Gavriil Bertren

Gavriil Bertren was the son of a French father and a Russian mother. He was educated at a secondary school in Dole in France. He then attended the Versailles Artillery Military School and earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics. Subsequently, he served as a lieutenant in the French Army. In 1905, he joined the Imperial Russian Army as a lieutenant in the 44th Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment. Later that year, he was assigned to the Cavalry Officer School, assisting in officers’ training courses and was promoted to staff captain and three years later to the rank of captain.

In 1912, Bertren competed in the Olympic Games in Stockholm in three events and advanced to the quarter-finals in the individual épée. In the equestrian events, he served as a judge. He also excelled in show jumping, winning the Royal Horse Show in London in 1910.

With the outbreak of World War I, Bertren was transferred as a lieutenant colonel to the Kabardian Cavalry Regiment and appointed commander of the 1st Company when he was severely wounded in 1916. His last rank was that of a colonel, and he was awarded the Orders of St. Vladimir, St. Anna and St. Stanislav. After World War I, he became head of the French military mission in the Caucasus in the rank of brigadier general (1919-21). Bertren then returned to France, was reintegrated into the French Army and made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in France in 1923.

In 1900, Bertren married his first wife, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Marron. Thirteen years later, he married Olga Iosifovna Denisova (née Panet), a grandniece of the famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin.