AFTER TWENTY YEARS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 April 1938, Page 10

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

RUSSIAN COLONEL RECOGNISED. WITNESS IN COURT CASE. Twenty years have passed since Colonel Alexis Ragosin, husband of Madame Lydia Kyasht, the ballet dancer, who is training two young New Zealanders —Miss Bebe De Roland and Miss Diana Power, both of Wellington—was a private in the British army. But he was recognised immediately he stepped into the witness box at the Clerkenwell County Court this week by Mr Registrar Friend.

“I think there is some objection to my dealing with this case,” Mr Friend remarked. “Didn’t you come from Russia and serve in the British army?” Colonel Ragosin: Yes. “I believe we served together?”— We did. “Well, I am very pleased to meet you again,” said the registrar, leaving the Bench and shaking hands *- with Colonel Ragosin, “but I am not going to try your case. You get to like a man very much when you have known him as a private in the army,” he added. The action —the colonel was sued for a debt of £2 2s 6d —was transferred to another court and later a settlement was announced. Alexis Ragosin was once a colonel in the Russian army and page of honour to the Czar. He holds St. George’s Cross and bar —the Russian V.C. “As a youth,” the colonel said afterwards in an interview, “I was at a cadet school and then, at 18, I had served as a page to the Czar. Then I became an officer in the Peter the Great Brigade, married, and, resigning my commission, came to England. “With the outbreak of war in 1914, I made my way back to Russia and after 20 days with the Ist Rifle Guards I was wounded. I went, back to the front, was again wounded, and was at Tsarskoe Selo when the Revolution came. Fortunately for me I was popular with the men. Several officers were killed. My best friend was bayonetted to death. “But the Provisional Government was about to fall. The soldiers warned me to leave and, travelling in mufti, I put up at an hotel on the Finland border. In the middle of the night Red Guards arrived, looking for escaping officers. They hammered at my door. I heard the hotel porter tell them I was an Englishman. They went away.

“So I got safely to England and served as a private under Mr Friend until I was transferred to the Canadian Army. I discovered later that the Bolshevists had murdered my father and confiscated our estates. Now I am a naturalised British subject, engaged in film work.”