The Bloody White Baron Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Introduction

  ONE - A Son of Crusaders and Privateers

  TWO - The Ends of the World

  THREE - Suspended Between Heaven and Hell

  FOUR - Things Fall Apart

  FIVE - Carrion Country

  SIX - Ragged Crusade

  SEVEN - Lord of the Steppe

  EIGHT - A Hundred and Thirty Days

  NINE - The Last Adventurer

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  For my mother and father

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks go first of all to Colin Thubron, who both encouraged me to propose the book in the first place and said ridiculously kind and reassuring things about my writing. My father, Martin Palmer, read and criticised the book at all stages, as well as supporting me through the inevitable financial travails of roaming across Asia; my mother, Sandra Palmer, provided an English home base filled with love and encouragement in those travels. Vicki Finlay helped greatly with the proposal and provided tips on dealing with the publishing process.

  Neil Belton improved this book immensely through his careful and intelligent editing, as did Henry Volans. Trevor Horwood’s thoughtful and detailed copy-editing was a pleasure to endure and András Bereznay tracked down even the most obscure Mongolian towns for the maps. Many thanks also go to my agents, Gillon Aitken and Jon Jackson.

  Willard Sunderland suggested Russian materials, read and criticised the manuscript and caught several important errors; I owe a great debt to his scholarly generosity, and am greatly looking forward to reading his own book on Ungern. Jamie Bisher’s White Terror was an invaluable source for information on Semenov and the Whites in Siberia, and his enthusiasm and kindness in providing further information an inspiration. My debt to the collections of materials and documents on Ungern compiled by S. L. Kuzmin is immense.

  Tjalling Halbertsma, Machiavelli of the steppe, encouraged me to come to Mongolia; Guido Verboom provided a warm welcome when I was there. ‘Jack’ drove me around the country in a beaten-up taxi that really shouldn’t have gone as far as it did. Urantsatsral Chimedsengee was an excellent translator, as was Anna. Shamefully, I have lost the name of my excellent half-Buriat translator and guide.

  My friend Christiane Mackenzie died the year before I started working on the book, after a long and loving correspondence in which she never stopped pushing me to write; her last letter to me was titled ‘Mongolia’. Arthur Hertzberg taught me that all good books stem from obsession. Olga Bryskine tried to introduce me to Russian many years ago; it wasn’t her fault that I was more interested in her than the language. Che Yiping made living in a dust-filled provincial city in Hebei a positive joy; so, in very different ways, did George Dent and Ian Sherman.

  I’d also like to thank James and Allison Holloway, Julia von dem Knesebeck, Evgenie Medvedev, Sergei Bojalensky, Christopher Kaplonski, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Nick Middleton, Jasper Becker, Tom McGrenery, Professor Khisight, Thierry Michel, Gareth Hanrahan, Elizabeth and Scott Akehurst-Moore, my aunts Roxie, Ralou, Sheila and Yan Chi, my uncle Nigel, my aged grandsire Rudolf Fischer and his wife Dagmar, all of whom gave advice, commentary, or support, as well as many others who provided hospitality or directions in Russia, Mongolia and Estonia.

  My girlfriend, Claudia He, put up with my wandering about Mongolia and Russia from the very start of our relationship three years ago, and kept a loving home in Beijing for me when I came back. She insisted, out of a Confucian sense of filial piety, that this book be dedicated to my parents alone; the next one is just for her.

  Maps

  The Russian Empire and her ncighbours, 1913

  Ungern’s movements in Mongolia

  Introduction

  My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.

  BARON UNGERN-STERNBERG, 1921

  I imagine that he would like to be remembered riding through a horde of terrified revolutionary soldiers, scything them down with his sabre as bullets whizzed around him, passing through his cloak, but never so much as scraping him; the warrior-king of Mongolia, receiving reports, tribute and prisoners, like his hero Genghis Khan, in a hastily pitched campaign tent. My chief image of him, though, is less heroic; I picture him on the steps of a temple, hearing - and believing - that he has only a hundred and thirty days left to live, his mutilated face suddenly contorted by terror.

