Russian General Staff Officer, saved Twice by L. D. Trotsky: General Staff Major-General S. I. Odintsov

Abstract

This was a man whose fate often took on many strange colours that were at times quite tragic. Having started after the end of the AGSh at the General Staff, like every young graduate of the “General Staff” alma mater, he got carried away by aviation and even flew on dirigibles himself… Our hero succeeded at this “fashionable” occupation in the beginning of the last century so much so that he even headed the air school. However, an inadvertently said word forced him to abandon aviation and return to the path in which he began his service in the Russian Imperial Army, to the army cavalry. The specific situation in which Sergei Ivanovich Odintsov found himself in the spring of 1918 was also that he not only became one of the first “General Staff” officers of the Red Army, but also one of the first victims of the Chekist terror among the Red Army’s General Staff Corps. Once in military service with the Bolsheviks, Sergei Ivanovich was twice arrested and twice saved from prison and returned to the service in the Red Army by the “guardian angel” of the corps of the Red Army General Staff, Chairman of the Revolutionnary Military Soviet of Republic (RVSR), L. D. Trotsky. In his personal life, our protagonist also suffered many troubles: he divorced his wife as early as 1919, and their eldest son lost both legs having fallen under a tram. The author hopes that this article will shed additional light on the biography of another specialist of the Russian and Soviet General Staff, whose apogee of life and military service fell precisely for the years of the “second Russian Troubles” of 1917–1920.