A TRIBUTE to 75-th ANNIVERSARY OF GREAT VICTORY: A WAR CAN HAVE A WOMAN’S FACE

From Russia by Zetta ERMAKOVAThey say: no one is born a soldier. That’s not true: they are born, they really are. She was born a soldier and lived like a soldier: the daughter of a hereditary soldier, a rank-and-file of the army of fashion, the commander of a mobile hospital, a Resistance hero, the godmother of a regiment in the Foreign Legion. Who is she? In a word: Elmeshan Hagundokova, Gali Bazhenova, Irene du Loire, who liked to call herself Leila. The heroine of two countries and three nations. French countess with a steel mountain rod inside.

Empires collapsed and borders were redrawn, the state came together in mortal combat – and Elmeshan-Gali-Leila-Irene always did what she had to do and what she could: set her shoulder up, saved and won. Cheerful and brave, austere and noble, full of courage and dignity Elmeskhan-Gali-Leyla-Irene is a staunch soldier who has defeated all life’s troubles and defeated the river of oblivion itself.

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Zurab Khagundokov, the girls’ grandgrandfather from Kabarda (Nothern Caucaus) belonged to local nobility. The educated aristocracy traditionally understood that small people could not survive any other way than in friendship with a big neighbour.         So his son Ismail, 11, was appointed to the Alexander Cadet Corps for young children in Tsarskoye Selo. From the Alexander Cadet Corps for juveniles he entered the Pavlovsky Cadet Corps, after which he made a notable military career. However, « Ismail » will no longer be quite true: Khagundokov married a Russian noblewoman, daughter of a Russian consul in China, and before that was baptised into Orthodoxy under the name of Nicholas. In September 1871, Nikolai’s first-born child was born, who was baptized Konstantin. In 1880 Nikolai died. But the orphan was not left under state care: in the same year Konstantin Khagundokov was admitted to the school for the children of wounded and murdered parents, from there he entered the 2nd Cadet Corps, and then the 2nd Konstantinovsky Military School.