Oprich
Maj. Gen. Ilya Nikolaevich Oprich as born 28 March 1886 in the setch of Ust-Medveditskaya to the son of Don Cossack nobility. Passing out of the Page Corps by 1906, he was a junior officer in the Life Guards Cossack Regiment. Fighting with the regiment in the Great War, by August 1917 he had been elected a colonel by his men. Returning home in January 1918 with the slow down in fighting, he was arrested by the local Military Revolutionary Committee and tossed in jail with other Tsarist officers in Red-controlled Novocherkassk. Liberation of the town in April 1918. He rode with Denisov during the ensuing Civil War, and, seriously wounded and reassigned to Army HQ, was promoted to a MG by Wrangel in late 1920. A widower whose wife, a nurse, passed in the evacuation, he eventually exiled to France where he wrote on the history of and founded the museum to the Life Guards Cossack Regiment– a unit he was a member of his entire career with the Tsar– and collected a large archive relating to the history of the military operations of Guards Cossacks. Eschewing throwing in his lot with the German-raised Cossack units during WWII such as Krasnov and Shukro (Oprich was only in his 50s at the time), he instead was “Resistance adjacent.” He passed in Paris in 1964, age 78 and was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery.