While in Siberia Ungern had worn a bright red Chinese jacket and blue trousers, after the army moved into Mongolia he wore an elaborate yellow silk deel, a long robe, with the markings of noble rank, so 'as to be visible to [my] troops'.1But as the army moved towards Urga, omens were on his mind. He had acquired several soothsayers - a wandering Buddhist fortune-teller here, a Buriat shaman there. As ever, he was intrigued by oracles, predictions, any way in which he might interpret the grand patterns of fate. As in Mongolia and China today, fortune-tellers were often destitute vagrants who had turned to predicting fate as a way of scraping a living, and they made a poor impression upon his Russian officers, who described them as 'impudent, dirty, ignorant and bandy-legged'. Among the Cossacks and Mongolians, however, the prophets were more respected. Soldiers are often superstitious, the Mongolian soldiers very much so, and his appeals to prophecy reassured his troops. Ungern trusted them implicitly, and often made strategic decisions based upon their predictions. Very few of these turned out well.
One of the most popular fortune-telling methods was to heat the shoulder bones of sheep and interpret the resulting cracks, and Ungern heeded the oracular bones when time came for the attack, choosing what was supposed to be a 'propitious day', 26 October. He split his forces into two groups, one under his command and one under Rezuhin, but both aiming for the same target, Upper Maimaichen (the name means 'buy-sell town'), the Chinese settlement down the valley just west of the main city of Urga. Unlike central Urga, with its feltgers and high temples, this was a proper, walled town, built with the crooked streets and courtyard buildings of China. The main Chinese garrison was here, though another group occupied the Russian buildings and central barracks down the road. Urga was surrounded by wooded hills, which concealed approaching troops but which rose and fell confusingly, with many gorges, sudden cliffs, and dead ends. Even from the top of the hills it was impossible to see which way the city lay, since there were few lights at night. The plan was to attack from the south, but the troops got lost in the moonless dark. Ungern mistook the location of Maimaichen, they spent the night stumbling around uselessly, and the only engagement was a skirmish with the Chinese in the early dawn. Several of the artillery pieces had to be abandoned in the night, and were taken by the Chinese.
Ungern delayed, waiting for another auspicious day, and then five days later charged forward with his men again, this time from the north-east, only to be beaten off once more. He had been confident enough to leave a large proportion of his troops, along with most of the army's supplies, at a base near the Onon river only twenty miles from the city, but the troops he took with him proved grievously inadequate. The attack was ill thought-out and poorly planned, and the dug-in Chinese were in strong positions.
It was close, though. The Chinese had only a couple of thousand men in the city, slightly fewer than Ungern's force, and Ungern's soldiers fought with the desperation of a homeless army on the brink of winter, and the outer defence of Upper Maimaichen was an archaic, crumbling wall, built in the preceding century from larch logs, earth and brick. Ungern was always behind his men, beating them on the back with his bamboo stick when they faltered in the face of machinegun fire, yelling shrill encouragement. The initial attacks broke the Chinese perimeter, driving them back to the temples on the edge of Maimaichen, but they were rallied by some brave but nameless young officer and forced Ungern's men back from the city.
The attacks caused a wave of anti-foreign feeling among the Chinese in Urga. After Ungern's first attacks on the city, the Chinese soldiers began to suspect every foreigner of collusion with the invaders, and to treat them with increasing contempt and aggression. Under pressure from the American consulate, the Peking government guaranteed the safety of foreigners, but this had little effect in practice. Chinese soldiers began looting houses on the pretext that they were searching for weapons. Soon enough they ceased using even this excuse and began simply to take whatever they fancied from the non-Chinese. Russians were particularly targeted, and many were summarily executed or imprisoned. It was luridly claimed by an American officer that 'scarcely a day passed without one or more cases of rape by Chinese soldiers upon white women and girls'.2
Ungern had made an indelible impression upon the Chinese, and an equally strong one upon the Mongols. To the Chinese he was a mysterious and terrifying enemy. They had been used to the sporadic raids of other White bandits, but this fierce attack seemed to come out of nowhere. To the Mongols he was now the chief symbol of anti-Chinese resistance. Beyond that, though, he was near-invulnerable.
He had seemed to be everywhere during the battle, but had never been wounded. Mongolians saw the marks of karma everywhere and somebody with such formidable luck was clearly not entirely of this world. He started to wear charms and amulets around his neck. It was said that he was bulletproof, protected by his talismans. The legends of a foreign savior began to carry more weight.
