To Serve the Russian Empire: The Autobiography of Boris Héroys

By John Elverson

This is the self-portrait of one man’s journey through life, schooled at two prestigious boarding schools in Saint Petersburg. He was chosen as one of two chamber pages to Princess Alix (Alexandra Feodorovna) at her wedding to Tsar Nicholas II. Commissioned into the elite Egersky Lifeguards Regiment, he paints a vivid picture of regimental life: the officer’s mess on Ruzovskaya Street, guard duty at the Anichkov Palace, the Peter and Paul Fortress and at the Tsar’s coronation, Military manoeuvres at Krasnoe Selo, and life in fashionable Saint Petersburg. In 1901 he attended the General Staff Academy, graduating in 1904 with the General Leontiev Prize for his thesis on strategy. The scene then changes to the Far East where, as a junior staff officer, he took part in the war against Japan. After Russia’s defeat, he describes his provincial posting to the divisional HQ in Kiev before being invited to teach tactics at Saint Petersburg’s General Staff Academy. After obtaining his professoriate, everything changes with the start of the First World War. He describes his career against the backdrop of Russia’s fortunes from the successful Galician campaign through the disastrous retreat and eventual stalemate after the Kerensky Offensive and the Bolshevik takeover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546284598

John Elverson

John Elverson was born in Kenya during the final years of the British Empire, and he was brought up in England, Malaya, Singapore, and Germany before his father retired to a small East Devon Farm. He was educated at Cheltenham College and Reading University, where he studied agriculture, culminating in a job working on a beef cattle ranch. He later worked for a London software company before co-founding and later selling a stake in his own company. He also worked for General Electric. A widower, he’s retired and lives in Scotland’s Galloway Hills.

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2018 John Elverson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/06/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8460-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8459-8 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Prologue

First Cadet Corps

Corps Des Pages

Egersky Life Guards

The Military Academy

The General Staff

The Japanese War

Kiev General Staff

Commanding A Company

Return to Division HQ

St Petersburg General Staff

Military Academy Professoriate

Commanding A Battalion

Southwestern Front

123rd Kozlovsky Regiment

Chief of Staff 31st Infantry Division

Izmailovsky Life Guards

The Special Army

Chief of Staff 11th Army

The Academy Again

Epilogue

Encyclopaedia

Appendix -

Bibliography

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

St Petersburg pre-1914

Eastern Europe in 1914

World War I Russian Front

Far East Theatre of War in 1904

The South Manchurian Battlefield

His Imperial Majesty’s Corps des Pages- A day off

Egersky Barracks on Ruzovskaya Street by B.V. Héroys

The Morning of a Parade for a Guards Officer by B.V. Héroys

Krasnoe Selo 1914

Boris Vladimirovich Gerua in dress-uniform

Boris Vladimirovich Gerua on Campaign

Colonel Gerua with the Kozlovskys

Izmailovsky Life Guards Regiment by B.V. Héroys

Izmailovsky Life Guards Regiment - on the march

Battle of Krasnystaw 4th - 6th July 1915

Vilensky Operation, August- September 1915

Colonel Gerua with his regiment

Colonel Gerua at Guards HQ Molodechno - June 1916

Stokhod Operations - July 1916

Cavalry General Vasily Iosifovich Gurko - by B.V. Héroys, 1921

At the Special Army HQ, Lutsk December 1916

General Baluyev (right), commander Special Army

Special Army HQ - Maj Gen Vineken sitting at the table

Major General Gerua at Special Army HQ, Winter 1916

Dolce far Niente (St Ives) by B.V. Héroys (Torre Abbey Museum)

The Tea Dance by B.V. Héroys

Boris Vladimirovich in artist uniform

Romanov Family Tree

FOREWORD

T HIS IS THE STORY of my grandfather. As I write this foreword I am reminded that not only am I a grandson of an eastern European immigrant, but that my own military background shared some similarities with Boris’. We both had the enormous privilege of commanding a Guards battalion on operations and subsequently of commanding a Guards regiment of multiple battal ions.

In the 1930s Boris spent some time carefully writing his military memoirs and then, subsequently, about his life as an artist. My brother Claude, when working on our family history in 1999, said: ‘Boris is my hero; he wrote it all down.’

My father Vladimir who spoke fluent Russian edited out the family and personal content from the military memoirs, the full originals of which are now in a St Petersburg Library. He then had them printed in Paris in Russian in 1970.

There is a strange lack of information about Boris’ counter-revolutionary activities both in Russia and in England between his leaving the World War I battlefront in Austria and starting his new life as an artist in England. John Elverson covers this period in his Epilogue, based on papers left by Boris’ companion of 15 years, Dorothy Barkworth, my brother Claude’s ‘The Héroys Family’ history, and Brian Edwards’ ‘The Luck to Survive’.

The record of his life as an artist only came to light recently amongst Dorothy’s legacy papers and were then edited by my brother Claude in 2016. As a Russian speaker, he was able to compare Boris’ original Russian with Dorothy’s translation.

The daunting task of translating the military memoirs from the Russian into English was commenced by John in 2015. Daunting, because John does not read a single word of Russian. Nevertheless, he painstakingly went through the tale, sentence by sentence, using computer translators to tease out the true meaning. His many challenges included the Russian idiom, military terminology, family names and place names. His translation has, therefore, retained a certain quaint ‘Russian-ness’ which brings the tale all the more to life.

The reader of the military memoirs will find that the interest will go far beyond the personal recollections of my grandfather whom I never met, beyond an analysis of the type of soldier that he was, and will also include the military, political and social insights that Boris reveals in a country going through cataclysmic change. The recollections of his life as an artist are equally captivating.

