Zinovy Peshkov

Origins and early life

Zinovy Peshkov was born Sverdlov at Nizhny Novgorod on 16 October 1884 into a modest Jewish family, his given Hebrew name recorded variously in the sources as Zalman, Yeshua Zalman or Yeshua Solomon, though the surname and the Jewish birth are never in doubt; his father Mikhail Sverdlov was a copper engraver from the Białystok region, and his younger brother was Yakov Sverdlov, who remained a Jew and became one of the first leaders of the Bolshevik state.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that Zinovy left Judaism: he was baptised into the Orthodox church in 1902 in order to be adopted by the writer Maxim Gorky, his godfather, whose surname Peshkov he took, and the two men remained close for life. He left Russia, worked in the United States, Canada and Italy, and in 1914 enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. At the second battle of Artois in May 1915 he was hit at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and lost his right arm; he insisted on returning to service and was sent on missions to Russia, the United States, China and Japan.

He fought again in 1939 and 1940, joined de Gaulle in London in 1941 and became Free France's envoy to South Africa, then head of mission to Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing and to the Japanese government after the war.

Later years

Made a general and a Companion of the Liberation, he was ambassador of France to China and to Japan, and he died in Paris on 27 November 1966; he is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.