For now, though, Ungern had been beaten. The army retreated to Zam Kuren, a hundred and sixty miles east of Urga, and made camp. The worst result of the failure to take Urga was that the army was left exposed to the fierce Mongol winter. Up until then it had been a cool, dry autumn, but now the serious cold had come. Temperatures sometimes dropped below minus 40°C, and normally hovered around minus 20 to minus 30. The European soldiers copied their Mongolian neighbours, sleeping in insulated gers, wrapping themselves in several layers of clothing and huddling around the central stove for warmth. Most of them came from countries with similarly awful conditions, and many had already survived at least one Siberian winter. There was little spare clothing, though, and they had to make do with whatever bizarre array of rags was available. Comradeship was a forgotten virtue, and the strong preyed upon the weak and old, especially those hapless villagers Ungern had mobilized from the Russian borders. Stripped of clothes by their fellow soldiers, many died of the cold. A favored item of footwear was the 'eternal boot', whereby a soldier took the fresh skin of a slaughtered sheep or cow, wrapped it round his foot and let it harden. By the end of the winter the soldiers had been wearing the same clothes for three or four months, without changing or washing, and must have stunk to high heaven.
Casualties from the attacks on Urga had been heavy, and the army was shaken. Desertions began to increase, particularly among the Russian officers. Ungern showed a growing fixation with desertion and treachery. It was revolution, weakness, caused by infiltrating Bolshevik agents. He used his most loyal troops, most often Inner Mongolian Chahars, to chase down those who deserted, hanging them on the spot or ordering them lashed to death. One of the things he scribbled most commonly as a postscript to letters was 'Do not trust .. .', followed by the names of various faithless officers. Alioshin described how he learnt of the terrible death of a friend of mine, Captain Rujansky. He and his sixty-eight men deserted the Baron one night, being unable to stand his atrocities any longer. Ferocious Chahars were sent after them and returned with a sack filled with sixty-nine human ears, as evidence that the Baron's orders had been carried out. Rujansky's beautiful wife was given to the Chahars as a reward. She went insane and died in agony.3
The Mongolian regiments were often quick to desert, though Ungern seems to have treated them with considerably more forbearance than he did European or Japanese deserters.
Siberian political divisions carried over into the new army. A split developed between the new Russian troops, the majority of whom had been followers of Admiral Kolchak, and those who had been with Ungern at Dauria.
Ungern's worldview combined both. His cruelty kept his troops in line, but it was also a necessary part of the spiritual purification of the degenerate, revolutionary world. Deserters and revolutionaries were not just human criminals, they were on the wrong side of a Manichean struggle between good and evil. He wrote of revolutionaries as though they were demons, 'Evil spirits in human shape who destroy kings, turn brother against brother, son against father, and bring forth great trouble in life.4
This was however familiar language, the Mitteilungen fur die Truppe, a German army newsletter for the Eastern Front in the Second World War, described the 'mostly Jewish' commissars in similar terms, 'the embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity [who] would have brought an end to all meaningful life [through manipulating the masses], had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment'.5
Only a tiny minority of Nazis, however, would have believed that Jews and revolutionaries were actually demons in human form. For Ungern, such words carried more weight. He was, after all, living in a culture which regarded evil spirits as a very serious problem. Certainly he believed that the Communist International was just the latest representative of an ancient spiritual evil. When asked where he thought it was founded, he replied, 'In ancient Babylon ... All history shows it.'6
Despite all this, Ungern’s army was growing every day. Troops were arriving from all over Mongolia. For the Russian troops who arrived, it was a trap. Often initially skeptical of the stories they'd heard about Ungern, they found the truth worse, and desertion often fatal. For the Mongolians, though, it was an opportunity. They were relatively safe from Ungern's disciplinary zeal and eager to join so great a warrior. Ungern took full advantage of the Mongolian rumor mill and issued declarations that he had come to liberate the Mongols from Chinese oppression and rescue the Bogd Khan from his captors. All the old Mongolian resentment of Chinese rule came bubbling up. Combined with the fresh humiliations inflicted by Xu's men, it was enough to recruit many to Ungern's forces.
The support of the nobility was vital. The Mongolian aristocracy was organized under the same militaristic banner system as the Manchurians in China, so that nobles could mobilize hundreds or thousands of men with relatively little difficulty. Most of these men were not trained soldiers, but every Mongolian man knew how to ride, hunt and shoot. Recruitment was particularly strong among refugees from Inner Mongolia, where Mongol tribes, their traditional lands taken over by settlers, had been skirmishing with the Chinese for decades. Particularly prominent was an Inner Mongolian contingent under the command of two princes, Bayar and Togtokh, both heroes of the I9II revolution. The 'Determined Hero' Togtokh, in particular, was famous throughout Mongolia; a chivalrous and charismatic man now in his fifties from an impoverished noble family, he had fought the Chinese since the beginnings of major Han settlement thirty years beforehand. He was also a strong supporter of pan-Mongolian ideas. Immensely popular among the ordinary people, his support gave a major boost to Ungern. Another prince, Sundui Gun, also a well-known anti-Chinese guerrilla, was to join later.
