World War I & The Russian Revolution
Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army at the beginning of World War I, he was captured by the Tsarist army and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Siberia. Freed by the October Revolution, he became a Bolshevik and joined the Red Army. He led a partisan unit in Siberia against the White Army of Admiral Kolchak and fought in Mongolia against the warlord "bloody" Baron Ungern von Sternberg and his ally, the religious leader Bogd Khan. In 1921 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of the short-lived Far Eastern Republic.
After the Civil War, he returned to Moscow and enrolled in the Frunze Military Academy. Upon graduation, in 1924, he joined Walter Krivitsky in the Red Army's Fourth Department (the GRU, or military intelligence). He was assigned to the Comintern and acted as an instructor in its military schools.
Read more about this topic: Manfred Stern
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