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

Building upon the wide-ranging thematic treatment of the relationship of frontier, colonization, and empire in his previous work Taming the Wild Field, Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak turns his focus to the last years of the Russian imperial project and its ultimate dissolution through war and revolution. His perhaps surprising choice of a vehicle of analysis is Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a man whose controversial exploits and exotic reputation have inspired a number of sensationalistic biographical accounts. Yet Sunderland’s interest is strictly academic, and he offers what he terms a “micro-history,” not a biography in the strict sense, as a tool to examine the complexities of empire as a lived experience. Indeed, Ungern’s relatively short yet varied life allows Sunderland to explore a variety of issues: the disparate impact of policies of Russification in the last decades of the empire, the institutions and patterns of socialization and assimilation that structured military service; the critical transformations of the imperial polity and society wrought by the mobilizations and demands of the Great War; the ultimate fracturing and fragmentation of imperial unity and space under the radicalization of war and revolution; and the various projects — Bolshevik, White, and Ungern’s — to re-imagine and reconstruct territorial integrity and political authority.

Sunderland emphasizes that the empire was always defined by difference, yet also constituted a unified polity, however awkwardly its component regions and peoples were pieced together. Ungern exemplified this duality; he was at once extraordinary and typical of the imperial experience. On the one hand, his lofty noble title, his lineage from a small yet disproportionally wealthy, important, and accomplished ethnic minority, even his idiosyncratic career choices distinguished him from many of his peers, to say nothing of the peasants of the black earth provinces to whom his tale likely would have sounded fantastic, even incomprehensible. At the same time, his cosmopolitan pattern of upbringing and service as one of the many “sub-contractors” of the sovereign, as Sunderland calls them, would have been all too common for a number of frontier peoples, among them Poles, Finns, and Georgians, and particularly their elites. Moreover, as Sunderland notes, the number of such people who “knew the country on much broader terms” (p. 7) only increased as the empire grew and time wore on. That said, the book’s parallel tracks of analysis regarding the personal and imperial could have potentially fit awkwardly together, but Sunderland transitions between the two seamlessly and integrates them in compelling fashion. An inscription on the Ungern estate mansion, a Mongolian yurt, even the titular cloak adopted by the baron in his last days, all offer opportunities to reflect upon the complexities of empire and the larger themes noted above.

Moreover, the wisdom of Sunderland’s choice to eschew a strict biography in favour of a broader approach becomes even more evident in light of the many gaps in the historical record. Ungern’s story is at once fascinating and fragmented. Throughout the book he remains a somewhat ethereal guide, bringing the reader to a variety of exotic locales — the rich urban environs of Reval, the remoteness of the Trans-Baikal frontier, the brutal trenches of the Eastern front, the barren steppes of Mongolia — while frequently fading into the background. Sunderland’s diligence and creativity in using a variety of sources and methods to reconstruct Ungern’s life journey are impressive, but his subject remains elusive. In light of this, Sunderland can indeed be forgiven for frequently musing upon Ungern’s possible musings, imagining Ungern’s imaginings. Yet in terms of embodying Sunderland’s analytical fusion of individual and empire, it is fitting that Ungern was in the end the ultimate success story of imperial socialization, a man who became a quintessential tsarist servitor.

Ambitious and meticulous in both its breadth and depth of research and analysis, Sunderland’s work...