In the Baron’s Cloak, Willard Sunderland explores the final years of the Russian Empire, from the growing instability of the late nineteenth century, to the collapse of imperial power and its rebirth in the form of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. At once wide-ranging and intimate, Sunderland’s study is a micro-history of the Russian Empire told through the lens of an individual life, that of Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German who famously led an ill-fated campaign to restore the Russian monarchy from Mongolia in 1921. While Sunderland concedes that other lives may have been used to tell the story, he argues that, “Ungern’s is more useful than most because he leads us into places and questions we rarely consider together” (5). Indeed, Ungern’s movements throughout the Russian Empire and his participation in all of the major conflicts of the late imperial period enable Sunderland to uniquely discuss the entire span of these tumultuous years from the vantage point of the empire’s diverse peripheries rather than its center. In each location, Sunderland focuses on “the government’s policies, the dynamics of local society, the intertwining of cultures”, in order to consider what united the disparate regions under consideration as well as what ultimately tore them apart (10).

Sunderland structures his work around Ungern with each chapter dedicated to a particular place in time in his life. Sunderland begins on the Russian Empire’s western peripheries in Graz, Ungern’s birthplace in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before shifting to Estland, present-day Estonia, where Ungern’s familial and ancestral estate was located. For centuries, various imperial rulers, including the Tsars, allowed the local Baltic German aristocracy to administer the Baltic in exchange for their political loyalty. As the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century began posing challenges to the imperial system, European rulers increasingly found themselves needing to balance the diversity of their lands against the growing imperatives of nationalism. In the case of the Baltic, the centuries-old arrangement between the Tsars and the Baltic German elite began to change in the 1880s, as the Tsars adopted Russification as their answer to the question of nationalism. Rather than a nationalist policy, as some have argued, Russification, according to Sunderland, was an imperial policy whose “ultimate purpose was to repair and improve the country as an empire rather than reengineer it into a Russian nation-state” (37). Although Russification was adopted throughout the Russian Empire, Sunderland demonstrates how its implementation and severity varied depending on local factors and the perceived threat posed by particular ethnic groups. Intended to simplify imperial rule by making the empire more “obviously Russian-oriented”, Russification, Sunderland argues, created new tensions and anxieties that helped tear the empire apart (77).

Shifting from the empire’s western periphery to the Russian Far East, Sunderland devotes the majority of his work to the Trans-Baikal region where Ungern arrived at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Sunderland paints a fascinating portrait of life in this border region where centuries-old, cross-cultural ties between native Buryats, Tungus and Russian settlers on the one hand and Chinese settlers on the other persisted despite attempts to regulate the populations on either side of the border. Here, as elsewhere throughout the book, one sees a society in transition where old connections and ways of self-identifying persisted even as the processes of modernity were forcing changes and adaptations. Ungern spent the majority of his adult life on the border between the Russian Empire and Outer Mongolia. It is from here that he led anti-Bolshevik forces, first as Ataman Semenov’s right-hand man and later on his own during the so-called Mongolian Campaign to restore imperial power. Although they viewed empire in different terms, Sunderland suggests that the Whites and the Bolsheviks were products of the same cosmopolitan and imperial milieu that predisposed them to see large multiethnic states as the best form of social organization. Writing about the Russian Civil War, Sunderland proposes that it can be seen as a “war to gather up the broken pieces of the tsarist state and recreate a meaningful imperial center, whether that center actually called itself an empire or not” (151).

The Baron’s Cloak is a fascinating, well-written and well-researched study that captures the breadth and diversity of the Russian Empire. While containing much that would be of interest to specialists, it includes enough background about events taking place elsewhere within the Russian Empire to be accessible to readers less-versed in Russian history. The inclusion of several detailed maps, as well as contemporary photographs of Ungern and the various places he visited, are valuable additions to the book. This is particularly the case when Sunderland discusses Ungern’s cloak—a Mongolian deel with Russian officer’s epaulettes in which Ungern was photographed by the Bolsheviks during his trial in 1921—that symbolizes his liminal character between the old and the new. In addition to photographs, Sunderland uses a variety of sources from an impressive number of archives to recreate Ungern’s life. In conclusion, Sunderland’s approach makes for an engaging study not just of Ungern’s life, but also the diverse, multicultural world in which he lived.