Vasily Boltinkof, an engine fitter, came from the village of Boguchar near Voronezh in Central Russia. In 1912 he boarded a ship in India together with Jackow Petroff and landed in Fremantle. They worked together in Holyoake district, but then Boltinkof moved to Sydney and Melbourne.
His service in the AIF was not long: he was discharged six weeks after entering with a note ‘to rejoin his regiment in Voronezh’.
Arthur Florentin Carlsson from the Kimito in Abo area in Finland came to Australia in 1907 and worked as a labourer and a miner in Gippsland, King Island and in Derby in Tasmania.
He was the first Russian subject to enlist in the AIF in Tasmania. He served with the 7th Field Ambulance in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. In July 1916, in the battle for Pozieres, he received a gunshot wound to the forehead and shell shock and was invalided to Australia.
Frank Novotny was a Bohemian from Prague, which was within the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. He came to Australia in 1911 and lived in Sydney working as a tailor.
In 1915 he enlisted in the AIF as a Russian Pole from Warsaw. While training in the camp, he wrote a letter to the military authorities, admitting that he was a Bohemian, rather than Russian, and asking to allow him to serve in the AIF, as, he argued, ‘we, Bohemians, are the bitter enemies of Germans’. Nevertheless he was discharged as an enemy subject.
Russian Anzacs