Alexei Alexejewitsch Ignatjew

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Count Alexej Alexejewitsch Ignatjew 1903

Count Alexei Alexeyevich Ignatyev ( Russian Алексей Алексеевич Игнатьев ; born March 2 . Jul / 14. March  1877 greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 20th November 1954 in Moscow ) was a first Imperial Russian , later Soviet general and diplomat.

Life

After finishing school, the son of Count Alexei Pavlovich Ignatjew began his career at the imperial court at the age of 17 as a chamber page of Tsarina Dagmar of Denmark (as Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna) . Later he was trained as an officer and served in a guard cavalry regiment . After studying at the Academy of the Russian General Staff , Count Ignatiev was appointed Staff Assistant. After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Count Ignatjew volunteered for the front and took part in the fighting as a staff officer with distinction. After the war his first assignment took place as a Russian military attaché in France. He was then appointed to Denmark, Sweden and Norway as a full military attaché. In the increasingly tense international situation on the eve of the First World War, he was sent back to Paris in the rank of colonel by order of Tsar Nicholas II on March 12, 1912, where he became the military representative of Russia at the French headquarters after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. For his services he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Legion of Honor.

After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Kerensky government appointed him major general . After the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, Alexei Ignatiev placed himself in the service of the Soviet power. As the only person entitled to dispose of it , he refused to hand over 225 million gold francs , which belonged to the Russian state and were deposited in Parisian banks, to the counter-revolutionary Russian government in exile. Instead, he handed the money over to the Soviet government, which had no knowledge of the existence of these financial deposits.

Count Alexei Ignatiev turned down the offer to become a French citizen and general. However, he stayed in France in the following years and after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and France worked in the Soviet trade agency in Paris. In 1935, Alexei Ignatiev returned to the USSR. Here he received his old rank back from the Red Army and was later promoted to lieutenant general. He survived Stalin's cleansing operations in the armed forces, party and state apparatus. Ignatjew took on responsible duties in military training and retired from active service in 1947.

Ignatyev often became ill with increasing age. In the fall of 1953 he fell so seriously ill that he had to be hospitalized, where he died a year later.

Count Alexei Ignatjew was married to Natalia Trukhanova. His memoirs , which he dedicated to the Soviet youth, are entitled “Fifty Years in Line” (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1956. Translation by Пятьдесят лет в строю).

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