, they even had a reserve brigade as well as a shock battalion.

soon, Masaryk would go and set up an autonomous Czechoslovak Corps of more than 50,000 soldiers. So the more successful an army was, the more likely people were to sign up? Yes, exactly. Because in... What would they do before that? They just wouldn't sign up or they'd go to another army? Largely foreign volunteers were precisely that. They were

They were volunteers. And so the whole reason behind Czechs going and wanting to fight in the first place was specifically for independence. They wanted to do this. Now, it's almost like that situation that in a revolution, if you're looking at a side that is just getting absolutely battered, you're less likely to go and sign up because you see it as, well, probably going to lose. And I'm just going to get myself and potentially my whole family killed because I'm going to explain this here in a bit.

When you have peoples that are technically speaking part of a state and they volunteer for an enemy state in order to be able to fight their home country or territory that is owned by their home country, they're no longer foreign combatants only. They are traitors, which means that they, their friends, their family, anyone could potentially be rounded up by the government and executed.

For treason? For treason. Do people, do countries still charge you with treason if it's just leaving for another country? Oh my God, yes. Yeah, they do. You know what happens in North Korea if you... Well, yeah, it's North Korea though. Yeah, but the same... But like most countries aren't about to be wilding out like that, right? Well, it depends upon the state. It depends upon the government, the ideology, how it is that they control the population, etc. There's a lot of different rules around it. Interesting. And treason is always punishable by death? Usually, yes.

Interesting. It can also be a life sentence, which has happened in many cases with the United States, like in the case of foreign spies or others. I want to say foreign spies. I mean, spying on behalf of a foreign government. But, you know, it varies. It really does depend. The thing is.

Things seem to be looking up for the Legion, right? This was a great victory. They were getting recruits all over the place. But if you know anything about World War One, what was happening to the Russian Empire this time is we're talking October of 1917. Yeah, you would know that things are about to go very bad, very, very, very quickly.

Despite the victory at Zborov, the Kerensky Offensive was overall a failure. The Tsarist government had already been overthrown with the February Revolution in 1917, and you had the provisional government that was in charge now. And the inability of that Russian provisional government to assert authority led to growing instability, which was dominated by communist Bolsheviks' attempts at seizing power.

In November of 1917, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, the communists would finally succeed in overthrowing the government, taking power in Moscow, St. Petersburg and opening the stage to the next Russian revolution, which would then form into the Russian Civil War as Russia would implode again. They really did that a lot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they did.

The question that one may then have is, OK, well, this is just after the Czechoslovak Legion really started to make ground and expand itself. What the hell happens to them? Do they get all murdered? Well, see, that's what we're getting into. They're stuck in a foreign land that is no longer friendly to them. They are surrounded on all sides by potential enemies and their future is uncertain. No one knows what is going to happen. In order to get them out, that is going to take a Herculean effort and a ton of luck.

So here's how this goes down. The Bolsheviks begin peace talks with Germany as early as November of 1917, trying to peace out the war.

In the meantime, Russian authorities were planning to evacuate Slovak forces through the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok on the Pacific, this being the major Russian port that was arguably the only big Russian port that existed there on the Pacific coast. From there, they would be able to be transported all the way around the world back to Western Europe in order to be able to continue the fight.

It would be necessary to move east in an extremely roundabout way as the Russian ports to the west in order to try and escape that way, the faster way, were already blockaded. So a long journey thus awaited the men. However, negotiations between the Russians and the Germans were not going as well as Lenin had hoped they would.

The Germans would demand major territorial concessions, including an independent crane, which would become a German protectorate. They wanted to create a series of buffer states to the east where they would be able to have dominance over this. And for anyone who's actually seen my gaming YouTube channel, where I often play the Kaiser Redux series,

which is the alternate history in which Germany won World War I. If you look at the map of there and see all the independent states to the east of the German Empire, this is what it is talking about as part of the great like Kaiser's pack, like the whole region that is subservient to Germany. This was the goal.

Because that was going really slow, in February, the Central Powers would launch Operation Boschlak in order to force the hand of Moscow and make them come to the table and agree. One of the objectives of the offensive was to destroy any remaining forces that had been fighting against them, such as the Czechoslovak Legion, to stop them from escaping to the Western Front.

One of the demands that I think they actually gave in that time was specifically that they demanded to Russian authorities that they stop the Legion from escaping so they could take them as prisoners of war. But the Legion was already trying to move away as fast as possible. The overall operation was

was a success. The Germans would succeed. Lenin was forced to bend to their demands. However, the Czechoslovak Legion did manage to fight off the Austro-German offensive at the Battle of Bakhmut and flee from Ukraine into Soviet Russia.