Boris was a serious professional soldier who became a respected professor at the Military Academy. Biased though I may be, I have gained the firm impression that he was the type of soldier who tended to look down and worry about his subordinates, rather than look up in order to try and impress his superiors. I believe that this focus made him effective in war and successful in battle. In his second life in England, having become a professor at the Chelsea School of Art, he earned the respect of his contemporary artists, such as Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

His gravestone in Devon is inscribed with the simple tribute: ‘Soldier and Artist’. Enjoy!!

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Héroys

formerly Grenadier Guards.

PREFACE

M Y MOTHER’S AUNT DOROTHY, after a long spell in a Care Home, died in March 1986 aged eighty nine. Amongst the usual artist’s bric-a-brac and tools of the trade found at her house in Torquay, was a self-portrait in pencil of Boris Vladimirovich Héroys. On the back was written ‘To my Student’, it was dated Christmas 1927.

It was 1927 that Dorothy Barkworth first attended the Chelsea School of Art, where she was taught drawing by Boris Vladimirovich Héroys. They ended up setting up home together in Chelsea and later, during the Second World War, moving to Paignton in Devon. They had a holiday home, the Old Customs House in Kirkcudbright, which was next door to the artist A. E. Hornel’s Broughton House. One imagines that there was quite an artist community there at that time.

Dorothy was born in September 1896, the second child of Edmund Barkworth and Clara Adelaide Maitland Reid. She was brought up on Edmund’s farming estate, centred on South House, in the village of Piddletrenthide near Dorchester, the county town of Dorset. She was educated privately with her younger sister Betty, by a tutor called Miss Paquelin until her mother died at the young age of forty-three in 1912. In the same year her uncle, Algernon Barkworth, had decided to treat himself to a first-class ticket to New York aboard the Titanic. He survived but had to swim for it, eventually hauling himself onto an upturned collaspsible lifeboat. Edmund sold his estate that year and moved to Hillymead in the South-East Devon coastal town of Seaton. Later marrying his wife’s nurse Ellen Bamber.

Dorothy was sent to Sherborne Girls School in January 1913, aged sixteen, she stayed for two terms. She grew up to be a self-possessed and determined lady.

I can remember Hillymead very clearly as it was our home whenever my father was on leave from his regiment and in-between his overseas postings. For what had been an all-female household since the start of the Second World War, there were some masculine artefacts from a previous age that at the time seemed perfectly natural but on later reflection appeared totally incongruous. The corridors were lined with Red Deer heads, all shot on the island of Mull. There was a very well-equipped gun room under the stairs with a collection of ancient firearms and the attic was stuffed with every kind of weapon, many of unknown age and uncertain ethnicity: bows and arrows, spears, swords, and a stock whip. There was a set of over-used toy soldiers, a selection of Boys Own albums and other stirring adventure books.

Occasionally Aunt Dorothy would breeze-in from Torquay, tweed-clad, she would stay for only an hour or two. Apparently, they had been calling in from time to time ever since Boris and Dorothy had moved to Paignton.

Dorothy’s elder brother was my grandfather. He inherited Hillymead in 1931. I had spent some time researching his career in the Royal Field Artillery: graduation from the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1912, the war years on the Western Front, a spell in India, his retirement, his recall at the start of the Second World War to the Training Department at Aldershot and his subsequent death from pneumonia in the spring of 1940.

I thought it would be interesting to contrast his experiences on the Western Front with that experienced by Boris Vladimirovich against Germany’s Eastern Front. I thought that I could make do with translating a paragraph here and there from Boris’ memoirs. As I got better at the process, I found his story fascinating, a unique history from the last days of Imperial Russia, leading me on to fill in all the gaps, greatly encouraged by Claude and Alexander, Boris’ grandsons.

John Elverson

October 2017

INTRODUCTION

T HIS IS THE SELF-PORTRAIT of one man’s journey through life. Starting from a privileged position in Tsarist Russia: attending two prestigious boarding schools in St Petersburg, commissioned into one of the elite Life Guards’ regiments, studying at the General Staff Academy , attaining his goal as a professor of tactics in academia, experiencing two savage wars, and eventually, perhaps finding his true vocation as an artist in e xile.

Boris Vladimirovich lived through the last days of Imperial Russia and the start of the Soviet era. In his writings, he brings a new perspective to these events, and in the process, describes some of the high-ranking players on the imperial stage.

His family, though not wealthy, had, through service to the Empire, gained a privileged position in St Petersburg society. Boris was schooled, initially at the First Cadet Corps, housed in the Menshikov Palace across the Neva River on Vasilievsky Island, and subsequently at the prestigious Corps des Pages in the Vorontsov Palace, situated on Sadovaya Street close to the renowned Nevsky Prospekt on the St Petersburg mainland.

Whilst a schoolboy, Boris accompanied the funeral cortege of Alexander III as a page-boy and later was chosen as one of two chamber-pages to Princess Alix (Alexandra Feoderovna) at her wedding to Nicholas II.

At the end of his schooling, Boris describes the military exercises at Krasnoe Selo and his selection to the Egersky Life Guards Regiment, one of the top regiments of the elite Guards.

Boris proves to be a shrewd judge of character, and during his initial career in the Guards and his subsequent time studying for his General Staff qualifications, he describes a number of the prime movers in Tsarist Russia, such as Dragomirov, Leer, Palitsyn, Alekseyev and Sukhomlinov, many of whom he had known and worked under.

He was a keen observer and a lively raconteur in his description of an officer’s life in the Imperial Army, in a provincial regiment during peacetime; as a junior staff officer in the Japanese War and during the Great War, both in command of a frontline regiment and of a Guards regiment and later as Quartermaster General and Chief of Staff of an army during the closing stages of Russia’s war against the Central Powers.

