Sunday, October 30, 2016

An unpleasant man behind some stamps

Most collectors will be aware of the "Western Army" issues, which saw a tiny bit of use (mostly on contrived envelopes sent within Mitau) during 1919. They're associated with a gentleman usually referred to as Colonel (or even Prince!) Avalov-Bermondt.
Very few collectors will know much about this unpleasant character. In the first place, his name is just Bermondt. During 1918 he claimed to be the adopted son of a Georgian prince called Avalashvili, and started hyphenating his name as a result. he also adopted the title of Prince while he was at it. Needless to say, claims like that were easy to make in 1918 and impossible to check.
The appalling story of the Western Army is easy enough to read about but it's only after its final defeat that Bermondt's story starts getting really unpleasant. He hovered around the fringes of various Russian/German extreme right-wing groups in the early 1920s before he went all the way and became the leader of the Russian National-Socialist Movement (usually abbreviated as RoND). Here's a picture of him at a fun little get-together:
That's Bermondt in the middle. To his right is Anastasii Vonsyatskii (Anastase Vonsiatsky in Americanized spelling) about whom half a wonderful book has been written ("The Russian Fascists - tragedy and farce in exile" by John Stephan, which I recommend to everyone). To Bermondt's left is Alexander Kazembek, another interesting case.
Bermondt eventually ended up in the USA, where he died in New York in 1972.
Bah!