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The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution
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 career
Recurring 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.
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 career
Recurring 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.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 27, 2018
This book focuses on the life of Baron Robert Nikolaus Maximilian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg, also known by the nickname of "Mad Baron". He 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 basis of a fantastic plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war approached.
In this book, the author tells the epic story of the last decades of the Russian Empire through the arch of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast confines of Eurasia. In tracking the movements of Ungern, he travels across the multinational borders of the Empire, where the country ran into three other condemned empires, Habsburg, Ottoman and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by the war, the revolution and the imperial collapse was particularly cruel.
The center of the author's story is a specific artifact: the baron's cloak, an essential part of the intercultural uniform that Ungern chose for himself at the time of his campaign in Mongolia: an orange-orange mongolian caftan embroidered in Khalkha's fashion, but equipped with a czarist style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived throughout the Russian Empire, combined his contrasting cultures, and fought in its wars and was shaped by his larger institutions and more volatile borders. He became a deeply contradictory figure, reflecting both the potential of the empire and a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.
In short, this was a tour de force that represents the brutality of the Russian Revolution. This is definitely a must-read.
In this book, the author tells the epic story of the last decades of the Russian Empire through the arch of the Baron's life, which spanned the vast confines of Eurasia. In tracking the movements of Ungern, he travels across the multinational borders of the Empire, where the country ran into three other condemned empires, Habsburg, Ottoman and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by the war, the revolution and the imperial collapse was particularly cruel.
The center of the author's story is a specific artifact: the baron's cloak, an essential part of the intercultural uniform that Ungern chose for himself at the time of his campaign in Mongolia: an orange-orange mongolian caftan embroidered in Khalkha's fashion, but equipped with a czarist style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived throughout the Russian Empire, combined his contrasting cultures, and fought in its wars and was shaped by his larger institutions and more volatile borders. He became a deeply contradictory figure, reflecting both the potential of the empire and a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.
In short, this was a tour de force that represents the brutality of the Russian Revolution. This is definitely a must-read.
May 5, 2025
Either you find the late Russian Empire and Revolution and Civil War fascinating, in which case this study of those times and events and the part that Baron Ungern-Sternberg played in them fascinating or you will be left cold. I do because what happened back then, which was for so long dismissed, forgotten and ignored has come back to life and relevance. None of this makes the baron anything but a very unpleasant character - it is hard to see him as anything but clinically insane - as well as barbarous - but overall a delusional fantasist. If you know nothing about the baron this is an excellent introduction to his life and times - and times is very important because when he lived, the world he came from means everything to understanding, that does not mean excusing, him.
This is not a biography in the way that 'The Bloody White Baron' by James Palmer was but it does look at this period through the Baron's life. I would be hard pushed to choose between the Palmer and Sunderland books. Both authors are fine academics and know, through travel, the areas they discuss.
I think it's only fair, since GR has no information on Willard Sunderland that I make up for this:
'Professor Sunderland received his BA in Russian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctorate in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. Since joining the department in 1996, he has taught in the fields of Russia and the Soviet Union, modern Europe, and world history.
'Sunderland's principal research interests are in the history of the Russian Empire in the modern period. Over the course of his career, he has lived and traveled extensively throughout the Russian Federation as well as the other states of the former Soviet Union.
'He is the author of two books and co-editor of four volumes of scholarly essays on varied topics connected to Russia's imperial history. His The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution, appeared with Cornell University Press in 2014 and was recognized with publication awards from the Association for the Study of the Nationalities (ASN), the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the Ohio Academy of History.
Sunderland's current book-in-progress is a travelogue/history of John Quincy Adams' voyage to Russia in 1809 as the first US ambassador appointed to the Russian court. Following John Quincy's route, Sunderland sailed to the edge of Russia himself with his friends and fellow Cincinnatians Tom and Chuck Lohre in his sailboat Clio in the summer of 2023. John Quincy's trip from Boston to St. Petersburg took 80 days. Sunderland's from Boston to Kotka, Finland, located just shy of the Russian border, took 76.
