Sunderland, Willard The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 766 capitalism, so it is not quite right for Thomas to claim that the ‘solitary success of a beleaguered Russian Revolution laying claim to his mantle was to Marx the least likely of scenarios’ (p. 166). In so short a book each author will focus on what for them is the essential Marx. Thomas captures Marx the theorist and Marx the revolutionist, although I think he has an overly harsh reading of a phrase from McLellan (cited p. 23) that Marx made slow progress of Capital because of the work he undertook for the First International that was ‘forced upon him’. One can accept tasks voluntarily and still note the impact of the commitment and this is how I read McLellan’s remark. I would not make it a major point of attack to be returned to (p. 164). Marx was clearly a revolutionary politician and a theoretician. Here I would have included my favourite sentence from Marx but absent from this book: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.’ Ulster University Coleraine Ian D. Thatcher Sunderland, Willard. The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. xv + 344 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00:£21.50. In his preface, Willard Sunderland gives an interesting account of the genesis of this book and how it came to assume its current form. He began it as a conventional biography of Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921), better known as the ‘Bloody Baron’ of Civil War mythology. A darker version of T. E. Lawrence, Ungern’s brutal exploits in Mongolia have already spawned numerous biographies (the most accessible is probably James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron, London, 2008), and extensive primary source publications (the most extensive from S. L. Kuz´min Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh & Legendarnyi Baron: neizvestnye stranity grazhdanskoi voiny, Moscow, 2004). As Sunderland puts it ‘as I read more deeply, I began to see how widely he had lived and travelled, and the sources I was finding seemed to reveal at least as much about the Russian Empire as they did about him’ (p. xi) — so this book is much more than a biography. Instead Sunderland is attempting to use the techniques of microhistory — in this case the study of a single life — to tease out recurring themes in the history of late imperial Russia and its collapse between 1917 and 1921 (this is also the guiding principle behind Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, Bloomington, IN, 2012, which he edited together with Stephen M. Norris). By and large he succeeds brilliantly in this, and along the way actually REVIEWS 767 gives a much better explanation of the development of Ungern’s character, personality and beliefs than previous biographers, who have tended to focus on the well-documented Civil War years and paid little attention to the imperial forces and milieus that moulded this ‘toxic cosmopolitan’ (to use a phrase from one of Sunderland’s earlier articles on the subject). From his birthplace in Graz to his execution in Novonikolaevsk, via Tiflis, his stepfather’s estate at Jerwakant in Estland, Reval, St Petersburg, Chita, Dauria, the Amur region, Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, the Eastern Front against Germany and Austria-Hungary and back to Mongolia again (Sunderland organizes the chapters chronologically and geographically), Ungern’s life certainly does bring to the fore the sheer ‘imperial-ness’ of the world he inhabited, one where the national idea was gathering in strength, but had not yet carried all before it. The book is rich in detail which illustrates this, but I will single out one vignette from a 1915 report from the Eastern Front just north of Warsaw, quoted in full by Sunderland: ‘Officer Ungern-Sternberg leapt to his feet before the wire and called out loudly in German, “You there, what’s gotten into you? Stop your shooting. It’s your own men!”’ (p. 136). The Germans fell for this ruse, allowing the German-speaking aristocrat Ungern (born, lest we forget, in the Austro-Hungarian...