  This book tells the story of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, the last khan of Mongolia, who in one short year rose from being a Russian nobleman to incarnate God of War and returned Khan. In Mongolia he was lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god.

  I first stumbled upon his story in one of Peter Hopkirk’s brilliant accounts of central Asian espionage, Setting the East Ablaze. In late 1920 a White Russian baron and cavalry major-general, thin, intense and hideously scarred, had cut his way into Mongolia, defeated the Chinese occupiers, taken over the country, ruled it briefly and brutally, and raised a Mongolian army to lead back against Russia.

  It could have been just another bloody episode in the long horror of the Russian Civil War, but what made it unusual was the sheer oddness of Ungern-Sternberg. Most of the Russian leaders, whether the Bolshevik Reds or their opponents the Whites,1 were a vicious bunch who were not averse to the slaughter of a few thousand citizens, the Reds in the name of the people, the Whites in the name of the tsar, but none of the others did it in the name of Buddha. According to his Russian companions, Ungern-Sternberg was a pious, if unorthodox, Buddhist, and he lived in a world of gods and prophecies that contrasted starkly with the one inhabited by most of his contemporaries. He had not seized Mongolia out of a grand strategic plan, but because, it was claimed, he believed himself to be the returned Genghis Khan, flail of the Bolshevik unbelievers and head of an empire that would stretch from China to the Urals.

  It was an almost unbelievable story. One of his chief war aims was to free the Bogd Khan, the huge, blind Living Buddha who had been imprisoned by the Chinese, so that he could act as a rallying point for his crusade. Like all good conquerors, he was rumoured to have left hidden treasure behind him, plundered from monasteries and buried somewhere on the steppe. Ungern-Sternberg did not seem to belong to a century of tanks and telephones but to an earlier, cruder age. Like his Baltic forefathers, he was a lost crusader, a bloody-handed pillager driven by both an intense religious fanaticism and devotion to the joy of slaughter. His hatred was focused, though: Jews and Bolsheviks were killed by his troops on sight, presaging a later, greater evil.

  His adventures were made all the stranger by their location. Mongolia can sometimes seem half-imaginary, a storybook country that has no business being real. Most countries project their own mental image, however muddle-headed or stereotypical: skyscrapers and hamburgers, berets and the Eiffel Tower, the willow pattern and the Great Wall, bowler hats and big red buses. Mongolia’s popular images are emptiness and exile; Outer Mongolia is a metaphor for as far from anywhere as you can be. When the current president of Mongolia, Enkhbayar, came to England to study as a young man, he was detained by a sceptical immigration official who refused to believe that Mongolia was a real country - ‘You’re having me on, son’ - until Enkhbayar produced an atlas to prove his homeland’s reality.

  There was a time, though, when the Mongols ruled the world, or at least a substantial chunk of it. Under Genghis Khan (1162-1227), arguably the most successful conqueror in history,2 the M
ongols were transformed from a group of infighting backward steppe tribes to become the masters of Asia, a ruthless, streamlined war machine whose speed, force and flexibility massively outclassed any other army of the era. By the time of Ungern’s invasion, however, the Mongol Empire had long collapsed, swallowed up by Russia and China, once again a collection of scattered and feuding clans. They left behind them deep cultural memories of massacred peoples and burnt-out cities.

  Tolstoy, writing gloomily of the brutalities of the tsarist system in the nineteenth century, feared the onset of ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’,3 and perhaps a greater soldier could have made something of the combination of Mongol ferocity and modern strategy. Ungern was not that man. His agenda was set by the rantings of shamans and his chaotic dreams, not by railway timetables or quartermasters’ reports. How, I thought, do you come to behave like this? How does a Baltic-Russian aristocrat end up a fanatical Buddhist?

