The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story Of The Russian Nobleman Who Became The Last Khan Of Mongolia, by James Palmer

It is difficult to fully understand why the author so deeply hates the subject of this book so much. In order to understand this book and the context it is in, one needs to understand the politics of the Russian Civil War and the state of Russia in late czarist times. The subject of the book, one Baron Ungern-Sternberg, was the sort of person whose rise could only happen in a system where people were kept from uselessness or prison while being violent and thuggish towards ordinary beings. In many ways, the titular baron of this story must have been a deeply unpleasant person to be around, the proud and aristocratic lout who takes full advantage of his status as a privileged Baltic German with ancestral ties to both Russian and German royalty to get out of scrapes that would have left lesser men (and women) with long sentences in Siberia, but one who came alive in war and demonstrated himself to be the sort of brave and patriotic psychopath who has a very limited purpose in wartime and who can do things that need to be done even if they are deeply unpleasant to do.

One gets the sense that even though the author recognizes the Baron as both a figure of his own dying age of ancien regime Russia, as well as his serving as a figure who points towards the horrors of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, both of whom would kill on a far more savage and industrial skill than he managed during his short and violent life, he does not truly understand the importance of this. The baron appears to have been a principled member of the White forces, one who was tied to the corrupt and often ineffective leaders who ruled over various Siberian fiefdoms during the Russian Civil War, one whose record was better than most and who had a genuine, if highly disturbing, view of popular apocalyptic Buddhism. According to the author, his main flaws appear to have been a reflexive and unconscious anti-Semitism (which is, sadly, all too rampant in contemporary Academia today) as well as having a genocidal hostility to Communists, which I consider to be a good thing and not a bad thing at all. The world would certainly have been much better in the 20th century (and today) if Marxists were eliminated from the world, instead of being the main source of state-sponsored murder as they have been for more than a century now. The author, though, is too busy enjoying his ChiComm wife and the life of a leftist author to appreciate the baron as the sort of person who, for all of his unpleasantness, would have made the world a better place had he been more successful at killing Russian commies.

This particular book, in terms of its contents, is about 250 pages and has nine chapters. The book begins with acknowledgements, maps, and an introduction that set the context and the author’s feelings about his subject. This is followed by a discussion of the dissipated and violent and largely wasted youth of the titular baron (1). The author talks about how the baron found some use within the Russian army during his postings in remote Siberia (2) as well as how he found himself dealing with being cashiered and then valued for his bravery in the horrors of World War I (3). This is followed by a discussion of how things fell apart in Russia (4), and how the baron found his place as a killer of Chinese occupiers of Mongolia (5) as well as the leader of a Mongolian crusade (6), that led him for a time to be considered as a khan of Mongolia (7). The author then reflects on his last 130 days (8), where he fought fatalistically against defeat and treachery before succumbing to them, and where the author discusses the aftermath of the baron’s life (9) as well as the larger historical problems of Mongolia in an epilogue. The book then ends with notes, a bibliography, and an index.