page_title: Roman von Ungern-Sternberg
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Roman von Ungern-Sternberg / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Р.Ф. Унгерн в семилетнем возрасте
context_page_description: Baron Roman Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, often referred to as Baron Ungern, was an anticommunist general in the Russian Civil War and then an independent warlord who intervened in Mongolia against China. One of the Russian Empire's Baltic German minority, Ungern was an ultraconservative monarchist who aspired to restore the Russian monarchy after the 1917 Russian Revolutions and to revive the Mongol Empire under the rule of the Bogd Khan. His attraction to Vajrayana Buddhism and his eccentric, often violent treatment of enemies and his own men earned him the sobriquet "the Mad Baron" or "the Bloody Baron".
  In February 1921, at the head of the Asiatic Cavalry Division, Ungern expelled Chinese troops from Mongolia and restored the monarchic power of the Bogd Khan. During his five-month occupation of Outer Mongolia, Ungern imposed order on the capital city, Ikh Khüree, by fear, intimidation and brutal violence against his opponents, particularly the Bolsheviks. In June 1921, he went on to invade eastern Siberia to support supposed anti-Bolshevik rebellions and to head off a Red Army-Mongolian partisan invasion. That action led to his defeat and capture two months later.
context_section_description: Robert Nikolaus Maximilian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg was born in Graz, Austria, on 10 January 1886 [O.S. 29 December 1885] to a noble Baltic German family. The Ungern-Sternberg family had settled in present-day Estonia during the Middle Ages. Ungern-Sternberg's first language was German, but he became fluent in French, Russian, English and Estonian. His mother was a German noblewoman, Sophie Charlotte von Wimpffen, later Sophie Charlotte von Ungern-Sternberg, and his father was Theodor Leonhard Rudolph Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg (1857–1918). He also had Hungarian roots and claimed descent from Batu Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson, which played a role in his dream of reviving the Mongol Empire.
  In 1888 his family moved to Reval (Tallinn), the capital of the Governorate of Estonia in the Russian Empire, where his parents divorced in 1891. In 1894 his mother married the Baltic-German nobleman Oskar Anselm Hermann Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene. Ungern-Sternberg grew up in the Governorate, with his home being the Hoyningen-Huene estate at Jerwakant (modern Järvakandi, Estonia), deep in the forests, about 40 miles from Reval. In the summer, Ungern-Sternberg lived on the Baltic island of Dago (now Hiiumaa), which he liked to boast had belonged to his family for over 200 years.
  As a boy, Ungern-Sternberg was noted for being such a ferocious bully that even the other bullies feared him and several parents forbade their children from playing with him, as he was a "terror". Ungern was well known for his love of torturing animals, and at the age of 12 he tried to strangle to death his cousin's pet owl for no particularly good reason other than his cruelty towards animals. Ungern-Sternberg had extreme pride in his ancient, aristocratic family and later wrote that his family had over the centuries "never taken orders from the working classes" and it was outrageous that "dirty workers who've never had any servants of their own, but still think they can command" should have any say in the ruling of the vast Russian Empire. Ungern-Sternberg, although proud of his German origin, identified himself very strongly with the Russian Empire. When asked whether his "family had distinguished itself in Russian service", Ungern proudly answered: "Seventy-two killed in wartime!" Ungern-Sternberg believed that return to monarchies in Europe was possible with the aid of "cavalry people" - meaning Russian Cossacks, Buryats, Tatars, Mongols, Kyrgyz, Kalmyks, etc.
  In 1893 Ungern-Sternberg surveyed mountain ranges for the Tiflis Geographical Society in Tbilisi. In 1898, his father was briefly imprisoned for fraud and, in 1899, was committed to the local insane asylum. From 1900 to 1902 Ungern attended the  Nicholas I Gymnasium in Reval. His school records show that he was an unruly, bad-tempered young man who was constantly in trouble with his teachers because of frequent fights with other cadets and breaking other school rules: smoking in bed, growing long hair, leaving without permission etc., which finally led to the schoolmaster writing a letter in February 1905 to his stepfather and mother to ask them to withdraw him from the school, or he would be expelled. In 1905, he left the school to join the fighting in eastern Russia during the Russo-Japanese War, but it is unclear whether he participated in operations against the Japanese or if all military operations had ceased before his arrival in Manchuria although he was awarded the Russo-Japanese War Medal in 1913.
  In 1905, Russia exploded into revolution, and Estonian peasants went on a bloody jacquerie against the Baltic-German nobility, which owned most of the land there. Aristocrats were lynched and their estates burned down, one being the one at Jerwakant where Ungern-Sternberg had grown up. The Revolution of 1905 and the destruction of the Jerwakant estate were huge traumas to Ungern-Sternberg, who saw the jacquerie as confirming his belief that the Estonian peasants who worked on his family's lands were all "rough, untutored, wild and constantly angry, hating everybody and everything without 
caption: Ungern-Sternberg as a child.
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