Download PDF The Baron Cloak A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution Willard Sunderland Books
Download As PDF : The Baron Cloak A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution Willard Sunderland Books
Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close.In The Baron's Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire's final decades through the arc of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern's movements, he transits through the Empire's multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland recreates Ungern’s far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time.Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern’s experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern’s activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his careerRecurring throughout Sunderland’s magisterial account is a specific artifact the Baron’s cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire’s potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.
Download PDF The Baron Cloak A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution Willard Sunderland Books
"This was a tour de force depicting the brutality of the Russian Revolution."
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The Baron Cloak A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution Willard Sunderland Books Reviews :
The Baron Cloak A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution Willard Sunderland Books Reviews
- This monograph is a microhistory that centers around the life of Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, also known by the moniker of the “Mad Baron.†Sunderland remarks that most historians take note of Ungern because of “the extremism and exoticism of the Mongolian campaign,†and that both historians and contemporaries have portrayed Ungern as “mad,†dismissing him as a minor footnote in history (9). Sunderland differs by drawing original conclusions from anecdotes, historical research, and his own experience of the localities that were important to Ungern’s story. As a result, Sunderland attempts “to reposition the way we look at Ungern so that he can help us make sense of the complicated experience of the empire in a remarkable time†(9). In short, it is the task of The Baron’s Cloak to appropriate Ungern’s life story in order to reveal the relationship between the center and the peripheries of Russia during the fin de siècle, World War I, and the Russian Civil War.
At the center of The Baron’s Cloak lies the argument that connections (or linkages) within the Russian Empire and between Russia and other states can serve to demonstrate how the Russian Empire functioned, fell apart, and was reconstructed by the Bolsheviks (10). Sunderland describes Imperial Russia as “a puzzle of accommodations made between the tsars and the different peoples of the realm, reflecting the alternating stages of the empire’s history and its varied physical and cultural environments†(6). He also argues that Imperial Russia was able to exist for so long due to the balance of “violence and exploitation†and “recurring accommodations†between the center of the Russian Empire and its’ peripheries (230). Sunderland reveals that one of the important connections of the empire came in the form of a multi-ethnic nobility, which, as a Russo-German, Ungern was able to embody. Yet, with the rise of nationalism and the ensuing programs of Russification, the “supranational ambiguity that had been a mainstay†of the Russian Empire’s success for centuries had weakened (128). This led to an exacerbation of “divisions within national and imperial communities,†resulting with the demise of Russia, along with other multi-ethnic empires, during or at the end of World War I (128-29). As the empire crumbled around him, Ungern attempted to restore the old autocratic government by joining the Whites in the Russian Civil War, and by raging a campaign of destruction in Mongolia and Siberia. Unfortunately for Unger, the Bolshevik leaders were able to effectively reestablish many connections of the old empire, including material connections such as the trans-Siberian railway, and were effectively able to combat the Whites and capture Ungern, executing him shortly thereafter. - Where this book fails is in attempting to be both the history of a period, The Civil War, and the history of an individual.
In attempting to be both it fails to be either. However, it remains an interesting book and if you're interested in the Russian Civil War you will undoubtedly be interested in this small sideshow. - The author, a professor of Russian History at the University of Cincinnati, has written several books on the eastern periphery of Russia. This one follows the Russian participation in the First World War and the subsequent revolutionary period through the career of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, a scion of on old German family in the Russian Baltic area. The baron was a bold and dashing man. The book is a highly interesting and enjoyable approach to the complex history of this era.
- This was a tour de force depicting the brutality of the Russian Revolution.
- Thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend to anyone. Prof. Sunderland has an incredibly engaging writing style, and his story covers an incredibly wide swath of history over a vast expanse of geographies and time periods, while still finding space for a rigorous analysis of the sources he used and drawing useful and often surprising conclusions from his material.
- Solid history in a gripping story.
- What little bit I have read so far is interesting.
- Born to Austrian nobility, a soldier of the Russian empire, a Cossack, a megalomaniacal, murderous anti-revolutionary, Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg was a reflection of his age. The turning of the twentieth century through the First World War was a time of great flux and modernization, when empires tore apart at their seams, when millions were sacrificed on the crucible of ideas, when a single soldier could muster a small force and commandeer a nation.
For Ungern, notorious for his cruelty, anti-Semitism, and ruthless leadership as a White commander during the Russian Civil War, that nation was Mongolia, and he (almost unwittingly, it seems) sought, in the final year of his life, to make it the vanguard of a new Asiatic power to counteract the scourge of Bolshevism. He failed in his “campaign†to take Mongolia (which Sunderland shows to be far less intentional than has been ascribed), was captured and shot. Yet he also partially succeeded, in that Mongolia gained a semi-autonomy that lasted through the Soviet era.
Unlike other accounts of Ungern, Sunderland does not give overmuch attention to this final year of his life, instead focusing on the broader sweep of events, on the full arc of Ungern’s life from Austria to Estland, from Trans-Baikal to Mongolia. In part, this is because there is really very little to know about Ungern, but also because Sunderland wants to show how the multinational, ever-bored Ungern was an apt, if sociopathic, mirror of his times. The effort succeeds and this is a fine history of the era.
As reviewed in Russian Life magazine
