Ilia Odishelidze


Ilia Odishelidze was a Georgian military leader who had also served as a general of the Imperial Russian army.

Biography

Born in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, he graduated from the 3rd Alexander’s School and the General Staff Academy in St Petersburg. The next ten years were spent in military work in various regions of the empire. He took part in the Russo-Japanese war in the capacity of a chief of staff of the 6th Eastern Siberian Division. He served, from 9 November 1911 to 9 January 1914, a governor general of Samarkand and was moved afterwards as a chief of staff of the Turkestan Military District.
Promoted to lieutenant general on 11 October 1914, he was Chief of Staff of the 10th, and later of the 1st Army. In 1917 he held command over the 15th Army Corps, 1st and 3rd armies. On October 2, 1917 he was appointed the commander-in-chief of the Caucasus Army. In January 1918 he was in command at Erzurum. During the total collapse of the Tsarist administration he tried to prevent the imperial army's disintegration, then resigned as a commander and helped to organize national Georgian divisions.
In March 1918, he served as deputy minister of war for the Transcaucasian Transcaucasian Commissariat, but was sacked for his nationalistic sentiments. After Georgia’s declaration of independence, he held various important posts in the national armed forces and served as the commander-in-chief of army from the fall of 1920 to February 1921.
After the Soviet invasion of Georgia, his fate becomes unclear. According to some sources, he was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921. He, however, appears to have fled to Turkey, where he died around 1924. Odishelidze's son Alexander, a colonel of the Georgian army, moved to France, where he committed suicide in 1933.

His younger son, George, as a student of the Tiflis military college, fought against the Red Army in 1921 and then fled to France, where he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and distinguished himself in World War II.

Honours and awards