The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

Ungern’s Early Life and Origins in Graz

Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg was born into a noble family in the Austro-Hungarian city of Graz.

Illustration of the city of Graz by Joseph Franz Kaiser, 1830. Credit: Joseph Franz Kaiser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This was a world undergoing great change. Yet amid huge societal, technological, and economic upheaval, the nobility and aristocracy sought to resist their own demise by maintaining their own societal and cultural norms:

Excerpt 1: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 15   […] even as the world changes, much stays the same, and so it was with the nobles. […] most nobles thought of themselves as members of a separate society – the denizens of a special universe with its own expectations, habits, and moral sensibilities.   This was especially true of the aristocracy, the richest and oldest of the noble families. The highest born of Europe married each other, attended each other’s clubs, balls, and funerals, looked after their friends and relatives in business and government, and shared a common attachment to the manor (or castle) lifestyle. They patrolled their lineages by keeping their own scrupulously maintained genealogies and tracked each other’s comings and goings in the society pages. This rarified aristocratic world lasted largely intact up the Great War and even beyond.

In Estland: A Germanic Noble in the Russian Empire

Within a few years of his birth, Ungern’s family relocated from the Austro-Hungarian empire via Georgia to Estland (present-day Estonia), then a Baltic province of the Russian Empire. Here, Ungern would spend the next twelve years of his life.

Although Estland had been conquered and incorporated into the Russian Empire in the previous century – a huge change in its own right – local noble elites were allowed to continue established social and political practices at a local level until at least the 1880s, provided they served the Russian Tsars and Empire. This enabled significant continuity in local social relations and power structures, including on the Ungern-Sternbergs’ own estate.

Excerpt 2: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, pp. 26-28   The Russians, like many empire builders before them, took advantage of the services of local elites to reinforce their power as they expanded their state into non-Russian areas. […] The native nobles were allowed to keep their lands and privileges. They were incorporated on an equal footing within the ranks of the Russian nobility. They were, in effect, bought off. And in return, they pledged their loyalty to the Tsar.   In the process, the non-Russian nobles became de facto subcontractors for the empire. They continued to run their affairs under Russian power much as they had done before – only now their domains belonged to the empire and they ran them in the name of the Tsar.

 

Even as the world changed around them, the Ungern-Sternbergs continued to rule in the manner of feudal lords over the local population. Here, change and continuity co-existed side-by-side, as traditional practices clung on amidst growing modernisation.

Excerpt 3: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 32   Serfdom was abolished in Estonian areas during the 1820s, but the Estonian serfs were freed without land, which kept them closely tied to their former owners. Even at the time of Ungern’s boyhood, almost 70 percent of land in the province remained in the hands of a tiny number of German lords, and social distinctions remained stark. There was a quasi-feudal feel to the world of the countryside, accentuated by the divide of ethnicity. […] The peasants paid rend to their ex-masters, sometimes with cash but often in kind, echoing the old ways of the feudal economy.

Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg as a child in Estland. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Outbreak of War and Ungern’s Military Career

After attempting – at first unsuccessfully – to train as an officer in the Russian army, Ungern joined the army in time to witness huge political and social upheavals. First the 1905 revolution almost toppled the Russian Tsarist system, before being brutally crushed. Then the February 1917 revolution overthrew the Tsar and plunged Russia into a tumultuous period of change.

Alarmed at the disintegration of the Russian military at a time when the First World War was still raging, Ungern sought to resist what he saw as the ignoble erosion of military discipline by helping establish new non-Russian military units in northern Persia, where he was stationed in the spring of 1917. In this case, his efforts had at best a slight and temporary impact; traditional military discipline overall would continue to erode rapidly, leading to the collapse of the old Tsarist imperial army and establishment of competing Red, White, and other armies during the Civil War. At a very local level, however, Ungern actions may have at least helped slow down the collapse of the old military structure.

Excerpt 4: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 146   We have no direct evidence of when or how exactly Ungern turned against the new politics [of revolution] around him, but [fellow officer and Cossack, Grigorii] Semenov’s memoirs suggest that something had happened by the spring [of 1917]. As he [Semenov] tells it, sometime in April he and Ungern decided to approach their commanders with a plan to form new units of “native volunteers” [i.e. non-Russian locals]. The rationale was simple: Russian soldiers at the front were sick of the war and corrupted by the ongoing erosion of discipline [caused by revolutionaries and socialists]. “Alien” volunteers would give the soldiers a “moral example” that would reenergize them, in effect shaming them into action.

By this time, Russia was engulfed in a new continuum of crisis, which would be marked by seven years of continuous warfare between the start of World War One in 1914 and the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921. This novel trend of continuous military conflict transformed Russian society and politics, giving rise to new brutal practices and ensuring violence would shape developments throughout and after that period.

Excerpt 5: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, pp. 135-136   The titanic violence that began in 1914 […] gave rise to the violence of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The Great War did not cause the revolution – given all the tensions and complexities of the empire, a revolution may well have occurred in Russia anyway. But the war guaranteed that whatever did occur would be especially violent. […] The result was a bloody continuum. The brutality of one war became the bloodline of the next.

Ungern’s Anti-Bolshevik Campaigns in the Russian Civil War

Russia’s continuum of crisis was reflected in the increasingly brutal practices of Ungern, who by the final years of the Russian Civil War was attempting to carve out his own territory as a feudal warlord-cum-mystic on the Russo-Mongolian border. This involved seizing land from Chinese troops in Outer Mongolia, which had previously been part of the Chinese Empire, at a time when different Mongolian groups were also seeking to establish an independent Mongolia.

