Yuri Karlowitsch Stark

Juri Stark (before 1917)

Yuri Karlowitsch Stark ( Russian Юрий Карлович Старк ; * October 20, 1878 as Georgi Karlowitsch Stark ( Russian Георгий Карлович Старк ) in Saint Petersburg ; † March 2, 1950 in Paris ) was a Russian naval officer and admiral .

Life

Tsar times

Juri Stark attended the sea cadet institute until 1898. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05 he was a mine officer on the protected cruiser Aurora and took part in the naval battle of Tsushima , in which he was wounded. In 1912 he was promoted to captain of the second rank and in the following years he was in command of the destroyers Silny , Straschny and Donskoi Kasak of the 5th and 12th destroyer divisions in the Baltic Sea . During the First World War he took part in various operations and skirmishes and was promoted to captain of the first rank on October 6, 1916 . In 1917 he was promoted to commander of the destroyers of the Baltic Fleet and rose to the rank of rear admiral on July 28, 1917 . He was adopted on April 3, 1918.

Revolution and civil war

In August 1918, Stark joined the Komutsch People's Army in Kazan and commanded the white Volga flotilla. Later, Admiral Kolchak appointed him commander of a naval rifle division and in this position he took part in the retreat of the whites through Siberia with the troops of Lieutenant General Kappels in 1919, fell seriously ill with typhus and had to be treated in Harbin , Manchuria . From June 17, 1921 Stark was in command of the white Siberian flotilla of the white provisional Amur government and fled with 30 ships, which had a total of about 10,000 people on board, from the advancing Bolsheviks from Vladivostok . First, the flotilla headed for the Korean Wonsan, which was under Japanese occupation . In Shanghai he let the civilian refugees disembark and then called on Manila . There he sold the remaining ships of the flotilla and distributed the proceeds as well as the remains of the gold reserves of the Siberian whites among the surviving crews and officers. He sent a report on the operations and finances of the flotilla to Nikolai Nikolayevich Romanov , who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces during World War I.

In exile

After the end of the civil war, Stark lived in Paris and worked there a. a. as a taxi driver. He no longer took part in political activities by Russian exiles and also refused to cooperate with the German occupiers during the Second World War , but was chairman of the Association of Russian Naval Officers in Exile from 1946 to 1949. He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois .

family

Yuri Stark was married to Elisaveta Raswosowa (1881-1924), the sister of the Russian admiral Alexander Raswosow . The marriage resulted in two children: Boris Georgowitsch Stark (1909–1996), Russian priest and missionary, and Tatiana Georgowina.

Awards

• Order of the Great Siberian Ice March
• Order of St. Vladimir , IV class
• Order of St. Stanislaus , II class
• Russian Order of Saint Anne , III. class

Web links

• Biography and picture ( Memento from October 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (Russian)
• Short biography on hrono.ru (Russian)