Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr

Up to the 1980s prisoners of war were hardly even mentioned in military history. Only in recent years have scientists acknowledged the importance of this topic. For their investigations some of them chose the First World War, especially the Eastern front, where more than 5 million soldiers were captured until the revolutionary events of 1917/18. Contrary to the few existing studies, the present publication concentrates more on the evaluation of captivity in the historical background rather than on the description of "POW-fates" in "the hands of their enemies". It therefore focuses on the meaning of captivity and repatriation during the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Communist International. Based on documents of the central archives in Vienna and Moscow, the thesis comes to the following results: On the one hand, conflicts between the soldiers of the Central Powers in the former Tsarist empire, in particular between the Austro-Hungarian nationalities, for example between the "Bolshevik internationalists" and the "Czech Legion", played a decisive role in the beginning of an Eastern European "period of confusion" which can hardly be entitled a "Russian Civil War". On