This was a desperate fight as the men of the Legion knew that it could very well be their last. Remember what I said earlier, defeat would have implied summary execution for the soldiers of the Legion because they would be traitors to Austria-Hungary. So if they got captured, they, their friends, their family, everyone would be executed likely, or at least they would be executed and their friends and family would probably be thrown into jail and who knows what would happen after that.

Once in Russia proper, there, the 42,000 Czechoslovak volunteers would negotiate the last details of their evacuation. On March 25th, both sides would sign the Penza Agreement, something that would explicitly allow the Legion to keep some of their weapons and then use the Trans-Siberian Railway to reach Vladivostok. However, proceedings were slow and not smooth at all.

This was complicated because Russia at this time was entering into a state of civil war. There were many different separate factions, many different groups that controlled different parts of the country, even if they at different points were part of the same type of leadership. And so over and over and over again, Czechoslovak leaders had to negotiate for passage through certain parts. It didn't matter if the previous guy had already granted it. They had to do it again and again and again.

And the Legion and the Bolsheviks, they did not trust each other at all. Leaders of the Legion suspected the Bolsheviks were going to try to seek favor with the central powers and turn them over to them in order to gain better negotiation grounds. While the Bolsheviks saw the Legion as a threat, literally a foreign army that had been fighting for the imperialist forces earlier was inside their land, which was bad, but

Also, technically speaking, the Bolsheviks were in desperate need of professional troops to fight for them, and they did try to convince the Legion to incorporate itself into the Red Army, which, of course, they refused, which only created more mistrust. The slow evacuation by the Trans-Siberian Railway was only made worse and exacerbated by transportation shortages.

There was a severe lack of available trains as due to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Wait, no, Litovsk. Litovsk, that's what it is. Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks prioritized the westbound repatriation of German, Austrian, and Hungarian POWs.

Most of the trains that would have ran along the railway were concentrated in the West specifically for these repatriation efforts to try and return those POWs, while those that remained in the East were very small in number and simultaneously oftentimes in very poor states of repair. So everything was broken and there was very few of those available in the first place. Not easy. In these conditions, tensions were very high and it's inevitable that

That a fight was going to break out. And that's precisely what happened in May of 1918, as Legion troops slowly traveled eastward by rail under insecure, very tense conditions. Former POWs who remained loyal to these powers, including even a few Czechs and Slovaks, were already traveling west with priority under that Bolshevik protection that I talked about.

On the 14th of May at Chelyabinsk, an eastbound train that was carrying legion forces of Czechs and Slovaks who were supporting the Allies and sought independence would encounter a westbound train bearing Hungarians who were loyal to Austria-Hungary and the Central Powers that technically speaking were still at war and who regarded the legion soldiers as traitors.

So the trains met and stopped? Yes. To fight? Yeah. They're just going to throw a hand? They can just drive past each other? Here's the thing you also have to understand about Russian Railway is that it sucked. Oh my God. Russian logistics were absolutely horrible. They had very few rail lines. So oftentimes what would end up happening is that you'd get these trains that would create these huge... Not stopgap. That's not the term. Bottleneck. That's the term. So they would meet... They would have to meet at like a...

railway station and then from there sort out who was going to get priority because in some sections of the Russian network there would literally only be a single track so if a train was meeting you know part way through and it had to be organized that one train would end up having to wait at a train station for the other train that was heading that way to pass so that they could then get on it to head to the other station but they met and they were like catch these motherfucking hands sorry for the swearing no that's true that is that is what happened

So a fight broke out between the two groups, which would slowly transform into a full-scale battle. Hungarian loyalists would end up losing as the Legion, with all their professional fighting over the years and the fact they weren't POWs, would crush them. However, the issue would end up pushing local Red Army troops to intervene and arrest some of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires.

The Legion would then turn around and attack the Bolsheviks, storming the railway station and freeing their men, effectively taking over the city of Chelyabinsk while cutting off the Bolshevik rail link to Siberia. The whole incident would cause the People's Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky, who, if you heard that name, very big figure in Russian communist history, to order the complete disarmament and arrest of the Legionnaires.

