Continued from P.3: Soon the crowds where to loose their old affection for him. If Unger’s depredations had been limited to the Chinese and Russians, his popularity among ordinary Mongolians might only have risen. Increasingly, though, he ordered the seizure of livestock and goods from locals, taking, according to one ridiculously precise tally, 4,635 camels, 40,174 horses, 26,407 head of cattle and 1OO,729 sheep and goats. By any standards these so-called 'requisitions' represented a small fortune; for the Mongolians it was seized from, it was their entire living.The areas around Urga and other White-held settlements became more and more desolate as the Mongolian herders retreated further into the steppe to avoid the attentions of Ungern's men. Families were devastated not only by the loss of their animals, but by the drafting of the young men who did the heavy work necessary for survival. Young Mongolians who had arrived in Urga on pilgrimage, or to try to sell furs, or to gawp at the Bogd Khan's coronation, were drafted; any who tried to flee were hanged, their bodies left on display as an example to others.
Most of all, the army needed feeding. Pay was optional, as it had been for the last four years, but food was not, and the lack of it was increasingly telling upon the soldier's morale. Thinking it over later, Ungern reflected, 'To be fed is necessary ... it is difficult to express ... if only I could just have put on a cap and vanished!'1 It was a problem facing any army that stayed too long in one place, when, according to Ungern, 'the signs of corroption would inevitably set in drunkenness, robberies .. .' Ungern also knew the solution. In the north, the Bolsheviks and their Mongolian allies had violated the territory of Mongolia itself. It was time to take the fight to them. War would lift the spirits of the army, for 'a soldier at work cannot be demoralised'.2
It was an odd choice, for there were other ways out. In the Transbaikal, facing the complete collapse of his forces, Semenov was already planning his final evacuation to Manchuria, which was fast becoming virtually a White colony. Harbin was crawling with White refugees, and from the Chinese ports a man with money - and Ungern had plenty of that now - could make his way anywhere in the world. Even in China there was no shortage of opportunities for a man with a taste for killing; warlords needed lieutenants, gangsters needed bodyguards. The civil war had not yet taken on the clear outline of nationalists against communists - and Ungern anyway still branded most of the Chinese leaders as 'revolutionaries' for overthrowing the Qing - but there were leaders out there who shared at least some of Ungern's worldview. It was rumoured that Zhang Zuolin, with whom he had been corresponding, even offered him a job as commander of his cavalry.
And while Unger went to fortune-tellers and oracles again, it is possible that the Mongolians played Ungern's own superstitions against him. Eager to see the city rid of his men, it would have been relatively simple - and with some precedent - to influence the oracles to push him in a certain direction. There was no rational way to believe that heading north towards invading Russia would prove anything but disastrous.
Before they rode out, Ungern issued a proclamation to the whole army, sending it by horse messenger to each White group. The Urga presses ran off hundreds of copies, and it was distributed not only in Mongolia, but among Whites elsewhere in Asia. It was the first such order he had made, but it was titled Order No. 15 for both political and superstitious reasons. It gave the impression of previous orders, and so of a more sizeable and organized force than actually existed. His fortune-tellers had also advised him that fifteen was his lucky number; the Bogd Khan had been crowned on the fifteenth day of the lunar month, after all.
The opening text was not composed directly by Ungern, but written by Ossendowski, containing a statement that echoed the Russian edition of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' that 'the crowd is a barbarian, and acts as such on every occasion. As soon as the mob has secured freedom it speedily turns it into anarchy, in itself the height of barbarism.' It continued, 'First the year 1905, and afterwards 1916-1917, witnessed the criminal, horrible harvest of the seed sown by the revolutionaries.Three months of revolutionary licence sufficed to destroy what many centuries had achieved.'3
According to the text, tradition and unity, preserved over generations, had been destroyed by the black forces of revolution. There was still hope, though. 'The people feel the need of a man whose name is familiar to them, whom they can love and respect. Only one such man exists; the man who is by right lord of the Russian earth, the emperor of all the Russians, Michael Alexanderovich.' The capitals give the pronouncement a cranky edge, like a letter written in green ink. Prince Michael had been missing, presumed dead for three years, and most of the Russian people didn't give a damn about him, but that no more dissuaded Ungern than the lack of support for the Qing among the ordinary Chinese had. Monarchy was the only right way to order the people, and they ought to long for it. If they didn't, they had been corrupted and would have to be punished.
