Q&A: Sunderland Searches for the "Mad Baron"

The New York Review of Books

honored Willard Sunderland a few weeks ago by reviewing

Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe

. But Sunderland spent little time reading his credits because he is already immersed in researching a biography of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, Russia's “mad baron” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Q&A below he answers questions from Russia, where he is working on the new book.

Q:

Why has the steppe been described as a “symbol of Russia?"

A:

Like most people, Russians define national identity in terms of language, religion, and a shared sense of history, but geographical images are also important. Some landscapes and environments have special meaning as quintessentially

Russian

. The huge grassland region of southern Russia has this iconic national quality. My book analyzes how Russians colonized the region and invested it with national meanings. The steppe helps explain the interethnic violence in Chechnya and the Northern Caucasus today because it lies just north of this region, and understanding how Russia colonized it helps explain its relations with non-Russian cultures.

Q:

How did you move from the “wild field” to the “mad baron”?

A:

Russia's multinational empire fascinates me. My new project examines the problem of empire within a single life. Although not well known today, the Baron was one of the most notorious anti-Bolshevik figures of the Russian Revolution. His life combines the diversities and complexities of the late tsarist empire. He served as a tsarist military officer all over Russia, spoke several languages, internalized the empire's complicated mix of cultures, and reflected its jumble of conflicting ideologies. In a sense, he was the empire in miniature.

Q:

But was he crazy?

A:

That's a tough question because there's no way to get inside his head. But my answer is “no” - at least not in a clinical sense. Some of his contemporaries thought so because of his brutal treatment of Bolsheviks and those he suspected of pro-socialist sympathies, including - most prominently - Jews. He was an extreme disciplinarian who punished his soldiers by forcing them to stand barefoot for hours in the snow or beating them with his whip. His behavior could be impulsive, even reckless. But brutality and extremism were common during Russia's Revolution and Civil War.

Q:

Can historians accurately assess people so far removed in time, or is history simply second-guessing?

A:

Whether a historian can make an accurate assessment of people who lived in the past, I too wonder sometimes. The past truly is another country. Some ideas, habits, and events of the past can appear intensely familiar, but others are strikingly foreign. Making sense of it all is challenging because no matter how close we get to the past, we remain rooted in the present, which creates unavoidable distortions. For me, the most interesting part of the process is the search. I realize the difficulties of finding what I'm looking for, but the quest is intriguing.

Q:

In your quest for Baron Ungern, do you have everything you need in area libraries?

A:

No, most of the materials I need for my new book on the Baron are located far from Cincinnati. I'm using this year's sabbatical to travel to Russia, Estonia, Mongolia, Washington, D.C., and California. I like traveling, so I'm looking forward to this aspect of “the search” - that is, as long as I don't lose my luggage.