His cousin, Baron Nikolai Von Wrangell (1869 - 1927), also belonging to the Estonian Knighthood, reached high military rank.

[4] After graduating from the Rostov Technical High School in 1896 and the Institute of Mining in St. Petersburg in 1901, Wrangel volunteered for the prestigious Life Guards cavalry.

After the war ended, in January 1906, he was reassigned to the 55th Finland Dragoon Regiment, which, under General A. N. Orlov, took part in pacifying rebels in Siberia.

However, it was soon apparent to him that the new government existed only because of the waning support of Germany, and in August 1918, he joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army based at Yekaterinodar, where he was given command of the 1st Cavalry Division and the rank of major general in the White movement.

He was willing to accept not only the loss of the Donets basin, but of the entire Don Voisko because he believed strongly that no goal could be more important than meeting Kolchak's advance somewhere along the Volga river.

Wrangel gained a reputation as a skilled and just administrator, who, unlike some other White Army generals, did not tolerate lawlessness or looting by his troops.

Continuing disagreement with Denikin led to his removal from command, and Wrangel departed for exile to Constantinople on 8 February 1920.However, Denikin was forced to resign on 20 March 1920, and a military committee, led by General Abram Dragomirov in Sevastopol, asked for Wrangel's return as Commander-in-Chief of the White forces in Crimea.

[10] However, by that stage in the Russian Civil War, such measures were too late, and the White movement was rapidly losing support, both domestically and overseas.

Wrangel is immortalized by the nickname of "Black Baron" in the marching song The Red Army is the Strongest, composed as a rallying call for a final effort on the part of the Bolsheviks to end the war.

[11] After being severely outnumbered and facing defeat in Northern Tavria and in Crimea, Wrangel organised a mass evacuation on the shores of the Black Sea.

Those who chose to stay in Crimea were subject to brutal repression by the Bolsheviks as part of the Red Terror, along with many civilians, with up to 150,000 murdered.

His family, however, believed that he had been poisoned by his butler's brother, who briefly lived in the household in Brussels and was allegedly a Soviet agent.

"[21] Defunct The Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci, which had served as his headquarters after he emigrated from Russia, erected a monument in his honour in 2007.

After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, some prominent military émigrés referred to the position that they believed Wrangel would have taken.

[23] In 2015, the government of the Russian Federation began to repatriate the remains of White Emigres that were buried abroad, but the descendants of Wrangel refused to have his remains returned to Russia as the current Russian government had not "condemned the evil [of Bolshevism],"[24] referring to Vladimir Putin's unwillingness to denounce the Soviet crimes and implement a proper decommunization.

[25] He was portrayed by Russian actor Aleksandr Galibin in the first season of the Serbian television series Balkan Shadows, which features Wrangel's Cossack emigres as major characters.

In September 2021, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Wrangel's grandson Peter A. Basilevsky compared the "bureaucratic incompetence" of the U.S. government in Afghanistan to the successful November 1920 evacuation of 150,000 anti-Bolshevik soldiers and civilians under Wrangel which became possible with far inferior resources of the White Army and in the face of the advancing Red Army.