Anatoly Pepelyayev

Anatoly Nikolayevich Pepelyayev (; , in Tomsk – 14 January 1938) was a White Russian general who led the Siberian armies of Admiral Kolchak during the Russian Civil War. His elder brother Viktor Pepelyayev served as prime minister in Kolchak's government.

Early life and career Anatoly Pepelyayev was brought up "in the family of a military man." who was a Lieutenant General in the Imperial Russian Army, by the name of Nikolai Mikhailovich Pepelyayev ) and to the daughter merchant by the name of Claudia Nekrasova. . Born in Nizhneudinsk Nina Gavronskaya died in 1979. (Graduated in 1908, having joined the same year he graduated the Omsk Cadets Corps. Pepelyayev took part in World War I at the rank of Lieutenant A group composed of 4 squadrons of mounted scouts from the 42nd Regiment, 11th Siberian Rifle Division, was led by Pepelyaev in mid-September 1915. By the Russian Revolution, he was a lieutenant colonel, and took the helm of the White movement in his native Siberian city of Tomsk, raising the 1st Middle Siberian Corps and joining forces with the White Czechs. His greatest victory was the Capture of Perm, where some roughly 20,000 ~ Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner on 25 December 1918 following its abandonment." Still, he harboured the intention of wresting Siberia from the Bolsheviks. On 31 August 1922 Pepelyayev and 553-strong volunteer "druzhina" embarked on the last major operation of the Civil War. They sailed into the Sea of Okhotsk and disembarked at the port of Okhotsk, aiming to penetrate westward into the rugged mountainous country.

In September Pepelyayev sailed up the Okhota River into Siberia, with his eyes set on Yakutsk. His troops swarmed over Yakutia, but were contained by Ivan Strod's Bolsheviks. Numerically weaker, they were defeated by sheer weight of numbers. After abandoning the key settlement of Amga, Pepelyayev pressed on towards the Pacific in the hope of making a crossing to Sakhalin. This final campaign saw him defeated near Okhotsk on 1–2 May. Pepelyayev surrendered to the Bolsheviks after the siege of the seaside village of Ayan on 17 June 1923. This was the last siege of the Russian Civil War.

Imprisonment and death

Lieutenant General Pepelyayev was tried by the Vladivostok military tribunal and sentenced to execution by firing squad. After he asked Mikhail Kalinin for pardon, the sentence was commuted to ten years in prison. He served this term in the Yaroslavl prison, then in Butyrki. Pepelyayev was finally set at liberty on 6 June 1936 and was employed as a carpenter in Voronezh. In August 1937, during The Great Purge, he was again arrested, taken to Novosibirsk, tried on charges of having created a counter-revolutionary organization, sentenced to death on 7 December and executed on 14 January 1938 as an 'enemy of the people'. His Civil War rival Ivan Strod also perished in the Great Purge. Pepelyayev was posthumously cleared of these charges and completely rehabilitated on 20 October 1989.

Honours and awards Order of St. Anna, 4th class with the inscription "For Bravery", 3rd class and 2nd class Order of St. Stanislaus, 3rd and 2nd classes Order of St. Vladimir, 4th class, with swords and bow Order of St. George, 4th class (27 January 1917) Gold Sword for Bravery (27 September 1916)

In popular culture Pepelyayev is a supporting character in the novel 1936, written by Sean League. It offers a fictional explanation for his release from prison in 1936 and re-arrest and execution a year later.