This new work of popular history covers a really intriguing range of topics: the Russian Civil War, Mongolia, Tibetan Buddhism and the Bloody White Baron of the title: Roman Ungern-Sturnberg, a Baltic aristocrat who essentially conquered Mongolia with an irregular cavalry army in the chaos of the Russian Civil War and briefly became its de facto ruler (and a god in their extensive pantheon).

Ungern-Sturnburg seems to have been one of those men who found his true place only in war. He was a cavalry soldier who fought for the Russian army in the Great War (although he was of German extraction, as most of the upper classes in Estonia were). Prior to the war he had been stationed in the Russian Far East, and he had taken the opportunity to explore Mongolia, which was at the time nominally independent but effectively a Chinese satellite state. He became fascinated with the prevalent religion, an offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism, incorporating it in to his mishmash of theosophical religious beliefs, and of course absorbed much of the landscape and culture that had produced the mighty Ghengis Khan.

In the chaos after the Russian Revolution and Russia’s withdrawal from the Great War, the Bloody Baron rose in stature among the White (counter-revolutionary) forces – along with similarly ruthless allies, he terrorised large parts of Siberia with his Asian Cavalry Division, a mixture of Buriat (ethnic Mongol), Cossack and Tatar cavalry. He was a fanatical disciplinarian with his own troops, and a ruthless, pitiless foe to the Reds, directing widespread torture and murder of opponents. Rabidly anti-Semitic, he detected the hand of Zionism everywhere, managing to believe that Jewish conspiracies were simultaneously behind Communism and capitalism!

Ungern’s great achievement was to ‘liberate’ Mongolia from the Chinese, and for a while he was effectively its dictator, recruiting Mongolian troops, imposing a reign of terror on the people, and considerably enriching himself in the process, all the time allied with the corpulent and self-serving spiritual leader the Bogd Khan. With the prospect of Mongolia acting as a permanent base from which White Russians could harrass Siberia, the Bolshevik regime could not countenance allowing the Baron’s reign to go unchallenged, and his ragtag force clashed with the Red Army in a series of increasingly one-sided battles. His actions and provocations can be seen as directly responsible for the fact that Mongolia became a Russian satellite, instead of remaining a Chinese one – so Palmer suggests that, indirectly, the country owes its current independence to this turn of events, as continued Chinese rule would almost certainly have resulted in colonisation and marginalisation of the nomadic Mongolians, as happened in Chinese-occupied Inner Mongolia.

Palmer has written an excellent and enjoyable work of popular history which very effectively chronicles the early career and later exploits of the Bloody Baron, and his mental and moral deterioration. Although the historical record is clearly patchy in places, the quality of the research that has gone in to the book is evident, and when assumptions and conjecture are required, they are never presented as fact. The exploration of Ungern’s bizarre belief system and worldview, his disciplinary severity and his ultimate end are all described superbly in the context of the Russian Civil War and the political and military environment in China, Japan and the Russian Far East. Although I would have liked some photographic plates to look at, Palmer’s clear depth of knowledge and lucid prose painted a vivid picture of the man whose blank stare engaged me from the front cover – a man who, however briefly, was worshipped as a god in the land of the great Khans, and who is apparently still remembered there today.

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