The Russo-Japanese War was carefully followed by the western powers at the time, with observers embedded with the respective sides, keenly interested as they were in a ‘modern’ war between the two, recently industrialised, sides. However, it is no longer much known about in the West, having been eclipsed in magnitude by the First World War. I have outlined in an appendix, the events leading up to the conflict and some of the main events during that war for a modern audience.

During the First World War, Boris describes the excitement of being on the winning side during the Galician Campaign against the Austrians, albeit against the backdrop of the disastrous loss of Russia’s Second Army in East Prussia at the Battle of Tannenberg. After that, the painful Russian retreat from Galicia, deep into Russian territory against the overwhelming superiority of the German armaments is described in detail, until there comes the moment when everyone cheers with the decision by the tsar to take overall command of his armies, even though everyone must have known that he would fail, though no one imagined that the consequences would prove to be quite so apocalyptic.

Boris ends with a description of his experiences during the final days of the Russian Empire, the loss of discipline in the ranks, the attempts by Kerensky to continue the war and the final takeover by the Bolsheviks.

Boris’ family name was Héroys, of French origin. When his ancestor, Claude moved to St Petersburg, the Cyrillic spelling became ‘Геруа’, which translates as ‘Gerua’ and pronounced with a hard ‘G’. I have used the Gerua form of his name in a Russian setting and the Héroys form after his exile to the west. His descendants in the west are Héroys.

St%20Petersburg%20Pre-1914.jpg

St Petersburg pre-1914

Eastern%20Europe%201914.jpg

Eastern Europe in 1914

World%20War%20I%20Russian%20Front.jpg

World War I Russian Front

Far%20East%20Theatre%20of%20War%201904.jpg

Far East Theatre of War in 1904

South%20Manchurian%20Battlefield.jpg

The South Manchurian Battlefield

PROLOGUE

M Y GREAT-GRANDFATHER Claude Héroys , who according to the History of the Academy of Arts, was an architect, professor, and academician moved from Paris to Russia in the service of Catherine II, known to us as Catherine the Great . At that time in 1774, Russia had signed the Treaty of Kü çük Kaynarca, which concluded the brilliant first Turkish war. The names of Potemkin, Suvorov and Rumyantsev reverberated across the country. A year before, the Pugachev Rebellion had been suppressed.

At the beginning of 1774 the venerable Diderot was the guest of the Empress, though he didn’t live in the palace, as he expected. In St Petersburg he certainly saw another famous Frenchman, Falconet, occupied at the time with casting the statue of Peter the Great.

The capital was being feverishly built up. The third Frenchman, who built the Imperial Academy of Arts on the Neva Embankment, was Vallin de la Motte. Prior to this the Academy was huddled in houses near the future building on the same right, Vasileostrovsky bank of the Neva. Even earlier, until 1762, it was registered in Moscow at the university. As a university, and as a new born (since 1757), the Academy of Arts represented the beginning of these educational institutions, averaging almost a hundred students in them.

In an architectural fever, structures made of stone rose to the glory of St Petersburg: Felten’s bridges on the Neva, the Marble Palace of Rinaldi, the Chernyshev Bridge (now the Lomonosov Bridge) by Perone, who had designed the bridge at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. With 1779 standing out for the ingenious Giacomo Quarenghi with a string of buildings. Following these foreigners: Kokorinov; Bazhenov and Starov stand out. The last two in time could have been my great-grandfather’s pupils. It is not known whether he built anything; being a professor, he can have had little opportunity.

Painters of that time were, the portraitists: Dmitry Levitsky; Vladimir Borovikovsky and Shebanov. The first landscape painters were Sylvester Shchedrin and Fedor Alekseev.

The first director of the Academy was the diligent Losenko, who had studied in Paris, and who died in 1773.

The name of my great-grandfather is mentioned several times in ‘Materials on the History of the Academy of Arts’, edited by A. Petrov in the 1850s. Unfortunately, this book couldn’t be found in the library of the British Museum and I didn’t succeed in finding it in exile. The stunted compilation ‘History of the Academy of Arts’ by Heinrich Reimers, which is available in the British Museum, ed. 1807, doesn’t give any essential references, except the translation into French of the first regulations of the Academy. Among the forty-three foreign artists who were in Russia (actually in St Petersburg) in 1807, according to the list attached to Reimers’s book, there is no Gerua. Therefore, he must have died by this time.

Claude’s son Alexander, was born in 1784. He was educated at the Engineering Corps for Noble Cadets (which was also for artillery). He graduated in 1800 and served sixteen years as an officer in the Pioneer Regiment. In the following year, the Engineering and Artillery Cadet Corps was transformed into the Second Cadet Corps and lost its special meaning, and in 1804 the School was established for the training of military engineers. This served as the basis for the future Engineering School and Academy (1819), which was subsequently under the command of my grandfather as Chief of Staff of the exalted General Inspectorate of Engineering.

The Second Cadet Corps considered my grandfather a pupil and placed him among their outstanding students.

A. K. Gerua was a captain in the Patriotic War of 1812 and in the battles of Yakubov, Klyastitsy and Golovchitsa. He was in the 1813 engagements at Lützen, Bautzen and Leipzig, and apparently at the Battle of Kulm in Bohemia (being a commander of a field company of his name attached to the Guards Corps). In 1814, they were near Paris.

In 1816, Alexander Klavdievich was appointed commander of the Sixth Pioneer Battalion, and in 1818, with promotion to colonel, he was transferred for his outstanding service to the Life Guards Engineering Battalion. He was at the same time appointed an aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich (the future Tsar Nicholas I). Because of this he became acquainted with the Grand Duke, the future head of all military engineering departments. He remained a close associate of Grand Duke Nicholas, and then of his brother Michael who followed him as head of department, until 1849, i.e. for about thirty years.