References to Ungern as a 'God of War' suggested by the Dec. 2007 Junge Freiheit, is based on a misunderstanding that confuses the Mongolian word Bogd with bog in Russian. Where the latter word means God in Russian, the former word doesn’t have that meaning.
Rather, among the Oirat Mongols of Russia, now dwelling in the Altai region near the south of Mongolia, a bizarre cult had arisen fifteen years beforehand around the visions of a simple shepherd and his daughter. They saw a rider dressed in white, riding a white horse. They referred to him as the Ak-Burkhan, which also meant 'white god'. He was a herald who signalled the return of ancient messianic heroes such as Amursana, an eighteenth-century opponent of Manchu power. The Ja Lama in the west, Ungern's erstwhile hero, already claimed to be his reincarnation. The new faith founded as a result was violently anti-Christian and anti-Russian. Partly because of the color association, but mostly due to commonplace minority fears of forced assimilation and loss of privileges, the Burkhanists fought on the White side in the civil war, waging a vicious guerrilla fight in the mountains. Another White officer, Captain Satunin, had deliberately assumed aspects of the Ak-Burkhan in order to raise support among the Oirat. Perhaps these myths had passed from the Oirat to their Khalkha cousins in northern Mongolia. Ungern, a 'white' fighter who was famous for his white horse, and who fought both the Russians and the Chinese, would have been the perfect fulfillment of such messianic expectations.
And when the 'white' fighter closed in on Urga a second time, the undisciplined and untrained Chinese soldiers became sincerely worried. On the other hand, the Baron's soldiers were outnumbered, attacking fortified positions and fighting in winter conditions with only the barest of shelter, unlike their well-billeted opponents. The temperature that February was around minus 20°C; the sustained effort required for combat in such conditions could rapidly exhaust even the fittest and best-insulated soldier. All they had on their side was military training, desperation and the manic inspiration of their leader. The promise of food and housing if they did capture Urga was also a spur; this was a last-chance attack.
Rescuing the Bogd Khan was one of Ungern's top priorities, but his palace was deep within the Chinese defences. Only one approach was left unguarded, for the Chinese were confident that no attacker could strike from that direction. Behind the palace was Bogd Uhl, a sacred preserve, covered in virgin forest, created by the Buddhist monks three hundred years beforehand. Animals roamed there free from fear of the normally rapacious Mongolian hunters, since the penalty for trespass was execution. They included some strange creatures; the Bogd had a liking for exotic animals and the tranquility of the forest was sometimes disturbed by tigers, cheetahs, even the Bogd's pet elephant. So strong was the prohibition that the wolves on the mountain had learnt to exploit it, streaming out of the forest to attack the locals' herds. When chased by the shepherds, they would retreat back over the line of sanctuary, regarding, according to the shepherds, their frustrated pursuers with a look of distinct smugness. For three centuries the mountain had remained inviolate.
The Chinese guards had no desire to risk supernatural wrath, especially after the mysterious night-fires of the winter, or to provoke further Mongolian anger, and they made no patrols on the mountainside. On that clear, cold winter morning they had no idea what was coming, although even Pershin saw the Tibetan cavalry moving down the mountainside, 'like little black dots against the snow'.7.
The Bogd was imprisoned inside his European-style house, which was in the centre of a complex of temples surrounded by a flimsy wall. When the horsemen burst through the gates, the Chinese didn't have a moment's warning. The outer sentries were either shot silently with arrows, or murdered by Tibetan infiltrators disguised as Mongolians bringing food and supplies. Some of the attackers seemed to gleam unnaturally and to have distorted, terrifying faces; the Chinese must have been uncertain, in their last moments, whether their assailants were men or gods. In truth, they were dobdobs, Tibetan monk-enforcers, their clothes lightly smeared with butter and their faces painted with soot to strike fear into the enemies of the faith. Although the attackers were outnumbered two or three to one, the terrified Chinese barely resisted. Of a hundred and fifty men, ninety-seven were dead within minutes, and the remainder were running for the main Chinese lines.
The liberators had brought spare horses for the Bogd Khan and his entourage, planning to take them to safety in a nearby hill monastery, but there was a small hitch. During his months of captivity the Bogd's already formidable bulk had grown to the point where he could no longer sit on a horse without overbalancing. After a couple of panicked minutes, a solution was found. Two muscular Tibetans hauled him on to the horse and rode either side of him, balancing his weight between them. Ten Tibetans remained behind to cover their escape, exchanging sporadic fire with the Chinese before making their own getaway. An American merchant, A. M. Guptill, witnessed the whole attack and commentated that 'the entire action consumed exactly one half-hour and was the prettiest piece of cavalry work that one could desire to witness'.8 When Ungern heard the news, he yelled exuberantly, 'Now Urga is ours!' His Mongolian ally Togtokh was able to raise a two-hundred-strong personal bodyguard for the Bogd to ensure that he would not fall back into the clutches of the Chinese.
