Cuori di tenebra. I Signori della guerra che volevano farsi re

With the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the four great empires—Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman—disappeared. The multietnic political systems that had managed to ensure peace and stability from Central Europe to the Baltic, from the Upper Adriatic to the Balkans, from the Danube to Siberia, and from the Caucasus to Central and North-Eastern Asia as far as the borders of China, vanished into nothingness. Between 1918 and 1922, these territories became the hunting ground of warlords, who turned them into a shattered conglomerate of “bloodlands.” It is of these adventurers—heroes, dreamers, executioners, yet ultimately “children of a lesser god”—that this book tells the desperate, at times noble and at times infamous, epic, evoking the grim deeds of Kurtz, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There are figures such as Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel, Supreme Commander of the White Army, fighting against the Bolshevik Red Army, who transformed Crimea into an autonomous state. Or Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen, a member of the ruling house that had dominated the oldest European empire, who aspired to become sovereign of Ukraine. And Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, another White general who, in February 1921, occupied part of Mongolia. There is also İsmail Enver, Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire, who cherished the mirage of raising the banner of the Crescent Moon over a hypothetical Emirate of Turkestan. Finally, there is Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, after wresting Fiume from Slavic encroachment, decided to create a Duchy independent of the Kingdom of the much-despised House of Savoy.