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The Bloody White Baron (2008)

by James Palmer(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0571230237 (ISBN13: 9780571230235)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Faber & Faber

review 1: The subtitle of the 2009 edition is a misnomer: "The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia." I think it was the publisher's ploy to get people to pick up the book. It worked for me (I was searching for Mongolian history books), and I feel a bit deceived. *Spoiler alert*: The Baron von Ungern-Sternberg was never a khan of Mongolia.Otherwise, I really enjoyed the book. Palmer weaves together an incredible account of this fascinating madman who (can you believe it?) walked the earth just a 100 years ago. This book fills in some of the world history gap that no one will ever learn in American high schools. Mongolia in the early 20th century is barely an entity--it's just a pawn to be fought over by Russia and China. But Palmer offers ... morea glimpse into the struggle for an independent Mongolia. That said, the book is not really about Mongolia. It's about an old school European aristocrat who turns to the wild west that is northeast Asia, trying to carve a bit of territory and restore the old world (monarchical) society he is comfortable with.
review 2: Even by the standards of that playground of monsters that was the twentieth century, Baron Ungern-Sternberg stands out as a deranged horror. A mere thug in the dying days of Tsarist Russia, he was transfigured by war, revolution and civil war into something much worse. And yet in all his atrocities, and even his achievements (conquering a country with cavalry, less than a century ago), he still seems an almost cosy foretaste of what was to come. A mystical fantasist who loved the swastika emblem, and believed Jews and Bolsheviks (basically synonymous) were to blame for the world's evils; a paranoid seeker after conspiracies, turning Mongolia into a charnel-house - he at once prefigures those two much more famous utter cunts of the decades to follow. Hell, all three of them even share terrible taste in moustaches. Were it just the tale of one awful man, this book might become wearying, even given the dry with with which Palmer tells the tale. But there's a wider world here - the peculiarities of modern(ish) Mongolian faith and culture, the eddies of central Asian politics in the early 20th century - all closed books to me, all filled out here. And yet he resists the temptation to move too far from Ungern - the 'Yellow Peril' fears of the time are discussed, for instance, but they could easily have taken over. Not least because of Russia's ambivalent position in such a paradigm - was it bulwark or vanguard of the 'Asiatic races'? Ungern himself ends up at a very interesting place with regards to all this, essentially by inverting it, and seeing Asia as the custodian of a truer, more primitive virtue which the Europeans have thrown away, and which Asia will in time return to them by any means necessary. Oh, humanity. When it comes to murderous idiocy, you never cease to amaze. less

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