1871–1961
○ 10 years in camps; posthumously rehabilitated
The artillery general who led Kolchak's drive to the Volga and was broken by Frunze's counterstroke
On 7 July 1915, when his 12th Infantry Division broke under superior enemy pressure, Hanzhin personally led a reserve battalion into the gap and stopped the retreating troops.
An artillery officer of Orenburg Cossack stock who distinguished himself as a gunnery commander in the Russo-Japanese War and the Brusilov Offensive of the First World War. During the Civil War he raised the Ural Corps for the Siberian Whites and, as commander of Kolchak's Western Army, achieved the strategic breakthrough of March 1919 that drove within 30 km of the Volga, only for his overextended front to be struck by Frunze's Southern Group counteroffensive at Buguruslan and Bugulma. After his dismissal he served as Kolchak's last Minister of War, then lived in exile in China until SMERSH arrested him in 1945; he served ten years in the camps and was posthumously rehabilitated.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1890–1893Orenburg Cadet Corps → Mikhailovskoye Artillery School, commissioned khorunzhiy
- 1899Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy, graduated first class
- 1904–1905Russo-Japanese War: 4th Battery, 3rd East Siberian Artillery Brigade; Order of St. George 4th class
- 1914–1916WWI: 19th Artillery Brigade → 12th Infantry Division → 8th Army artillery inspector, planned Brusilov Offensive bombardment
- 1918–1919Ural Corps commander → Kolchak's Western Army, drive to Volga → dismissed after Buguruslan. Promoted General of the Artillery
- 1919–1920Minister of War in Kolchak's government; member of the 'Troika' managing the regime's final collapse
- 1920–1945Exile in China (Dalian, Shanghai, Changchun); headed Far Eastern section of ROVS
- 1945–1961Arrested by SMERSH, 10-year sentence → released 1955, died in Dzhambul. Posthumously rehabilitated 1992
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarEighth Army artillery inspectorDuring the First World War, he led the artillery planning for the Brusilov Offensive.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCommander of Kolchak's Western ArmyHe led the strategic breakthrough toward the Volga in March-April 1919, and his overextended front became the target of Frunze's counterstroke at Buguruslan.
Manchurian exile: from White elder to railway draftsman
Having slipped out of Irkutsk aboard the train of a foreign military mission, Hanzhin crossed into China and lived in Dalian and Qingdao, then in Changchun and Mukden from 1925, Shanghai from 1931 and Dalian again from 1932. Among the Russian military émigrés of Manchuria he carried great authority and played a prominent role, though he could not keep the émigré community from splitting over the affair of General Andogsky. From 1928 to 1930 he headed the Far Eastern department of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).
In 1935, on his own initiative, he founded and chaired a trustee committee responsible for preserving and maintaining Russian military cemeteries across Manchuria, including Port Arthur. His livelihood in exile, meanwhile, had nothing to do with military affairs: he was a director of a soap factory, manager of a soybean shipping office, a technician at a chemical plant and at an army arsenal, a clerk in the economic department of the South Manchuria Railway Company and, from October 1933, a draughtsman in the South Manchuria Railway's research department, drawing and correcting maps.
Hanzhin in these years stands in sharp contrast to the commander of the Western Army advancing on the Volga in 1919. In Manchuria the defeated White general kept his honour as an elder of the émigré organizations while earning his living by wage labour, and at that in a junior technical post on the South Manchuria Railway, an enterprise closely tied to imperial power. His life ran on with these two divided faces until SMERSH arrested him together with his son in Dalian on 15 September 1945.