So far, the Order could have been issued by many White commanders; the following two passages, where an expression of Ungern's belief in the counter- revolutionary struggle as essentially a metaphysical one. Evil, as represented by Judaeo-communism, threatened everything.
- Commissars, Communists, and Jews, together with their families, must be exterminated. Their property must be confiscated.
- In the course of the struggle against the criminals who have destroyed and profaned Russia, it must be remembered that, on account of the complete depravation of morals and the absolute licentiousness, intellectual and physical, which now prevail in Russia, it is not possible to retain our old standard of values. 'Truth and mercy' are no longer admissible. Henceforth there can only be 'truth and merciless hardness'. The evil which has fallen upon the land, with the object of destroying the divine principle in the human soul, must be extirpated root and branch. Fury against the heads of the revolution, its devoted followers, must know no boundaries.
The closing remarks of the text next, included a direct quotation from the opening and closing verses of the twelfth chapter of Daniel, a famously strange and ambiguous prophecy. It was often strongly associated with the purported wrongdoing of the Jews, whose refusal to recognise Christ was taken to be the sign that 'none of the wicked shall understand', and used to justify anti-Semitism. There is a sense of mystery about the prophecy, too, a suggestion of hidden wisdom and secrets revealed only to the initiate, which appealed to Ungern's esoteric sensibilities:
The Holy Prophet Daniel foretold of the cruel time when the corrupt and the unclean would be defeated and the days of peace would come: 'And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, everyone that shall be found written in the book. Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand. And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.'
His own interpretation of the text was that the abomination of desolation referred to was the Bolshevik decree of 20 January, 1918, which had closed the churches and thus removed the 'daily sacrifice' of communion. One thousand two hundred and ninety days had passed from then to the beginning of his attack on the Bolsheviks. Actually, it was one thousand two hundred and sixteen, but it was close enough, and figures were never Ungern's strong suit.
Next, Ungern's main force moved to battle the Soviet forces in Kiatkha, but they lost.
While retreating deep into the Mongolian hills, Unger gathered his remaining forces near Karakorum, which had once been the great capital of Genghis Khan's empire. It had been a city of gers, like old Urga, but all that remained now were two giant stone turtles, glumly facing the desert.
Not wanting his personal treasure to fall into Soviet hands, Ungern ordered it to be thrown into the nearby Orkhon river. Stories claim the treasure-bearers were then disposed of, like the coffin-bearers of Genghis Khan. This was untrue, but the exact location of his loot remains unknown, creating a mystery that puzzles acquisitive Mongolian fortune-hunters to this day.
Ungern's faith in the mobility of cavalry, who could 'strike from any direction and at any time',4 however appeared unshaken.
But when word of Ungern's reappearance reached the Soviet commanders they were nonplussed. Thousands of men were mobilized by train or horse to track and surround Ungern's force. In the early weeks of late July, as Ungern came close to Verkhne-Udinsk, there was no final battle, no clash of good and evil, just a series of blockings, skirmishes and retreats, and, for Ungern, the slow, painful realization that his plans had been based on fantasy.
On 30 August 1918 then, Trotski in a speech denigrating emigre newspapers, spoke of a report concerning Siberia:
This is what the Paris paper has to say: 'A Havas [a well-known news agency] telegram from Tokyo reports the capture of Chita by Baron Ungern and the fall of Soviet power in Irkutsk.' News, as you see, of high importance! Baron Ungern was a major card in the intervention in the Far East. He invaded Mongolia and threatened the Far Eastern Republic. Now they tell us that he has taken Chita and overthrown Soviet power in Irkutsk. I must admit that in this report, unlike the others, there really is a grain of truth. Baron Ungern is now indeed west of Chita. I have recent official dispatches from our Siberian command which, while confirming in this respect the telegram from Tokyo, on the other hand correct what it says to a very substantial degree. I will allow myself to read out one of these dispatches: "On August 22, at I2 o'clock, Shchetinkin's combined force (then follows a list of units) captured General Ungern with his bodyguard of 90 Mongols, led by a Mongol prince. General Ungern was brought to headquarters at IO o'clock on August 23 and interrogated. General Ungern readily answered all questions, on the grounds that it was all up with him anyway. There is no fresh information about some small, scattered units of General Ungern's force." Thus, Baron Ungern was taken prisoner and taken under escort westward of Chita. His army has been destroyed. Consequently, this card, too, of the intervention in the Far East has been covered.5
The Soviet journalist Vladimir Zazubrin interviewed him, finding him 'sitting in a low soft armchair, one leg thrown over the other. He smokes cigarettes, kindly given to him by his enemies,' which he reached for with 'a thin dry skeletal hand'. He had a 'mild, guilty smile', and seemed to be 'a tiger turned into a lamb', but 'his claws, though receded, were still sharp'. When the train stopped in Irkutsk, his captors took him on a brief tour of Soviet achievement, showing him 'a number of offices where their bureaucratic machine ran at full speed'. He sniffed ostentatiously and sneered, 'It smells strongly of garlic. Why do you employ so many Jews?'6 He looked curiously at everything, like a man who knew these sights would be among his last.
