Trotsky's train was the personal

armoured train An armoured train is a railway train protected with armour. Armoured trains usually include railway wagons armed with artillery, machine guns and autocannons. Some also had slits used to fire small arms from the inside of the train, a facilit ...

Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...

while he was the

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

People's Commissar of Defense. In 1918 Trotsky had a train that was formerly used by one of the Tsar's ministers of communication converted into an armored train for him to quickly visit areas in the

Russian civil war , date = October Revolution, 7 November 1917 – Yakut revolt, 16 June 1923{{Efn, The main phase ended on 25 October 1922. Revolt against the Bolsheviks continued Basmachi movement, in Central Asia and Tungus Republic, the Far East th ...

where the Red Army needed leadership. The train included a telegraph station, a library, a printing house, a radio station, an electric power station, a squad of picked sharpshooters and machine gunners, and an automobile garage. The staff on the train included many Soviet military and civilian procurement specialists. A special newspaper – ''En Route'', which served as agitation for the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

– was published in it. The armored train contributed to the formation of the Red Army and the subsequent consolidation of the power of the Bolsheviks in

Soviet Russia The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR ( rus, Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, Rossíyskaya Sovétskaya Federatívnaya Soci ...

. The train was awarded the highly prestigious Decoration of the Red Flag in honor of the work that it and its crew performed during the civil war.

References

Sources and further reading

* Heyman N. M. ''Leon Trotsky and the Birth of the Red Army'' // Army Quarterly and Defence Journal. 1975. Vol 105, No. 4. pp. 407–418. * Heyman N. M. ''Leon Trotsky : propagandist to the Red Army'' // Studies in Comparative Communism: Trotsky and Trotskyism in perspective. Los Angeles, Cal.: Univеrsity of Southern California, 1977. Vol. 10, No. 1–2. pp. 34–43. DOI:10.1016/S0039-3592(77)80073-2. * ''Leon Trotsky's Armored Train'' // Russia in war and revolution, 1914—1922 : a documentary history / ed. J. W. Daly, L. T. Trofimov. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2009. . * Tarkhova N. S. ''Trotsky's Train. Unknown Page in the History of the Civil War'' // The Trotsky Reappraisal / ed. by T. Brotherstone and P. Dukes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. . * Winsbury R. ''Trotsky's War Train'' // History Today Magazine. 1975. August, Vol. 2, No. 8. pp. 523–531. {{Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky Russian Civil War Armoured trains