“Our brothers in blood”: Czechoslovakian legionnaires in the information space of the east of Russia (Spring - Autumn 1918)

The article focuses on the role of the Czechoslovakian corps and its image in the periodical press of the East of Russia at the beginning of the Civil War. It was the Czechoslovakian Legionnaires who launched the Civil War in Siberia, played a key role in the overthrow of the Soviet system and ensured the superiority of the anti-Bolshevik movement. The author determines the main explanatory models and strategies of argumentation used by the press for positioning the Czechoslovakian corps, its embedding to the fundamental anti-Bolshevik “narrative of the revival” - a super-text narrative in which hundreds of tellers told the story of country liberation from the Bolsheviks to millions of Russians and foreigners. This plot is interpreted in the context of the fundamental problem of “I - Other”, where “I” is a sub-regional community, and “Other” is Czechoslovakian Legionnaires. The author concludes that Славянский мир в условиях современных вызовов ¹⁹¹ the press of that time showed duality in the interpretation of this image. On the one hand, it demonstrated a strategy of rapprochement (“appropriation”), within which the Czechoslovakian corps was perceived as a collective “Other”, close to becoming “Our”. Czechs and Slovaks were represented as “brothers in blood”, Slavs who came to help Russia in the fight against “Teutonic Magyars” and the Bolsheviks in difficult times. On the other hand, the press seeks to preserve the image of the Czechoslovakian corps as of a collective “Other”, endowed with qualities that distinguish it from “Ours” and therefore makes it some kind of cultural sample to follow (the strategy of distancing).

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