In the struggle for the acquisition of national statehood

Abstract

The article gives a high assessment of the monograph of the famous St. Petersburg researcher A. M. Zakharov, dedicated to the participation of Slavic volunteer formations during the First World War and the Civil War in Russia. The author considers this phenomenon as a special case, which had a number of distinctive features. It is noted that the Slavic formations, which had many years of combat experience, subsequently played a decisive role in the formation of the independence of a number of European states. It is indicated that, contrary to the established opinion, not only the Czechoslovak Corps, but also parts of Poles, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes operated on the territory of Russia. Abstracts of the monograph by A. M. Zakharov are compared with data from little-known documents from archival collections in Moscow and Novosibirsk.