Turchaninov, Ivan

Turchaninov, Ivan Vasil’evich

 

Born Dec. 24,1822, in the Land of the Don Cossack Host; died June 18,1901, in Anna, 111. Military figure and revolutionary-democratic publicist.

The son of a landowner, Turchaninov graduated from the Mikhail Artillery School in St. Petersburg in 1841 and from the Academy of the General Staff in 1852. As a colonel, he was appointed to the General Staff in 1855. An opponent of the autocratic serf-owning system, Turchaninov emigrated in 1856 and settled in the USA, where he was known as John Basil Turchin. In a letter to A. I. Herzen in 1859, he sharply criticized American bourgeois democracy. Turchaninov fought in the American Civil War on the side of the North. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1863 and took part in a raid into Alabama and in the batties of Chattanooga and Chickamauga. In Chicago in 1865 he published the military and political review Military Rambles, in which he defended revolutionary methods in the struggle against slaveholders.

WORKS

Chickamauga: Noted Battles for the Union During the Civil War. Chicago, 1888.

REFERENCES

“I. V. Turchaninov i ego zhena—Gertsenu.” In Lit. nasledstvo, vol. 62: Gertsen i Ogarev, part 2. Moscow, 1955.
Startsev, A. I. “I. V. Turchaninov i Grazhdanskaia voina v SShA.” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1974, no. 6.

A. I. STARTSEV