The Mad Baron

One of Mongolian history's most unusual characters was Baron Roman Nikolaus Fyodorivich von Ungern-Sternberg, a renegade White Russian officer who believed he was the reincarnation of Chinggis Khaan, destined to restore the Mongol warlord's previous empire. Contemporaries paint a fine picture of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, later known as the Mad Baron, describing him as haunted-looking, with a psychotic state, that fixed on people 'like those of an animal in a cave'. He spoke with a high-pitched voice and his bulging forehead bore a huge sword scar, which pulsed with red veins whenever he grew agitated. As a finishing touch, one of his eyes was slightly higher than the other.

The Bolshevik victory in Russia forced the Baron east and he slowly accumulated a desperate army of renegade mercenaries. Amongst his closest advisers was a thug known as the Teapot, who trained to strangle whoever the Baron talking to whenever a 'teapot' was called for. Another close adviser was the obviously insane Colonel Sepailov, who witnesses recall was 'always nervously jerking wriggling his body and talking ceaselessly, making most unattractive sounds in his throat and spluttering with saliva all over his lips'.

The Baron enforced discipline with a reign of terror, roasting deserts alive, baking defiant prisoners in ovens and throwing his rivals in locomotive boilers. He slew many of his own troops in drunken stupors. Believing himself to also be the reincarnated god of war and a descendant of Attila the Hun, he was a deep believer in soothsayers and also a fervent Buddhist, convinced that he was doing his victims a favour by packing them off to the next life sooner rather than later.

With an army of 6000 troops (and the tacit backing of the Japanese) the Baron crossed the Mongolian border in the summer of 1920 with the aim of establishing a Pan-Mongolian empire. By October his forces attacked Urga (as Ulaan Baatar was then called) but were driven back four times, once regrouping on nearby Bogd Uul, before finally taking the city. He freed the Bogd Khaan who had been imprisoned by the Chinese, to general joy but this turned to horror as the next three days saw an orgy of looting, burning and killing. Witnesses recall how his followers were allowed to thrust one hand in the Mongolian treasury and keep whatever they pulled out. In May 1921 the Baron declared himself the Emperor of Russia.

After only a few months the Bolsheviks retook Urga and the Baron fled the city. Out in the desert, his own followers tried to kill him, shooting him in his tent, but he managed to escape. One can only imagine their horror when, only minutes after riding off, he slowly reappeared on horseback out of the darkness. A group of Mongolian herders later found him bleeding in the desert. He was eventually taken by the Bolsheviks, deported to Novosibirsk and shot on September 15, 1921, presumed mad. He was defiant to the end.