The Black Baron of the Baltic who wanted the kingdom of the lamas in Mongolia

The Red Baronas the ace was called Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918) for the color with which he had his Fokker Dr. I painted, he entered into legend as the “knight of the sky” and in the records with the highest number of kills in the First World War. Everyone knows him. Much less known is the contemporary knight Black Baron, Roman Nicolaus von Ungern-Sternberg (1886-1921), with whom he shares German noble blood and nothing else. Also because they had given Ungern-Sternberg other nicknames that were anything but edifying, such as Mad Baron and the Bloodthirsty Baron.

Ancient lineage and unstable character

If fate had brought them together on the battlefield, they would have found themselves on opposite sides: Richthofen on the side of the kaiser Guglielmo IIUngern-Sternberg with Tsar Nicholas II. The Black Baron was an ethnic Baltic German, born in Graz of the Habsburg empire from a family of ancient lineage rooted in Estoniabut steeped in the aristocratic environment and mentality of Romanov Russia. He despised everything that was not of his social level and it is easy to imagine how he could have welcomed not only that revolution of 1905 when the insurgent farmers burned some of his estates, but above all that of October (or November, depending on the reference calendar) of 1917 which completely overturned the world in which he believed and of which he believed himself to be a dominant part.

Courage in battle and excesses of violence

From a young age he had displayed a rebellious character with worrying outbursts of authoritarianism, both in school and in the army ranks where he would ascend all the steps up to the rank of general. There violence it was part of his way of understanding existence, just like when as a boy he subjected animals to acts of cruelty that aroused disapproval. An expert knight, he had been sent at his request to garrison in Siberiain Transbaikalia with the Cossack army, and in 1913 he had come into contact with the lifestyle of the Mongolian tribeswho had won him over.

Deployed on the Galician front, against the Austro-Hungarians, and later against the Ottomans (transferred because he attacked two officers), he displayed evident leadership qualities and extraordinary courage (wounded four times and decorated with the Cross of the Order of St. George, the Order of St. Vladimir and the Order of St. Stanislaus), but also the propensity to always do his own thing and not to evaluate either the risk of his life or the variables of a battle, so much so that the His superiors were not inclined to promote him to the top.

The turning point is when, after the fall of the Tsar, he is sent by Kerensky’s provisional Menshevik government to the far east of the former Russian empire, under the orders of General Grigory Semenov, together with whom he will line up against the Bolshevik army, without organically adhering to the admiral’s counter-revolutionary White Army Alexander Kolchak whose authority they do not recognize. In fact, everything stops at sympathy for the restoration of aristocratic Russia, but the whites want it back the same as before and indivisible while Semenov and Ungern-Sternberg instead want to carve out an autonomous piece of it in the East.

The yellow flag with his initial and the nicknames of mad or bloodthirsty Baron

In this period Unger-Sternberg indulged in excesses and violence which earned him the nickname Mad Baron and Bloody Baron. He leads Russian, Cossack, Buryat and irregular troops, attacks any supply transport that comes his way, White or Red, and in 1920 he even ends up separating from Semyonov who pursues the dream of a Cossack kingdom of Transbajkalia. He instead has a mystical ideological vision of opposition to Bolshevik subversion, dreaming of a new Russian-Chinese system. His army carries as its flag a black “U” resembling a horseshoe on a yellow field, and that symbol spreads terror in the Far East.

His political ideas are a mix between Christianity and Buddhism, shamanism and esotericism, and with the messianic belief that only a monarchical system can save the world from the chaos into which it has fallen. In 1921 he thought of establishing one theocracy led by the Dalai Lamaaccepting the invitation to liberate Mongolia from the Chinese. The troops under his orders attempted to capture the capital Urga (now Ulaanbaatar) but the attacks were unsuccessful and cost a high price in deaths and injuries. The general then had the surrounding hills set on fire, to give the impression of a numerically superior army, and in February he entered the city without firing a shot.

The Last Khan defeated by the Bolsheviks who wanted him on their side

After a few days he proclaimed Mongolia an independent monarchy governed by him with dictatorial powers, ending up convincing himself that he was the reincarnation of Gengis Khan came not to conquer but to bring freedom. On the other hand, it was claimed in the family that they were descendants of Batu Khan, founder of the Golden Horde. During his “reign” of a few months there were hundreds and hundreds of summary executions on his orders.

This does not seem to disturb him at all, just as he is not worried about the Bolshevik military pressure, which he tries to neutralize by striking inside the territories controlled by the revolutionary troops called for help by the pro-Soviet Mongols. But the Baron, destined to also be the last Khan, underestimates the strength of the opposing contingent and the signs of crumbling of his composite army. He loses two battles in mid-June and at the beginning of July the Red Army reinforced by Bolshevik Mongols enters Urga. He hopes by retreating north to receive aid from Japanwhich however do not arrive.

In August he was confronted and definitively defeated. The Kalmyk raider Ja Lama hosts him, and then treacherously hands him over to the Soviet general Vasilij Bljucher (1889–1938): he bears the name of Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Napoleon’s winner at Waterloo, but only because a Russian nobleman had intended to pay homage to him by naming a peasant family from which he came, precisely the kind that Ungern-Starnberg despised so much, like Bolshevism. And with equal contempt he had accepted the offer to join the Red Army.

In front of the firing squad, yet another gesture of contempt

From this moment on, his fate is sealed. On September 15, a military tribunal located in present-day Novosibirsk tried the Black Baron for a series of crimes against Soviet Russia, from having created a vassal state in Asia with the help of Japan (which provided money and armaments) to having conspired and acted to restore tsarism. The verdict was death by firing squad.

Perhaps it is legend, perhaps it is even true, but it is said that before being brought before the firing squad Ungern-Sternberg had swallowed the cross of St. George which he had been awarded for military valor and which he wore on his chest, to prevent the Bolsheviks from appropriating it as an heirloom.