'In addition, Sunderland is also working on a book focused on the history of Russia and the world in the age of Peter the Great as well as new research related to Russian maritime history, the history of the Russian Far East and Northern Pacific, and Sino-Russian relations.'
For the full profile see: https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/su....
This is not a biography in the way that 'The Bloody White Baron' by James Palmer was but it does look at this period through the Baron's life. I would be hard pushed to choose between the Palmer and Sunderland books. Both authors are fine academics and know, through travel, the areas they discuss.
I think it's only fair, since GR has no information on Willard Sunderland that I make up for this:
'Professor Sunderland received his BA in Russian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctorate in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. Since joining the department in 1996, he has taught in the fields of Russia and the Soviet Union, modern Europe, and world history.
'Sunderland's principal research interests are in the history of the Russian Empire in the modern period. Over the course of his career, he has lived and traveled extensively throughout the Russian Federation as well as the other states of the former Soviet Union.
'He is the author of two books and co-editor of four volumes of scholarly essays on varied topics connected to Russia's imperial history. His The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution, appeared with Cornell University Press in 2014 and was recognized with publication awards from the Association for the Study of the Nationalities (ASN), the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the Ohio Academy of History.
Sunderland's current book-in-progress is a travelogue/history of John Quincy Adams' voyage to Russia in 1809 as the first US ambassador appointed to the Russian court. Following John Quincy's route, Sunderland sailed to the edge of Russia himself with his friends and fellow Cincinnatians Tom and Chuck Lohre in his sailboat Clio in the summer of 2023. John Quincy's trip from Boston to St. Petersburg took 80 days. Sunderland's from Boston to Kotka, Finland, located just shy of the Russian border, took 76.
'In addition, Sunderland is also working on a book focused on the history of Russia and the world in the age of Peter the Great as well as new research related to Russian maritime history, the history of the Russian Far East and Northern Pacific, and Sino-Russian relations.'
For the full profile see: https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/su....
January 24, 2022
Sunderland skillfully weaves an detailed description of the history of the Russian Revolution using only the single thread of Ungern’s life.
He also finds quite a variety of ways to say “[some fact] was true, but at the same time [the opposite of that fact] was also true.”
Definitely worth a read if narrative history is your jam.
He also finds quite a variety of ways to say “[some fact] was true, but at the same time [the opposite of that fact] was also true.”
Definitely worth a read if narrative history is your jam.
August 12, 2025
I read Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution in 2022, just after two years of pandemic shadow.
It was a period when my own sense of time felt fractured, and perhaps that’s why this book’s way of charting the fate of an empire through the life of a single man struck so deeply.
Sunderland chooses Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg as his prism—not because the Baron represents all of imperial Russia, but because in his journey you can glimpse both the privileges and the pathologies that ran through it.
The book follows Ungern-Sternberg from his Baltic German aristocratic youth, through Tsarist service, the mud and slaughter of World War I, and into the vortex of the Russian Civil War, where he briefly styled himself ruler of Mongolia.
Through him, Sunderland traces the geography of a crumbling empire: Baltic estates, Petersburg drawing rooms, Caucasian outposts, and far eastern frontiers. Each place is a chapter in the Russian imperial story, revealing a different mode of rule and a different kind of breakdown.
The “cloak” of the title is Sunderland’s metaphor for the empire itself—its expanse, its networks of loyalty and hierarchy, its protective sheen that, once torn, left those beneath it exposed to the storms of revolution and war.
What impressed me was Sunderland’s refusal to sensationalise. Given Ungern-Sternberg’s later legend as a mystic warlord, the temptation must have been great to play to the gallery.
Instead, Sunderland proceeds with a historian’s restraint and an almost judicial irony, showing how the Baron’s radicalisation was a gradual process rooted in the disintegration of imperial institutions, not an inexplicable leap into madness.
