Adol’f Adol’fovich Endrzheevskii was commissioned as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army in 1914 and served in the Life-Guard Moskovskii regiment during the First World War, and as an adjutant during the Russian Civil War. He also participated in the Second World War as a battalion commander in the Russian Corps in Yugoslavia. The Russian Corps was a military unit formed in 1941 and composed primarily of Russian émigrés resident in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Later in the war, German authorities allowed large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war to fill its ranks.
One folder of Endrzheevskii’s papers contains his correspondence with the founder and first commander of the Russian Corps, General Mikhail Skorodumov, and with Colonel Anatolii Rogozhin, who commanded the corps at the end of the war. Much of that correspondence concerns the activities of Russian émigrés during and after the Second World War, particularly their involvement in military operations against Yugoslav communist guerillas.
Another aspect of Endrzheevskii’s life reflected in this collection is his postwar work with Russian displaced persons through the Tolstoy Foundation in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this time, he also collected issuances of other organizations (mainly based in or around Munich), primarily of a monarchist and anticommunist nature.
Anatol Shmelev PhD
Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow, Robert Conquest curator of the Russia and Eurasia Collection, and the project archivist for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection, all at the Hoover Institution.
