Uniforms of the 1st Russian-Czech Volunteer Regiment, 1918

All material and reconstructions are by A. Karevskiy.

In the summer of 1918 the Samara KOMUCH government, holding a pathological distrust of its own officer corps, found what seemed to be the ideal way to form a combat-ready army. It was decided to form mixed Russian-Czech regiments: the officers would be Czechoslovakian and the soldiers Russian, with the latter recruited exclusively from volunteers, rather than conscripted. Such regiments were organised in Samara, Ufa, Ekaterinburg, Kungur and Kurgan, but their further development was halted at the insistence of the new Supreme Commander-in-Chief (of the Ufa Directory government), General Boldyrev. Only in General R. Gaida's Ekaterinburg group did one continue to form. After the Czechoslovak Corps withdrew from participation in internal Russian affairs in the autumn of 1918, its officers left the Russian-Czech formations. By February 1919 the men of those units had been incorporated as reinforcements into the units Admiral Kolchak's Russian Army.

Uniforms of the Russian-Czech Regiments (possible variants):
1 – Private, 1st Samara Russian-Czech Regiment of the People's Army;
2 and 3 – private of a Russian-Czech Regiment in the Ufa Directory's Russian Army;
4 – Officer of the Czechoslovak Corps in a command position in a Russian-Czech Regiment;
5 – shoulder-board of a private in the Ufa Directory's Russian Army;
6 – cockade of the Russian-Czech regiments

Shoulder-boards were re-introduced on 2 October 1918. The cipher has been reconstructed based on the ciphers of the Czechoslovak Corps in the early period of its existence ("Ч.-С.").

According to documents kindly provided by B. Panus (Military Museum in Prague, Czech Republic), the cockade was an equilateral triangle with its apex pointing downwards, the lower half of which was in the colours of St. George, and the upper half in white and red. The colours of St. George were associated with the KOMUCH People's Army, while white and red stood for the Czechoslovak Corps: their combination indicated the mixed nature of the unit. It is believed that the cockade was made of fabric: a rigid base was first covered with white and red material, and then supplemented with St. George ribbon at the bottom.