Historian James Palmer relates the story of meglomaniac Baron Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, an anti-Bolshevik German Russian reactionary who in 1920 led a lethally effective rabble of cavalrymen in a grand but shortlived campaign to unify the Mongul people while at the same time frightening the Russians and slaughtering everyone he suspected of irreligion or of being a Jew.