Studying was easy for him, he graduated from the rural parish school with a certificate of merit, and after graduating from the village school, his father took him to the district village of Velikoknyazheskaya. He assigned him to a real school, which he also graduated from with a meritorious diploma, having received the right to work as a folk teacher. Over the years of study, Kirsan has developed as an extraordinary person; this is evident from his subsequent short but bright life.
After graduating from the Grand Duke Real School, he did not have to teach for long, he was called up for active service in the tsarist army.
In 1914, Russia declared war on Germany and the long First World War began. Defeat sentiments grew in the army. The Bolsheviks demanded an end to the war and urged soldiers to turn their weapons against the tsarist autocracy. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov found himself in the wake of revolutionary unrest. He was subject to arrest for revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers, but managed to hide in time.
On the outskirts of the village of Vlasovskaya, in a wrecked dugout, lived a poor Russian family with many children, the Chebotarevs. In the evenings, Kirsan, under the guise of playing cards, secretly met with poor Cossacks at the Chebotarevs, talked about events in Russia and the cause of Bolsheviks’ fight. Soon the sons of Chebotarev began to speak openly that the revolution would soon begin, the tsar would be overthrown, and the land would be distributed to poor peasants, at least, they said, that’s what Kirsan had said. Apparently, these conversations reached the local authorities, and intensified surveillance began.
One evening, at one of the meetings with the Cossacks, he was detained and placed in custody in the village administration. The next day, with the instructions of the village chieftain and accompanied by a Cossack Dolginov, Kirsan was sent as a deserter from the tsarist army to the gendarme department of the district village of Velikoknyazheskaya. Dolginov was Kirsan's brother-in-law, that is, he was the brother of his wife Avka Dolginova.
Maybe this family connection saved Kirsan. They were traveling by rail From the Gashun station, where Kirsan managed to persuade the escort to give him accompanying documents, in which he wrote that the prisoner Kirsan Ilyumzhinov had been handed over to the gendarme office, and signed for the gendarme chief. He ordered Dolginov to return home to the village of Vlasovskaya, to report to the chieftain that he had handed over Kirsan to the gendarme administration, and to return the accompanying documents to him. He did exactly as Kirsan said, and everything turned out well.
Since then, Kirsan disappeared. There was no news of him, until the February Revolution of 1917. As it turned out later, he went by train from the Zimovniki station to Tsaritsyn. Here he conducted underground revolutionary work among the port workers, then moved to the estate of Prince Tundutov and began to serve as a coachman under the name Badmaev.
In February 1917, the tsarist autocracy collapsed, a bourgeois-democratic Provisional Government headed by Kerensky was created. It announced a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. Thanks to this, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov returned to his native village Vlasovskaya.
After the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne, Vlasovskaya, like all the villages of the Cossack Don, seethed with gatherings and rallies of returning front-line Cossacks. Everyone asked one question: since the tsar is no longer there, thus, what kind of power will replace him? At this troubled time, the Bolshevik Kirsan returned to his native village. This is how the villagers called those Cossacks who stood for the ideas of Lenin and the revolution. The front-line soldiers elected him the red commander of the village of Vlasovskaya. Kirsan's closest assistants were the Chebotarev brothers, who were the first to join the Red Partisan detachment.
The Salsk steppe is the birthplace of the legendary First Cavalry Army. It was here that the Red Partisan cavalry detachments of Boris Dumenko, Semyon Budyonny, Oka Gorodovikov, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Vasily Khomutnikov, as well as first Don Soviet Rifle Division of Grigory Shevkoplyasov were formed.
Kombrig (Brigade commander) of first Cavalry Army Kirsan Ilyumzhinov died in 1919.
In the 60s of the last century, the folk poet of Kalmykia Aksen Susseev wrote the poem "Towards a New Life" about the short but bright life of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. God forbid, to again face the division of people into "white" and "red", into "enemies" and "friends of the people"; we have already passed this path of blood and suffering.
Prose by Nikolai Ilyumzhinov (printed with abbreviations)