Dal libro di Peter Hopkirk, “Setting The East Ablaze”

p.17 … In the towns and villages of the ancient Silk Road, Bol­ sheviks and White counter–revolutionaries fought it out in a

civil war that
engulfed vast areas ofthe country, ebbing and flowing as first one side triumphed and then the other. The Bolsheviks had managed to seize Samarkand , Tamerlane‘s former capital, early on and virtually without resistance, but without the help of Austrianprisoners of war they would undoubtedly have lost it again. For one night four train–loads of mutinous Bolshevik soldiers –‘seduced by Tsarist promises‘, the local commissars claimed–managed to capture the railway station. Such was their shortage oftroops that the Bolsheviks hadleft the town itselfvirtually undefended. There was only oneway to save it from falling into the handsof themutineers, and that was to arm the ex–POWs.

In exchange for a promisethat one of the trains would be theirs to take them home, the Austrians agreed to capture the railway station. This they did with the loss of eleven of their number. The two thousand mutineerswere disarmed and handed over to the Bolsheviks –as were the arms with which theyhad been issued for the attack. But the promise of one of thetrains was conveniently forgotten,and the NCO who led the Austrians – one Gustav Krist – found himself sentenced to death, although this was commuted at the very last minuteto three months‘ imprisonment.

Ecco le carte

Il Gioco