About the book: 2010 / New, revised and almost doubled edition of the book "Autocrat of the Desert" winner of the "National Bestseller" (2001) and "Big Book" awards ( 2009) Leonid Yuzefovich, is a documentary biography of one of the most mysterious characters in Russian history of the 20th century. Baron Roman Fedorovich Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) became famous not only for his cruelty, but also for his unprecedented utopian project of saving the dying European civilization on the principle of ex oriente lux (“light from the east”). A white general, a Buddhist and the husband of a Chinese princess, in 1921 he and his Asiatic Division defeated Chinese troops in Mongolia, liberating it from Beijing, after which he invaded Soviet Russia, but was captured and executed. The book of more than 600 pages (about 100 photographs, many of which are published for the first time) invites the reader to take an unusually exotic journey through time and space, immersing himself in the atmosphere of the Civil War in eastern Russia, Mongolian Buddhism and the Silver Age of Russian culture.