An Obelisk on Foreign Soil; A Memorial to General A.V. Samsonov.
The tragic episode from the 1914 war is widely known. The Russian 2nd Army under the command of General of Cavalry A.V. Samsonov, carrying out its commitment to its French ally, on 7 August went over to an offensive that ended in catastrophe. As early as 10 August Samsonov knew that large German forces were concentrating against his left flank. However, all his requests for permission to halt and clarify the situation were answered by telegrams from the commander-in-chief of the Northwest Front, General Ya.G. Zhilinskii that unequivocally alluded to the general’s timidity and lack of spirit. Finally, Samsonov sent his quartermaster-general to personally report to the front headquarters. In reply, Zhilinskii, for his dryness and intolerance nicknamed “the living corpse,” sharply cut off the exchange with “Tell General Samsonov that he’s dreaming the enemy is where he is not. If General Samsonov would show more courage, everything would be fine.” The fatal advance continued. On 13 August the Germans counterattacked the army along the whole front, turned its flanks, and by the 16th surrounded its two center corps, throwing the remnants of the 2nd Army over the Neva River. Samsonov did not want to surrender himself and ended his life with a revolver shot. He was buried in the soil of East Prussia.
For a year the general’s widow, Yekaterina Aleksandrovna Samsonova, showed remarkable persistence and tenacity in order to find her husband’s grave. Determining the exact spot of the general’s demise and his burial site was done with the help of Samsonov’s surviving personal effects. Among them was a medallion inside which was a photograph of Yekaterina Aleksandrovna with their two children. This medallion was carefully saved by the family of a woodcutter named Jedamski in Karolinenhof. As a mark of gratitude Samsonov’s widow gave him one hundred marks. (As an aside, a German officer escorted Yekaterina Aleksandrovna and the authorities rendered her every assisstance.) In spite of it being the year 1915 and in the middle of a bloody war, the Russian General Samsonov was given all military honors with the participation of the German war ministry. The Germans even allowed the erection of a memorial on the site of A.V. Samsonov’s first burial, which is preserved to this day. On a small pyramid is the inscription: General Samsonow der Gegner Hindenburgs in der Schlacht bei Tannenberg. Gef. 30.8.1914. [General Samsonov, the opponent of Hindenburg in the Battle of Tannenburg. Killed 30.8.1914.]. Below we show a contemporary photograph of the obelisk as located in Wielbark, Olsztyn District, Poland.
The idea and design of the obelisk belonged to a woodsman of the local timber industry, a former soldier in the German army named Kreits. The memorial was erected in the form of a truncated pyramid crushed by the weight of a round Prussian boulder. According to Kreits’s conception, this shape for the obelisk symbolized General Samsonov’s military career, cut short as it was achieving its peak. In the monument’s base was immured a bottle containing a letter recounting the story of the obelisk’s creation and also of the fall of the German empire. To support the latter, the bottle also held German monetary notes of the postwar period of hyperinflation.
Ye. A. Samsonova succeeded in returning the general’s ashes to his native land. It pleased fate to arrange it so that the coffin containing A.V. Samsonov’s remains was met at the Yelisavetgrad train station by junkers of the YeKU led by the temporarily acting chief of the school, V.G. Lishin. The remains were buried with honor on the Samsonov estate at the village of Akimovka, Yelisavetgrad District. However, in contrast to the Germans and Poles who have preserved the obelisk up to our time, after 1917 fellow countrymen were scornful of the memory of the fighting general. During the years of Soviet rule the estate fell into ruin and Samsonov’s tomb erased from the face of the earth. It was barely possible to ward off the construction of a school lavatory on its site. Presently, local history-minded Kirovograd citizens led by Konstantin Shlyakhov and Vladimir Bas’ko are trying to find the means to set up a modest memorial marker on the grave of A.V. Samsonov—valorous Russian general, knight of St. George, and former commander of the YeKU. He was also a holder of the order of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, and it was in saving that country that his army perished in East Prussia.
Source: Badges and Jetons of the Yelisavetgrad Cavalry School. By Viktor Petrakov. [From Tseikhgauz No. 14, 2/2002. Pages 30-36.]
Other states the the grave remained unfound:
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=V8xj ... ov&f=false
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