The Deserters: How Peasants Fled the Red Army

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore a hidden chapter of the Russian Civil War: the mass desertion of peasant conscripts from the Red Army. Drawing on Soviet archives, they uncover the scale of the problem—over 1.5 million deserters between 1918 and 1921—and how Trotsky's regime responded with a mix of terror, amnesty, and propaganda. They discuss the 'deserters' committees' that locals set up to protect runaways, the Cheka's hunt for 'malicious' deserters, and the bizarre case of the 'Green Army' in the forests of central Russia. The episode also examines how desertion shaped Bolshevik policy, from forced grain requisitions to the creation of the 'blocking detachments' that would later define Stalin's war machine. A story of ordinary people caught between two ruthless forces, it reveals the fragile human underside of revolutionary mythmaking.

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