Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An interesting archive of documentation and photographs appertaining to General Constantine Dessino, K.C.M.G., Imperial Russian Forces, comprising an impressive array of family photographs, mainly of the 1920s and 1930s (approximately 50), the majority being formal studio portraits, mounted on card, and including several of the General, over the ages, in uniform and wearing his decorations; together with more miscellaneous photographs, unmounted (approximately 30), some of which would appear to date from pre-revolution days in Russia; a programme for the Russian Ball at the Ritz, 5 July 1939; several invitations addressed to a ‘Mrs. Braye’ (possibly the married name of one of his daughters), including Buckingham Palace garden parties in the 1930s, and another to the marriage of Prince Andrew Alexandrovitch and Miss Nadine McDougall on 21 September 1942; two old Russian documents, bearing wax seals, one dated 1907 and the other 1921; two further illuminated documents with Russian text, marking a 120th anniversary event 1818-1938, each bearing assorted signatures, and one with watercolour of a badge of the Order of St. George; the original invoice for the General’s funeral expenses, dated 20 March 1940, etc., etc., generally in average or better condition and well worthy of further research (Lot) £80-120

An accompanying London newspaper cutting, dated 25 December 1938, states that Dessino fought in the Russo-Japanese War and in the Great War, latterly in Galicia, winning the Cross of St. George. It was from Galicia that he sent such frequent complaints of the shortage of munitions that the Czar sent for him, a meeting that led to Dessino being appointed to the command of munitions supply in that theatre of war. In 1917 he arrived in the U.K. as a member of a Russian military delegation, ‘was banqueted, taken on inspections, granted a long audience with King George V, and taken to the battlefield of France’. Then came the Russian revolution and ‘he lost everything ... with his family, including a six month-old grandson, he escaped to England ... Now [1938, in exile in London] eighty-one years old, still handsome but too weak to walk more than a few yards, he sits all day smoking cigarette after cigarette in a holder, and reading military and diplomatic books in Russian, French and English. A nurse looks after him constantly, taking him out in a wheel chair once a day to look at the shops. Shop window gazing is his greatest pleasure’. The General died in March 1940.