Abstract
At the end of 2022, the research project "Czech Russians and the crossroads of modern and contemporary history: a biographical interview" was completed. The project focused on researching the historical memory of people with Russian nationality, language, and culture who lives in the Czech Republic for a long time or permanently. The research lasted about three years, from April 2020 to December 2022. The project was financed by the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University within the framework of the Specific University Research grant (Project SVV 260 608 / 2020 Historical-anthropological research.) Our research team was interested in the relationship of Czech Russians to key issues of modern Czech-Russian history, among which the story of the Czechoslovak legions (1914-1918) in particular belonged.
Several dominant narratives emerged when discussing and interpreting this issue in the interviews. At the same time, it can be seen that the assessment of Czechoslovak legionnaires as historical actors is to some extent homogeneous, and mostly of a rather negative nature. The authors of the contribution will therefore reflect on the extent to which this is mainly due to the specific post-Soviet perspective of the narrators and the dependent assessment of the Czechoslovak legionnaires' actions on the territory of the former Russian Empire during the civil war. These positions, as it seems to us, are partially corrected due to the influence of education obtained in the Czech Republic or as a result of a relatively long stay here.