{"id":3170,"date":"2009-07-29T04:58:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T04:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3170"},"modified":"2009-07-29T05:22:06","modified_gmt":"2009-07-29T05:22:06","slug":"book-review-the-bloody-white-baron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3170","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Bloody White Baron"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0by James Palmer<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 20th Century was remarkable for its voluminous bloodshed and civilizational upheaval yet for inhuman\u00a0cruelty and sheer weirdness, Baron<\/strong> Roman Nikolai Maximilian Ungern von Sternberg <\/strong>manages to stand out in a historical\u00a0field\u00a0crowded with\u00a0dictators, terrorists,\u00a0guerillas, revolutionaries,\u00a0fascists and warlords of the worst description. Biographer James Palmer<\/strong> has brought to life in The Bloody White Baron<\/strong> <\/em>an enigmatic, elusive,\u00a0monster of the Russian Civil War who is more easily compared to great villains of fiction than real life war criminals. Palmer’s bloodthirsty Mad Baron comes across like a militaristic version of Judge Holden<\/strong> <\/a>from Cormac McCarthy’s<\/strong> Blood Meridian<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/strong> or perhaps more like Hannibal Lecter<\/strong> with a Mongol Horde.<\/p>\n

Ill-tempered, impulsively violent, insubordinate and\u00a0socially isolated even among fellow aristocratic officers, Baron Ungern was, as Palmer admits,\u00a0without much wit or charm, a complete failure in Tsarist society and the Imperial Army until the coming of the Great War. As with many “warlord personalities<\/a>“, the chaos and ruin of the battlefield was the Baron’s\u00a0natural element and for the first time in his life, he\u00a0experienced great success, his maniacal bravery under fire winning\u00a0Ungern promotions and the highly\u00a0coveted St. George’s Cross<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0This is an\u00a0eerie parallel with the life of Adolf Hitler,<\/strong> and numerous times in the text, Palmer alludes to similarities between the Baron’s apocalyptic views on Communists and Jews, and that of\u00a0Baltic-German refugees like Alfred Rosenberg<\/a><\/strong> and Max Scheubner-Richter<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0who\u00a0contributed eliminationist anti-semitism and theories about “Jewish- Bolshevism” to Nazi ideology.<\/p>\n

A fanatical monarchist and philo-Buddhist fascinated with far-off\u00a0Mongolia and Tibet, the Baron regarded the Russian Revolution as the greatest of calamities and joined the Whites under the leadership of the\u00a0gangster-like Ataman Semenov<\/strong> <\/a>to rape, loot, torture and murder with a hodgepodge Cossack horde\u00a0across the Transbaikal region of Siberia. The Baron’s fiefdom under Semenov was a macabre, bone-littered,\u00a0execution ground ruled by reactionary mysticism and ghoulish exercises in medieval torture visited upon the Baron’s own soldiers scarcely less often than on hapless peasants or captive Reds.<\/p>\n

Dismayed by Semenov’s corruption and dependence on the Japanese and the collapsing fortunes of Russia’s White armies, Palmer recounts how\u00a0the Baron fled with a ragtag band of followers to Chinese occupied\u00a0Mongolia, where, in a series of bizarre circumstances, the Baron managed to destroy a sizable Chinese army (charging on horseback straight into enemy machine gun fire and emerging unscathed), seized the fortified capital, restored the “living Buddha” the Bogd Khan<\/a><\/strong> to the throne and become\u00a0celebrated the eyes of the Mongolians, variously as\u00a0the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan<\/strong> and\/or the prophesied coming of the\u00a0“God of War”. Naturally, to further his dream of building a pan-Asian Buddhist Empire, Baron Ungern unleashed a nightmarish reign of terror in Mongolia, taking especial and personal delight in the executions of Jews and captured commissars.<\/p>\n

Ungern’s final foray in battle, before his capture, trial\u00a0and execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks, is like something out of the Dark Ages:<\/p>\n

With this final defeat, Ungern shed any trace of civilization. He rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. he had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite the best efforts of the Bolshevik prosecutor to focus upon political motives, even the Soviet revolutionary tribunal that condemned\u00a0him to death on Lenin’s orders, considered the Baron to be a dangerous madman.<\/p>\n

James Palmer has shed a great deal of light on one of the darkest corners of the Russian Civil War, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a\u00a0subject that largely eluded prominent historians like W. Bruce Lincoln<\/strong>, Orlando Figes<\/strong> and Richard Pipes. The Bloody White Baron<\/em><\/strong> is a fascinating read and a window into the\u00a0life of the 20th century’s strangest warlord.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia\u00a0by James Palmer The 20th Century was remarkable for its voluminous bloodshed and civilizational upheaval yet for inhuman\u00a0cruelty and sheer weirdness, Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian Ungern von Sternberg manages to stand out in a historical\u00a0field\u00a0crowded with\u00a0dictators, terrorists,\u00a0guerillas, revolutionaries,\u00a0fascists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[232,420,228,133,234,309,233,483,165,51,199,367,501,372,436,91,18,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-20th-century","category-authors","category-biography","category-book","category-communism","category-criminals","category-dictator","category-extremists","category-historians","category-history","category-insurgency","category-military-history","category-myth","category-non-state-actors","category-psychology","category-russia","category-war","category-warriors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}