Early Life and Russian Civil War
Skoblin was a cavalry officer in the Kornilov Division of the White Russian Army during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920. He was known for both his bravery and cruelty. Red soldiers captured by Skoblin's men were hanged or shot on the spot. It is said he met his wife, Plevitskaya during the war. The romantic version is that Skoblin captured his wife during a raid against the Red Army. She was Nadezhda Plevitskaya, a committed Bolshevik considered to be a great beauty, who had been traveling the front singing and entertaining Red Army troops. Plevitkskaya used her considerable charms to seduce Skoblin and escape the gallows. Through her influence, Skoblin became a Bolshevik intelligence agent for the Cheka and later for the Soviet Union's NKVD.
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Skoblin
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, early, life, russian, civil and/or war:
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“I won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“To the cry of “follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,” Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“... in any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)