The Russian Imperial Guard in 1917
Blead Out in World War One the Guards Allowed the Monarchy to Fall
The most dangerous and pivotal point of the Revolution came when men of the 4th company of the Pavlovsky Regiment mutinied on March 11, 1917 and got in a firefight with tsarist police. This started a domino effect and the next day more regiments of the guard including the famed Volhynia, Litovksi and Preobrazhensky Regiments went over to the insurrection. The last unit still loyal to the tsar, the Palace Grenadiers, five companies of the Moscow Regiment and some cossacks under General Khabalov were ordered to leave the Winter Palace so that it would not become a battlefield and simply melted away. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated soon after and Russia became a shaky democracy. This was a polar opposite of how the Guard acted in 1905.
The Guards went downhill from there, men deserted wholesale; most remaining officers were cashiered so they would not be lynched by revolutionary squads. New officers were elected by popular vote and a myriad of counter productive committees were formed that effectively crippled the remaining forces. In June when the machinegun regiment mutinied against the young democracy, the majority of the Guard stood idle and did not take a side. In August during the Kornilov revolt it did the same. Tired of fighting the Guard once again stood by the November when Lenin’s Bolsheviks sized power. The only defenders of the Winter Palace in November were young military academy cadets, a battalion of women, and a line Cossack unit that disappeared into the night.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in the November Revolution, Colonel Alexander Kutepov, last commander of the Preobrazhensky Regiment formally disbanded what was left of his unit on December 2nd, 1917. The Bolsheviks disbanded the entire Imperial Guard corps on May 20, 1918 over a year since the Tsar had abdicated.
The officers and men of the Guard served on both sides of the Russian Civil War. Notable Guards officers General Wrangle and Kutepov went on to lead the Whites in the South. General Mannerhiem went on to defend his newly free country of Finland for the next thirty years. The stories of rank and file guardsmen fighting with the Reds are common. Both sides sought to capitalize on the legend of this old Tsarist fighting force. In the south General Deniken's white army had a composite regiment formed of former guardsmen who still wore thier uniforms and decorations. In St Petersburg the muntinous members of the former Semenovsky Reserve battalion reformed into a regiment of Red Guards. These men lived up to thier former reputation and promptly went over to General Yudenich's white army in 1919 when he advanced towards the city unsuccesfully.
The 1er Regiment Etrangère de Cavalerie (1er REC) or 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment, part of the world famous French Foreign Legion was formed in Tunisia in 1921 by members of the Russian Imperial Guards Cavalry who had fought and lost on the White side in the Civil War. The Finnish Army, who provided a regiment to the Tsar's Imperial Guards from 1830 to 1917, traces the lineage of a current special forces unit, the Guard Jaeger Regiment to its old imperial namesake to this day. The Reds, as the Soviet Union, decreed regiments who had served with great honor as "Guards" regiments and used the title extensively throughout World War Two and the Cold War. Today many of the units of the Russian Army still hold this honorary title.
On March 20, 1993 The Russian Army established the Presidential Regiment from the old Tomb of Lenin Guards. It is housed in the Kremlin Arsenal and wears an 1812-pattern Imperial Guards Uniform that is almost an exact copy of the Egerski Regiment----and they still goose step.
You can bet the ghost of Peter the Great is reviewing them.
Sources –
Mark Conrad's The Russian Army, 1914
Melegari, The Great Regiments, 1964
Stewart, George. The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention. Macmillan, 1933.
Footman, David. Civil War in Russia Faber and Faber, 1961.
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