Peter von Hahn, member of the Russian nobility, remembered in the United States mainly as the father of Helena Blavatsky.
Background
Son of Lieutenant-General Alexis Gustavovich von Hahn and Countess Elizabeth Maksimovna von Probsen. She was the daughter of Princess Helene Dolgoruki (1789-1860) and Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeev (1789-1867), Privy Councillor of the Caucasus, and half his age.
Career
Father of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A captain of horse artillery, Peter von Hahn, whose family came originally from the petty nobility of Mecklenburg, married, in 1830, the 16-year-old Helene Fadeev. Vera, a younger sister of Helene Fadeev, would marry Julius Witte and become the parents to Count Sergei Yulievich Witte.
Soon after the wedding, the young Captain received orders to join his regiment for service in the notably ruthless campaign to put down the Polish insurrection of 1831.
On his wife"s death, at the age of 28, the Captain, realized that army camps were most unsuitable for little girls. Her grandfather promptly shipped her off to her father, but she escaped with a boat captain, "leaving her father fuming on the docks of Odessa".
She was not to contact her family for the next ten years. Her future discussions of these years are extremely confused and contradictory and even today have not been satisfactorily explained or researched.
Shortly afterward, Colonel Hahn married again to Baroness von Lange and had a daughter Liza.
The Baroness died a few years later. Colonel Hahn was living in 1858 in Saint St. Petersburg, where Helena"s sister Vera was also living, when Helena again showed up. According to reports, Colonel Hahn was at first aloof from Helena"s alleged psychic powers, but later come to believe in them, from certain demonstrations.
He died and is buried at Stavropol.
With Helene Fadeyev
Helena afterwards Blavatsky, b 1831
Sasha b 1832 d 1833
Vera afterwards Vera Zhelihovsky(1835-1896)
Leonid b 1840
With Baroness von Lange
Liza b 1850/2.
Membership
Captain Hahn had been educated as a member of the Imperial Cadet Corps, limited to the sons of the nobility.