19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bloody White Baron; A Bloody Good Read, March 17, 2009
As a college student and a history major I was attracted to this title by reading the glowing review that it received in the New York Times Book Review (Yes, there is somebody under 25 who still reads newspapers). I was not disappointed.
This book tells the story of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Russian born Baltic German (from what is now Estonia) who becomes an officer in the army of the Russian Empire. After a series of disastrous starts in the Russo-Japanese war, World War I and the Russian Revolution. He flees to Mongolia and helps them win independence from China. He meets his eventual demise at the hands of the Soviets. Although he is insane and horrendously tortures his troops, he managed for a long time keep them together and for a short time became the last Khan of Mongolia.
Author, James Palmer, writes so vividly that you would swear that you are on the battlefield with Ungern when he is laying siege to Urga (now Ulaanbaatar). Not many people know that for a long time Mongolia was controlled by China and that Siberia was a battlefield for the Russian revolution against the Bolsheviks and the Whites. At times this book is wrenching though never boring. I am looking forward to Palmer's next book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and frightening, May 4, 2010
This review is from: The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia (Hardcover)
Baron Roman Ungern Von Sternberg is one of those peripheral characters who always gets brought up in passing: he's too colorful to overlook, but arguably too minor to warrant extensive coverage. He was name-dropped in Robert Edgerton's Warriors of the Rising Sun, Peter Hopkirk's Setting the East Ablaze, David Mitchell's 1919: Red Mirage and Richard Luckett's The White Generals, to name just a few of the books I'd encountered him in. The Mad Baron was overdue for a full-length biography, and James Palmer brings him to vivid and grisly life.
The Bloody Baron was a nobleman of German descent, who early on revealed a predilection for violence and sadism - and an interest in Eastern mysticism. He had a fairly successful military career, decorated for service in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and found himself on the White side of the Russian Civil War, fighting for the restoration of the Tsar. Already showing a penchant for violence, he was dispatched to Mongolia in the waning days of the conflict, converting to Buddhism, raising a rag-tag multi-national army and conquering Mongolia amidst much bloodshed. His disastrous administration and the encroachment of the Red Army only convinced Ungern to greater ambition - to try and recreate Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire and extirpate Jews and Bolsheviks.
Palmer ably shows two salient points about Ungern: that he was very much a product of his time, and that he was a harbinger of things to come. As horrifying as Ungern's pogroms and atrocities were, in a sense, they were a logical (or illogical) extension of one of the cruellest wars in history. For all his appalling cruelty, Ungern was a piker compared to other leaders, Red and White, in more powerful positions. In fact, the Reds, in "liberating" Mongolia from Ungern, would commit far worse crimes than his short-lived regime. The primary appeal is not Ungern's atrocities, but his sheer weirdness: a demented Russian nobleman with a personal religion. He has few redeeming features as such, but remains a gruesomely compelling figure throughout.
What made Ungern unique and dangerous, however, was his ideology: a curious blend of anti-Semitism, Nietzschean superman rhetoric, vaguely-defined occult mysticism and absurd megalomania, he was a clear precursor of the Nazis, who indeed venerated Urgern as a heroic precursor to Hitler. Palmer does make the point that Ungern had no deep understanding of Buddhism per se, but he had enough appeal to garner him thousands of devoted followers, and the love of a nation (apparently, he's still worshipped by some Mongolians). And just twenty years later, the world would be driven to the verge of destruction by a frighteningly similar ideology.
Palmer does a fine job introducing the reader to Mongolia in general, and in particular a branch of Buddhism that endorses violence and mayhem. This is a fascinating topic, largely swept under the rug in the West, where Buddhism is seen as a benign force. Palmer shows this is an incredibly patronizing and limited view: Ungern's crimes were unique mostly for their being perpetrated by a European. He does a slightly-lesser job of depicting Tsarist and Revolutionary Russia, which is perhaps forgivable since it's not his area of expertise.
As a writer, Palmer provides fine prose, with vivid descriptions of towns, set pieces and miitary campaigns. He has a fascinating subject matter and cuts through the veils of myth and distortion to make Urgern a credible (if still horrific) character. His biggest failing is his attempts at psychohistory, telling us to "imagine" certain key scenes in Ungern's life. That sort of "insight" should be saved for a novelist, or at least someone better-qualified than Palmer.
Despite some flaws, The Bloody White Baron is a fascinating - and frightening - book. Monsters always make for fascinating history, and the Mad Baron provides a particularly interesting case of how vicious and depraved humans can be.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent read, but with glaring flaws., April 3, 2009
This review is from: The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia (Hardcover)
The life of Baron Ungern-Sternberg was indeed a gruesome adventure of unbelieveable proportions, therefore, it is difficult for any portrait of such an man to be dull. Palmer's account is fascinating, and he goes to great lengths to give readers sufficient background in the situation of the Far East in the early 1900s, as well as offering a glimpse into Mongolian culture, Buddhist spirituality, and Russian mysticism; all of which had a significant impact on the Baron's career.
Unfortunately, Palmer's book is far from perfect. Given the fact that the Baron's rise to infamy in the Transbaikal and Mongolia was enabled by the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, one would think that Palmer would strive for accuracy when referring to the greater conflict which Ungern-Sternberg was a part of. Instead, the reader is informed that there were prominent officials in Admiral Kolchak's government in 1917 (p. 183), Baron Vrangel evacuated his men from the Crimea in November of 1919 (p. 115), and one of Ungern-Sternberg's worst sadists, Colonel Sipailov, was present at the murders of the Irkutsk hostages on Lake Baikal on January 6, 1919 (p. 114). In reality, Kolchak's government was not formed until November of 1918, Baron Vrangel evacuated the Crimea in November of 1920, and the massacre on the icebreaker in Lake Baikal occurred in January of 1920, not 1919. Apparently, both the author and the editors could have benefited greatly from a basic history of the Russian Civil War which, not surprisingly, is missing in the book's bibliography. After detecting such errors on a subject I am familar with sprinkled throughout the book, I naturally questioned how many other errors were present on events newer to me, such as Mongolian struggle for independence, which I might be unable to detect.
The errors aside, Palmer's account is readable and covers a personality and events which are all but ignored by most modern histories. That is fortunate for Palmer, since a more carefully crafted account on Ungern-Sternberg could quite possibly displace his work in many libraries.
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