RADM Sergei Vladimirovich Evdokimov
RADM Sergei Vladimirovich Evdokimov was born in Sevastopol in 1878 to a long line of naval officers. Graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps, he was a mine officer in the Black Sea Fleet by 1900. When the Russo-Japanese War came, he was shipped off to join he crew of the auxilary cruiser Ural as it headed to its destiny at Tsushima where he was the officer who volunteered to stay behind to scuttle the striken warship. Plucked from the sea by the tug Svir and taken to Shanghai for the rest of the war, by the time the Great War came along in 1914 he was a captain in command of the minelayer division of the Black Sea Fleet. He served admiralby against the Germans and Turks during the conflict, earning a St. George Cross in an attempt to block the Ottoman port of Zunguldak. By 1917, he was a rear admiral in command of the Black Sea Fleet’s training squadron. Once the Whites took over in December, he would become the Deputy Head of the Naval Department. Evdokimov is shown above as part of the final circa 1920 White government in South Russian, with Baron Wrangel seated center and the admiral standing to the left of the Baron behind Terek Ataman, Lt. Gen.G. A. Vdovenko and Don Cossack Ataman, Lieutenant General A.P. Bogaevsky (in the tall fur hat). He helped arrange the evacuation of the 140,000 Whites from Crimea when it fell and eventually passed into exile in France. During the German occupation, the admiral and his son were arrested by the SD and, shippd to Poland, would narrowly escape the Soviets in 1945. Post-WWII he moved to NYC, where he died in 1960 at age 88. He is buried at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York.