In 1820 Alexander Klavdievich received command of the Life Guards Engineering Battalion, and on 30th August 1825, the name-day of Tsar Alexander I, he was granted Wing Adjutant to his Majesty. This was the last award in the retinue of Alexander I.

In 1826 Alexander Klavdievich was made a major general in connection with the coronation of the new Sovereign, during which my grandfather fulfilled the duties of chief of staff to the troops participating in that event, he was appointed adjutant general (at that time there were no generals in the Suite of his Majesty, the rank was subsequently given to major generals).

He graduated from the service in 1849 to become a member of the Council of War and he died on 12th February 1852. He had all the awards, up to the St Alexander Nevsky diamond decoration and Saint George the Victorious 4th Class, for twenty-five years of service.

During the Decembrist revolt in 1825, as Wing Adjutant, Colonel Gerua led the Life Guards Sapper Battalion into the courtyard of the Winter Palace and occupied it just a minute before the rebels were ready to rush in there. The battalion, at first did not come, and he had to run to Kirochnaya Street where his barracks were. Emperor Nicholas brought out to the sappers his little heir, the future Tsar-Liberator (Alexander II) and passed him into the hands of the old veteran soldiers who had saved the Imperial family. This moment was captured in a picture placed in the collection of the battalion, and one of the bas-reliefs of the monument to Emperor Nicholas I. My grandfather is represented standing in his uniform, with a drawn sword at his side.

Emperor Nicholas I loved and respected my grandfather. When he died, and his body was born from the Catholic Church of St Catherine on the Nevsky by the Anichkov Palace, the Sovereign left the Palace and walked behind the coffin for some distance.

My father, as the only surviving male representative of A. K. Gerua’s descendants received, on Imperial command, a life pension in memory of the public service of my grandfather.

Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, who died in 1849, three years before the death of my grandfather passed, by will, his sapper’s general adjutant silver aiguillettes to the family of his old service officer. Father gave them to my brother and he put them on his General Staff uniform at the reception in the mess of the Life Guards Sapper Battalion in 1912, on the occasion of its centennial anniversary. We had been invited to this festival in memory of my grandfather, the second commander of the battalion which had kept his uniform after his death.

Alexander Klavdievich was married to Anastasia Aleksandrovna Kobozeva. It can be assumed that the marriage took place in 1832, according to the date of birth of the eldest son Nicholas in 1833. That year my grandfather was forty-eight years old. It was undoubtedly a late marriage even if the assumed date is inexact. Because of this, all the children were very young when they lost their father: the eldest was nineteen years old, the youngest, my father was only twelve. The death of my grandfather had an effect on the education and guidance of the children. We know nothing about my grandmother except that she threw herself into religious seclusion, surrounding herself with dependents and pilgrims. In all this there is a feeling of something typically Moscovite about her actions. Maybe my grandmother’s family was from there. In her portrait, she looks quite a beautiful woman, not yet old, with Russian features. She sits in a blue velvet chair at an open window overlooking some water with ships. Her dress of heavy velvet, dark-lilac in colour, with wide open shoulders and arms. Dark hair brushed smooth and parted in the middle.

With some approximation, it can be assumed that my grandmother, Anastasia Aleksandrovna died in about 1860. By this time my father had risen to the rank of officer (1858) and as far as I remember, he soon had to begin quite an independent life.

In the Corps des Pages he only took examinations, taking the course at home. He remembered how he was brought for examinations to the Corps in a carriage. In 1857, before his full graduation from the Corps, he was transferred to the senior special grade, he was attached to the Exemplary Infantry Regiment for his service, and following that, on 18th March 1858, he was promoted ensign in the Kexholm Grenadier Regiment. My father was eighteen years old. But he only remained in service for just over a year and on 6th June 1859 he retired with the rank of collegiate registrar. In 1867, we see him again determined on military service. He was appointed aide-de-camp to the top military commander of Western Siberia, Adjutant General Khrulev (a hero of the Crimean war) and enlisted in the Siberian Cossack Army with the rank of centurion. My father was twenty-eight years old and owing to his long stay out of service, this rank was retarded.

In Tobolsk my father married the daughter of the Governor of Tobolsk, Maria Yurevna Pelino and in the same place their eldest son Alexander was born. My sister Olga was born in Omsk in 1872. In 1876 my parents were in Aulie-Ata (now Taraz in Kazakstan) where my father held the position of district chief for the National Military Government. Here the author of these notes was born on 9th March 1876. During his fifteen-year service in Siberia and Turkestan my father was promoted in rank and left for Russia already with the rank of colonel. My father died in Minsk on 21st December 1904 with the rank of major general and a position as commander of the Minsk Local Brigade.

FIRST CADET CORPS

I N THE SUMMER OF 1886, I was taken to St Petersburg to take exams for the first class of the First Cadet C orps .

The corps was situated in the Menshikov Palace on Vasilievsky Island, but the admission examinations took place, all in one day, in the old corps building on Petersburg Storon (Petrogradskaya Island).

In the big hall, which was brightly illuminated by the sun, there were tables at some distance from each other, which were allocated to this or that subject and the corresponding teachers. The boys’ names were called out loudly according to the list and directed, in turn, to these terrible tables. These small boys, in their jackets and sailor suits, cut off from their mothers, aunts, or other relations, went to be examined. I remember that I had not the slightest sensation of fear or shyness.

Easier than the other subjects taken by me was Russian Language, on which my future tutor, Vasily Grigoryevich Novoselov, questioned me. Weaker were my eternal obstacle, arithmetic and unexpected and stupidly, calligraphy. Unexpectedly because my handwriting wasn’t bad, and stupidly because instead of concentrating at the dictation on the beauty of the letters, I thought of the spelling, which I had every reason to be proud of. As a result, my manuscript was written probably wisely, but carelessly. I earned a pathetic seven points, out of a possible twelve!

That did not stop me entering the corps in the first six or seven of a dozen accepted, and the most important thing it was at the state’s expense.

In one of the next Sunday evenings, I was brought from Ligovka to the far Petersburg Storon and handed over to the corps. My military life had begun.

I was ten years old, I had been tied to a domestic situation that promoted my independence, and I didn’t know true discipline. Also, I didn’t have those early military inclinations which were found in my elder brother. My instincts were peaceful - the pugnacity of some companions, not the best, to me was repugnant and I had no desire to play a command role in class. Therefore, it took me some time to become accustomed to it all. Even the best uniform with red epaulettes, a braided collar and a black-tie cloth clutching the neck, didn’t brighten up my initial homesickness. Coming home on Saturday on holiday, I’m still on the steps, waiting until the door is opened to my call, taking off my coat and unbuttoning my uniform, holding parts of my uniform. I was impatient to change in a minute or two into a comfortable Russian shirt, which was waiting for me at home!

They appointed me to the Second Division, to a civilian, Novoselov, who was a tutor and the teacher of Russian and who had examined me on this subject. Civilian tutors survived in military schools at that time as a few exceptions. The Milyutin system of military gymnasia, which were semi-civilian in nature, had been caste in 1882. Gymnasia were renamed again into corps and put on a military footing. In my time in the First Cadet Corps, there were only three civilian tutors. All the others were officers. Division by age had been replaced by a company organisation. The First Company consisting of the senior two grades, the sixth and seventh, received light rifles of a dragoon model and were called frontline companies. In it the twelve best cadets were appointed to command positions, the vice-non-commissioned officers who were the apostles of the regime and stood as deputy sergeant majors between a company and its officers. They were selected on points and on their external and assertive qualities. Epaulettes of vice-non-commissioned officers were covered by a braid surround, and the vice sergeant major had the third stripe in the middle.

The director of the First Cadet Corps in 1886 was the General Staff’s Major General Pavel Ivanovich Nosovich. This educated, intelligent and excellent teacher remained a Milyutin ‘civilian’ general after the reform. The old frock coat with tarnished aiguilettes hung on his thin figure, as on a hanger; from his forehead subsided an unruly perpetual quiff, a lock of grey hair; on his nose, his glasses sat crookedly and through them his inquisitive and kindly, soft, myopic eyes watched. A small and tousled Chekhov-type beard supplemented his candid civilian appearance.

Nosovich died during my first year in the corps, and I have no special memories associated with him.

Vasily Grigoryevich Novoselov brought our unit to the fourth grade inclusive, the limit then delivered by civilian tutors. In the fifth grade we were taken by Captain Carlstadt.

The difference between them was huge. Even the degree of severity, in which both differed, was expressed quite differently. Novoselov was silent and put pressure on us quietly, exactly and impartially. We were rather afraid but respected him. He was not one of those tutors and teachers to whom cadets organised so-called benefit performances from time to time. Buffooneries, in Corps des Pages terminology. These scandals happened day or night, with the performance staged in advance, causing noisy and silly disorder, and came to an end inevitably in a victory of the authorities and punishment of all the class - even the whole company. Nevertheless, this revolutionary institution did not disappear.

The initiative invariably belonged to the dregs of cadet society kept in the lower grades. In fear, others joined those who were involved in these outbreaks, like a herd. As these latter were eliminated, the ringleaders were excluded for loud behaviour and the others became resigned to peaceful studies or came to nothing. Influence passed to the better elements, starting from about the fifth grade (young men of fifteen years of age) and the chances of further ‘benefit performances’ if they didn’t disappear, then they became fewer.

Novoselov guided his pupils, invisibly achieving results through different teaching methods that weren’t evident. He studied each cadet and directed them respectively. The written certifications, which were required from him on each boy, carried an imprint of reasonableness. Copies were needed of these sheets; there were no typewriters then, as they were still in their infancy, so it was necessary to do it by hand. Novoselov took the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: to preserve the work and, at the same time, to give the chance to some cadets to get acquainted with the guiding content of certification, which was officially considered confidential. He invited, to his apartment in the evening leisure hours, two cadets in turn, to drop in for a talk. So, I spent once or twice a few hours in his bachelor apartment, where on the dining table I copied the certification, including his own. That was when I reached the third grade and thirteen years old.

Here is what I read of myself as a warning in the final sentence of the review, which was generally very good: ‘Have observed the rudiments of egoism which can develop either in selfishness, or in extreme demands on himself.’

How much of this has come true from this prediction? I cannot judge, but the keenness of the tutor’s observation and the depth of his remarks are undeniable.

Novoselov was snub-nosed with a red moustache, partly through smoking. He brushed his hair ‘on loan’ across the whole of his bald head from the temple. He limped and walked with a stick.

They nicknamed him the Suffix possibly because of the way that he pestered his students on the Russian language.

Nikolai Ferdinandovich Carlstadt had recently moved to become officer tutor at the corps, having had his roots in Finland. He was cheerfully energetic and active. He shouted loudly a lot, commanded exactly, and laughed thunderously in a loud bass. Before his assignment to us, Carlstadt operated a graduation class in a frontline company where he earned himself a reputation as a popular conversationalist with his vulgar jokes, and he also had earned the nickname Porridge. Cadets showed in this nickname the presence of better taste, than that on which their tutor expected; this did not prevent, however, a crowd accompanying the procession of the story-teller, from one end of the huge assembly hall to the other, and the outbursts of laughter encouraged to further performance in the field of selected stories and words.

