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about his early years are sketchy except that he
became an officer in the Czarist army, and like
Semenov, served as squadron commander of the
Nerchinsk Cossacks under Petr
WRANGEL
's com-
mand. Nominally subordinate to Semenov, dur-
ing the civil war Ungern-Sternberg took his
division of Cossack cavalry into Mongolia in
October 1920. He captured the Mongolian capi-
tal Nyslel Huree in February 1921, which he
made his headquarters, and took the Mongolian
ruler, the Bogd Khan, hostage. Ungern-Sternberg
recruited a core of Mongol troops with promises
of loot and restoring the glory of the era of
Genghis Khan. He adopted Mongolian dress,
which he complemented with his Russian badges
and decorations, including the St. George's Cross.
Ungern-Sternberg's personal cruelty stands out
in a cruel period. Accounts coincide in painting a
portrait of a bizarre, even deranged, “puny-look-
ing” man who personally ordered the flogging,
torture, shooting, and slaughter of his prison-
ers, men and women alike. By May 1921, Red
Army troops were assisting the indigenous
Mongolian Revolutionary Army in their strug-
gle against Ungern-Sternberg. Defeated in an
early encounter, Ungern-Sternberg turned west-
ward and north into the present-day Buriat
Republic, where he confronted the Red Army
near Lake Gusinoye in August 1921. As he
retreated back into Mongolia, he was captured
on August 22. Accounts of his death vary in the
details. Mongol sources state that Ungern-Stern-
berg was taken by the
BOLSHEVIKS
to Novoniko-
laevsk (now Novosibirsk), tried, and executed on
September 15, 1921, while other sources place
his execution a few days later, almost 1,000 miles
away in Irkutsk.
military to an unchallenged position inside the
Soviet government. Born in the Volga River town
of Samara, Ustinov studied engineering and
received degrees from Moscow's Bauman Higher
Technical School and the Leningrad Military
Technical Institute in 1934. A party member since
1927, after graduation he directed the epony-
mously named Bolshevik arms factory in
Leningrad. In 1941 at the outset of the war with
Nazi Germany, he was appointed people's com-
missar for arms industry, a position he held until
1946. In this capacity he supervised the transfer
of many Soviet industries eastward from the
western regions to safety in the Urals and beyond.
As minister of armaments (1946-53), Ustinov
was actively involved in promoting Soviet rock-
etry by gathering information from captured Ger-
man scientists. In 1953 he became minister of
defense industry and again played an important
role in developing space research. After serving as
deputy chair of the USSR Council of Ministers
from 1957, in 1963 he was promoted to first
deputy chair with responsibility for the defense
sector. Ustinov's career in the
COMMUNIST PARTY
ranks also progressed smoothly in the postwar
period. In 1952 Ustinov became a member of the
Central Committee. Closely allied to Brezhnev, in
1965 he was appointed Central Committee secre-
tary with responsibility for the defense industry
and made a candidate member to the Politburo.
From 1976 until his death, he reached one of the
pinnacles of Soviet power, joining the Politburo
as a full member and succeeding Marshal Andrei
Grechko as USSR minister of defense, the first
civilian in Soviet history to hold that rank. Usti-
nov was promptly given the rank of marshal,
allegedly to counter the reluctance of top military
officers to follow orders from a civilian. With
Brezhnev in poor health, Ustinov was, together
with Mikhail
SUSLOV
and Andrei
GROMYKO
, one of
the kingmakers in the Kremlin during the final
years of Brezhnev's long rule, playing a key role
in the decision to invade
AFGHANISTAN
in 1979
and in selecting Yuri
ANDROPOV
and then Kon-
stantin
CHERNENKO
as successors to Brezhnev. He
died in December 1984.
Ustinov, Dmitrii Feodorovich
(1908-1984)
Soviet official
Dmitri Ustinov was a highly influential member
of Leonid
BREZHNEV
's inner circle in the 1970s and
1980s who, as defense minister, succeeded in
advancing the interests and status of the Soviet
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