I bought this biography, The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer at some point from a charity shop – it has a price sticker on the cover for £2 which has a date of 13 August 2021 so that point may be some years ago. I will have acquired it because it is a biography and because it is about the Russian Civil War in the 1920s and I have an interest in that period, although not a huge amount of knowledge. It’s a paperback in good condition and a very interesting read.
The Baron in question is Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, an ethnic German who grew up in Estonia which was, in the early years of the twentieth century, part of the Russian Empire. He was a serial unachiever at school, and even when he joined the Russian army, but came into his own after the Russian Revolution in 1917 when he commanded his own troops in Mongolia fighting against the Bolsheviks and also the Chinese warlords. It was a brutal and cruel time and few were more cruel and brutal than the Baron who was a sadist, a bully, a racist, possibly a repressed homosexual, a sexist and almost certainly insane.
The book takes the reader through the politics at the time in both China and Russia as well as describing the situation in Mongolia. The Baron believed that God had decreed that the Czar should rule, with the help of the aristocracy, and that ordinary people existed only to do the will of their betters. He saw the Jews as opposing and interfering with the natural order of things and the Bolsheviks as putting the Jewish plans for world domination into action. He had an interest in Buddhism and mysticism and made decisions based on fortune telling. He believed in autocratic rule and that he had the right to do anything he wished to those under his command as well as those in the areas in which he fought and the soldiers of opposing armies. He indulged himself in his brutality including burning people alive, burying them alive, abandoning them unclothed in the cold, shooting them, hanging them and using corporal punishment as routine.
The Baron did, however, have one redeeming feature – he was very brave, possibly because he had little imagination. At great cost to his army, he subdued the local people and ruled a considerable part of Mongolia using cavalry and his officers, many of whom were devoted to him. His aim was to reinstate a member of the Romanov family as Czar and to return to Russian Imperial rule. In the end, the bravery was not enough and the Bolsheviks captured and executed him.
This book, thankfully, doesn’t dwell on the brutality too much but shows the reader the situation at the time and what the Baron achieved militarily, and at what cost. I didn’t know any of this before I read the book and I found it all very interesting – I also didn’t miss the similarities between the way that the Baron thought and how the Nazis gained and held power in the 1930s. This is an excellent book which could have, in my opinion, greatly benefitted from more maps and some pictures. I shall shelve it with my small collection of books on the Russian Revolution.
Anne Is Reading 