Peter Michaelovitch Chirvin was born in Vladivostok, Russia in 1894. Eighteen years later, he immigrated to Australia; young, fit, confident, and keen to see the world. He worked as a reporter in Brisbane for a time before enlisting as an Australian soldier in the 9th Battalion in 1915.

Born in Vladivostok: Private Peter Chirvin served as a Russian subject in the Australian Imperial forces. Imperial Russia was Australia’s ally during the First World War. The Imperial Standard of the Emporer of Russia (1858–1917), Creative Commons.

Chirvin was one of around one thousand Russian Australians to serve in the First AIF, and one of over a hundred who saw action at Gallipoli. He was wounded twice during the course of the war and awarded the Military Medal for his bravery as a stretcher-bearer at Mont St Quentin. ‘Private Chirvin,’ the citation reads, ‘displayed courage of the highest order, and was always the first to volunteer . . . By his splendid devotion to duty numbers of wounded were saved.’

Courage of the highest order: Will Dyson’s famous image of Australian stretcher-bearers at work in France. Chirvin served in similar conditions to these, braving the elements and heavy enemy fire. ART02266 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Mont St Quentin was one of the last major battles the First AIF would fight, and it broke the German lines. In all, over three hundred casualties were brought in from the battlefield. Chirvin’s ‘bearing’ in the face of danger ‘was worthy of the highest praise’.1

Peter Chirvin survived the war and returned to Australia in 1919. The troopship HMAT Anchises took several weeks to reach Sydney. Throughout the voyage the young soldier counted the days. He ‘appeared quite cheerful’, a shipmate remembered, and was ‘looking forward to returning’ to the place he had made his home.

Then everything changed.

News of Bolshevik disturbances back home in Australia spread like wildfire through the ship. There had been riots in the streets of Brisbane as Allied armies began a new war in Russia, seeking to restore the old regime. Many in Australia’s Russian community rallied beneath the Red Flag, calling for an end to foreign intervention in the affairs of that country and demanding the right to return home. Mobs of returned soldiers denounced the demonstrators as traitors and attacked the headquarters of the Russian Association. Police with rifles and fixed bayonets dispersed the angry crowd.

In the tense postwar atmosphere, fear and suspicion grew. The men on the ship decided Chirvin might also be a ‘Bolshie’. He was heckled, ridiculed and told that his Russian parentage somehow made him disloyal.

On the morning of 15 April 1919, as the men on the Anchises were nearing home, Private Chirvin asked to speak to his commanding officer. Lieutenant Colonel Denton later told a court of inquiry:

He was very moody and depressed. He told me that he intended to go overboard . . .  His comrades were calling him a Bolshie . . . I tried to obtain the names of the offenders but he refused [to turn them in].

Private Chirvin handed the Colonel two letters for safekeeping. They were written to Australian families he’d corresponded with during the long years of war. The next day Chirvin was found hanging from a beam in the ship’s washroom. The court of inquiry into his death later returned a verdict of ‘suicide whilst temporarily deranged’.2

Written to Australian families: One of the last letters that Peter Chirvin wrote was to Miss Lorimer in Western Australia. The two had corresponded often during the long years of war. In the final moments of his life Peter Chirvin tried to explain the circumstances that had driven him to suicide. Friends and fiancées often heard of the death of their soldiers overseas, but few received news like this. NAA: B2455, CHIRVIN P courtesy National Archives of Australia.

One of Chirvin’s last letters was written to a Mrs Bryan in Brisbane. He thanked her for all the gifts and the great kindness she had shown him. ‘By the time you receive this I will be out of the world,’ the letter continued, ‘but do not think me a coward, not for a battlefield. If you see the 49th Battalion boys ask them about me, and they will tell you.’3 Chirvin’s last letter claimed he was ‘true to Australia’. But had Australia been true to him?

True to Australia: Lieutenant Bond relates the background to Private Chirvin’s death. Bond claimed that Chirvin got no more than the ‘usual teasing that most foreigners get’. Northern Star 23 April 1918 courtesy National Library of Australia.

In 1926, Peter Chirvin’s mother made her way to the British Mission at Vladivostok. She said she’d received a letter from her son during the war, telling her that in the case of his death, she would receive ‘one or two small trinkets’, a ring and a watch, and whatever money he had. The last personal effects of Peter Chirvin were sent home to Russia, as were the decorations he had earned in the war. When the Victory Star arrived, the parcel had already been opened, the medal removed and only the ribbon remained. The authorities deducted the sum of two shillings and ten pence from the money Peter had left his mother – the exact cost of the medal being replaced.

Peter Chirvin’s body was buried in an unmarked grave in the Quarantine Station at North Head in Sydney Harbour. Alongside him lie thirteen men of the First AIF who died of wounds and disease. No other man from the 49th Battalion lies there. And perhaps that is just as well.

Buried in an unmarked grave: The final resting place of Private Peter Chirvin. Like many returned soldiers, Chirvin was buried in what was commonly called a pauper’s plot. His remains compete for space amongst hundreds of others buried at the Quarantine Station. This empty stretch of bush land is very different to the neatly aligned tombstones found in cemeteries in Flanders and on the Somme. Courtesy David Little.

The grave has no epitaph and Mrs Chirvin would never visit it. Like countless thousands of Australian mothers, her boy’s body was buried oceans away. But she kept the letter the young soldier had written to her from France, where he went to fight for the country he’d adopted. ‘I beg you once more not to worry too much, I think we shall meet each other again.’4

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Peter Chirvin’s service dossier NAA: B2455, CHIRVIN P. The death of Private Chirvin was reported on throughout Australia and this story draws on these contemporary newspaper articles. For further reading on Russian Anzacs see Elena Govor, Russian Anzacs in Australian History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005).

1 London Gazette, 17 June 1919.

2 Witness statements at Court of Inquiry, 16 April 1919 NAA: B2455, CHIRVIN P.

3 Port Pirie Recorder, 28 April 1919.

4 Peter Chirvin to his mother Natalia Vassilievna, 23 June 1916, NAA: B2455, CHIRVIN P.