The research base is broad—archives in Russia, Europe, and East Asia, memoirs, military records; and newspapers—and the prose is clean and controlled, with moments of quiet sharpness. Sunderland balances the micro and the macro: personal episodes sit alongside thematic discussions of imperial administration, frontier politics, ethnic relations, and military culture.
If there’s a limitation, it’s inherent in the method: Ungern-Sternberg’s life was extreme, and while it illuminates much, it can also skew the scale toward the dramatic fringes of imperial experience.
Read alongside James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron, the differences are stark. Palmer’s book is brisk, vivid, and myth-soaked—a warlord’s life retold for dramatic effect, leaning into the strangeness and cruelty of Ungern-Sternberg’s Mongolian interlude. It’s engaging, but it thrives on the very exoticising and demonising tendencies Sunderland avoids.
Palmer’s Ungern-Sternberg becomes an almost timeless figure of chaos; Sunderland’s remains firmly embedded in the late imperial and revolutionary contexts that shaped him.
And if you place The Baron’s Cloak next to a broader imperial study like Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon, the contrast is one of scope and lens. Lieven’s book operates at the scale of grand strategy, statecraft, and institutional resilience in the face of a continental threat. His Russia is an empire of ministries, generals, and logistics—Ungern-Sternberg would barely merit a footnote.
Sunderland’s Russia, by contrast, is refracted through a single officer’s travels and transformations, showing how the same imperial structures that could coordinate armies across Europe could also, decades later, strand a man on the Asian steppe with only his cavalry and his delusions.
Together, these three books map the interpretive possibilities of imperial history: Palmer’s narrative flair gives us the legend, Lieven’s command of scale gives us the machinery, and Sunderland’s biographical focus gives us the connective tissue between individual and empire.
Reading them in sequence, you see how the Russian Empire can be remembered as an impersonal engine of power, as a stage for human extremes, or—perhaps most compellingly—as a lived world whose collapse was experienced one life at a time.
It was a period when my own sense of time felt fractured, and perhaps that’s why this book’s way of charting the fate of an empire through the life of a single man struck so deeply.
Sunderland chooses Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg as his prism—not because the Baron represents all of imperial Russia, but because in his journey you can glimpse both the privileges and the pathologies that ran through it.
The book follows Ungern-Sternberg from his Baltic German aristocratic youth, through Tsarist service, the mud and slaughter of World War I, and into the vortex of the Russian Civil War, where he briefly styled himself ruler of Mongolia.
Through him, Sunderland traces the geography of a crumbling empire: Baltic estates, Petersburg drawing rooms, Caucasian outposts, and far eastern frontiers. Each place is a chapter in the Russian imperial story, revealing a different mode of rule and a different kind of breakdown.
The “cloak” of the title is Sunderland’s metaphor for the empire itself—its expanse, its networks of loyalty and hierarchy, its protective sheen that, once torn, left those beneath it exposed to the storms of revolution and war.
What impressed me was Sunderland’s refusal to sensationalise. Given Ungern-Sternberg’s later legend as a mystic warlord, the temptation must have been great to play to the gallery.
Instead, Sunderland proceeds with a historian’s restraint and an almost judicial irony, showing how the Baron’s radicalisation was a gradual process rooted in the disintegration of imperial institutions, not an inexplicable leap into madness.
The research base is broad—archives in Russia, Europe, and East Asia, memoirs, military records; and newspapers—and the prose is clean and controlled, with moments of quiet sharpness. Sunderland balances the micro and the macro: personal episodes sit alongside thematic discussions of imperial administration, frontier politics, ethnic relations, and military culture.
If there’s a limitation, it’s inherent in the method: Ungern-Sternberg’s life was extreme, and while it illuminates much, it can also skew the scale toward the dramatic fringes of imperial experience.
Read alongside James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron, the differences are stark. Palmer’s book is brisk, vivid, and myth-soaked—a warlord’s life retold for dramatic effect, leaning into the strangeness and cruelty of Ungern-Sternberg’s Mongolian interlude. It’s engaging, but it thrives on the very exoticising and demonising tendencies Sunderland avoids.
