Interesting information has been preserved about this unusual person, the great-grandfather of the great Russian poet A.S. Pushkin. A native of an Ethiopian princely family, he was born in Lagon around 1697. The situation in the country was unstable, and at the age of seven, Ibrahim (Abram Petrovich) was in Turkish captivity, was taken to Constantinople.
Purchased in 1706 by the Russian ambassador S.V. Raguzinsky, he ended up in Moscow as a gift to the future emperor Peter I. The monarch drew attention to the boy and took him under his wing. In Vilna, on July 13, 1707, the sovereign and the Polish queen Christina Eberhardina baptized Ibrahim. He became Orthodox, served until 1716 under Peter I, was a valet, secretary, and at the same time took part in various campaigns, being in the rank of captain of the bombardier company of the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment.
In January 1742 he became a major general and received the post of Revel’s chief commandant. Along with the ranks, property benefits followed: he received the palace estate of Mikhailovskaya Guba in the Pskov district with 569 peasant souls. A year later, on September 28, 1743, the village of Ragola became his property.
He was married twice. The first wife is Evdokia Dioper, a Greek by birth. The second wife is a German woman Christina-Regina von Scheberch.
Children from the second marriage: Ivan, Peter, Osip (A.S. Pushkin’s grandfather), Isaac, Jacob, Elizaveta, Anna, Sofia, Agrippina.