The Russian consulate at Urga, Outer Mongolia, 1913. Credit: Embassy of Russia in Mongolia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

After seizing control of the town of Urga (present-day Ulaanbaatar) in February 1921, Ungern’s forces unleashed a devastating pogrom against its Jews and “Reds”. This, like other major pogroms during the First World War and Russian Civil War, reflected the growing use of violence against Jews and the intensification of exterminatory antisemitism during consecutive years of warfare.

Excerpt 6: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 175   What caused the pogrom [in Urga]? The prevailing view of the Russian sources and much of the historical writing is that it was the product of Ungern’s personal antisemitism, which, by now at least, had become obvious. […]   Yet even accepting that Ungern was an extreme anti-Semite, describing the pogrom as the result of his personal prejudice is at best a partial explanation. The roots of the horror in Urga lay in groups and institutions as well as individuals. If we take a broader view, it is more accurate to say that Ungern came to the town not with his private hatred alone but also with the accumulated habits of intolerance and violence that had been playing out in Russia for the preceding seven years, and it was this set of violent presumptions and practices that provided, in effect, the essential toolkit for the pogrom.   As we have seen, anti-Jewish violence was integral to the Russian military’s experience of the Great War. As the war then morphed into the turmoil of revolution and civil war, this storm intensified. […]   Ungern, in this sense, was simply repeating familiar practices.

While the Civil War saw the growth of Ungern’s own exterminatory antisemitism, his main aim was not the annihilation of Jews (a group that he, like many other antisemites in Civil War Russia, saw primarily as agents of revolution). Instead, his main aim was the restoration of ancient monarchical empires, including not only the Romanovs in Russia, but also the Qing in neighbouring China. It was only after the collapse of his forces and his arrest and interrogation by the Soviet Red Army in 1921 that the full scope of his ambitions was truly revealed.

By this time, if there had ever been the slightest hope of Ungern achieving his aim, it had certainly vanished. Shortly after his capture, he was put on public trial and executed. Neither the Romanovs in Russia, nor the Qing in China, came back to power (and if they had, it would not have been thanks to Ungern’s efforts).

Nevertheless, Ungern’s ambitions demonstrated the instinctive appeal amongst some reactionaries at the time of to wind back the clock of history, restoring past forms of political authority in order to set Russia and the wider world back on the seemingly steady course it had been wrenched from by revolution in 1917.

Excerpt 7: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, pp. 3-4   During his interrogations, Ungern admits that he had had ambitious plans in Mongolia. In taking over the country, his hope had been to launch a sweeping series of restorations, beginning with the restoration of the Mongolian ruler, the Bogda, who had just recently been deposed by the republican Chinese. (Ungern, in fact, formally reinstalled him shortly after taking [the Mongolian town of] Urga.) With this accomplished, he then imagined resurrecting the fallen dynasty of the Qing in China and the Romanovs in Russia, while also creating a vast new domain in the centre of the continent – what he described as a “central Mongolian empire” (sredinnoe mogol’skoe tsarstvo) that would unite the Mongols and other nomads of the steppe under the Bogda, who would then dutifully pledge his own allegiance to the great “Manchu Khan” in Beijing. The empires of old had come apart, but he, Ungern, would cobble them back together again.

 

Baron Ungern-Sternberg, shortly before his execution in September 1921. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While Ungern’s audacious plans to restore the old empires came to nothing, Sunderland makes the case for Russia’s old imperial structure living on in the Communists’ new Soviet state (from 1922 officially named the Soviet Union). In this sense, there was, after all, a kind of reversion or restoration, as the new revolutionary state came to embody a revamped version of the old Russian empire.

Excerpt 8: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 232   In seizing power, the Bolsheviks had helped crack the empire apart, of course, but, as they saw it, the empire that had to go was the imperial order of the old regime and its echo in the empire of the Provisional Government. By contrast, the creation of an empire redefined as a pseudo-federalist, centralised multinational state, founded on a “correct” understanding of socialism and nationality, and monopolized by the party, was perfectly fine. In fact, building this sort of empire was absolutely necessary.

An Independent Mongolia: Baron Ungern’s Legacy?

If we might be tempted to write off Ungern’s impact on history, Sunderland notes that some historians today actually credit his efforts to split Outer Mongolia away from Chinese rule as leading to an independent Mongolia today. Although Sunderland is sceptical of this interpretation, he nevertheless acknowledges the argument that Ungern’s actions may have a long-term legacy.

Excerpt 9: Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak, p. 229   Since 1991 Russian and other historians have made much of the fact that without Ungern, Mongolia today, much like Inner Mongolia, might still be a part of China. Without the Mongolian campaign [launched by Ungern during the Russian Civil War], the argument goes, the Soviets would not have intervened in the country and, without their protection, the Red [Communist] Mongols [who were allied to and sponsored by the Soviets] would never have been able to achieve independence. There is some truth to this, though, like most outsider perspectives, it (unintentionally or not) overstates the role of foreigners and reduces the contributions of the Mongols themselves to their own history. It also glosses over the inconsistencies of Soviet policy, which for years after Ungern’s defeat zigzagged between supporting Mongolian independence and acknowledging Chinese claims to the country.