Maj. Gen. Pavel Pavlovich Gudim-Levkovich
Maj. Gen. Pavel Pavlovich Gudim-Levkovich. The son of decorated Gen. Pavel Konstantinovich Gudim-Levkovich, an artillery specialist who served at the siege of Plevna against the Turks in 1877 and went on to teach the art at the Nikolaev Academy, it should be no surprise that Pavel Pavlovich would become a cannon cocker. Born in 1873, after passing through the Cops of Pages, by 1892 he was a lietunant in the Guards Cavalry Artillery Brigade. After earning multiple St. Anne’s, St. Vladimir and St. Stanislaus medals on service in the Russo-Japanese War, in which he was severely wounded during the Battle of Mukden and sent to seek specialist treatment in France– where he met and married his English wife, Evelyn Green, a cousin of Winston Churchill– the junior Gudim-Levkovich became ADC to Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich and then as a military adviser/attache to Greece throughout the Balkan Wars. Following service in the Great War, in which he tried to patch together the Russian artillery branch and reached the rank of major general, he left the country in 1920 following the victory of the Reds. Settling in France, he established an informal Russian military museum there culled from artifacts and relics brought out by the White exiles to include a set of military soldiers figurines once owned by Peter the Great. Fearing the Germans would either sieze or destroy the museum, he was able to sprit the bulk of the collection from occupied France to Denmark in 1942 with the assiastance of exiled spymaster Maj. Gen. Sergei Nikolaevich Pototsky, who was big in Danish officer circles there and was chairman of the Russian Officers’ Union in Copenhagen and the Red Cross Society in Denmark. While Gudim-Levkovich passed in France in 1953, aged 79, and is buried there, his museum https://www.russianhistorymuseum.org/2022/02/17/russian-collection-danish/ endures in the collection of the Danish War Museum.