The fighting at the eastern end of the city had reached a temporary stalemate. The plan was gradually to squeeze the Chinese inwards from both sides. Japanese artillerists had brought their guns up to the hills in the north-east that the Whites had seized the previous day, and had begun to pound the Chinese positions. But the Chinese had consolidated their forces in their trenches and, although fighting continued throughout the day, neither side made any significant advance.
The Russians and other foreigners sealed up their homes, barricading their doors and arming themselves with whatever weapons they could find. They stored food and organised twenty-four-hour watches, praying that Ungern would take the city before the Chinese could begin a fresh wave of persecution. They need not have worried; the Chinese were too panicked to make reprisals. They had dreaded the attack all winter, and the seizure of the Bogd Khan was almost the final straw. On the morning of 1 February, the day following the Bogd's liberation, the Chinese officers grabbed all the motor vehicles and fuel they could find and roared north out of town, heading for Kiatkha and safety and leaving their men to cope as best they could. An American observer wrote contemptuously, 'They left at daybreak, just in time to save their skins in the most approved Chinese manner, and will probably be made Field Marshals for their bravery and skill in retreating.'9 Years later the locals still sang 'a Mongolian battle song whose text, dealing with Chinese Generals riding in Muhor teleg (motor-cars), bore witness to its modern origin'.10
The Baron, always keen to gain the support of the local population, tried to limit the victims of the atrocities to the Europeans and Chinese. He failed. As one observer noted, 'One wished to avert one's gaze from the hangings, all over the place, of the poor, lamas, men and women, old and young, even children.'11
And while there were still a few hundred Jews left in the city, and Mongolia must have been the last place they expected a Cossack pogrom. Many of the Mongolians, who had no native tradition of antiSemitism, were just as shocked by the Whites' behavior, as were most other foreigners in the city. Mongolian friends of a kindly baker named Moshkovich asked vainly, 'What harm has he done, this good old man?' as he was taken away. Extreme violence has a shocking playfulness, and the Cossack pogroms had always had a festive quality about them, a mixture of drunken indulgence and willful murder; now, among the looting and the flames, the game was on again. Jews were hunted on horseback through the streets of Urga, lynched in their homes, tortured for amusement. Afterwards, the murderers took their property.
The soldiers made no distinction of age or sex. Ungern had spoken, back in Dauria, of how 'neither men, nor women, nor their seed should remain'.12 Now he had a chance to put theory into practice. Gang rape had always been part of pogroms, although traditionally the women's lives were spared, not from mercy but to gain additional amusement when they became pregnant with Cossack children.13 That was not the case here. The best to be hoped for were bizarre spasms of chivalry such as that shown by the Russian officer who allowed one young Jewish girl to commit suicide before the soldiers could have her. One Russian emigre returned to Urga a few days later to find 'dozens of raped and mutilated women, slaughtered children, the bodies of old men'.14
Describing the site of one of these final massacres the Danish explorer Henning Haslund wrote: We saw a large Mongolian monastery not far from the road, [and] we at once steered our course thither, glad of the chance to encounter living beings. But within the whitewashed walls with their gay red edgings all lay desolate and abandoned. On the steppe in front we had seen numerous Chinese uniforms, felt boots and sheepskins lying widely scattered around, and within the cloister lay the many-colored remnants of lamaistic robes, red togas, and rusty yellow hats, and many of the red cloaks contained bleached fragments of skeletons. A last remnant of General Hsu's [Xu's] ten thousand soldiers had halted there in their flight from the avenging Mongols, and all this silence and death was the last achievement of the Chinese soldiery in the 'Grass Country.' But in that very place the Chinese troops had been overtaken by a dreaded Kalka General with his mounted Mongols, and not one of the ten thousand invaders had found his way home to China.
The wild dogs of the steppe now nosing round the ruined buildings indicated the fate that had overtaken both lamas and soldiers after death.15
Ungern in turn, now was declared to be a reincarnation of the Fifth Bogd Gegen, the Bogd Khan's predecessor, a rather dull figure of the early nineteenth century. It was an odd choice, and exactly how both the Bogd and Ungern could be reincarnations of the same person simultaneously was a spiritual mystery (although multiple incarnations were not unknown in Tibetan Buddhism), but it suggested an unusual affinity between the two. He was also made a khan, as well as being granted a hereditary double princedom and the ·splendid title of Outstanding Prosperous-State Hero. There were rewards, too, for Ungern's fellow Russians and his Mongolian allies, most of whom became Heroes of some variety - roughly equivalent to the European 'knight'.
