FAMOUS CAVALRYMAN

Southland Times, Issue 19822, 19 March 1926, Page 7

FAMOUS CAVALRYMAN

GENERAL BRUSSILOFF DEAD. (Rec. 5.5 p.m.) Moscow, Mar. 17. General Brussiloff, the famous cavalry commander, is dead. —Reuter. • A DISTINGUISHED CAREER. Alexei A. Brussiloff, who came of the Russian nobility, was born in September, 1853, and joined the corps of pages. He entered the Tver Dragoons in 1871 and took part in the war against Turkey in 1878, in which he did well. In 1900 he became director of the Cavalry school for officers at Petrograd, and in 1906 commanded the 2nd Guards Cavalry Division. He did not play any very important part in the war with Japan. In 1909 he commanded the 14th Army Corps, and was later assistant to General Skalon, who was Governor of the Warsaw Military District. At the beginning of the world war he was in command of the 12th Corps and then of the Bth Army which did brilliant work in Galicia. On September 3, 1914, he captured the stubbornly defended’ town of Halicz. Four times he crossed the Carpathians with his troops. But in October, 1914, he was driven back near MarmarosSziget in Hungary and got the worst of the fighting round Przemysl in June, 1915. Only when following on the defeats of 1915, the War Minister, Suchomlinoff, had been made the scapegoat did Brussiloff’s luck turn again. On April 5, 1916, he was put in charge of the armies of Kaledin, Sherbatieff, Sacharoff and Leshnitzki on the South-West front, and during the subsequent summer he carried out the great offensive in Galicia in which he took over 450,000 prisoners with vast booty, and relieved the Italian armies by drawing off troops to meet the crisis in Galicia. But eventually his advance was held up. In May, 1917, after the Kerensky revolution he was given the supreme command and carried out the final Russian offensive, but conditions at the front rapidly became hopeless and he resigned. In 1920, in view of the war with Poland, he placed his services at the disposal of the Soviet Government, together with other generals of the old regime and was for some years employed by Trotsky as a “Military Expert,” but he did not command any of the Soviet forces. In the spring of 1925 he went to Western Europe and settled in Prague.