  And yet, there seemed to be more to his leadership than sheer despotic terror. He was undoubtedly popular among his Mongolian troops, who fought for him with a fury which appeared to some European observers to be close to devil-worship. Everything about the story seemed uncertain, even Ungern’s appearance, tall in some sources, short in others, grey-eyed, green-eyed, blue-eyed - nobody was able to pin him down. In one account he came across as a detached fanatic, willing to muse on philosophy and history, in another as a sadist and butcher, hands steeped in blood. Stories about him were a morass of rumour, myth and supposition. His personal beliefs were murky; his Buddhism might have been inherited from an equally eccentric grandfather, or the result of a personal conversion during his early years in Mongolia, and he seemed happy to use the most respectable, if mystical and apocalyptic, language of Russian Orthodoxy at points, despite his family being Lutheran. The changes in his appearance suggest an atavistic religious progress. In one of the few surviving photographs he appears in Russian army uniform, neatly groomed, but with an intense, monastic appearance, like an Orthodox mountain hermit, but near the end of his campaign he rode bare-chested, ‘like a Neanderthal’, hung with bones and charms, his beard sprouting in all directions and his chest smeared with dirt. He had gone from monk to shaman in a few years.

  The ferocity of Ungern’s crusade was surprising, given his Buddhist connections. Buddhism has always been one of the most accessible Asian religions to Westerners; appealingly philosophical, pleasantly pacifist and, compared with Hinduism or much of Chinese religion, supposedly free of ‘superstitious’ or ‘primitive’ beliefs in the form of gods or magic. Many writers ignorant of Asian history - particularly, for some reason, anti-religious science writers - also claimed that Buddhism lacked the history of atrocities and intolerance that marked Western religion, despite, for instance, the many Buddhist-inspired messianic revolts in China, or the deep complicity of Zen Buddhism in Japanese militarism during the Second World War. It especially appealed to the English because, like the Church of England, it seemed not to demand that you believe in anything. To be a Westerner and call oneself a Muslim, or even a Hindu, makes some definite statement about your beliefs and perhaps your actions; calling yourself a Buddhist in the West, however, does not define your identity in any fixed way. Western Buddhism resembles Unitarianism without the harsh dogma.

  The emphasis on the philosophical aspects of Buddhism in the West also means that the reality of Buddhist religious practice worldwide tends to be eclipsed. For instance, Buddhists are often portrayed in the West as not believing in a God or gods, and most Western Buddhists don’t. The vast majority of Buddhists worldwide, however, are enthusiastic believers in all manner of gods and spirits, often drawn from local traditions or taken from older religions such as Hinduism or Daoism.

  At first I found it hard to understand why Mongolian Buddhism made a particularly strong and fearful impact on Westerners such as Ungern. In the Chinese variety with which I was familiar the most ferocious of the gods are the guardians found at every temple entrance. Their expressions of earnest intensity, combined with their elaborate martial stances, make them look like Morris dancers. Temple complexes as a whole feel gentle and benign: quiet gardens, the slow chanting of prayers, the gods and Buddhas set to the back of spacious halls, their hands raised in benediction.

  Buddhism in China, introduced by missionaries from India in the first century AD and rapidly incorporated into the happy melange of Chinese folk religion, was part of the mainstream of the Mahayana tradition, the largest school of Buddhism. It focused upon salvation, mercy and release from the wheel of suffering; although there were Buddhist monks and nuns, it remained a populist religion at heart. The chief figures were the various bodhisattvas, beings who had turned back at the threshold of enlightenment in order to work towards redemption for the rest of the world.

  However, Chinese Buddhism was - and is - very different from the Mongolian variety. Mongolian Buddhism was an offshoot of the Tibetan religion, also known as Lamaist or Tantric Buddhism. The country had converted as a result of a deal struck in the sixteenth century, effectively giving the Mongol khans temporal authority over Tibet in return for the Tibetans assuming spiritual authority over Mongolia. The relationship was not particularly easy; the Fourth Dalai Lama had been Mongolian, and had been murdered by the Tibetans for being so. Though based in the Mahayana tradition, Tibetan Buddhism focused on magic, secret teachings, spirits and demons, the acquisition of special powers, and the superior status of the monk or lama - all of which were to play an important role in Ungern’s story.