Ungern's new title conferred sartorial benefits as well; he was now entitled to wear, according to the decree proclaiming his rank, 'a green sleeveless jacket, a red and yellow coat, a yellow silk thread in his hat, and three peacock feathers'. The Bogd lavished praise upon him, declaring that he was a meritorious person for restoring our independence and the State of Mongolia. Since he mobilised his army in this land, he has never been frightened, has never hurt our people, and has seized Khuree [Urga] in the blink of an eye, a meritorious deed. He destroyed evil and, if we consider his army regime and command, it is truly rigorous.16
Ungern must have been especially pleased by the last sentence, confirming a religious sanction of his disciplinary methods. Before the coronation there was a procession from the Bogd's palace to the central temple where the ceremony was to take place. Crowds lined the route even before dawn, fighting for a good view and scrabbling up onto roofs and fences to witness the restoration of their old king. The procession began at about ten o'clock with Mongolian heralds riding out to announce the coming of the king. When they blew their horns, the crowd froze, and it was 'as though a thousand people turned to stone sculptures'.17
Behind them came a procession of monks, chanting hymns of praise. In their centre was a horse-drawn wooden pyramid on a cart, from which a huge flag rose. On it, woven in gold thread, was the soyombo, a national symbol of Mongolia created by the first Bogd Gegen. It was a complicated fusion of images, chief among them a burning flame over the moon and the Chinese yin/yang symbol, but to the crowd it meant only one thing: independence.
At last came the Bogd himself, accompanied by his wife. He was huge and motionless, incongruously wearing dark glasses to shield his eyes against the low winter sun. He rode in a Chinese carriage, with guards to his left and right. Only one man rode behind the Bogd, in the place of honor; Baron Ungern, on his familiar white mare. Much to the shock of his men, their usually scruffy leader wore the full uniform of his new rank, peacock feathers bobbing slightly as he rode. His red Mongolian coat was still glossy; he had pinned on it his Cross of St George, and tightened his sword belt. It was a moment of pure, happy triumph. He had restored a king, and captured a country.
According to Ossendowski who soon thereafter visited Dauria, Ungern was a devout Buddhist, who had devoted his life to 'war or the study and learning of Buddhism'.18 He gives us some of Ungern's best mystical speeches but, sadly, his desire to tell a good story and his own occult leanings cast doubt on much of what he says. It was undoubtedly true that Ungern was deeply curious about Buddhism, in a half-superstitious, half-philosophical way. He asked Pershin one day, 'I hear you have studied Buddhism and are friends with the lamas; could you tell me something interesting about it? i am very much interested in it, and want to know.' He trailed off, but Pershin assumed, probably rightly, that he was talking about the more esoteric practices of Buddhism, and told him that 'I know very little about the occult part of Buddhism. Really, i am interested only in the ethnography of the religion.'19 His offer to show Ungern more temples and introduce him to some Buddhist philosophers was never taken up.
Despite this interest, Ungern maintained that he was 'a believer in God and the Gospels, and practised prayer' 20 There is no record of him attending church, but he certainly prayed, though those around him were often uncertain to which deity or deities. He sometimes led the ecumenical evening prayer sessions of the Asian Cavalry Division. He seemed to feel that modern Christianity was a long way from the divine principles which had originally driven it. When addressing his Russian troops he unhesitatingly employed Christian references, but when talking to lamas and philosophers he was equally willing to engage in discussion of Buddhist principles. He was a believer in protective charms, divinations, the efficiency of alternative medicine and, possibly, reincarnation, but considered it perfectly feasible to hold all those beliefs and still think of oneself as Christian, if some way outside the mainstream.
So, what did Ungern actually believe? Was he a Christian or a Buddhist? He probably would, have dismissed the question as irrelevant; he saw the two - indeed, he seems to have seen all religions - as essentially compatible. Surprisingly tolerant in some ways, doctrine and creed didn't matter to him. This was a common enough trend in esoteric Western circles, where all religions were often seen as fragments of a greater truth. Ungern believed in this ultimate truth, and what mattered for him was where a person stood in the great battle of ordered good versus revolutionary evil. To be 'called to struggle for the truth and the Gospels' was the same as fighting for the truth of Buddhism; he could combine the roles of Christian crusader and Buddhist wrathful protector without difficulty. Although it seldom arose, he was similarly tolerant of Islam, since many of the Mongolian-descended ethnic groups were Muslim. His religious points of reference were always ecumenical, and very similar to the language of other Russian occultists: 'Heaven', 'the Divine', and particularly 'truth'.
As we saw earlier, such universalizing language was common in the Western esoteric tradition in the early twentieth century. The next step of Ungern's thought was more unusual. Socialism was blasphemous not only because it went against divinely ordained order, but because it was a false religion. Communism was, according to Ungern, 'a kind of religion. It is not obligatory for a religion to have a god. If you are familiar with Eastern religions, they present the rules of how to order your life and the state. Ordering your life based on Lenin is also a religion.' The issue of true and false religion was far more important than nationality; people did not go to war for their 'tormented homeland' you can almost hear the sneer in his voice there - but for religion, the only thing that 'made war possible!' To us this might sound like a criticism of religion, but for Ungern, still as enthusiastic about the vital qualities of war as ever after seven grim years of slaughter, it simply meant that religion was an essential part of a serious life.
