Maurice Janin

Maurice Janin

Pierre-Thiébaut-Charles-Maurice Janin (born October 19, 1862 - † April 28, 1946 ) was a French general. He headed the French military mission in the Russian Civil War .

Life

Maurice Janin graduated from the Saint-Cyr Military School . From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Russian Nicholas General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg. On April 20, 1916 he was promoted to general and in May appointed representative of the French mission of the Triple Entente in the Russian Empire . To do this, he went to the headquarters of the Commander- in- Chief in Mogilev . After the October Revolution , Janin initially returned to France at the end of 1917.

On August 24, 1918, five months after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty , Chief of Staff Ferdinand Foch appointed him commander-in-chief of the Allied intervention forces in Russia. One of his tasks was to evacuate the Czechoslovak legions via Vladivostok and bring them to the Western Front . At the same time, Winston Churchill installed Alfred Knox as head of the British military mission, although he was largely self-sufficient. On November 18, 1918 - with the approval of the British - Kolchak , the commander of the White Army in Siberia, provisionally took over the government in Omsk . Janin arrived there on December 16.

On November 14, 1919, the Red Army captured Omsk. Kolchak's army and military missions as well as 200,000 civilians withdrew mostly on foot via the Siberian tract to the east, and on January 14, 1920, Janin Kolchak in Nizhneudinsk ultimately placed "under Allied protection". The Czechoslovak Legions took him to Irkutsk , where the City Council of the Social Revolutionaries wanted to allow passage in case Kolchak was extradited. Janin, who was already in Vladivostok, approved it, and the legions negotiated 30 more wagons of coal. The council, which the Bolsheviks took over shortly afterwards , executed Kolchak. Together with General Milan Štefánik, Janin evacuated 30,000 Czech legionaries and 1,100 French soldiers (including 200 officers).

Janin returned to France in 1920 and brought the last photos with him from the Ipatiev house before the murder of the tsarist family , which Pierre Gilliard had given him.

literature

• Maurice Janin: Ma mission en Sibérie 1918-1920 . Payot, Paris 1933.
• Jean-David Avenel: Interventions alliées pendant la guerre civile russe (1918–1920) . Economica, France 2001, ISBN 2-7178-4152-0 .
• Edwin Erich Dwinger : Between white and red. The Russian tragedy 1919-1920 . Diederichs, Jena 1930.