Aleksandr Cherepanov  Aleksandr Ivanovich Cherepanov ( – 6 July 1984) was a Soviet military leader. A peasant's son, Cherepanov served as a junior officer in the Russian Army in World War I and took part in the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War with the Red Army. A 1923 graduate of the Red Army Military Academy, Cherepanov first came to China as a military adviser to Sun Yat-sen's National Revolutionary Army in 1923–1927. He returned as chief military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang China during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938–1939. Appointed a senior instructor at the General Staff Academy after returning from China, he was named commander of the 23rd Army in 1941 and promoted to lieutenant-general in 1943. A member of the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria in 1944–1947 and the commission's chairman in 1947, he returned to the Soviet Union to become deputy chief in the Department of Military Colleges of the USSR Ministry of Defense in 1948–1955. Born on to a peasant family in the village of Kislyanskoye (now in the Kurgan Oblast of the Russian Federation), Cherepanov received a basic education in the town of Kurgan and was a factory worker and vocational school student in Yekaterinburg and Omsk before being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army in Omsk in 1915. He graduated from a junior officers' school in Irkutsk and fought in World War I as a platoon commander in the 8th Company of the 56th Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army's Northern Front in 1916–1917. Cherepanov joined the Red Guards soon after the October Revolution of 1917. He entered the newly formed Red Army of Soviet Russia in 1918, in which he served as regimental commander, a regimental chief of staff, and a brigade commander during the Russian Civil War and concurrent Polish-Soviet War. Selected to attend the Red Army Military Academy at the concluding phase of the Civil War, Cherepanov was one of five volunteers selected from the cadets of the 1923 graduating class to serve as military advisers in China following Foreign Affairs Commissar Joffe's signing of a friendly treaty with China's Kuomintang leader Sun Yat-sen in January 1923, and arrived in Peking on 21 June. A personal acquaintance of Sun Yat-sen between February 1924 and Sun's death in March 1925, Cherepanov taught at the Whampoa Military Academy alongside Vasily Blyukher, and took part in the campaigns against the regional warlords, joining China's famed Northern Expedition as a senior Soviet adviser.