Gustav Mannerheim is one of the most complex and dramatic figures in the politics of the 20th century: the scion of an impoverished Swedish family, a guardsman who wasted his life in St. Petersburg, a reconnaissance traveler who penetrated the mysterious regions of Asia, a military general who fought the Japanese and Germans, a leader The White movement in Finland, who brutally suppressed the Red Finns, a commander who resisted the power of the Red Army, who entered into an alliance with Hitler, but refused to storm Leningrad... The biography, compiled on enormous archival material, reveals a new Mannerheim.