At first glance, it seems impossible: a disparate force, poorly equipped, with no real state behind it, holding its own — even briefly — against the Red Army, a machine in full consolidation. And yet, this is what Roman von Ungern-Sternberg achieved in the heart of the Asian vastness.
The key does not lie in power, but in context.
In the early 1920s, the Russian Civil War was not yet a clean Bolshevik victory. The Red Army, though disciplined and expanding, remained stretched across immense territories. Eastern Siberia and Outer Mongolia escaped direct control for the most part. These were margins — spaces of transition, where authority fragmented, where distances became weapons.
It is precisely there that Ungern's cavalry found its strength.
Mobility, Terrain, Endurance
His division was not an army in the modern sense, but a mobile formation adapted to the steppe. Mongolian horsemen, Cossacks, Buryats — these men knew how to live off the land, to move quickly, to strike and disappear. Where the Red Army advanced with heavy logistical lines, Ungern exploited fluidity. He did not seek the decisive battle, but attrition, surprise, instability.
To this mobility was added extreme discipline. His troop, held together by fear as much as by loyalty, could endure conditions that few regular armies would have borne. Cold, hunger, isolation — all became almost routine. This endurance gave Ungern a capacity for action in zones that his adversaries controlled poorly.
The Political Vacuum
But there was also a political factor.
In 1920–1921, Mongolia was occupied by Chinese troops, while the Bolsheviks were not yet firmly established there. Ungern exploited this vacuum. By presenting himself as the liberator of the Bogd Khan and of Mongolia's traditional order, he gained local support — or at least tolerance — that allowed him to operate. His capture of Urga in 1921 was not merely a military victory: it was a moment when an irregular force managed to establish itself as a power.
For a brief instant, that was enough.
The Limits of the Project
But this resistance carried its own limits. An army founded on the charisma of a single man, on terror, and on an extreme ideological vision could not transform itself into a durable power. When the Red Army, better organized and now allied with Mongolian revolutionaries, concentrated its forces, the balance shifted rapidly.
So the question is not only how Ungern defied the Red Army — but why it could not last.
His success was that of the margins: a flash in a world still disorganized. But as soon as the Soviet state extended its power truly into these frontiers, the free cavalry of the steppe could only yield before a modern army, sustained by an ideology and a structure capable of outliving the man who commanded it.