His captors concluded that he 'was by no means psychologically healthy' and, rather crushingly, that he 'certainly did not have the capacity to run a whole country'. 7 He was 'pathologically impulsive', and the only rule he could imagine was a totalitarian military order. He had been 'infected by mysticism'.8
The Soviet authorities had no time for legal niceties. Unlike later show trials, this was no drawn-out, months-long affair.
Ungern was given little chance to expound upon his odder beliefs, apart from some brief, incredulous questioning as to whether he really believed that communism had been founded three thousand years ago.9
All of Ungern's horrors, prosecutor Eme’lian Iaroslavskii pronounced, 'were done in the name of God and religion!' Ungern also gave his unrepentantly reactionary views on the stupidity and laziness of the working classes, and the need to stomp down hard on them, allowing Iaroslavskii to conclude that the sentence 'should be a verdict against all noblemen who try to lift a hand against the authority of workers and peasants!' The judgment 'would be a judgement on an entire social class which cannot give up its power and wants to keep it for ever, even if were to mean the extermination of half of humanity!'
Ungern's defender, Bogoliubov, a former tsarist barrister, seems to have made at least a token effort to mount a defence for his obviously doomed client. He argued, reasonably enough, that there was no evidence that Ungern had actually co-operated with the Japanese, and that his psychological disorder meant that he had not been responsible for his actions as such. Rather than being executed, he should be put in solitary confinement, where he would have time to reflect upon his crimes. Ungern was in no mood to co-operate. Asked by Bogoliubov if a history of mental illness ran in his family, he bluntly lied, 'No.'
The final verdict was unsurprising. He was guilty on all charges, and the only possible punishment was execution. The court accepted that Ungern was mentally ill, but saw it as no excuse.
Various legends arose around his last moments, spread among the Whites as they brooded in exile. Pieces of his Cross of St George were supposed to have splintered as the bullets hit, striking his executioners. Or he had escaped death altogether, breaking out of prison and vanishing into the forests to continue his war against Bolshevik evil. Even in death, Ungern disappeared into myth.
From a Mongolian point of view, Soviet rule was at first not so bad. Certainly it was not an auspicious sign when the Soviet Union ripped away a chunk of western Mongolia - the same part claimed by the tsarist regime in 1911 - and declared it a new, 'independent' republic, Tanna Tuva. Tuva's only notable achievement was the production of extremely beautiful stamps during the 1930S, and it was subsequently absorbed outright into the Soviet Union. To the Mongols it was all too reminiscent of the chipping away at Mongolian territory by the Chinese. Although the country was nominally governed by the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, everyone knew who held the ultimate authority. However, until the mid-1920s, the actual Russian population in the country remained relatively small. Only a few hundred Russian soldiers and officers were sent to train the new Mongolian army, and life continued much as it had in the past. There was little persecution at first, either of political or religious figures. Western travelers could still witness prayers and dances, the gods were still appeased, and new novices even joined the ranks of the monasteries, despite official discouragement. One of the first leaders declared, after Lenin's death, that there had been 'two great geniuses on earth - Buddha and Lenin'.10
The Bogd Khan was allowed to live out his life in peace, still nominally the head of state.
A decade later however, there was a systematic campaign to smear the Bogd's memory and turn people against Buddhism. And while until the beginning of 1930, the temples still controlled large amounts of land and livestock, the number of lamas had decreased by a third.
