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- BIOGRAPHY
Roman, Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg, was born on 29 December 1885 in Graz, Austria, the oldest son of Theodor, Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg and Sophie, Freiin von Wimpffen. His parents were divorced by the time he was six.
After the Russian Revolution, Siberia was in chaos with large scale executions. Grigory Mikhaylovich Semenov wielded undisputed power in the Transregion where he instituted a reign of terror and coercion that enabled him to confiscate the wealth of men and women who lived under his authority. His robberies included a half-million dollars' worth of furs that belonged to a company in New York.
Semenov owed a portion of his success to the wit, wisdom, and tactical genius of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, perhaps the most bizarre of his lieutenants and certainly one of the most cruel. Once described by General Wrangel as 'the type that is invaluable in wartime and impossible in times of peace.' Ungern-Sternberg, like Semenov, had been a squadron commander in the Nerchinsk Cossacks under Wrangel's command, and also like Semenov, he wore the St.George's Cross.
Physically, mentally, and morally, he was a tangle of contradictions. Wrangel thought him 'fair and puny-looking' but quickly discovered that he had 'an iron constitution and ruthless energy.' Although appalled by the baron's personal uncleanliness and lack of military bearing, Wrangel also remembered him as a man having the 'shyness of a savage.' Not a professional soldier, 'Roman Fedorovich' Ungern-Sternberg was a hunter and a killer of men. 'War was his natural element' Wrangel concluded. 'He was not an officer, but a hero out of one of Mayne Reid's novels.'
In the Carpathians he had fought together with Grigory Semenov, and were posted to Siberia at the same time. One of Ungern-Sternberg's favourite hobbies after he was promoted to the rank of Major-General was to enter taverns, consume enough vodka to achieve double-vision and then fire at the other patrons, logging how many he could hit. To his astonishment, it remained a constant fifty percent of those he aimed at. Despite his tiny head, it took enormous quantities of alcohol to make him drunk. After a few years of developing his hobby, drinkers across Siberia learned to flee when he kicked open cafe doors with a boot.
Ungern-Sternberg felt the pull of the east, the mountains, rolling steppes and the icy wastes of Genghis Khan's stamping grounds. He studied the tactics used by Mongol warlords and was fascinated by their courage and stamina. When his total of dead customers became too high for his addled brain to recall, he was struck with a revelation. He later compared this blast of insight with satori, the enlightenment experienced by Buddha. This noble divulgence was as follows: by slaying people he was doing them a favour. If they were unable to protect themselves, it meant they were feeble and living under poor Karma. By dying in a state of innocence, they improved their position on the rungs of the cosmos.
The accounts of those who knew Ungern-Sternberg during the Civil War paint a terrifying picture of a man grown used to killing and, perhaps, unhinged by having held too long the power of life and death over others. Baron Budberg once called him a 'specialist in floggings and shootings,' and by his orders, men and women suffered death by beating, hanging, beheading, disembowelling, and countless other tortures transformed them from living human beings into what one witness called a 'formless bloody mass.' Ungern-Sternberg's physician described one of his written orders as 'the product of the diseased brain of a pervert and megalomaniac affected with 'thirst for human blood.'
To take on the Red Army, however, was above even Roman von Ungern-Sternberg's delusions. Nor could he stay longer in Russian territory. The answer was simple---he would ride into Mongolia, destroy the Chinese administration and set up a personal kingdom. Then he would forge a Pan-Asiatic empire, including Manchuria and Tibet. He managed to enlist over three hundred devotees, he baptised them in vodka and hashish and gave them a name : the Order of Military Buddhists. The Order of Military Buddhists dazedly entered Mongolia in 1920, partly chased out of Russia by the Bolsheviks.
In February 1921, they reached Urga. Mongolian winters are incredibly severe: temperatures of minus 40 are not uncommon. Unable to launch his attack without astrological guidance, Ungern-Sternberg set up camp outside the gates, awaiting a beneficial alignment of the stars. Eager to taste the heated delights of the city, his soldiers whiled away the hours by debating the virtues of necrophilia. Finally, at a divinely ordained moment, the Baron released his frostbitten crew of savages upon the capital. They encountered scant resistance as they stampeded through the narrow alleyways and courtyards. The carnage was atrocious: an orgy of rape and looting lasted three days. Whether every tale which surrounds the Baron's excesses is entirely factual is open to debate. Bolsheviks surely played up his monstrousness after his death.
Ungern-Sternberg managed to last eight months merely because of financial assistance from Japan. The details of this assistance are unknown; undoubtedly Tokyo saw an independent Mongolia as a useful bulwark against the Russian bear and Chinese dragon. The end came through a Red Army division which, for Mongolia, was the start of seventy years of diffident intolerance and anguish as a Soviet satellite.
Ungern-Sternberg did not wait to welcome defeat in the ruins of Urga. He decided to take the fight to the Bolsheviks. He rounded up his followers and charged north. To prepare for the impending conflict, double rations of vodka and hashish were issued. His drugged army was quickly decimated by a communist patrol. The survivors mutinied and attempted to shoot the Baron. He fled, without hat or clothing, into the night. One description endures from this period: 'On his naked chest numerous talismans, charms and medals were hanging on a yellow cord. He looked like a reincarnation of a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid even to look at him.' One by one his remaining men were caught, he was the last.
He was taken to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk by train. At every station he was exhibited on the platform as a freak in a cage. His trial was swift and callous, yet for the first time in his life, he spoke eloquently. He was the last 'White' general to trouble Lenin; the revolution was settled.
In September 1921 he was sent before a firing squad, still weighted down with talismans. His head was much too small to make a suitable target, so the marksmen aimed for his chest. Shrapnel from a charm seriously injured at least one of them. His brain was removed for study by doctors and it was disclosed that his left lobe, now considered the hemisphere of identity, existed only as a shrivelled root.
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