laststandonzombieisland

This whiskered Cossack colonel is one Alexander Nikolayevich Pugovochnikov, who graduated from the Nikolaev Cavalry School in 1905. By the 1917, he was a colonel who saved his regimental standard and icons from being destroyed by red-armband wearing troopers– which ended his career even before the Bolsheviks took over. Fighting with Kornilov’s Volunteer Army by early 1918 as a private by 1920 he was again commanding a horse regiment under Wrangel. Moving to Yugoslavia after the Whites lost, he was a jockey in Belgrade before landing a job as instructor in the Royal cavalry school, helping to prep the country’s equestrian team for the ill-fated 1940 Olympic Games. Captured by the Germans in April 1941, within a year he was a volunteer for the German-raised 600th Cossack battalion fighting partisans. Finishing the war as a colonel (again) he gave the Soviets the slip and by 1949 was living in New York City, teaching horseback riding in Central Park. He died in 1968.

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