I doubt whether TikToker Leonie is a direct descendant of the ‘Bloody Baron’ for the good reason that Roman von Ungern-Sternberg probably did not have any children.

Occasionally an unexpected name from an unexpected past emerges in the press.

The headline in the New York Post:

Descendant of “God of War” who once ruled Mongolia is a TikTok influencer who carries “burden” of his name: “Just a girl who drinks matcha.”

The Post writes:

A TikTokker has revealed she is directly descended from one of the 20th century’s most brutal warlords, dubbed “the Bloody Baron” — but she says she’d rather drink matcha than reclaim her historic throne.

Leonie von Ungern-Sternberg, 29, an MBA student in Spain, often shares fun posts of her life as a matcha-sipping millennial on TikTok.

I doubt whether TikToker Leonie (“noble nuisance, reluctant heiress to questionable legacies”) is a direct descendant of the “Bloody Baron,” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, for the good reason that Ungern-Sternberg probably did not have any children, and if he did, they are not visible in the Ungern-Sternberg family tree.

“Probably” is a word that plays a large role in any history of the baron. Indeed, the first time I referred to him in National Review, which was in the course of an article about a trip to Mongolia, the editor going through the piece queried a reference to the country’s “brief, brutal, and bizarre rule [by] a crazed Baltic baron” with the words “are you certain about this?”

I was.

There is a lot of “probably” about the Baron, but he was indeed one of the German ruling class (to give a very abbreviated version of a very complex history), in the territories that make up modern Latvia and Estonia, under the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, and the tsars. This particular baron was indeed bloody (one of the entries in the index under his name in James Palmer’s  The Bloody White Baron, a biography of the baron that I reviewed for NR in 2009, is “a delusional psychopath”). And he indeed (briefly) ruled Mongolia, although he was not its king. He made no claim to its throne.

Naturally, one of the most famous quotes attributed to the baron (“My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.”) was fake, coined by Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Polish adventurer, writer, and Munchausen who encountered the baron in Urga (today’s Ulaanbaatar, or Ulan Bator).

Leonie talked to The Post about the “burden” that comes with her “unusual surname.” “If a family is almost 1,000 years old, there is a chance that one or the other is going to . . . have done negative things throughout history.”

When it comes to doing “negative things,” the Baron, who emerged as a warlord in the savage fighting in Siberia’s Transbaikalia during the wars that followed the Bolshevik coup in 1917, was certainly up there.

As I wrote in my review:

There was indeed an Ungern, a killer, a torturer, a burner-alive, who battled the Bolsheviks with a heedless bravery and primitive ferocity so devastating that he was able to turn a corner of Siberia into a charnel-house realm all his own. And yes, he later did the same with a swathe of Mongolia that he transformed into an anticipation of Babi Yar and a reminder of Genghis…

Russia’s Calvary was Ungern’s opportunity. Like Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness on which Apocalypse Now was modeled, the baron had “immense plans”: He dreamt of building a great Asiatic empire as bulwark and spearhead against the revolutionaries (and anyone else) who “threaten[ed] the Divine Spirit” in mankind. And like Conrad’s Kurtz, Ungern appears to have been beguiled, emboldened, and inspired by the wilderness in which he found himself, far from home, far from convention, far from conscience.

Some aspects of Palmer’s account have since been criticized in articles such as this by James Boyd (2010) and this by Sergius Kuzmin (2013), a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a specialist in the region and, somewhat incongruously, amphibians.

Among other flaws, Kuzmin notes that:

It is wrong to assert that Roman Ungern transferred to reality tortures depicted in Buddhist temples. Tortures used by Ungern’s men were similar to those in the Soviet Cheka (secret service)… but not to the tortures in Buddhist images.

Either way, the baron was best avoided.