which translates as âunwillingly, reluctantlyâ, is an odd one. It even inspired an anti-Semitic joke, popular during the 1930s: âWhatâs your name?â âUngern-Sternberg.â âIf I were Sternberg , Iâd be unhappy about it too.â Though there is no evidence that Ungern possessed any trace of Jewish ancestry, he separated out the names, entirely incorrectly, often referring to himself as Ungern von Sternberg. It was clearly an uncomfortable name for him; when he translated it into Mongolian it disappeared entirely, and he became simply âGreat Star Mountainâ.
Ungern was christened Nikolai Roman Maximilian, a mixture of Russian and German names befitting his heritage. He added a patronymic, in common with most Germans in Russia, transforming his fatherâs German Theodor into the Russian Fyodorovich. Even the date of his birth reflects the split between these two worlds, for he was born in two separate years: on 10 January, 1886 by the Western Gregorian calendar and on 29 December, 1885 by the Russian Julian one, which ran twelve days behind. Errors in conversion from biographers and bureaucrats alike have produced birthdates ranging from 23 January to 16 December! Similar cross-cultural confusion and misinterpretation would mark Ungernâs whole life.
In truth, he had barely any Russian ancestry, his family were thoroughly German and warlike; in his own words, âcrusaders and privateersâ. 1 There was a weak family connection to Russian royalty many generations previously, true, through the Romanov intermarriage with German nobility, but this was hardly unusual for an aristocratic central European family. Through them there was an even more tenuous claim to distant Mongolian ancestry. The family had a tradition of pride bordering on arrogance. One of their ancestors was supposed to have been an ambassador to the court of Ivan the Terrible, and to have had his hat nailed to his head after he refused to lift it to the tsar; it was said that they would have boarded the Ark only reluctantly, hence the origin of the name. (The real origin of âUngernâ lay in the familyâs distant Hungarian roots; âunwillingâ was a linguistic coincidence.)
Young Roman could, in fact, claim descent from any number of royal bloodlines, including the Plantagenets and the Habsburgs, but it was the Russian imperial connection that he always liked to assert and it was as a Russian that he always, first and foremost, presented himself. An intense programme of Russification had taken place during the 1860s as part of a wider Russian effort to strengthen the ties of the border provinces to the central Empire, 2 and it had had a deep effect on the Ungern-Sternbergs. Even so, the Baronâs sense of attachment to the Russian Empire was almost pathologically intense; in some ways he had what Isaiah Berlin described as âborderlands syndromeâ, the insecurity that comes from being on the fringes of a great empire, and which seems to produce an unusually high frequency of the most blindly cruel servants or leaders of these empires. Such men, including the Austrian Hitler, the Corsican Napoleon or the Georgian Stalin, developed, according to Berlin, either âexaggerated sentiment or contempt for the dominant majority, or else over-intense admiration or even worship of it . . . which leads both to unusual insights, and - born of overwrought sensibilities - a neurotic distortion of the factsâ. 3
His homeland, Estonia - then known to both the Germans and the Russians as Estland - had been carved into existence by the crusading order of the Knights of the Sword in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Northern Crusades against the pagans of Lithuania and Livonia have received scant attention compared with the crusades for the Holy Land, but they were long-lasting and bloody affairs,
undertaken more out of a desire for land than any genuine missionary
Krista Lakes, Mel Finefrock