What an Awful Man!

The Baron Ungern-Sternberg is the subject of James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron: the Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia--h0w's that for a title! Fortunately Palmer is a more concise writer than this suggests and he has a whale of a story to tell. However obscure a historical figure the Baron may be, Mongolia, the background of his short, brutal rise to power, turns out to have been a crucial battleground in the years following the Russian Revolution, as the Whites and the Reds fought for supremacy and China and Japan jockeyed for power in that part of Asia.
As Palmer says in his introduction, The Baron "in one short year rose from being a Russian nobleman to incarnate God of War and returned Khan. In Mongolia he was lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god." Having fled to Mongolia as the last best hope for the return of some sort of monarchy--his preferred form of government--Ungern raised a Mongolian army, freed the Living Buddha who had been imprisoned by the Chinese and for a brief time enjoyed a a precarious supremacy in Mongolia. This did not, however, last long, and Ungern, his army in ruins, was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks.
Palmer makes a good case for the importance of his story and in his epilogue finishes the sad story of Mongolia, a forgotten country that suffered first at the hands of the Chinese and second,from the much worse tyranny of the Soviets. Ungern was arguably a monster but his story rises above the man. Palmer has a nice sense of humor as well as a gift for conveying the historical scene. Overlook the title and read this book.