Palmer’s Ungern-Sternberg becomes an almost timeless figure of chaos; Sunderland’s remains firmly embedded in the late imperial and revolutionary contexts that shaped him.
And if you place The Baron’s Cloak next to a broader imperial study like Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon, the contrast is one of scope and lens. Lieven’s book operates at the scale of grand strategy, statecraft, and institutional resilience in the face of a continental threat. His Russia is an empire of ministries, generals, and logistics—Ungern-Sternberg would barely merit a footnote.
Sunderland’s Russia, by contrast, is refracted through a single officer’s travels and transformations, showing how the same imperial structures that could coordinate armies across Europe could also, decades later, strand a man on the Asian steppe with only his cavalry and his delusions.
Together, these three books map the interpretive possibilities of imperial history: Palmer’s narrative flair gives us the legend, Lieven’s command of scale gives us the machinery, and Sunderland’s biographical focus gives us the connective tissue between individual and empire.
Reading them in sequence, you see how the Russian Empire can be remembered as an impersonal engine of power, as a stage for human extremes, or—perhaps most compellingly—as a lived world whose collapse was experienced one life at a time.
February 9, 2022
A lot has been written about Ungern-Sternberg, mostly viewing him as a “mad baron”, a wild man on a wild frontier. This book however, does something more interesting. It sees Ungern as a product of the Russian Empire, and uses his life to explore that empire and its collapse. Less a biography than a micro-history using Ungern’s story as a connecting thread, the book explores how the Russian Empire was held together, how it fell apart, and how it was reassembled by people who, in their own way, were just as much products of the empire as Ungern himself. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in Ungern, Russian history, and empire more broadly.
December 9, 2016
A competent effort that fails to weave together revolutionary Russia with the biography of one of the White's more colorful and disturbing characters.
If readers are interested in an introductory blending of revolution, civil war, and psychopathy this might be an interesting read, but for those with any background in the revolution and civil war may find The Baron's Cloak redundant.
Not a bad book, but it fails to illuminate a disturbed man and the civil war he fought in.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
If readers are interested in an introductory blending of revolution, civil war, and psychopathy this might be an interesting read, but for those with any background in the revolution and civil war may find The Baron's Cloak redundant.
Not a bad book, but it fails to illuminate a disturbed man and the civil war he fought in.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
January 7, 2019
This study is a revealing and scholarly look at a lost world: the Russian Empire passing its apex in the first two decades of the 20th Century. Through the short, violent life of Nikolai Roman Max (Ritter) von Ungern-Sternberg, we see how the multi-cultural patchwork of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire disintegrated in war and revolution. Ungern was technically an Austrian, but the meaning of that term today is misleading. In the context of the world he knew, he was a 'trans-national German,' an ethnic group that peopled areas from Tyrol and Switzerland to Bessarabia and the Ukraine. From his attempt to join in the Russo-Japanese War right out of school to his final days fighting against Red Army in Mongolia, Ungern's life provides us with precious glimpses of how the collapse of the Hapsburg and Romanov empires led to a pattern of war and ethnic cleansing that lasted 50 years and left all the lands from the Elbe to Sakhalin under the hegemony of the Soviet Union, the last great empire whose Red Tsar perfected oppression, dictatorship and genocide yet remains admired by millions. With its protagonist who evokes Moorcock's Colonel Pyat, this book helps to fill some of the huge void in Western literature about the fascinating and cataclysmic history of Eastern Europe, European Russia and its failed 'Russification' of Central Asia. I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of those still very troubled regions.
August 19, 2019
A just-the-facts biography of Ungern that ties his life directly with the general trends of late imperial Russia. An odd overlooking of military affairs for such a figure, though. Even in the campaigns were there is a fair amount of information available.
