Jan Korenew, born in Odoev in Tula Province, came to Australia in 1912. Although he had the trade of a cement worker and engineer, he worked on a poultry farm on the outskirts of Adelaide in South Australia.
Enlisting in the AIF, he came to Gallipoli with the 12th Battalion not long before the evacuation of the troops from the peninsula. He continued his service on the Western Front with the 52nd Battalion. In September 1916 he was killed at the battle for Mouquet Farm.
Johannes Benjamin Merkulski was born in the township Vaivara near Narva in Estonia. In his naturalisation application he provided his nationality as ‘Russian Finn’, but it is more likely that he was Baltic German or Estonian. Arriving to Australia in 1903, he settled in the township of Ross in the eastern part of Tasmania and was engaged in general farm and other work. He also mastered the trade of a blacksmith.
Enlisting in the AIF, he served on the Western front with the artillery brigade and finished the war with the rank of farrier sergeant.
After the war he moved to Melbourne and married an Australian girl, Josephine Hodgson.
Hendri Teodor Sepp, an Estonian seaman, came to South Australia in 1911 and settled in Port Adelaide, working as a wharf labourer.
He came to Gallipoli with the 12th Battalion not long before evacuation of the troops from the peninsula. He continued his service on the Western Front; in April 1917 he was wounded at Bullecourt and died of wounds the same day.
His brother, a seaman as well, was found after the war, while his Australian friends placed commemorative advertisements in the local newspaper on the day of his death, and remembered him for a long time afterwards.
Russian Anzacs