  Many foreigners were suspicious of Tibetan Buddhism. One seventeenth-century Jesuit text on China depicts in wonderful hand-drawn illustrations the various idols the missionaries encountered. The pictures of solemn monks standing next to smiling statues of Chinese Buddhist gods, resting one affectionate hand on their backs, look like holiday snaps in comparison with the Tibetan deities, which stand on their own, sharp and fierce. There is a distant respect about the pictures, mixed, perhaps, with a touch of fear. By far the most commonly worshipped deity in Buddhism is Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, similar in many ways to the Virgin Mary in Christianity. Merciful goddesses have their place in Tibetan Buddhism, but more prominent is the child-devouring figure of Palden Llamo, a ferocious figure close to the Hindu death-goddess Kali.

  The Jesuit illustrations capture something that photographs never can; in the harsh light of the lens the Buddhist deities appear cheap and gaudy, painted in bright colours and hung with fake jewellery. The accoutrements don’t help; in most cases an excess of weapons, skulls, corpses, rats, and spikes serves only to make them look a little ridiculous, like a group of middle-aged heavy-metal fans.

  In the flesh - or the wood, rather - the Mongolian gods have an even fiercer presence. I first encountered them at the Seven Towers Temple in Hohhut, the capital of Inner Mongolia. Squashed between old houses, with narrow hallways and tiny courtyards, it was a disturbing place. Despite the high, bright afternoon outside, almost everything was shadowed; the only light was from very dim, shuttered lanterns. I could hear a ragged chanting everywhere I went, adding to the general eeriness. I was reminded of the Yonghe Gong, the Lama Temple in Peking, where in the 1930s Western visitors were warned to keep to well-lit corridors for fear of assault by rogue monks.4

  I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I wasn’t certain who he was, since the Tibetan pantheon inherited by the Mongolians is replete with such figures. In a small dark room, with incense burning and other gargoyles looming, it seemed capable of an awful, twitching animation; I felt it might lick its lips at any moment. A rural Mongolian couple were kneeling on the floor before it, chanting and kowtowing; they’d brought oranges to feed the god, and cash to bribe him. Even after the pilgrims had left, I didn’t want to stand in front of the thing, let alone examine it closely; it was the first time I’d had any concrete sense of the word ‘idol’.

  Elsewhere in the temple, small-denominati
on notes were tucked into the armpits and behind the ears of most of the gods, and ageing fruit lay before them. I wondered whether the purpose was prayer or appeasement. The assembled gods trampled bodies, gripped weapons and had fixed, bloody smiles. The last time I’d visited a Chinese temple I’d spent my time wisecracking about the ‘war umbrellas’ the gods carried, much to the horror of my Chinese companion, who, despite being Muslim, was convinced I was drawing some awful curse down on myself. I was raised Anglican, which takes most of the fear out of religion, but I wasn’t making any jokes in this place. I could see chipped paint and worm-eaten wood, the cracks and hollows of years of neglect. It didn’t make me feel any more at ease; it just made the gods seem older and darker and angrier.

  The temple’s gift shop sold plastic versions of the monstrosities inside, grinning horror reduced to plastic kitsch. I bought some oranges and a few sticks of incense before returning inside with a bunch of schoolchildren, their laughter and joking soon silenced in the shadows before the gods. I stuck the incense in the sandbox before the biggest and grisliest of the lot and placed a five-yuan note alongside the oranges at its feet. Better safe than sorry, after all.

  Such a temple, with its close, fearful atmosphere would surely have made a deep and lasting impression on Ungern. He had not come to it a blank slate - he was a cruel and ruthless man long before his arrival in Mongolia - but the images of Mongolian Buddhism, filtered through the perspective of the equally murky world of Russian and European mysticism and its fascination with the ‘Orient’, had shaped his thinking and his actions. This fascination was mingled, in Ungern’s time, with deep fears of the ‘inevitable’ rise of the East, creating the myth of the ‘Yellow Peril’, the hordes of sinister Orientals who threatened the West.