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Lt. Gen. Boris Sergeevich Permikin. Born in 1890 in the Urals, he left St. Petersburg University while still a student to volunteer with the Russian Legions fighting against the Turks in the Balkan Wars in 1912. Returning to Russia just before the Great War, he signed up as a trooper with the 9th (Bug) Lancers Regiment, a Ukrainain/Polish formation, and by January 1915 he was promoted to ensign, rising to the rank of Staff Captian by 1917 and earning the St. George. Soon after the Revolution, he donned a red stripe and continued fighting under the Bolsheviks against the Germans into 1918 then, that October, brought the bulk of the Balakhovich regiment over to the Whites, rechristening his unit the Talab Battalion after the Talab Islands in Lake Pskov, where they switched sides. Fighting as part of Yudenich’s Northern Army, he was made a colonel in May 1919, and the Talabs grew to regimental size, then disquished himself and the regiment by taking Gatchina during Yudichch’s failed attempt to seize Petrograd that fall. Retreating to Estonia and then Northern Poland, he was tasked with forming what was referred to as the 3rd Russian Army from White units in exile in early 1920 with the blessing of Pilsudsky and the promotion to the rank of Lt. Gen. by Wrangel. Consisting of two infantry “divisions” (under Major General Lev Aleksandrovich Boboshko– a Great War colonel– and Lieutenant General Count Alexis Petrovich von der Pahlen– the last wartime colonel of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment) and a Cossack “division” under Major General V. A. Trusov, along with an artillery unit and support troops, his force never numbered more than 8,000 at its strongest. Permikin’s Third Army took the field against the Reds until October 1920 when a truce between the Poles and Moscow took effect, then remained active against Red Ukrainian partisans into 1921 when it was disbanded. Remaining in Poland, Permikin continued in White affairs until 1941 when, aged just 51, he was recruited by the Germans to help support Vlasovs Russian Liberation Army as a major general attached to the staff. He retreated with the rump of the German Cossacks into Austria in 1945 and was allowed to remain there post-war, passing in Salzburg in 1971, aged 80.

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