THE BLOODY WHITE BARON

Historian and travel writer Palmer spins the recherché story of a megalomaniac German Russian reactionary who invaded Mongolia during the Russian Civil War.

The author portrays the extravagant, doomed 1920 campaign of the German Russian aristocrat Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg to create an empire in Mongolia. Growing up amidst several military-minded feudal-lord families in Estonia, he maintained a perverse intractability true to his name (ungern means “unwillingly” in German) and was expelled from several schools for his thuggish behavior. He finally found his calling in the military. An interest in Eastern religion and the occult propelled him into the lands of the East, first during the Russo-Japanese War. Then, as the old imperial order began to crumble with the outbreak of World War I, he was mobilized on the Eastern Front and became infamous as an undisciplined, ruthless officer, notable for fighting in duels and delivering sadistic punishment. Fiercely anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik, Ungern-Sternberg soon had a new enemy to fight—the Red Army. He hooked up with another renegade on the fringes of the tsarist empire, Captain Grigori Semenov, raised an army and established an execution camp in Transbaikal, Siberia, before pushing into the border garrison town of Urga, Mongolia, in a grand scheme to unify the Mongol people, then under China rule. Ungern-Sternberg entered Urga as the great liberator, reinstalling the living Buddha Bogd Khan on the throne and frightening the Russians with his piratical, roguish ways. He was even heralded as a savior and Buddhist hero, a designation that would prove to be short-lived. Ungern-Sternberg became increasingly vicious in his despotism, which makes for some tough reading. But Palmer is to be commended for his dogged research and contextual knowledge of Mongolian history.

An immensely readable off-the-beaten path history.