It was in Mongolia that he met his wife Julia Barminan, a high school teacher who was fluent in four languages and who had studied Greek mythology, whom he married in 1923. Their daughter Ariadna was born in 1925. In 1924 and 1925 he attended the Leningrad Higher Cavalry School, where he first met Georgy Zhukov. He returned to Mongolia, where he was a trainer for the Mongolian People's Army. Soon after, while serving in the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army under Vasily Blyukher, he took part in the Russo-Chinese Eastern Railroad War of 1929–1930 when the Soviet Union intervened to return the Chinese Eastern Railway to joint Chinese and Soviet administration, after Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang of the Republic of China attempted to seize complete control of the railway.