For the short time that I was under the command of Carlstadt, all of two to three months before my transfer in the first half of the academic year to the Corps des Pages, I did not have the chance to experience educational methods of this sort. I rather got the impression that Carlstadt was very attentive to his students and probably became sincerely attached to them. When I announced my transfer, and began to get ready to leave, Carlstadt became upset and he said, ‘Well, as always, they take away the best!’

The next time I met Nikolai Ferdinandovich was more than a quarter of a century later, in the summer of 1917, in a foreign land at Tarnopol. I was Chief of Staff of the Eleventh Army and Lieutenant General Carlstadt was the excellent commandant of the city. I did not allow him to leave, we embraced and kissed.

On the day of my parting with the First Cadet Corps, it was a cold and sunny November morning. We walked on the other bank of the Neva, three of us together. Apart from me, there was my schoolmate Vladimir Boorman, who transferred at the same time as me and Watermelon. That was the nickname of Lieutenant Colonel Florova, who was really round and ruddy. He was soft and the cadets’ favourite teacher. He had painted a little watercolour and brought it to show me, or even as a gift, a fellow colleague of art, an amateur enthusiast in the spirit of the then famous Elizabeth Boehm.

We crossed on a planked footway, the Neva shining in the sun in her icy attire between the Nikolaev and Palace bridges. The winter draft blew and penetrated us, our overcoats too had become ‘lined with the wind’. Earflaps protected ears. Hoods remained hooked under shoulder straps, the last time for the red shoulder straps with the letters ‘I. K.’ (1st Kadets). Subsequently the corps was given the initials of the foundress of the corps, Empress Anna Ivanovna.

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His Imperial Majesty’s Corps des Pages- A day off

CORPS DES PAGES

W E HAD ARRIVED AT THE Corps des Pages . We were handed over to the new administration. Watermelon shook our hands in parting and wished us all prosperity. For us a new chapter had opened and for me it started a day or two after the presentation of new uniforms and comrades, with a stay in the hospital. The Nevsky draft had penetrated me, and I came down with my usual periodic abscesses in the th roat.

In the Pages’ infirmary for the ‘general grade’ (answering to the courses of the cadet corps) the first notable person that I met was the Inspector of the Infirmary, Kirill Ivanovich Vavenko and the senior doctor with the general’s rank of State Councillor, Jurgenson.

Kirill Ivanovich, whom everyone knew by name but rarely by last name, was a veteran in the corps and he remembered fathers and uncles as pages in their time. Having read my surname over the bed, he immediately rummaged in his memory and declared that there was a Gerua who had choked on an elastic band! If this wasn’t a case of the blank imagination of an old man trying to stay at the height of his reputation as the historian of the infirmary, then he could only have treated my uncle Nikolai from the end of the 1840s when he left the corps before his termination. Thus, at the end of 1890, Kirill Ivanovich had to have had no less than forty-five years of service within the walls of the corps. He was a small, dry, fussy old man with a small grey beard and a red wrinkled face.

Vladimir Magnusovich Jurgenson was numbered among those medical officers of the old school. Trusting in the immovability of medicine which had been acquired by them on the school bench and in the first years of service. However, with me, whilst I was in junior special grade, he conducted an experiment that would hardly have been recommended in the medical books. I had a regular abscess in the throat, and Jurgenson decided to stop the process by the ingestion of pure turpentine. He had probably not thought about its internal action, but rather of the cauterisation of the throat, when swallowed. They gave me turpentine only once a day from a teaspoon. This caused a considerable, sharp pain, not to mention disgust, but the benefit of the new agent (the old I knew by heart) did not become apparent. Jurgenson should have waited on the abscess, to allow it to mature and then lance it.

The old man was not averse to a drink and often, on his evening visits to the infirmary, smelled of wine and sometimes his gait gave away evidence of a recent libation.

On one such evening when I lay in the infirmary of the general grades with neuralgia, Jurgenson ordered my back to be rubbed with quinine! So, quinine outside, and turpentine inside!

The Corps des Pages of the last years of the 19th century differed markedly from what it was in its first years after its foundation in 1802. Then it was a small school with a small scholastic content and with a considerable court bias. Memoirist A. Gangeblov, a Decembrist, tells us about the years 1814-1820. Because the chamber-pages were assigned to wait on the Empress and the Grand Duchesses, their total was 15, two were sent daily to the respective palaces, where they were on duty for the whole morning on the expectation that they would be needed. As that was very seldom, these chamber-pages often loafed about, sometimes they were solely at court, but more often they were released home by authority of Her Majesty or Imperial Highness. For the working-day, during which in the corps, these young men should have received an education, there was not much evidence of it. Residing in the corps in such circumstances led to the Imperial Family knowing many of the pages by sight, their total number was limited to 150, and at final graduation there were only thirty people; the Grand Dukes influenced the exit of pages to this or that Guards regiment; education was secular rather than military. Obviously, this superficial polishing didn’t prevent the students of the corps appearing in the forefront of the ruling class in the army and subsequently among the educated Russian people. It is impossible to explain it only as despotism. The point was that the tradition of home education was still alive in the 18th century for which noble parents did not regret a remedy and for which educational institutions, such as schools, for their sons could only be regarded as a help.

In my time, that is at the end of Alexander III’s reign, the state of the corps was 330 pupils, from which 170, that is about half, were interns.

The staff of cadet corps were three times as large, since out of the Pages reckoning it was necessary to exclude special grades which corresponded to a military college. Non-residents at cadet corps almost never happened (except the Aleksandrovsky Cadet Corps, which was almost entirely for externs, and the Nikolaev where a large percent were allowed). The internal way was always the same.

