Peter Hahn

Peter von Hahn (1799–1875), member of the Russian nobility, remembered in the United States mainly as the father of Helena Blavatsky.

Son of Lieutenant-General Alexis Gustavovich von Hahn and Countess Elizabeth Maksimovna von Probsen. 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. 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. 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. The girl-wife returned to her parents in Ekaterinoslav in the heart of the Ukraine, and it was there that Helena was born on the night of August 12, 1831 (July 31, on the Russian Julian calendar).

At the close of the Polish campaign, Madame Hahn and "Lolo" (her pet name for her daughter Helena), rejoined the Captain at the station in southern Russia where he was leading raids against the mountain tribes of the Caucasus. Captain Hahn had been educated as a member of the Imperial Cadet Corps, limited to the sons of the nobility. On his wife's death, at the age of 28, the Captain, realized that army camps were most unsuitable for little girls. And the two children were escorted back to their grandparents home.

Colonel Hahn retired, sometime before 1848 and was living near Saint Petersburg when his daughter married Nikifor Blavatsky. This marriage lasted only three months, and Helena ran away, abandoning her husband. 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.

...
Wikipedia