September 17, 2023
An extremely readable primer into the unfortunate revolution told through the eyes of a very idiosyncratic man. Has very interesting and unique insights into peripheral topics of the revolution and ww1 (industrialization, the role of baltic germans, their Russification, the role of Mongolia etc)
June 6, 2025
Really enjoyable book that chronicles the period of the Russian revolution through the life of baron Ungern. A really useful book that gives you an insight into such a complex period through the perspective of one man’s life.
December 4, 2024
One of the essential books of the Myth of the Mad Baron.
January 19, 2016
Stripped of tales of atrocity, madness, and mysticism, the Bloody Baron is revealed for what he was: a nothing, politically vacuous and embarked on a hopeless quest. In that sense, the book may be a bit disappointing. But by placing Ungern's activity in a larger context of Civil War and imperial convulsions, Sunderland provides a much more tasty meal than just a catalogue of one man's obsessions and crimes.
February 15, 2016
I love history about Russia from its exit from the Great War to the consolidation of Soviet Power and emergence of the USSR. There was a lot of wacky stuff going on. I also love the less thorough, but still wildly interesting accounts of Ungern-Sternberg's life by other authors. An extremely well-researched book by someone who can delve into the native sources and craft a well-defined picture of Ungern's time and place makes this a very interesting read that resides firmly in my wheelhouse.
November 24, 2014
Interesting look at the symbols of Empire and the end of the imperial age.
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February 7, 2018One of my intentions for the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 has been to finish reading some of the numerous books I've started in the past several years, as my reasons for leaving them unfinished have rarely been a comment on their quality, but more a sign of my moods and availability. I began reading this one when sitting in on a colleague's Russian history course, but hadn't quite finished it by the end of the semester and I moved on to more urgent forms of scholarly reading.
We read portions of The Baron's Cloak in part to familiarize ourselves with ways in which biography can be used to reveal aspects of history extending well beyond the confines of a single life. This particular book is an example of a historical genre called microhistory. My Sibling asserts that this is just a new name for a "life and times" type of biography, but it seems to me that a "life and times" always centers on a major historical figure (especially a cultural figure?) about whom quite a bit is known--so for instance Shakespeare or Hogarth. A microhistory, on the other hand, can take either an obscure or a relatively well known figure as its point of departure, and is more interested in that person's world than in the person him- or herself. In this case, the baron of the title is a historical figure of some but not overwhelming significance, and while there is data about his entire life, it's often not very detailed data and very little is known about what the man actually apart from what can be gleaned from his sometimes bizarre actions. He was a military man in the Russian empire, may have ensured Mongolian independence, and was tried and executed by the Bolsheviks. So, if you expect this book to take you inside Baron Ungarn himself, you'll be disappointed, but if you recognize that its intent is rather different, the book has a good deal to offer in its exploration of non-Russian nationals' allegiances and choices within the collapsing Russian empire.
We read portions of The Baron's Cloak in part to familiarize ourselves with ways in which biography can be used to reveal aspects of history extending well beyond the confines of a single life. This particular book is an example of a historical genre called microhistory. My Sibling asserts that this is just a new name for a "life and times" type of biography, but it seems to me that a "life and times" always centers on a major historical figure (especially a cultural figure?) about whom quite a bit is known--so for instance Shakespeare or Hogarth. A microhistory, on the other hand, can take either an obscure or a relatively well known figure as its point of departure, and is more interested in that person's world than in the person him- or herself. In this case, the baron of the title is a historical figure of some but not overwhelming significance, and while there is data about his entire life, it's often not very detailed data and very little is known about what the man actually apart from what can be gleaned from his sometimes bizarre actions. He was a military man in the Russian empire, may have ensured Mongolian independence, and was tried and executed by the Bolsheviks. So, if you expect this book to take you inside Baron Ungarn himself, you'll be disappointed, but if you recognize that its intent is rather different, the book has a good deal to offer in its exploration of non-Russian nationals' allegiances and choices within the collapsing Russian empire.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews