laststandonzombieisland

Lt. Gen. Ataman Afrikan Petrovich Bogaewsky. Born in 1873 in a Don Cossack stanitsa near Rostov to a hereditary noble family, he graduated from the Don Yunkers school in 1890, then the Nikoleav Cavalry School in Petersburg two years later, joining the Atamansky Guards Cossack regiment as a cornet in 1892. After service in the Boxer Rebellion, Russo-Japanese War and the punitive expeditons of the 1905-06 revolution, he was a colonel by 1908, serving as chief of staff on the 2nd Guards Cavlry Division. Earning a St. George Cross commanding the 4th Mariupol Hussar Regiment againt the Austrians in 1914, he finished the Great War as a major general in charge of the 1st Trans-Baikal Cossack Division. Escaping execution in December 1917 (his brother, Mitrofan Petrovich, was not so lucky), he took command of anti-Bolshevik Cossacks near Rostov and, in Feb. 1919, was elected ataman of the All-Great Don Army, ousting Pytor Kransov. Leaving Russia in November 1920 with Wrangel, he helped form and lead the exile All-Cossack Union in the West and was seen as “the last ataman elected on the Don land.” He died in Paris of a somewhat mysterious heart attack in 1934 and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.

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