Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

As the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917–1918, Ulmanis helped found the Latvian Farmers’ Union (one of the most powerful political forces in Latvia at the time); joined the Latvian People’s Council (Tautas Padome), which declared Latvian independence on 18 November 1918; and became prime minister of the Latvian republic (19 November 1918–18 June 1921) during the Latvian War of Independence. He was returned to that office on several occasions, as governments came and went in interwar Latvia, before in 1934 intervening with military assistance to partially suspend the constitution and establish an authoritarian dictatorship (the “Nationalist Dictatorship”) under his command. (Ostensibly, he moved to forestall a coup that had been planned by an extreme-Right organization, the “Legion.”) In 1936, he merged the offices of prime minister and president and began styling himself “Tautas Vadonis” (“Leader of the Nation”).

When the USSR invaded Latvia in June 1940, Ulmanis advised nonresistance, which added to the controversies surrounding his part in Latvian history. The following month (on 21 July 1940), he was arrested by the occupying Soviet authorities and was deported to Stavropol′, in Russia, where he was initially assigned to agricultural work before being imprisoned in July 1941. The following year, as invading German forces approached the North Caucasus, he was among prisoners evacuated across the Caspian Sea to Krasnovodsk, in Turkmenistan. He contracted dysentery and died soon after his arrival in Central Asia. Despite the controversy that surrounds a figure who imposed a dictatorship and ordered the passive surrender of his country to an invader, since 1989 Ulmanis has enjoyed some rehabilitation in independent Latvia. One of the major streets in Riga is named after him (K. Ulmaņa gatve), and in 2003 a monument of him was unveiled in a park at Bastejkalns, in the city center.

UNGERN VON STERNBERG, ROMAN FEDOROVICH (22 January 1886–15 September 1921). Sublieutenant (1908), esaul (1915), major general (1918), lieutenant general (1919). The “Bloody Baron” R. F. Ungern von Sternberg, one of the most notoriously cruel and violent characters of the civil wars and the personification of the Siberian atamanshchina, was born at Graz, Austria, as Robert Nicholas Maximillian von Ungern-Sternberg, but later changed his name. He was raised on the Estonian estates of his ancient Baltic German family, and even as a youth, he terrified and terrorized both his teachers and his classmates. He was expelled from the Revel (Tallinn) Gymnasium and later (February 1905) was withdrawn from the Naval Cadet Corps by his family, under threat of being cashiered, then served in the Far East as an ordinary soldier. After returning to European Russia and graduating from the Pavlovsk Military School (1908), he again served in Siberia, in the Argunsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. A wild, undisciplined character and a heavy drinker (remembered by P. N. Wrangel as “the type that is invaluable in wartime and impossible in times of peace”), he was expelled from the army in 1911, but not before, during a fight with a colleague, receiving a heavy saber blow to the head that may have left him mentally unbalanced. He then drifted around eastern Asia for some years, becoming attracted to the culture of the Mongols and studying Buddhism. (According to some sources, he joined the Mongolian forces that overthrew imperial Chinese rule in 1911.)

Despite his checkered past, on the outbreak of the First World War Ungern was accepted into Wrangel’s Nerchinsk Regiment of the Ussuri Cossack Host and fought with distinction in Galicia. However, he had to be sent into the reserves in January 1917, to avoid a court martial, having struck a senior officer during a drunken brawl, and was in a military prison at the time of the February Revolution. After he was released, he made his way to Transbaikalia to join his friend G. M. Semenov’s mission to raise volunteer units among the Buriats. Following the October Revolution, he became deputy commander of Semenov’s Special Manchurian Detachment, later establishing his own fiefdom around Dauria and applying methods of murderous tyranny that even Semenov had to admit were “frequently condemned.”