Thus, belief in Shambhala, in some foreign savior, had not lost its power since Ungern's time. Rumors and prophecies began to circulate that a great Buddhist army was coming, led by the Panchen Lama of Tibet, the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. The then Panchen Lama, Thubten Choekyi Nyima, was working with the Chinese nationalists at the time, having fled Tibet after quarrelling with the Dalai Lama. The nationalists had given him a guard of soldiers, which sparked the original rumour. It was an obvious retelling of the Shambhala myth, fastened on to a convenient theological-political figure of the time. In early 1932, political grievances and anger at foreign repression were transformed by prophecy into sacred war.
Symbols of Russian power were burnt; co-operative farms in particular were a favorite target. Many of the fighters were Buriats. They had fled collectivization in the Soviet Union en masse, only to find the situation no better among their Mongol kin. They had had enough of running, and were determined to fight. The rebels had almost no modern weaponry; many fought with bows, arrows and swords. There was no holy army coming to aid them. They were crushed by the Red one, with the help of Russian air power and a special detachment of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. By October the rebellion was over. Although hundreds were shot, the rebels were treated with greater leniency than usual, since the Soviets blamed Japanese pan-Mongolian agitation for the revolt.
There would be no mercy in 1936, though. Then the Mongolian purges began, carried out with a thoroughgoing brutality by Marshal Choibalsan. He had accompanied Suhbaatar on his visit to Russia and was now one of Stalin's most toadying lackeys. He bent with the winds from Moscow; as the Soviet party was purged, so was the Mongolian. After the execution of the previous Mongolian prime minister, Genden, who had tried to stand up to Stalin, Choibalsan became the unquestioned leader of the People's Revolutionary Party in 1935. A fat, vulgar man, he switched from wearing traditional Mongolian dress to a Russian army uniform, lined with medals in traditional tinpot-dictatorial style.
Similar happenings in Tibet following the Chinese invasion of 1950 shocked the world, but Mongolia never caught the attention of the West. It was too early in the century, and too far away, and a large proportion of the Western intelligentsia was still in thrall to utopian lies. Tibet did not truly become a cause, after all, until communism was cracked and failing all over the world, and the cult of Mao had almost entirely disappeared in the West.
Many of Ungern's former comrades meanwhile ended up working for the Japanese. This was one of the most viable options for those who, facing a bleak exile from their homeland, wished to remain in Asia. Others eked out an existence in China, or migrated overseas to start new lives. Pershin fled to China, where he scraped a living as a translator and tutor, and died in poverty in 1936. Alioshin settled in London and published his memoirs during the Second World War. Makeev served as a bodyguard in Shanghai, while Ribo emigrated to the US, continued to work as a doctor and lived until the 1970s. Sipailov fled to China, where he was arrested for the murder of the young Dane, Olufsen. Somehow he engineered his release, and was last heard of in 1932 when, greedy as ever, he led sixteen other exiled Russians in a secret expedition from Manchuria into Mongolia to search for Ungern's gold. Rousted by an NKVD officer and his Mongolian cavalry, he was arrested and handed over to the Japanese.
Of all Ungern's old comrades, it was the flamboyant Ataman Semenov who had the most dramatic post-war career. After fleeing Chita with the Japanese, he wandered around Korea and Japan for a few months before ending up in Shanghai. After a Bolshevik assassination attempt, he decided China was too dangerous and headed for the United States, intending to make his way to France. In the US he decided to apply for political asylum and found himself caught up in a legal imbroglio concerning his conduct in Siberia. The opposition to his application was led by General W. S. Graves, the former head of the American forces, who loathed him. Numerous witnesses testified to the atrocities committed by Semenov's forces. Accused of presiding over robbery, banditry, bigamy, murder, torture, rape and pillage, he ended up in jail in New York. After his bail was raised by White organizations he was almost lynched by a crowd of three thousand Russians, mostly Jews who blamed him for White anti-Semitism. Eventually he fled the country and returned to Japan, and from there to Manchuria.
