Admiral Nikolai Ivanovich Chernilovsky-Sokol
Admiral Nikolai Ivanovich Chernilovsky-Sokol was born in Kiev in 1881 and enrolled in the Naval Cadet Corps at age 14, earning his epaulettes in 1901. Assigned to the Tsar’s growing Pacific Fleet, he played a key role in the scuttling of the outnumbered cruiser Varyag https://laststandonzombieisland.com/2012/06/13/warship-weds-june-13/ in 1904 and would spend the next decade in the Naval Infantry before given command of the cruiser Ochakov in 1914, part of the Black Sea Fleet. By 1917, he had transferred to aviation and was in command of the Black Sea Air Division. Following the revolution, he was one of the few professional officers retained in the fleet and had been selected to be on the soviet committee to negotiate the surrender of the Black Sea Fleet to the advancing Germans in May 1918 following the Brest Litovsk treaty. Promoted to rear admiral by Skoropadsky’s puppet Ukrainian government, he is seen as the first Ukrainian admiral. Once the Whites had been established in Sevastopol in November 1918, he was made Chief of Staff of the White Black Sea Fleet but following the collapse of the Denikin government in April 1919, he was cashiered and, making his way to Vladivostok via Constantinople, he held command of the sad Siberian Flotilla from September 1919 through July 1921 when he was replaced by Adm Stark, riding the desk of the Chief of the Naval Forces of the Far Eastern Republic until it fell in November 1922. Skipping over the border to Manchuria, he died in Tianjin in 1936, aged just 55, which looks kind of suspect.