Summary: Palmer introduces readers to a little known, and very bizarre, episode of post-Revolutionary Russia and to its main actor, the anti-Semitic and genocidal Baron Ungern-Sternberg. One of the leaders of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, Ungern-Sternberg and his army were pushed by the Bolsheviks into Mongolia, which had recently broken free from China. Conquering the country with cavalry--the last person in history to do such a thing--Ungern-Sternberg established a medieval-style dictatorship, murdering Jews and political opponents in a pogrom that foretold later atrocities by the Nazis. Writing in a popular style, Palmer vividly conveys the details of Ungern-Sternberg's rise to power and his eventual dispatch at the hands of victorious Soviet forces. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - (Book News)
Booklist Reviews
Well traveled in Mongolia, one of the settings in this fine history of a bizarre episode from the Russian civil war, Palmer recounts the story of Baron Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921). A military leader on the White side of the conflict, Ungern-Sternberg was many things: an ethnic German, an imperial Russian army officer, an anti-Semitic psychopath, and, as ruler of Mongolia in early 1921, a god incarnate to some traditional Mongolians. Finding hints of an unhinged, violent personality in the baron s youth, Palmer recounts its gruesome manifestation in the methods he applied to his area of Siberian operations during the civil war. As the victorious Reds approached in late 1920, Ungern-Sternberg, with several thousand troops, decamped for Mongolia, routed a Chinese force, and proceeded to enact an apocalyptic pogrom. Taking no prisoners and killing Jews out of hand, Ungern-Sternberg was actuated, in addition to innate sadism, by his fascination with Buddhism and the occult; his eccentric beliefs, Palmer suggests, were precursors to Nazism. Soundly researched, Palmer s biography vividly reflects the pitiless extremism of the Russian civil war.
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