At an army congress that convened in Chelyabinsk a few days later, the Czechoslovaks, against the wishes of the National Council, refused to disarm and began to issue ultimatums for their passage to Vladivostok. You will let us pass or we will fight you. And when those terms were refused, conflict was inevitable. This is going great. This is going swimmingly. As I told you, remember, there was going to be a lot of stuff. There was going to be a lot of heroics. There's going to be a lot of betrayal. There's going to be a lot of politics. There's going to be a lot of everything. And that is precisely what happens.

So fighting between the Czechoslovak Legion and the Bolsheviks erupted at several points along the Trans-Siberian Railway in the last days of May of 1918. By June, the two sides were fighting pretty much along the entire railway route from Penza to Krasnoyarsk, which I'm going to butcher a lot of these names. I'm sorry. They're Russian. There's going to be a lot of messy things in the first place. Deal with it. I'm sorry.

The thing is, you have to understand, remember what I said about the railway network and how terrible it was and how very few trains there were? This meant that the Czechoslovak Legion was spread out pretty much all along the railway at different stopping points. So this wasn't a force that was moving together in one go. This is like an entire army being strung out like a river going across the entirety of the railway station. It was messy.

And by the end of the month, legionnaires under General Mikhail Deterks would go and take control of Vladivostok, overthrowing the local Bolshevik administration. On July 6th, the legion would declare the city to be an allied protectorate. And the legionnaires began to return back west across the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to support their comrades that were still fighting there.

Despite the fact that the soldiers were extremely spread out along the entire railway, generally speaking, almost every single battle that would take place in this time, they were going to win. Moving deeper and deeper and deeper into Bolshevik territory, they were going to turn back the Reds at pretty much every single point. This would in turn free up space for the Legionnaires that were spread out along the entire line to be able to make their way east more safely. The Red Army soldiers were taken completely by surprise.

By mid-July, the Czechoslovak Legion, alongside its white allies that fought against the Reds, which this is a point I'm probably going to have to do a whole episode here on the Russian Civil War and the Reds versus the Whites and how that whole thing plays out. But they managed to take control of all of the cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Samara all the way to the Pacific.

As the Allied forces would close in Katarina Bern, where the last Tsar Nicholas II and his family were hiding, or I say hiding, they were being imprisoned there.

Bolshevik forces would execute them before evacuating the city, which this is where you then get the story of the czar, along with all of his children and his wife and the communist forces coming in and with just submachine guns, mowing them all down, down to the last child. Which czar? Was that the Romanovs? Yes, this was the last of the Romanovs. Oh, that's really sad. Yeah. Well, it's dangerous to be.

A czar. Oh, it was. It was. And when I say this, Nicholas II was not exactly a good guy. He's a very complicated figure. He wanted to be loved by his people and he wanted to be a great czar like the czars of old. But simultaneously, he was kind of inept. He was kind of stupid.

Incompetent? Yeah, he was incompetent. Like, that's the thing. Every single decision that he made, while there was kind of a logic behind it, simultaneously was just the wrong decision. Like, holy crap, that is dumb to do. People pleasers have the hardest time making decisions.

decisions that are like the most competent sometimes. I'll give you this as an example. So this is one of the big things that ended up leading to a lot of this political clout just absolutely collapsing. So in the opening days of World War I, things did not go well for Russia at all. They were getting pushed back again and again and again. For every battle they won, they lost like two or three. It was not good. And as they were being pushed back, despite all the domestic issues that they were already having,

Tsar Nicholas II decided, OK, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go to the front line and I'm going to take direct control of the military from my military leaders. Keep in mind, while he did have military training, as you know, in order to be the emperor, you had to have an education that specifically would teach you how to operate things. He had no real military experience.

Like for overall leading complete everything would come to operations for war. And he decided I'm going to go to the front and I'm going to take direct charge of the military. And this is going to boost the morale of the soldiers like an old king of old. You know, like when you would have the king who decides to lead his men from the front and charge into battle in order to inspire them. Problem was.

This did nothing to increase the effectiveness of the Russian army as it was already bad. Oh. So when he goes and takes charge, instead of the generals getting blamed for everything going wrong.

Now, he is the one who is getting blamed for everything going wrong, which only weakens his position within the military, within the domestic, like the Duma, which is like the legislature of what they would have. But it wasn't really a legislature. It's a complicated thing. It's basically their kind of state legislative body that would be summoned occasionally to fulfill the will of the emperor and get a consensus across the nation.

Either way, he weakens himself horribly from this, loses basically all support so that by the time early 1917 rolls around with Russia experiencing a famine, with horrible losses along the front, with state industry collapsing all over the country and with communists starting rebellions all over the place, everyone abandons it. That's not great. Oh, well, he tried. He tried. His intentions were...

