MOSCOW — HARBIN: THE LIFE ODYSSEY OF THE WHITE EMIGRANT NIKOLAI GALKIN (1895–1940)

This publication is an analytical review of the ambiguous and complex fate of Nikolai Gavriilovich Galkin, the son of a hereditary nobleman who became a career army officer who took an active part in the First World War and the Civil War, who consistently served in the Russian (imperial) army, and then anti-Bolshevik armed formations in the Russian Far East. The second half of the life of the captain N. G. Galkin was associated with living in China, where the hero of the publication emigrated for political and personal reasons. The aim of our research is to represent, in the context of military anthropology, the forms of adaptation of the «little man» to the conditions of social cataclysms. The methodological concept of the study, based on its genre characteristics, is based on the combined use of the anthropological approach, the theory of social mobility and the biographical method. The basis for the preparation of the article was a complex of previously unpublished sources from the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Historical Archive, the Russian State Military Historical Archive, the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East, the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, the State Archive of the Khabarovsk Territory, the archive of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Novosibirsk Region. Some of these sources were previously in secret storage. Photos and oral history (family information about the hero of the article) have an auxiliary role in the study. In conclusion, the authors emphasize that a conservative upbringing and worldview would not have allowed N.G. Galkin, who had persistent anti-Bolshevik convictions, to find himself in the conditions of Soviet society, and therefore, being in exile was for him the only way out in the conditions of the end of the Civil War and defeat anti- Soviet forces. The work is addressed to a wide range of readers, including specialists in the history of the Russian (imperial) army, the First World War and the Civil War, the White movement, the Harbin emigration, mass political repressions in the USSR in the post-war period.