"James Palmer’s “Bloody White Baron,” his life of Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, is the story of “a loser — albeit an upper-class one” — who turned himself into a visionary psychopath in the Russian far east. Uncomfortable but fascinating reading, it weaves together the weird alliances, murderous dreams and improbable careers that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and the fall of czarist Russia.
Mongolia is the focus, at a time when it was nominally free of Chinese rule after the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and ushered in a failing republic. The Japanese — flush with victory against the Russians in 1905 — were groping toward the expansionist, pan-Asian dream they articulated a few years later, while the Russians were caught up in the vortex of the Bolshevik revolution. Into this terrible shifting world of alliance and double-cross came Baron Ungern, a czarist Buddhist anti-Semite with messianic objectives.
Mongolia is the focus, at a time when it was nominally free of Chinese rule after the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and ushered in a failing republic. The Japanese — flush with victory against the Russians in 1905 — were groping toward the expansionist, pan-Asian dream they articulated a few years later, while the Russians were caught up in the vortex of the Bolshevik revolution. Into this terrible shifting world of alliance and double-cross came Baron Ungern, a czarist Buddhist anti-Semite with messianic objectives.
Born in 1885 and raised at the other periphery of the Russian Empire, in Estonia, Ungern belonged to the minor German aristocracy that supplied the czarist armies with officers. His military career was hardly glorious, although his cavalry service on the Western front proved his idiotic valor. Russia’s collapse in 1917 found him in the Russian far east, where he joined in wild exploits of daring with another White commander, Captain Grigori Michaelovich Semenov, which brought him notoriety and some recruits.
The atmosphere was apocalyptic, right down to the cheapness of human life. Millions had died on the Western front. Russian nobles were fleeing with their jewels to China. Local Buddhist rulers were vicious and corrupt. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was being read by everyone from the imprisoned czarina downward.
Engines plated with steel and equipped with weapons ripped from the gunboats on the Siberian lakes rammed back and forth along the trans-Siberian railway line, dragging behind them mobile towns of czarists, with opulent dining cars, theater cars, printing shops, brothels — and torture chambers. Prisoners were packed into waterless cars and left to die in sidings. The Whites simply ran amok. Pirates in command of these dreadnoughts of the steppe, but incapable of winning hearts and minds, they spent as much time hunting out Bolshevik spies — and torturing and killing the locals — as they did fighting the Reds. Ungern himself carried this sadistic paranoia to fever pitch.
His specialty, though, was Mongolia. He spoke the language, was an idiosyncratic Buddhist and liked the Buriats — nomads he always trusted over ordinary Russian peasants. Hence the increasingly Mongolian nature of his escapades. He was able to seize the Chinese-held town of Urga (Ulan Bator) with an army of some 6,000 men and to reinstate its ruler, the Bogd Khan.
With its panoply of outlandish tyrants, fortune tellers, mounted tribesmen and wild dreams advanced against absurd odds, the whole story could have possessed the makings of a glorious offshoot of the Great Game, had Ungern been anything more than a murderous sadist. His chief contemporary biographer, the Polish author Ferdinand Ossendowski, ladled on the trappings — the messianic visionary who stood too firm for czar and the right of kings.
Presumably Ossendowski saw beyond the torture, the firing squads, the casual executions; perhaps he was not unduly fazed by Ungern’s command to exterminate all the Jews, down to their children. Like many mad people, Ungern had the glittering eye and the gift for wandering prophecy that could, at a pinch, be taken for inspiration; and for a while his life seemed to be demonically protected. But it would be more true to say that the times brought forth the man, and these were appalling times.
Whites degenerated into warlords, with no realistic chance of turning back the Bolshevik tide. Ungern was the weirdest of the White warlords, presenting himself as the heir to Genghis Khan and for a few months holding the reins of power in Mongolia. He governed by terror. His men were forever trying to desert, but he pursued them like a fury, subjecting them to insane disciplinary actions.
Equally insane were his military decisions. He chose to march into Russia when the only course was to flee. At the end he was making for Tibet, although he made no real effort to escape.
Palmer, a travel writer who lives in Beijing, gives us a brilliant portrait of a very nasty war, fought by horrible people in a hostile environment. As he points out, the final capture and execution of Ungern in 1921 was a sideshow, and the chaos of Russia’s far east was not overcome by the defeat of the Whites. The Communists had only just got going, and were to massacre their own people by the millions in the coming years. The Japanese atrocities in China were a mere decade away. Ungern’s contempt for human life, his icy hatred of Jews, his appeal to a monstrous, ill-formed mysticism foreshadowed the foundations of the Third Reich. What makes “The Bloody White Baron” so exceptional is Palmer’s lucid scholarship, his ability to make perfect sense of the maelstrom of a forgotten war. This is a brilliant book, and I’m already looking forward to his next."
THE BLOODY WHITE BARON
The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
By James Palmer
