Kevin J. McNamara
Author & Essayist
A former journalist and congressional aide, Kevin J. McNamara has authored two books and more than 80 book reviews and essays, most of which deal with Europe, its history, current politics, stubborn challenges, and its difficult half-sibling, Russia.
A journey across eastern Siberia led to McNamara’s best-known narrative history, Dreams of a Great Small Nation, which tells the story of 50-65,000 deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army who are cast adrift inside Russia at the end of World War One. Isolated, surrounded, and threatened amidst war and revolution, these Czechs and Slovaks, long oppressed by the Austrian German rulers of their hated empire are organized into an unlikely army by an improbable leader — a fugitive professor of philosophy from Prague.
They turn on the rulers of Austria-Hungary, which was then fighting alongside Germany, to fight alongside the Americans, British, and French — in return for an Allied promise to create an independent Czecho-Slovakia. Their efforts to reach the trenches in France leads them on a perilous journey across Siberia,
where an altercation at a remote train station along the Trans-Siberian Railway explodes into a brawl that launches one of the wildest misadventures in modern history.
McNamara first learned of the incredible exploits of this Czecho-Slovak Legion during a journey across eastern Siberia in 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Traveling almost 2,000 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railway between Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, he happened upon the story of these legionnaires, who riveted the world’s attention in 1918 by seizing all of Siberia and nearly toppling Moscow’s new communist regime. Their improvised, yet powerful, army played a role in the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War, Allied Intervention, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the founding of Czecho-Slovakia, and the diplomacy that ended the war and remade the map of Europe.
McNamara subsequently acquired and had translated more than 100 first-hand accounts by the very men who served in the Czecho-Slovak Legion. Their personal stories were published in Prague in the 1920s in five volumes called Cestami Odboje: Jak Zily A Kudy Tahly CS. Legie (The Road to Resistance: How the Czech Legion Lived and Fought), but such works were suppressed during the Nazi and Soviet conquests of Czecho-Slovakia. No longer censored following the collapse of communist rule, these first-hand accounts have never before been rendered in English.
The result — Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs, 2016).
A former journalist and bureau chief for Calkins Media Inc., and a former Capitol Hill aide to U.S. Congressman R. Lawrence Coughlin, McNamara is an Associate Scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. He earned the B.A. in journalism and M.A. in international politics from Temple University, where he was a student of noted military historian Russell F. Weigley. He also earned a certificate in national security law from the University of Virginia’s School of Law.
A former contributing editor to Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, he has been published in Academic Questions, The American Spectator, Aspen Review Central Europe (Czech Republic), Commentary, Defense News, Historická Revue (Slovak Republic), Hospodářské Noviny (Czech Republic), Military History Quarterly, Modern Age, Orbis, Russian Life, The University Bookman, and The World and I, as well as in the Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Detroit News, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Seattle Times. His work has been translated into Czech, Korean, Russian, and Slovak and has been cited by the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Commission on Broadcasting to the People's Republic of China. He consulted on an exhibit based on his book, Guts & Glory: The War Train that Shaped a Nation (April 7—December 31, 2018), at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, Cedar Rapids, IA.
http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/hardcover/dreams-of-a-great-small-nation/9781610394840
http://www.fpri.org/contributors/kevin-mcnamara