All this said, his knowledge of both Christianity and Buddhism was rudimentary. He had never formally abandoned his family's Lutheran faith, but his thinking was clearly far more Orthodox, drawing upon traditions of hierarchy, stability and monarchy that were deeply rooted in Russian religion. Although he constantly made reference to 'the Scriptures', he barely knew the Bible at all, with the exception of the great, awful images of Revelation and portions of the Old Testament prophets. When he was asked for the specifics of a supposedly biblical prophecy to which he attributed such authority, his response was that it was 'somewhere in the Scriptures' and that although he had looked, he had been unable to locate it. Perhaps he found it easier to believe in their truth if he only engaged them at second hand, like a fundamentalist churchgoer who never reads the Bible in full. He maintained that all his cruelty and terror in no way 'contradicted the doctrine of the Gospel'.
He certainly doesn't seem ever to have attained any deep understanding of Buddhism. It was the surface trappings that appealed to him: ritual, order, ceremony. Most of all he valued its purity, the preservation of the old and correct order of things. This applied not only to Buddhism but to all the beliefs and practices of Asia. The restoration of divine monarchy would come not from the 'rotten West, which is under the influence of mad revolution and the decline of morality in all its manifestations, both physical and spiritual'21 but from the 'yellow Eastern culture, which was formed three thousand years ago and has been kept inviolable'.22 It was 'impossible to aspire for the restoration of European Monarchs, owing to the deterioration of public mind and science which has driven the nations out of their minds'. The East would rise, and replace the irretrievably corrupt West, from which 'no deliverance could be expected'23 and which brought 'corruption to mankind'. There was no 'Yellow Peril', but instead, in Ungern's mind, a deadly 'white peril'. He considered 'the yellow race more vital and more capable of state-building, and the victory of the yellow over the white both desirable and inevitable'.24 He had taken the old Russian and German fears of Asia and reversed them, seeing in the 'Yellow Peril' the triumph of righteousness rather than a wave of barbarians.
All this was, apparently, predicted in the Bible. Ungern was uncertain exactly where, but he assured anyone who would listen that, according to biblical prophecy, 'The yellow race will move against the white, both in ships and in fiery chariots. The yellow race will gather together and fight the white; eventually the yellow will be the masters.' This was probably a confused memory of Ezekiel, which is full of foreign armies descending in 'chariots, wagons and wheels' to punish the faithless and also features the famous 'chariots of fire' which bore Ezekiel to heaven, and which have fascinated wacky biblical theorists from William Blake to UFO cultists ever since.
Russia existed half-way between the pure East and the corrupt West. It was still redeemable, but its 'future, crushed morally, mentally and economically, is terrible and can not be imagined'. However, Russia could 'rise unanimously against the revolutionary spirit' which 'cannot be expected of the Western Powers now'. The monarchy could be restored, but only 'on the condition that the Russian people would regain their common sense, otherwise they would be subjugated to acknowledge such necessity' Ungern, and others like him, would whip the country into shape, but first it had to undergo a cleansing period to rid itself of corrupt Western influence, particularly that of the Jews.
Against Asia's preservation of the truth stood the lie of Jewish Bolshevism. 'Eastern culture' had been founded three thousand years ago; so had Judaism and the International, in ancient Babylon. The Communist Party was 'a secret Jewish party which arose 3000 years ago for the capture of authority in all countries, and its purpose now is being carried out'.25This was the climax of a long war. Hidden oriental wisdom contrasted with hidden Jewish evil. Knowledge of their true purposes was another hidden secret, 'known only by a few people', while 'all the Jewish states have followed their plan'. The Jewish hand could be seen in more than just revolution, however. Like many anti-Semites, Ungern believed the Jews were sufficiently cunning as to be simultaneously behind both capitalism and revolutionary socialism. As he outlined in a letter to a friend in Peking, the West was fundamentally corrupted by Jewish capitalists, an 'omnipotent, though very often undetected, enemy'. The Western Powers cared for only one thing - to protect their capital and property against the usurpation of the revolutionary forces by simple methods, not attributing to those methods any moral value. The conclusion is one - the revolution will triumph, the culture of the highest product will fall under the assault of the rough, greedy and ignorant mob, possessed by the madness of revolution and extermination, leading to international Judaism.26
Judaism, socialism, capitalism - all were fundamentally corrupt. The plan was simple. The first stage had already been accomplished; the restoration of the Bogd Khan and the creation of a new Mongolian state. This state, especially when reunified with Inner Mongolia, would provide 'military and moral defense against the rotten West, which is under the influence of mad revolution and the decline of morality in all its manifestations, both physical and spiritual'. Now the other tribes of central Asia, those 'of the Mongol root', could be united under the banner of Ungern's state. As he wrote, 'The next stage in the revolutionary movement in Asia, the movement carried on under the watchword of "Asia for the Asians", means the formation of the Central Mongolian Kingdom which must unite all the Mongolian tribes.'27
The Tibetans, the Kirghiz and the 'Chinese Mohammedans' - the Uighur of Xinjiang, then Chinese Turkestan - would, Ungern presumed, all join this alliance, along with the various Mongol and Turkic-descended peoples of the former Russian Empire:
Into this State must come the Chinese, Mongols, Tibetans, Afghans, the Mongol tribes of Turkestan, Tartars, Buriats, Kirghiz and Kalmucks. This State must be strong, physically and morally, and must erect a barrier against revolution and carefully preserve its own spirit, philosophy and individual policy. If humanity, mad and corrupted, continues to threaten the Divine Spirit in mankind, to spread blood and to obstruct moral development, the Asiatic State must terminate this movement decisively and establish a permanent, firm peace.28
An essential part of this was the restoration of the Qing dynasty, so bringing about a resurgent monarchist China. Like the old Russian union, the new empire needed a central core, and 'the salvation of the world should start from China'.29 After that, Japan and the other Asian countries would naturally join this happy yellow union, and the full power of the yellow race could be brought to bear against the degenerate whites.
