Article content

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Over the next two months, more than five million foreigners will come to Canada on their summer vacation. For the rest of the summer, the National Post presents this series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have taken time out from shaping world events to pay us a visit — and how that visit shaped them. Today, Tristin Hopper reports on how Canada made Leon Trotsky miss the opening months of the Russian Revolution.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Trotsky's tactical ruthlessness may have won the Bolsheviks Russia. But he almost missed the uprising in a Canadian jail Back to video

The deadliest war in all Canadian history had just ended, but for 4,000 unlucky Canadian soldiers, another war was just beginning.

As Russia descended into civil war between Bolsheviks and a loose coalition of anti-Communists, Canada, along with its other Great War allies, had promised troops to help patch up what was left of Imperial Russia.

In Victoria, B.C., when French-Canadian conscripts were told they were being shipped to Siberia, they mutinied. Within full view of citizens in the quiet B.C. capital, volunteer soldiers were brought up to whip the Quebecers with belts and march them onto waiting ships at the point of a bayonet.

A ruthless tactician headed the armies these men were being sent to fight. He drove millions of peasants into his ranks by force, held families hostage to ensure a soldier’s loyalty and even revived the Ancient Roman practice of decimation. If a unit retreated without orders, every tenth man was ordered killed.