Long surrounded by a tenacious fascination, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg lends himself badly to hasty simplifications. The volume Paul Serey devotes to him does not, however, merely add one more biography to an already crowded bibliography: it considerably widens the perspective and asserts itself from the outset as a project of singular scale. For the first time in French, the reader is given access to a remarkably rich corpus of texts, testimonies, and documents, gathered into a coherent whole. Laurent Schang rightly underlines the point in his preface: never before had a work of such exhaustiveness been devoted to Ungern. Paul Serey himself presents the volume as the culmination of fifteen years of patient research, drawing on archives, unpublished correspondence, and direct accounts. The ambition is plain: to offer the reference work on Ungern and on his Asiatic Cavalry Division.
It must be said that the man himself seems to call for — almost to provoke — that kind of immoderation. A Baltic aristocrat turned White officer, a mystical condottiere, perceived by some in Asia as a reincarnation of Genghis Khan, Ungern surges out of history like a quasi-mythological apparition. The book restores his entire vertiginous trajectory: his dominion over Dauria, the triumphal entry into Urga, the delirious dream of a Greater Mongolia stretching from Lake Baikal to the borders of Tibet, then the gradual collapse into a desperate flight forward. Certain images, of an almost visual force, lodge durably in the reader's mind: Ungern wearing a yellow robe beneath his imperial officer's coat as he leaves Urga at the head of his cavalry; the chimerical project of a march to Tibet; finally the betrayal, the trial, and the firing squad — the closing scene that tips him irrevocably into legend.
The power of the work lies precisely in this singular alchemy: the Russian civil war here meets anticommunist fever, the violence of the fighting mingles with a deeply internalized Asian mysticism, while the myth is fed by direct testimony — sometimes raw, always illuminating. As Laurent Schang suggests, nothing here is sweetened or smoothed into a tidy narrative. Ungern appears in his full disturbing complexity: his obsessions, his contradictions, his brutality, and his irreversible fall. Above all, he is shown through the many gazes of those who followed him, served him, fought him, or simply came near him, lending the portrait a rare density.
For any reader interested in Russian history, in counter-revolution, in the White armies, or in the great cursed figures of the twentieth century, the book asserts itself as an essential landmark. Far more than a simple historical work, it offers a plunge into a dark, violent, and fascinating epic, where history and legend interweave until they become inseparable. On that account, it is set to become — durably — the great French reference work devoted to Baron Ungern.