Georgy de Davydov

Georgy de Davydov was born into a family of Ukrainian nobility. He joined the Russian Imperial Army in 1892 and graduated from the St. Petersburg Infantry Cadet School in 1896. From 1901 he served in the 198th Alexander Nevsky Reserve Infantry Regiment. Two years later he became a member of the staff of the Officer Rifle School and kept this post after becoming a lieutenant of the Semyonovsky Life Guards Regiment.

At the 1912 Olympic Games, he competed in four military and free rifle events. During World War I, he was already wounded in 1914 in the battle of Warsaw and again in a battle near Lake Sasalu near Daugavpils in Latvia. In 1915, in the meantime promoted to the rank of a captain at the rifle school he was awarded the Order of St. Anna and St. Stanislaus. In 1918, he was the member of an illegal group of formers officers of the disbanded Semyonovsky Regiment.