Zinovy Alekseyevich Peshkov
French Lt. Gen Zinovy Alekseyevich Peshkov, born Yeshua Zalman Sverdlov in 1884, was a student and near adopted son of the famed Maxim Gorky prior to the Revolution. A Jew who converted to Christianity and took Gorky’s family name to avoid Tsarist Pale of Settlement laws, he left Russia in the years before the Great War and lived among assorted Russian exiles in the West, including anarchists and other revolutionaries along with writers and artists. When the lights went out all over Europe in August 1914, Peshkov, then living in Genoa, walked into the French Foreign Legion recruiting office in Nice and enlisted as a private. Wounded on the Western Front, he lost an arm but, being a polyglot who knew how to move in just about any circles, was soon a Captain on a nine month mission to then-neutral America on orders of Foreign Minister Philippe Berthelot. Post Revolution, he was sent with the French military mission to the Provisional Government which, after December 1917, became the mission to the White Volunteer Armies. Leaving with Wrangel in November 1920, Peshkov remained a Legionnaire, eventually commanding a battalion in the 2e REI in North Africa by 1940. Casting his lot with De Gaulle, he held a series of overseas posts concluding with being the head of the French Military Mission in KMT-controlled China in 1943. Remaining a force in Chinese and Indochinese politics until 1949, he was presented a rare Grand Croix de la Légion d’honneur in 1950, after having collected the chevalier depuis grade in 1917, officier depuis in 1926, commandeur depuis in 1938 and grand officier depuis in 1946. He passed in 1966, age 82, and is buried at the Russian cemetery at Geneviève-des-Bois. He tomb, per his request, is inscribed ” Zinovi Pechkoff Legionnaire.”