Georges Lodygensky: A Red Cross physician on all fronts in the Russian Civil War

This paper reconstructs the itinerary of a Russian medical officer from the aristocracy, Dr Georges Lodygensky (1888-1977), during the Great War, the 1917 revolutions and the Russian Civil War. Thanks to his family network, he was active on all fronts: on the medical front, as head doctor of a hospital run by the Russian Red Cross Society; on the military front, by exfiltrating officers of the former imperial army to Ukraine through the use of a Committee for the Relief of Victims of the Civil War; and on the political front, by trying to impose a right of humanitarian intervention in civil wars and by endeavouring to prevent international recognition of the ‘Moscow’ Red Cross, at a time when the legitimacy of the ‘White’ Red Cross was waning. On these different fronts, Lodygensky waved the humanitarian flag, and like his Communist adversaries, blurred the lines in such a way that would haunt the history of the Red Cross for a long time during so-called unconventional wars.