Diary and memoirs, relating to Georgian relations with Turkey, 1920- 1921; Georgian refugee life in Turkey and Poland; the Polish Army in the interwar period, and its defeat in 1939; the Georgian Legion in the German Army during World War II; and Georgian prisoners in British prison camps at the end of the war. Includes translations

Dmitri Shalikashvili was born in 1896 into a princely Georgian family of imperial Russia and was educated in the elite Imperial Alexander Lyceum in St. Petersburg. He spent most of his last year of school on horseback in an Imperial Horse Guard regiment mobilized for war against the Central Powers. Following the Russian Revolution and Georgia's declaration of independence in May 1918, Shalikashvili, by then a lieutenant in the Georgian cavalry, fought in the war against Armenia, the Russian Whites, and the invading Bolsheviks. In 1920 he was appointed to the Georgian military mission in Ankara, Turkey. When the Moscow-directed communist government took power in Georgia in early 1921, Shalikashvili remained in Constantinople. He and about a hundred other Georgian officers stranded in Turkey were soon recruited by the government of newly independent Poland as "contract officers." Their Polish hosts saw them as allies and potential cadres in a new Georgian army in what they saw as an inevitable future conflict with Bolshevik Russia.

3 manuscript boxes (1.2 Linear Feet)

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