Court appearances in the Corps des Pages were restricted to the rare calls for chamber-pages to be at the palace on solemn occasions and for receptions. One year didn’t resemble another in this regard: there were, for example, releases for ‘coronations’ where not only all chamber-pages, but also some of the other pages, left for a long time in Moscow and all of them took almost daily part in various court ceremonies; upon return to St Petersburg in such a year there were receptions, congratulations, etc. For these reasons, they were referred to as happy-releases.

It would be tactless to call my release of 1894-95 ‘happy’ in this sense, as quite a lengthy court appearance fell to us on the sad occasion of the unexpected and early death of Emperor Alexander III. We went to Moscow to meet the body of the late Tsar and carry it over the course of a month of intensified duty, returning with the mourning train to St Petersburg and then onwards to the funeral.

On 14th November in the church at the Winter Palace, the wedding took place of the young Emperor, which was attended by all the chamber-pages, and I was for the first time, personally paired with A. N. Shubersky as chamber-pages for Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. At the end of the same year, 1894 and the beginning of 1895, a row of receptions of different deputations and foreign ambassadors took place which called for the presence of the chamber-pages of the Sovereign, the Empress, and sometimes the Grand Duchesses and Princesses.

As an educational institution, the corps managed to get to grips with and caste off its reputation as a refuge for high-society idlers and lickspittles. This reputation had been kept into the 1870s and even the 1880s. The history of organising educational and academic affairs in the Corps des Pages is marked by the names of the company commander K. K. Zherardta, a French native (1843-59), the Directors General Pavel Nikolaievich Ignatiev (1834-45) and Dieterichs (1878-1894). The last was a director during almost the whole time of my stay in the corps (four out of the five years) and he then handed over the corps to Count Keller during the days of the burial of Emperor Alexander III. F. K. Dieterichs had served in the military-training department since 1868 and had spent about twelve years in Milyutin Military Gymnasia. Before his appointment to the Corps des Pages he was the director for four years of the 3rd St Petersburg Military Gymnasium (subsequently a corps), on the same Bolshaya Sadovaya Street but on the other side of the Neva. The long and diligent work of the German, F. K. Dieterichs, in military schools in general throughout his life made him an outstanding teacher.

To finally put an end to the legend of the insignificant nature of this privileged corps, he firmly took hold of the Pages and was even harder on the teachers and educational staff. Taking in hand, both those, and others, he pushed the corps onto the spot, making it truly account for its privileges and to justify them. The best teachers were invited, who were paid more than they would at a cadet corps. Several professors of military academies gave lectures to the special grades. Professor Military Engineer Kirpichev, one of the best-known mathematicians at the time, was an inspector of classes in my time.

The unfortunate exception in well-chosen teaching staff were the teachers-come-old-residents of the former school, who were difficult to dismiss. Among the old-residents was the lazaretto case of the famous Kirill Ivanovich, who was nice without bringing any benefit. In the field of teaching he did harm. I will tell about these exceptions below, in their place.

It wasn’t easy to manage the pages. Behind many of them there were influential and strong relatives. A weak and compliant directorship could lead to the indulgence of some, and in others to their awareness of the roughness of their handling by the administration.

F. K. Dieterichs put all on the same level. Educational marks, behaviour, and character served as the only measure for nomination. Once and for all, for example, it was established that in the senior special grade after the nomination of the sergeant major who was selected, not only for his scholarship, but also for his assertiveness and external qualities, two (or three) chamber-pages were assigned to the Empress (or Empresses) strictly according to precedence of marks. No mother or father from secular St Petersburg could induce Dieterichs to make an exception for their sons from this firm rule.

It seemed that the Director, this slow and important general, dry and unapproachable, was remote from the pages. Actually, as was apparent from officer-tutors’ remarks and as this or that decision testified, the old man knew everything that needed to be known about each page. On educational committees, he penetrated in detail into the reports and certifications of tutors and teachers. He understood, checked, and remembered.

In general, between the Pages a spirit of equality, mutual respect and decency was established. They carried away this spirit with themselves into life, first of all to those regiments they were assigned to on coming out. In some Guards regiments, such as the Rifles of the Imperial Family, the Preobrazhensky and the Horse Guards, the officers were almost entirely former Pages. There for them life continued as if in their home corps.

B. Engelhardt in his book (‘Memoirs of a Chamber-Page’ in the magazine ‘Diya Vas’, Riga, 1939), about Dieterichs, he mentions him only briefly and vaguely notes that the pages allegedly ‘did not love’ him. I don’t know in what measure tender feelings to the chief are useful to the business and whether, in general, it was possible for him to be ‘loved’ by all. There was enough that subordinates of the chief very much respected and slightly feared. That was exactly where F. K. Dieterichs placed himself. His outer inaccessibility was that barrier in a relationship behind which the danger of familiarity and dissoluteness begins. The successor to Dieterichs, Count Keller, removed this saving barrier, but the education of his students hardly benefited from it.

Among the ‘liberal’ and ‘friendly’ measures of the new director, an old page, there was the immediate establishment of washrooms in all company compartments, where behind curtains comfortable ‘bidets’ with flowing water had been arranged. In the morning Count Keller purposely ran around the company bedrooms in his usual bustling gait to convince himself that the pages were using this new improvement to their life. The hasty gait of Count Keller was the direct opposite of Dieterichs, who didn’t walk so much as ‘floated’ through the halls of the corps. Encountering a page with a towel over his shoulder going to the washroom, Keller would ask on the run: ‘Where are you going?’ if he was resourceful, the page would answer briskly ‘To the bidet, your Excellency!’ The satisfied director would move on.