There were a few holes in this plan. The most obvious was that Ungern had only the vaguest idea how each stage was to be carried out. He had conquered Mongolia through sheer energy and desperation, but had no clear idea what to do next. His first step towards broadening his pan-Asian alliance was to send letters to a swathe of prominent regional figures and hope for a favorable response. The targets included Buriat and Altai leaders, Chinese warlords and politicians, the Dalai Lama and the deposed Qing boy-emperor Pu Yi. They were strange communications, a mixture of lecture and sycophancy, with an easy assumption that the recipient shared Ungern's views about monarchy, revolution, the Apocalypse and Judaism. They mirrored, ironically enough, the naive enthusiasm of the International Comintern, which fired off a similar series of letters to a different set of foreign parties and figures. Few of Ungern's letters ever reached their intended recipients, most of their carriers taking the opportunity to desert if they were not intercepted by the Bolsheviks, and those that did were disregarded. In any event, he received no replies.
He placed a heavy burden upon his agents in China and Manchuria, asking them to 'address your activities to Tibet, Chinese Turkestan, and in the first place in Sin-tsan. You must find influential persons in the mentioned regions to whom you can address yourselves personally.'30 His agents, who were living an impoverished existence on the edges of the White refugee community, did not manage to spin the web of influence Ungern was hoping for. Yet he remained optimistic about his prospects and continued to canvass support for his crusade from visiting foreigners; understandably reluctant to upset him, their response was more often diplomatic than truthful.
The next problem was Ungern's splendid ignorance of the region's politics. He was familiar only with Mongolia and Manchuria, had never ventured further south than Peking, and his grasp of reality about the rest of Asia was tenuous in the extreme. His vision of China, and especially of the popularity of the Qing dynasty, was a mixture of wishful thinking, projection and fantasy. The Han Chinese had no love for their former rulers, who had not only been corrupt, incompetent and arrogant, but had compounded these typical failings of Chinese government by being foreign as well. Ungern maintained a naive faith that, like the Russians, the Chinese people had been led astray by revolutionaries, and that they remained essentially monarchist. Most of the other groups he was so keen to bring together wanted nothing more than autonomy; the Tibetans and the Uighur, in particular, were pushing hard to keep their independence from China. Ungern, however, believed that the 'majority of the peoples of Northern China and Manchuria are monarchists, and that the western Mohammedans [the Uighur] will not lag behind in the business of the restoration of the rightful heir to the Chinese throne'. Equally, a resurgent China, free from Japanese control, was Japan's worst nightmare. When he talked with people about his plans, they 'considered it inconvenient to object to the optimistic hopes of the Baron'. 31
But it was precisely Ungern's ignorance of the realities of most of Asia which let him dream of creating an ideal empire there. There is a tremendous sense of fantasy about his plans. They smack of the oriental dreams of European mystics; the preservation of hidden secrets and pure kingdoms. It was also the ultimate exertion of his own sense of will; he could be, if not emperor of China, at least a kingmaker on a grand scale. The pan-Mongolian movement had been distasteful to him because it looked to establish an essentially modern idea of a state, because of the obvious corruption of those involved, and because it was all too clearly a plan to create a Japanese puppet. Nevertheless, it provided the kernel of his own scheme, though Ungern's proposed state would not be a modern country but a revived empire, a re-creation of the legacy of Genghis Khan. It was also a mirror image of the most cosmopolitan dreams of imperial Russia. A single overarching kingdom could take in a multitude of peoples, languages and religions, united by one monarchy and a belief in 'truth and honor'. Having lost his place in one empire, he could regain it in another. He would be a preserver of the things that had been good and righteous about the old imperial Russia; a carrier of the truth from one race to the next, like the hidden masters of occult tradition.
