afterwards due to deteriorating health. After that, he, along with several other tsarist generals, went south to Taganrog, his wife's birthplace, and lived under the protection of a merchant named Smokovnikov. After the Red Army took over the city, Rennenkampf disappeared, disguised as a Greek subject named Mandusakis, but was tracked down by the Red Army and identified, after which he was brought to the headquarters of the Bolsheviks under the order of Red Army commander-in-chief Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. After arriving, the former general was offered a command in the Red Army, with refusal implying death. Rennenkampf refused to defect to the Bolsheviks, saying: At the time, the Germans were advancing toward Taganrog; the Czechs and Anton Denikin's White Army were as well. As a result, Rennenkampf was taken hostage by the Bolsheviks and brought near the railway tracks running from the Martsevo station to the Baltic. Upon arrival, Rennenkampf was forced to dig his own grave, then stabbed before being executed with a bullet to the temple. Aftermath According to Rennenkampf's wife Vera's memoirs, after his death, the Whites were told that Rennenkampf was on the way to Moscow. In May 1918, after the Whites had taken over Taganrog, a stick was found stuck in the ground near the railway tracks running from the Martsevo station to the Baltic Plant. After they dug up the grave, they found several bodies, including one nearly naked with a bullet wound to the head. When they took the corpses to a local cemetery (now the Taganrog Old Cemetery) in the city, Rennenkampf's wife Vera arrived at the cemetery and identified the nearly naked corpse as her husband Paul. The White troops and Rennenkampf's wife held a funeral that fulfilled Rennenkampf's wish of being buried in an unmarked mass grave with other victims of the Red Terror. But other than her memoirs, there is no evidence of Rennenkampf's burial in the Old Cemetery in Taganrog. In recent years, researchers at the Hoover Institution archives of the Stanford University found several photos taken during the civil war. In the photos, a marked grave was clearly seen on the left with "P. K. Rennenkampf" written on it. This allowed historians and researchers to determine and establish the final resting place of Rennenkampf at the burial ground in the Old Cemetery in Taganrog. Family Born into a large and wealthy family, Rennenkampf had five brothers and two