Colonel Leonid Sipailov

Leonid Sipailov emerged from the wreckage of the imperial army as one of the men the civil war promoted: an obscure officer of no distinguished service who discovered that in a regime without courts, the person who controls interrogation controls everything. He attached himself to Ungern in the Transbaikal and by February 1921 was commandant of captured Urga and head of the Asiatic Division's counter-intelligence.

Every surviving account of Ungern's Urga — Ossendowski's, the staff physician Riabukhin's, the émigré depositions collected afterwards — converges on Sipailov as its central horror. He is described as physically unsettling, with a nervous tic and a habit of talking gently while ordering killings, and as a man who preferred strangulation because it saved ammunition. His squads operated at night, took people from their homes on denunciation or suspicion, and killed them outside the city.

It was Sipailov who executed the practical machinery of the anti-Jewish pogrom that followed the capture of Urga, and who extended the killings to Russian civilians, refugees, suspected Bolshevik sympathisers and, eventually, to officers of the division itself. He also enriched himself systematically from the property of the dead. Ungern used him deliberately — Sipailov did what the Baron's own officers would not — and by the summer of 1921 several of those officers regarded removing the commandant as a precondition for removing the Baron.

His end is not securely documented. Sipailov was not with the division when it disintegrated on the Selenga, and the accounts diverge: some hold that he was caught and killed in 1921 while trying to escape through Mongolia, others that he was executed after falling into Soviet or Mongolian hands. What is certain is that he does not appear anywhere in the record after 1921. Historians of the period treat the various death stories as unverified.