Hugin & Munin Journal

James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron follows Roman von Ungern-Sternberg—the Baltic-German White commander remembered as the “Mad Baron”—through the wreckage of the Russian Civil War and into Mongolia, where imperial collapse briefly gave his private cosmology soldiers, territory and political force. Ungern can feel less like a historical subject than like a novelist’s excess that somehow survived the editor: aristocrat, cavalry officer, anti-Bolshevik warlord, mystic monarchist, anti-Semite, sadist and would-be restorer of sacred kingship. Palmer understands the attraction of this material. Ungern is grotesque enough to dominate any story in which he appears, but the book is most revealing when it refuses to treat him as a monster dropped into an otherwise orderly world. He emerged from a landscape already being dismantled by total war, revolution, imperial collapse, ethnic violence and armies that had ceased to answer reliably to states. His beliefs were extreme. The conditions th...