Yeah. Again, this is a guy who wanted to try, but he made just about every wrong decision that you can imagine. It's it was a bad time to be czar in all fairness. A horrible, horrible time in all fairness. Like he wasn't gonna have any easy decision. That's to be sure. Either way, his whole family gets killed. All that happens. And the the Reds flee the city. The Legion was only a week away from it.

So that whole family died. And theoretically, this is a fascinating alternate history. Depending upon the circumstances, they potentially could have been saved with by the Czechoslovak Legion. But it did not happen. By August of 1918, Czechoslovak forces and the White Army would then manage to capture the Russian Imperial Gold Reserve that still remain at the city. Things seem to be up.

As they travel, Czechoslovak troops, along with their dependents, which this included wives, children, all the varying different peoples that actually went with them. It wasn't just an army. It was almost like a army of medieval period where it's like everyone was traveling along with them. They would convert their rail cars into barracks, into bakeries, workshops, hospitals. The trains they were traveling on ended up becoming mobile fortress castles.

Like, it is fascinating when you go and look at this. Mad Max style? Literally Mad Max style. Here, okay. In the first place, Gab, while you have this up, and for anyone who's listening to this right now, if you have a chance, look this up. Look up Czechoslovak Legion armored train. If you look this up, it straight up looks like something out of a steampunk fantasy setting where you have these trains that have been converted into mobile fortresses

That on top of all the guns they have on them, simultaneously have all the different parts that have converted into, as I said, bakeries, hospitals, repair shops, anything that you can think of. It is. It is so cool to look at, even if the idea of an armor train, which was big at this time and actually being kind of dumb. But for them at the time, it was cool. And it did actually work. Know where you are.

You know? Yeah. That would only work in this specific instance. Literally only in the short time period would that ever actually apply. So they would even publish on some of that. They had their own newspaper. Like they straight up had their own newspaper on the train. Rail cars were armed with artillery and heavily fortified. And some were even adorned with patriotic slogans and paintings of national heroes. It was...

And they would communicate up and down the line of the railway to get reinforcements or communicate issues or other things they had via telegraph lines they would capture along the way. On the other side, allied governments that were troubled by the rise of communism in Russia used the Legion's plight and their issues as justification for the 1918 intervention in the Civil War.

Although the Americans and British were hoping that foreign participation in the conflict would bring about the downfall of the Bolsheviks and allow the Russians to rejoin the war against Germany, they would openly cite the evacuation of the Legion as being one of the key reasons behind why they would intervene in the first place. If they could save Russia, that would be an added goal. But for the most part, in the beginning, it was a humanitarian effort to try and stabilize things and get the Legion out.

In August of 1918, the first of a 90,000 strong multinational force made up of American, Canadian, British, French, Japanese, and Italian troops would all land at Vladivostok to try and capture the city and hold it long enough for the Legion to embark from the Western Front. Question, when you send in that

giant mix of troops and they don't all speak the same language. Of course, they'll be in different units and whatnot. But who is coordinating this? Like, do they just get a bunch of translators and hope that no one messes up a giant game of telephone? Yes. But also, typically speaking, when a multinational effort is launched, there is a command structure that is specifically created for it with a person that is overall in charge of something.

Typically, what ends up happening is that the largest and most influential power with the largest number of forces is the one that ends up taking charge. I get that, but I'm mainly worried about the communication. Yeah, and it does end up being a mess in many different cases. Also, don't forget that at any given point, all these different powers have their own goals of what they're going to do. Like, take the Japanese as an example. They entered in on the war specifically as warriors.

opportunistic parasites. Honestly, I get it though because that's me in any game where I'm a country. I'm like, how can I lead Joppa to ride the wave to the top? Exactly. In which me using the term parasite, I'm not talking about that as like the Japanese state as a whole. I mean that in the same way that the Japanese tried to do basically what Italy did. Italy joined in the war specifically so that they could take land from Austria-Hungary.

Japan entered the war because they went, hmm, all these Russian or not Russian, all these German colonies that are down here in the different tropical islands around Asia and other things. We could take those. Also, Germany had enclaves within China and Japan was basically trying to conquer China as part of their long term end goal. So they saw this as a perfect opportunity to expand their influence and take all this different territory like Japan.

it was Shandong in China. It was one of the big cities where the Qing imperial government tried to... They wanted to join the war on the Entente side, on the ally side, to take back their territory like Shandong and others. But...

Before they could intervene, Japan invaded it anyway, took the city over from the Germans, and then afterwards, Japan lobbied the Entente to not allow China to join the war. You may wonder, why the hell would they stop the Entente from getting another ally? Because they planned on killing China. Of course they did. Yes.

So they didn't want China to get power and influence and actually develop itself and get respect because they wanted to use it as an opportunity to get staging bases to further eviscerate China as time went on. Yeah, Imperial Japan, my friends, Imperial Japan. So by autumn of 1918, with more and more locomotives arriving daily, the Czechs and Slovaks were preparing for the next leg of their journey, the sea voyage to France and the Western Front.

But events on the other side of the world ended up kind of ruining those plans. During the autumn of 1918, the Legionnaires' enthusiasm for fighting in Russia, which mostly was confined along the Volga River and Ural Mountains, this would drop rapidly.

The rapidly growing Red Army was getting stronger by the day as more and more people signed up for the Communist Revolution, retaking the territory of Kazan on the 10th of September, followed by Samara a month later. The legionnaires, whose strength would peak at around 60 or 61,000 earlier that year, they didn't really have a way to get more troops.

They before would get reinforcements from POW camps. And after this, there wasn't anyone else they could really recruit to replace their losses. What about all the people, the forces they just sent in to help them? Nope. Allied forces, allied soldiers, though they would join and somewhat in cases of volunteers or others fight the Bolsheviks in certain parts.

They didn't move forward. They didn't fully launch their efforts behind the whites in order to be able to fight the Russians or the I say the Russians, the Bolsheviks. They didn't go and fight the Bolsheviks. The allied forces who landed did not move deeper in in order to be able to fight on the front lines.

Instead, they kind of just stabilized things on the coast and then just left it there, leaving the White Army, the imperial or the provisional government supporting forces to fight the battles instead. Which, to be fair, considering how the war had been going on for so long, they were in a really bad position anyway, because literally World War One. Anyway, on the 28th of October, Czechoslovak statehood was declared in Prague.

Now, with the collapse or collapsing of the after Hungarian Empire, you would have a Czechoslovak state, which was the very thing that all these people had been fighting for in the first place, which meant there was no reason for them to continue fighting. Their goal was fulfilled. They had a home country now to return to and they wanted to go.

The final blow to their morale would arrive on the 18th of November when a coup in Omsk would overthrow the all-Russian provisional government and install a dictatorship under Admiral Alexander Polchak in control of white Siberia. And this guy...

Oh man, he's a piece of work. This is an individual who is famous for his stupidity, arrogance, and distaste of foreign soldiers. He afterwards would relegate the Legion to guard duty of supply lines while the whites fought on the front line and lost again and again and again and again.

During the summer and autumn of 1919, Kolchak's armies were in a steady retreat from the Red Eastern Army Group. On the 14th of November, the Reds would take Omsk, Kolchak's capital, initiating a desperate eastward flight by the White Army and refugees along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Over the next several weeks, the Whites' rear would just become completely disorganized as widespread outbreaks of uprisings and partisan activities supporting the Communists would fight them and disorganize them further.

The legionnaires, homesick, simply wanted to leave Siberia. They didn't want to fight anymore. There was no reason for them to fight anymore. And so they didn't. They declared their neutrality amidst the unrest and did nothing to try to stop the rebellions and support the whites anymore. Pressure from the Red Army would force the Admiral's government to retreat from Onsk with the imperial treasures.

As the train carrying Kolchak and the gold approached the town of Vizidinsk, the Bolsheviks would push further, almost catching the white commander. The latter would end up being deserted by his bodyguards and left completely alone to the mercy of the locally deployed Czechoslovak soldiers and that of the French general Maurice Chenin, commander of the Allied military mission in Siberia.

In January of 1920, rather than escort Olchak to Vladivostok, as was actually ordered by the Entente, General Janin and the Czechoslovak commander Jan Svobod would surrender him to the Fifth Army instead, betraying him. On the 7th of February, 1920, the Legionnaires would then sign an armistice with the Fifth Red Army, whereby the Red Army would allow the Czechoslovaks to leave unmolested to Vladivostok.

In exchange, the legionnaires agreed to not try and rescue Kolchak and to leave the remaining gold bullion that they had captured or rather protected from the train with the authorities in Ikutsk. Earlier that day, Kolchak would be executed by firing squad to prevent his rescue from a small white army that was on the outskirts of the city. His body was then dumped under the ice of the Ingara River, which was frozen over, and it was never seen again. It was never recovered.

