Keller, Alexander Fedorovich

The son of Lieutenant General Count Fyodor Eduardovich Keller and Princess Maria Alexandrovna Shakhovskaya (1861-1944). Baptized in the Orthodox rite. At the end of the Page Corps, in 1902 he was made from sergeants in the cornet of the Cavalier Guard regiment .

With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War , on April 1, 1904 he was transferred to the 52nd Dragoon Nezhinsky Regiment and appointed as orderly to the commander of the 17th Army Corps, Baron Bilderling , and then adjutant to the Commander-in-Chief. In 1905 he was made a lieutenant . For military distinctions he was awarded four orders, including the Order of St. Anne 4th degree with the inscription "for courage."

On November 18, 1905 he was transferred back to the Cavalier Guard regiment as a cornet and was sent to the Estland province . In 1907 he entered the Nikolaev Academy of the General Staff and was promoted to lieutenant.

In World War I, he fought in the ranks of the Chechen cavalry regiment , was awarded the Order of St. George , 4th class. By 1915 - with the rank of captain , in 1916 he was promoted to colonel . Participated in the White movement.

Since 1920 in exile in France. Since 1925 he lived in Paris , then on the outskirts of the city. He was an employee of the bank, since 1927 - a rentier. He worked in the League of Nations , was engaged in archaeological research in the Syrian desert . He died in 1946 in Paris and was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois .

Count Keller was a member of the Grand Lodge of France , the Masonic lodges Hermes No. 535 and the Northern Lights No. 523, the capitulum Astrea , and also the keeper of the archive of the Northern Lights lodge (1929) ^{[1] [2]} .

For alchemical experiments, he acquired from A. L. Sokolovsky a valuable collection of minerals from all continents, which is now in the Vernadsky Museum and “includes Brazilian diamonds, Saxon silver, Ural gold and precious stones, noble opal from Australia, rare minerals: tellurides of gold and silver, native iron, meteorites, uranium minerals ” ^[3] .

He also had an extensive numismatic collection, about 3000 items from his collection (mainly Greek coins) in 1919 ended up in the State Hermitage Museum ^[4] .

First wife (from 02.02.1907) - Irina Vladimirovna Skaryatina, maid of honor, daughter of Lieutenant General Vladimir Vladimirovich Skaryatin from his marriage to the granddaughter of Field Marshal I.F. Paskevich , Princess Maria Mikhailovna Lobanova-Rostovskaya. Their marriage was not a happy one. According to the memory of a relative, the brother of Era Skaryatina in every possible way dissuaded her from this marriage. As a result, she divorced her husband (June 20, 1916), a high-profile playboy, four years later, after the tragic death of their little son ^[5] . She was buried with her second husband, Victor Blackley, at Arlington Cemetery. ^[6] Children:

• Fedor Alexandrovich (1908-1911)
• Maria Alexandrovna (1909-2002), was brought up by her grandmother, Countess M. A. Keller. She lived in Paris.

The second wife (from 14.11.1916) - Nina Ivanovna Kruzenshtern (1893-1966), maid of honor, daughter of Ivan Filippovich Kruzenshtern. Her second husband is a freemason Goleevsky. A daughter was born in marriage:

• Anna Alexandrovna (1919-1988), in the marriage of Ratmann.

• Order of St. Stanislav 3rd century;
• Order of St. Anne , 3rd century;
• Order of St. Anne 4th Art. with the inscription "for courage";
• Order of St. Stanislav, 2nd century;
• Order of St. Anne , 2nd art. with swords (VP ​​24.05.1915);
• Order of St. George 4th Art. (VP 17.10.1915).

• Collection of biographies of the Cavalry Guard: 1826-1908. - St. Petersburg, 1908. - S. 377.
• Russian Abroad in France 1919-2000. L. Mnukhin, M. Avril, V. Losskaya. Moscow, 2008.
• Keller, Alexander Fedorovich (neopr.) . // Project "Russian Army in the Great War".