As ever with Ungern, such ambitions unnervingly portend something much worse. One of the elements of Ungern's plan that is most striking with hindsight is how close it was to the Japanese blueprint for expansion into Asia during the 1930s and 40s. The kick-starting of conquest from the north-east of China, the restoration of the Qing dynasty - albeit by the installation of the hapless puppet Pu Yi as 'emperor' of Manchukuo - the unity of pure and uncorrupted Asian peoples against the degeneration of the West, the attempt to instill worshipful respect of a dynasty that linked heaven and earth; all this would come to fruition under the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. As Ungern did, the Japanese tried to reach out to the Tibetans and Uighur, sending secret agents to propose treaties guaranteeing independence in return for support against the Chinese.
There was clearly a measure of disgust with his own side here, too. The rest of the White movement had repeatedly proven weak, cowardly, corrupt, demoralized. Perhaps the separation from Semenov had stung more than he admitted. Not just the Whites, but all Russia had proved unworthy. They were more redeemable than decadent Europe, but they had turned away from the truth none the less. He would never see his yellow empire built, but he would bring his fevered vision back into Russia. Soon, as they had been seven hundred years earlier, the Mongols would be the scourge of God to punish a sinful people.
1. S.L.Kuzmin, Legendarnyi baron: neizvestnye stranitsy grazhdanskoi voiny [Legendary Baron: Unknown Pages of the Civil War],Moscow, 2004, p. 206.
2. US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), MID report no. 212 (RHI65, file 2657-1-158/3), 30 March, 1921.
3. Dmitri Alioshin, Asian Odyssey,London, 1941, p. 168.
4. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 8.
5. Omar Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich ,New York, 1992, p. 126.
6. Sovetskaya Sibir, no. 197 (557), 14 September, 1921, s. 1. 30 Ribo, 'The Story of Baron Ungern', p. 6.
7. D. P. Pershin, Baron Ungern, Urga i Altan-Bulak (Stanford, 1933)
8. NARA, MID Report no. 212 (RG59), 30 March, 1921. 379.
9. NARA, MID Report no. 212 (RG59), 30 March, 1921.
10. Henning Haslund, Tents in Mongolia: Adventures and Experiences Among the Nomads of Central Asia, London, 1934, p. 306. 39
11. N.Khisight, 'Baron Ungern's Mongolian Connection', Journal of the Institute of Social Sciences, National University of Mongolia, vol. 14, no. 188, 2002, p. 6.
12. Sovetskaya Sibir, no. 201 (561), 18 September, 1921, p. 3.
13. The Jewish matrilineal tradition is sometimes - mistakenly - held to have arisen as a result of rape, ordained by the rabbis so that no prejudice would be shown to the children; a heartbreakingly humane response to an evil practice.
14. N.M.Ribo, 'The Story of Baron Ungern Told by His Staff Physician', Hoover Institution, Stanford University, CSUZXX697-A, p. 1.
15. Henning Haslund, Tents in Mongolia: Adventures and Experiences Among the Nomads of Central Asia,London, 1934, p. 54.
16. National State Archives of Mongolia, a. 4, g. 7, n. 132I. 3 Makeev, Bog voiny, p. 52.
17. Had Ungern forgotten about Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Belgium, etc., or did they not have the age and tradition to count? Or did he, deprived of news, believe that the revolutionary tide that had swept away the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns must inevitably have taken the others with it?
18. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 309. 29
19. S.L.Kuzmin, Legendarnyi baron: neizvestnye stranitsy grazhdanskoi voiny [Legendary Baron: Unknown Pages of the Civil War], Moscow, 2004, p. 393.
20. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota [State Archive of the Russian Navy] (RGAVMF), f. 9427, op. I, d. 392, p. 48.
21. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 3. 33 Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 201.
22. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 5. 35 GARF, f. 9427, op. I, d. 392, p. 49.
23. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 240.
24. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 4. 38 Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. I 8 3.
25. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 4. 40 Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 3. 4 I Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 247.
26. Rosiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv (Russian State Military Archive), p. I6, op. 3, d. 222, p. I25.
27. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 240.
28. Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 393.
29. GARF, f. 9427, op. I, d. 392, p. 48.
30. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 3. 33 Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 201.
31. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 5. 35 GARF, f. 9427, op. I, d. 392, p. 49.
32. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 240.
33. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 4. 38 Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 183.
34. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 4. 40 Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 3. 41 Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 247.
35. RGVA, p. 16, op. 3, d. 222, p. 125.
36. Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia, p. 4.
37. Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, pp. 126, 393.