In Manchuria he became the godfather of the more reactionary Whites, working with Japanese intelligence and Chinese and Russian gangsters, and overseeing the Cossack overseas union. By the outbreak of the Second World War he was working for the Japanese directly, living in 'a ninety-thousand yen villa which contains offices, residential quarters, an air raid shelter, and a small arsenal, including stores of ammunition. The residence is carefully guarded by Japanese secret agents.'11 He grew very fat in the face, and extremely ugly. To his credit, he opposed the growing Russian Fascist Union, calling instead, as he always had, for the restoration of a 'semi-democratic monarchy'. However, when the captured Soviet general Andrei Vlasov formed his Russian Liberation Army, a group of former Russian POWs who fought (reluctantly) for the Nazis, Semenov was quick to declare his friendship. The enemy of the Bolsheviks was still his ally, however unpleasant the company kept.
In 1945, as the Red Army ripped through Manchuria, Semenov planned to flee to China, but the speed of the Soviet advance caught him unprepared. According to White legend, he offered a formal dinner to his captors at his villa, at the end of which the Soviet commander rose, toasted their host, and then placed him under arrest. He was taken back to Russian soil for the first time in twenty-two years and, in a highly publicized trial, sentenced to death as an 'enemy of the Soviet people' and 'active accomplice of the Japanese aggressors'. He was hanged on 30 August, 1946. In the thorough Stalinist manner, his son had already been murdered, and his daughters sent to the Gulag. Like Ungern, the Soviets left no tail.
Ossendowski's career was also dramatic. After escaping to Japan he moved to America and published his memoir of his escape from the Bolsheviks and his time with Ungern, Beasts, Men, and Gods. A massive bestseller, the proceeds set him up for life, but he continued to travel and write, maintaining a consistently anti-Soviet line. He returned to his native Poland in 1923 and, when the Nazis invaded, served heroically, despite his age, in the Polish underground. He died of natural causes in January 1945. It was rumored that just before the end he was visited by a great-nephew of Ungern's who was serving in the Wehrmacht. His death was well timed - he was already on an NKVD list as an enemy of the people.
Ungern's legacy emerged in odd ways in the West. In the murky world of post-war rightist occultism he was remembered as a precursor figure of the weirder fringes of Nazism. They were right, but only indirectly. Ungern's mixture of esoteric beliefs and anti-Semitism shared some common roots with the Thule Society and other minor occult groups involved in the early days of the Nazi Party, and the eccentric obsessions of Himmler and others sprang from the same sources. His particular brand of eliminationist anti-Semitism, transferred to Germany by his former White comrades, and especially by the Baltic Germans, was also a major influence on the German right in the 1920s. As ever with Ungern, he foreshadowed a worse madness. He was even the subject of a trashy novel published in Germany in 1938, I Order! The Struggle and Tragedy of Baron Ungern-Sternberg,12 which portrayed him as a heroic precursor of the Fuhrer, struggling against Judaism, communism and betrayal within his own ranks. Meanwhile, he remains, along with Ossendowski's fantasies of hidden underground realms, a minor part of the mythology of the modern extreme right, still given to occult conspiracies.
1. N.M.Ribo, 'The Story of Baron Ungern Told by His Staff Physician', Hoover Institution, Stanford University, CSUZXX697-A, p. 39. 3
2. S.L.Kuzmin, Legendarnyi baron: neizvestnye stranitsy grazhdanskoi voiny [Legendary Baron: Unknown Pages of the Civil War],Moscow, 2004, p. 471.
3. The full text of Order No. I5 is in Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota [State Archive of the Russian Navy] (RGAVMF), f. Varia, d. 392, pp. 1-6.
4. Sovetskaya Sibir, no. 201 (561), 18 September, 1921, s. 3. 18
5. Dmitri Alioshin, Asian Odyssey,London, 1941, p. 250.
6. Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 557.
7. GARF, f. 9427, op. I, d. 392, p. 36. 18
8. Kuzmin, Baron Ungern, p. 21O.
9. The trial account, and the following quotes, are in Sovetskaya Sibir, no. 200 (560), I7 September, 1921, s. 4, no. 20I (561), 18 September, 1921, s. 3, and no. 202 (562), 20 September, 1921, ss. 2-4.
10. C. R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, London, 1968 , p.260.
11. Jamie Bisher, White Terror, London, 2004, p. 366.
12. Berndt Krauthoff, Ich befehle! Kampf und Tragodie des Barons Ungern-Sternberg (Bremen, 1938).