ABSTRACT
The Czechs and Slovaks lived in the region of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia embraced by the then fragile borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The prospect for a national army seemed a fond aspiration as long as the Slavs were constrained by the Habsburg yoke. The men were compulsorily inducted into the army of Austro-Hungary and escorted with reluctance to war. Thomas Masaryk's distrust of the Russians merely intensified but, in the Druzina, he had at the very least the embryo of what he had always dreamed, a Czech national army. The main centre of Czechoslovak population in Russia was in the city of Kiev in the Ukraine. In October 1914, the Stavka issued an order permitting other Slavic people to join the Russian Army on condition that they took Russian citizenship. Service in the Legion had not greatly appealed to the Czech volunteers but French law precluded them from forming a national unit within the French Army.