On March 1st, 1920, all Czechoslovak troops were beyond the city of Yakutsk. One last thing stood in their way. The White Army Division that before they had been supporting and protecting, but now saw them as potentially hostile. This was the force that would stall the movements of the trains carrying the Legion to get a better strategic position in the upcoming fight against the Red Army. They would accuse the Czechoslovak Legion of treason for their abandonment of Kolchak, but...

A fight did not break out. By this point, the White Army was so horribly battered and weak that there was simply no way they could start another fight with the Reds bearing down upon them. The Czechoslovak soldiers would finally reach the city of Vladivostok in the summer of 1920 then, and the last soldiers were evacuated in September of that same year.

The troops would disperse aboard a series of ships that carried them back to Europe via the Indian Ocean. Others would sail across the Pacific through the Panama Canal. But eventually, all of them were repatriated. But while their long journey was finally over, their story actually is not.

In fact, what happens next is a little bit of a mystery. We don't really know about this. This is the thing that, hey, technically speaking, Gabby, you could do this as a mystery of everything because we don't know. It's one of the lost stories. You know how there's the story of like the lost Nazi gold? There's the story of like all these very different things. Yeah, this is the same kind of theory. Some historians argue that the Czechoslovak Legion did not actually go and hand over all the gold.

So on that train, there were millions, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold. And one of the theories says that as many as a full boxcar's worth of bullion, around $100 million worth, ended up accompanying the army back to Czechoslovakia. And it is believed that these funds actually helped to establish the Legio Banca in Prague, like the bank.

In fact, the bank's headquarters in the Czech capital has murals and facade that depict the army's 9000 mile three year journey across Russia. And it lends credence to this because you have a brand new state with coming out of the ashes of a broken Austria-Hungary. How does a bank start during that time? How? Well, the theory is through a bunch of Russian gold.

That they stole? That they stole. That they managed to smuggle a boxcar from that train off loaded with gold bullion. But we don't know that for sure. We don't know that for sure. The thing is, even if we don't know it, this belief was so widely held by different entities that even 20 something years later, when the Russians coming back as the Soviet Union

would go and fight the Nazis and take over pretty much all of Eastern Europe and would take over Czechoslovakia after, quote unquote, liberating it from the Nazis, which we say this as liberate. We prefer the term then under new management. When they did this, Red Army troops would raid the vaults of the bank, sending as much of the gold reserves there as they could back to Moscow, because in their mind, this gold belonged to Russia already.

So, yeah, they went and basically raided the banks and stole everything. It was a whole ordeal. Ultimately, in the end, the total number of people evacuated the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia was 67,739.

This would include 56,455 soldiers, 3,004 officers, 6,714 civilians, 1,716 wives, and 717 children, along with a number of other people. You had close to 2,000 foreigners and 198 other people, but this was primarily for the Czechs and Slovaks.

After their return to Czechoslovakia, the newly formed state, many of these soldiers would end up becoming the core of the new Czechoslovak army because these were veterans at a time that their experience was going to prove to be extremely valuable. Case in point, one of the things that immediately happened after the collapse of Austria-Hungary is that there was almost a Soviet republic that took over things in Hungary.

You would have the Soviet Hungarian Republic that would try and establish itself afterwards. And this ended up being fought off by the Czechs. I think the Austrians and the other entities that surrounded it, which would cause it to collapse. But either way,

Some of the soldiers would go off and join the army. Some would stay and join the communists. Others would go back and get into politics. Some of these getting key political figures such as Jan Savoy, who would end up becoming the country's prime minister from September to December of 1938, which was right before, you know, the Nazis took over.

Nowadays, the Czechoslovak Legion is still celebrated in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia as one of their major sources of national pride. It is a epic of their heroes who fought specifically to create their independent state, which would then become independent states. It is truly a legendary tale and one that we are going to have to end here at this time, as even now my voice is starting to get a little bit tired. But with that, my friends, we are here at the end. Thank you all for listening.

I'm going to go ahead and leave you all with a little bit of thing that I probably should have said at the very beginning. But currently at this time, though no one can actually see me, I am wearing a shirt that is part of our new merch line that we are getting ready to launch here on November 1st. We have a lot of things that are happening. Trips are getting ready to launch again. We have more spots or I say more spots. We only have six spots left for Turkey. Yes, only six spots at the time that we are recording this are open for Turkey. And besides that, well...

we're going to be revamping how things work with Patreon and everything else. I appreciate all of you for joining us here today and I will see you next time. Thank you, my friends, and goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.