Viktor von Wahl

Russian general and politician (1840–1915)

Coat of arms of the Wahl family of 1796, in the Baltic Coat of arms book by Carl Arvid von Klingspor in 1882.^[1]

Viktor Karl Konrad Wilhelm von^[2] Wahl (Russian: Ви́ктор Вильге́льмович Ва́ль, romanized: Viktor Vil’gel’movich Val’; 1840–1915) was a Baltic German general, mayor of St. Petersburg, and governor of Vilnius. He came from Baltic German noble Wahl family, which was a branch of the Scottish MacDowall clan. Von Wahl had also been a director of the Kseniinsky Institute, an exclusive school for aristocratic women.

Von Wahl became the governor of Vilna in the autumn of 1901. In 1902, he ordered the arrest and flogging of a number of Jewish and Polish workers who had taken part in a May Day parade.^[3] That same year, a Bundist worker, Hirsh Lekert, unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate him, wounding him in the leg and arm. Lekert was tried by military court, sentenced to death and executed.

Von Wahl became a member of the State Council in 1903, and held the title of "Assistant Minister of the Interior and Commander of the Gendarme Corps." after 1902.

He was awarded the Order of Prince Danilo I and a number of other decorations.^[4]

Notes

^ Klingspor 1882, p. 123.
^ In German personal names, von is a preposition which approximately means of or from and usually denotes some sort of nobility. While von (always lower case) is part of the family name or territorial designation, not a first or middle name, if the noble is referred to by his last name, use Schiller, Clausewitz or Goethe, not von Schiller, etc.
^ Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish; Dovid Katz; Basic Books; 2007; p. 260
^ Acović, Dragomir (2012). Slava i čast: Odlikovanja među Srbima, Srbi među odlikovanjima. Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik. p. 625.

References

V.I. Gurko. Features and Figures of the Past; Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II
Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life Before World War II; Hirsz Abramowicz, Eva Zeitlin Dobkin, Dina Abramowicz, Jeffrey Shandler, David E. Fishman, Yivo; Institute for Jewish Research; Wayne State University Press; 1999; p. 132
Klingspor, Carl Arvid (1882). Baltic heraldic coat of arms all, belonging to the knighthoods of Livonia, Estonia, Courland and Oesel noble families. Stockholm.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)