Another measure gifted to the chamber-pages was the right to order themselves breakfast and lunch from a menu. The housekeeper was obliged to bring a plan of possible dishes the evening before for consideration and from which the senior grades were to select from. At the same time attendance of chamber-pages was introduced in the kitchen, by way of an adjacent room for the use of special grades. Attendance could be useful, but I think that in practice it came down to the numbers on duty (I myself wasn’t on duty as I was one of the seniors, that is a platoon commander chamber-page who didn’t take any watches). As regards the choice and the invention of dishes, it undoubtedly improved our table, at least at the beginning before it degenerated.

However, it was an unnecessary indulgence and grandness since before this the table had been more than satisfactory; it was tasty, healthy and markedly exceeded the modest mass cooking of the cadet schools, according to an acquaintance from the First Cadet Corps.

Incidentally, we had a cup of tea, which was served in a large pot, with a glass of hot milk added for each page which did not, as a rule, happen in other corps. With tea drinking, the fact that the tea was poured, not into mugs but into glass tumblers with saucers had, in appearance, a domestic character.

These new kitchen measures were reflected in the expenses and the budget of the corps. Although I was not told of course but by the confused appearance of our bartender, Terebilov, a very patriarchal figure with a broad small grey beard like a Moscow merchant, it was possible to guess that the balance in this area was broken.

The lunch invitations to each of the chamber-pages in turn, on some weekdays, was the third measure of Count Keller. It allowed him a chance to get acquainted with their refined manners, language skills, especially French and, to some extent, their character. Presiding at dinner, to which there were six to eight pages invited, was Countess Maria Aleksandrovna, a still young, prominent, and beautiful brunette. A general conversation would be started, and you would be invited to join in, it was necessary to watch yourself so as not to make some gaff.

Was Baron Arpsgofen, also a senior chamber-page and my neighbour in the senior class at my school desk and on marks, guilty in this regard at my graduation? At the beginning of the academic year he was higher than I on the list by one but in the matter of assignment of chamber-pages to the young Empress, he was bypassed, and I was assigned.

This bypass was also due to innovation and the rejection of the strict Dieterichs system. Personally, I had of course won, but it did not prevent me from doubting the moral benefits of such a refusal. In the next issue for us, the coronation, they again bypassed a quite respectable young man who had graduated from the corps with a first class, in favour of someone who had arrived a year ago, whose standing on points was much lower, but who was titled, and had an historic Russian surname.

Worldly revaluations had begun!

I remember the first lunch I had with Count Keller. He deliberately changed to speaking French with me and asked, by the way, about my father. I answered bravely though at that time my colloquial French was not distinguished and unrestrained. But the director acted encouragingly, he gently corrected a mistake and prompted a word which I could not find at once. That I had nevertheless passed the examination, had been proved by my appointment to the Empress, paired with A. N. Shubersky.

Coming back to F. K. Dieterichs, I remember how he, on rare but necessary occasions, came down from Mount Olympus to inflict a dressing-down on us. He had a pointed, snub nose, a long grey-haired moustache framing a shaven chin, and a completely naked skull, upon which were three tell-tale bismarkian hairs, that must have been invented by caricaturists. In important cases, and his addresses to the pages ‘en masse’ were always such, he placed the thumb of his right hand over the second from the top button of his double-breasted frock coat, and with the other fingers patted himself on the chest, precisely accompanying his slow and measured issue of words. He spoke with a German accent and was brief. However, his expressiveness didn’t suffer from this.

I especially remember there were two addresses he made to my class. In the fifth class it happened that the teacher did not come, and we started to celebrate with a noisy commotion. Just at that moment Dieterichs entered the neighbouring hall of the third company. Without quickening his pace, he entered the class. We had managed to quieten down and had already taken our places. The senior ordered us ‘To rise quietly!’

The director stopped in the doorway in his ordinary pose. ‘What a noisy disgrace you are? You are not behaving as pages, but as school boys!’

He had obviously wanted to say street urchins.

The other dressing-down was in the elementary special grade, and was much more serious. Foolishly and for the fascinating feeling of adventure, our section decided to make a general substitution of a given French composition by others we had written in advance before class. For this purpose, it was necessary to forge the titles, which the teacher usually wrote with his own hand on each sheet. All this we had done, it seemed technically successful, but the Frenchman Pelissier (maybe a descendant of the commander-in-chief in the Crimean War?) noticed a difference in the shade of red ink. We were caught!

A terrible storm broke out. We were forced to write the composition once again; the class was left without holidays for the whole month; but the main thing was that we suffered disgrace.

Dieterichs ceased to greet us, he emphasised his goodwill to others, and only once entered the class to give one of his speeches.

‘You are not pages of the Imperial Court’, he said to us, accompanying himself with the hand on the side of his frock coat, ‘but forgers!’ And, circling his audience who were standing about in embarrassed silence, with a look of contempt, he repeated ‘Forgers!’

That was his complete speech. The director turned and left the class as though never to return, carefully bypassing us and not greeting us at the usual passages through the rooms of the company.

The epithet ‘forgers’ was much stronger than the ‘street urchins’ thrown at us in his address three years before that. We were ashamed and embarrassed and when at last the disgrace was removed and the director addressed us as usual again: ‘Hello, gospodin¹!’, timed for the days of fasting and forgiveness, we sighed freely. The weight fell from our shoulders.

Dieterichs could firmly conduct his policy at the corps, sensing the support of the Chief, Emperor Alexander III, who personally knew and respected him. But once the Tsar was lowered into his grave, the St Petersburg intriguers raised their heads. The sons of the Minister of War, Adjutant General Vannovsky, received their education at the Corps des Pages at the time of