The World the Baron Broke

The years covered by White Khan are among the most violent and least remembered in modern history. Between the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the fall of Vladivostok in October 1922, the Russian Civil War killed somewhere between seven and twelve million people — most of them civilians, most of them east of the Urals, and most of them from disease and famine caused by the war's disruption of the world they lived in.

The collapse of the Romanovs

In the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918, the militant Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky led the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and their four attendants. The killing was intended to sever any restoration of the Romanov line and to signal the beginning of a new order — one that rejected Orthodoxy, monarchy, and traditional Russian identity in favor of a militant, atheistic communist utopia.

The White Armies and the Asiatic Cavalry Division

The counter-revolutionary "White" forces that opposed the Bolsheviks were never a single army. They were a patchwork of monarchists, republicans, regional warlords, Cossack hosts, and foreign expeditionary contingents, fatally divided on what should replace communism. Baron Ungern-Sternberg broke with the White command in Transbaikal to build his own multi-ethnic Asiatic Cavalry Division.

The Bogd Khan's Mongolia

Outer Mongolia had declared its independence from Qing China in 1911 under the theocratic rule of the Bogd Khan (Jebtsundamba Khutuktu), the third most senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. By 1919 the country had been re-occupied by Chinese warlord forces and the Bogd Khan placed under house arrest. It was a country of perhaps 600,000 people spread across a landscape larger than Western Europe — and it was into this vacuum that the Baron rode.

Urga, 1921

When Ungern's Division took the Mongolian capital in February 1921, the city held a small but well-established community of foreign merchants — Russian, Chinese, Buryat, and Jewish. Among them was Israel Eli Zanzer, a Jewish businessman with a Mongolian family, a large gold-mining operation, and the personal favor of the Bogd Khan. His survival of the Baron's subsequent purge, and the shelter given to eleven refugees by the Mongolian national hero Prince Togtokho, form the moral spine of the series.