Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky ( – December 1927) was a Russian military officer who served as the commander of the special detachment at

Tsarskoe Selo Tsarskoye Selo ( rus, Ца́рское Село́, p=ˈtsarskəɪ sʲɪˈlo, a=Ru_Tsarskoye_Selo.ogg, "Tsar's Village") was the town containing a former residence of the Russian imperial family and visiting nobility, located south from the cen ...

and Tobolsk in 1917-18, where he oversaw the imprisonment of former Russian Emperor

Nicholas II Nicholas II or Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov; spelled in pre-revolutionary script. ( 186817 July 1918), known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer,. was the last Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Pola ...

, who abdicated his throne after the

February Revolution The February Revolution ( rus, Февра́льская револю́ция, r=Fevral'skaya revolyutsiya, p=fʲɪvˈralʲskəjə rʲɪvɐˈlʲutsɨjə), known in Soviet historiography as the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and somet ...

of 1917.

Biography

Yevgeny Stepanovich Kobylinsky ( Russian: Евгений Степанович Кобылинский) was born into a noble family in

Kiev Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the List of European cities by populat ...

on . He graduated from the Cadet Corps military school. On he became a lieutenant in the St. Petersburg Imperial Guard regiment. He served on the front lines in World War I and was decommissioned after sustaining major injuries. After Russian Emperor

abdicated the throne in

February February is the second month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The month has 28 days in common years or 29 in leap years, with the 29th day being called the ''leap day''. It is the first of five months not to have 31 days (th ...

1917, Kobylinsky became an employee of the Provisional Government which succeeded Nicholas. On Kobylinsky was appointed commandant of the

Alexander Palace The Alexander Palace (russian: Александровский дворец, ''Alexandrovskiy dvorets'') is a former imperial residence near the town of Tsarskoye Selo in Russia, on a plateau about south of Saint Petersburg. The Palace was c ...

, where the former Russian Imperial Family was imprisoned. He attended the family and forty-five retainers when they departed for the city of Tobolsk in Siberia that August. After the October Revolution later that year, a Bolshevik regime was established and Kobylinsky was replaced by Bolshevik officers, who employed a much stricter regime than he had. During the Russian Civil War, Kobylinsky was invited to join the White Army in June 1918. He initially refused, but in December of that year enlisted as a White officer under the command of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, for whom he fought until he was captured near Krasnoyarsk the following December and sent to a concentration camp. In exchange for freedom, in September 1920 he joined the Red Army, eventually becoming its treasurer. He was hired as an accountant by the Rybinsk County Bureau of Statistics in July 1921, and soon after married Claudia Bitner, a former tutor to the Imperial children from

, with whom he had a son, Innokenty. In 1926 a Tobolsk resident named Paulina Mežanc suggested during an interrogation that Kobylinsky was in possession of jewelry that once belonged to the Imperial family. An investigation was undertaken from June to September 1927. The alleged jewelry was never found, but Kobylinsky was revealed to have had connections to the White Army of Yugoslavia. He was sacked by his employer, charged with "monarchical conspiracy" against the Soviet state, and was killed by firing squad in Moscow, along with eight others, that December.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kobylinsky, Eugene People of the Russian Civil War 1875 births Russian people executed by the Soviet Union 1927 deaths Nicholas II of Russia