The Bloody White Baron (14 page)

It was almost inevitable that he and Ungern would become friends. They had much in common, including a desire for military success, a love of Mongolia and a keen interest in the peoples of central Asia. Perhaps most of all, they were both outsiders in their own regiment, although Semenov was isolated by race and Ungern by choice and temperament. With such similar careers, they must have met before, but it was under Vrangel's command in Poland that they became solid friends. Semenov was five years younger than Ungern, but he was very much the senior partner. They fell into a common pattern of close friendship; Semenov was the talker and charmer, Ungern the thinker, in the shadow of his charismatic friend. Ungern was, perhaps, a little overwhelmed by Semenov's Mongolian achievements. Later accounts would sometimes attribute Semenov's adventures in Urga to Ungern, a mistake which could be explained by their closeness to each other, but one wonders if Ungern didn't occasionally take the credit for his friend's exploits.

Now they were stationed together on one of the forgotten flanks of the First World War: the Turko-Russian conflict in Persia. Both were assigned to the mountains around Lake Urmia in what is now north-west Iran, and found themselves caught up in one of the war's worst horrors. Since August 1915 the Turks and their Kurdish auxiliaries had been engaged in the systematic genocide of the Christian Assyrian population in the area, on the excuse that some of them had allowed themselves to be drafted into Russian service when the Russians first invaded.

Thousands of Assyrians were massacred in the region around Lake Urmia alone and up to a quarter of a million elsewhere, a slaughter which has the unhappy distinction of being one of the least remembered genocides of the twentieth century, eclipsed by the slaughter of the Armenians elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire and obscured by continued government denial. It was carried out using the most primitive methods. Assyrian villagers were roped together and pushed
off cliffs, hacked to death, shot en masse, sent on death marches. If their Muslim neighbours tried to protect them, they suffered the same fate. Mass starvation and disease helped finish off those Assyrians who escaped the Turkish troops. Signs of the massacres were visible everywhere, and the few survivors, gaunt and traumatised, appealed to the Cossacks for aid.

Ungern saw them as potential military material. He dreamt up a scheme to recruit another Assyrian regiment, which would be motivated by revenge against the Turks and help alleviate Russia's increasingly desperate shortage of manpower. He rounded up some men, but his plan never came to fruition. The Assyrians ended up abandoned after the revolution, left with eight cannon and a few machine guns to face the murderous Turkish army. However, the idea inspired Semenov, who conceived of an all-Buriat regiment, fired with the fighting spirit of the steppe. Both soldiers became convinced that the salvation of the Russian state lay in recruitment among the native peoples of the East.

That state, however, was already on its last legs. Appalling casualties on the front, shortages at home and growing revolutionary sentiment combined to spark countrywide protests in February 1917. The brutal incompetence of the tsarist system, especially its inability to cope with the slow transformation of Russia from agricultural serfdom into a modern industrial power, had been increasingly obvious for over a decade. Then the Cossacks had been used to repress the uprisings; now mounted Cossack policemen were among the first to refuse orders and turn against the government. The old regime lost its authority in a matter of weeks. All over the empire soldiers turned against officers, workers against bosses, peasants against landowners. For Ungern and other natural reactionaries, it was the world turned upside down, the natural order perverted. The nightmarish visions of 1905 had returned.

By March Nikolas II had been forced to abdicate, and a democratic government was established. Led by the bantamweight figure of Alexandr Kerenskii, a young nobleman with dreams of being a new Napoleon, the Provisional Government re-established a veneer of order, but its authority was extremely weak. Badgered by generals, and still hoping for a German collapse, the government refused to accept the reality of Russian military defeat in the West, souring its
chances with ordinary soldiers as a result. Some optimistic liberals hoped that Russia had finally thrown off the shackles of her feudal past, and could now become a modern state. Meanwhile, more fanatical or realistic revolutionaries began to plan the seizure of power.

The collapse of the old order, especially the tsar's abdication, struck Ungern hard. Unlike Semenov, who was more phlegmatic about his political allegiance, and whose loyalty was to empire rather than tsar, Ungern was a pronounced monarchist. For him, the monarch was the fount of all honour, the ‘first person in the state'.
¹²
Around him he saw mass desertion from the army, which in his eyes was a kind of treason. The Kerenskii government, in his opinion, was a ‘total mess', but for the moment he respected its authority. Ungern and Semenov continued to work to recruit Assyrians, but Semenov also submitted a petition to the new government, hoping to receive permission to begin recruiting among the Buriat. The fragile Petersburg government was desperate for any measures that could boost manpower and strengthen the commitment of the border tribes to a crumbling empire. Semenov received the authority to begin recruiting for his Mongol-Buriat Regiment. Travelling to the Transbaikal, he found the going tough. He sought to bolster the thin ranks of his new force by opening recruitment to all, and by contacting friends across the border in Mongolia.

Between March and November 1917 Ungern's whereabouts are hard to place. He travelled with Semenov in the Transbaikal, but may have also returned to Estonia to visit his family. It's possible he was involved in the abortive coup in St Petersburg that August, led by the Cossack general Lavr Kornilov. One of Kornilov's grievances, the Provisional Government's abolition of capital punishment in the military, was a cause particularly dear to Ungern's heart. If he did visit Reval, his leaving was a final break with his homeland, and with his family. His real father died in St Petersburg four years later, while the rest of his family fled abroad, either to America or to Germany. He made no subsequent effort to contact them. Meanwhile, Estonia declared her independence in a brief period between Russian retreat and German occupation in 1918, and reasserted it again after the German collapse in November. The fledgling state faced two threats; the Red Army and German freebooters. The Baltikumer, groups of fighters made up of former German soldiers, characterised their rampages through the region as a new
Ritt gen Osten
, the Ride Against the East of the Teutonic Knights.

If Ungern had remained in the region, perhaps he would have found his place among these hard, wild men. Many of them ended up fighting alongside White forces during the Russian Civil War, wearing a combination of Russian and German insignia and dreaming of a restored Russian Empire, ‘to be reconstructed and administered by a ruling class of German nobility'.
¹³
Their eventual defeat meant, it seemed, a final end to German power in the region, just as the throwing back of the Red Army promised a future separate from the Russian Empire. Most of his relatives eventually made their way to Germany, where many Baltic Germans schemed for revenge against the Soviets. Both Ungern's aristocratic and his imperial roots in the region had been torn up; he had no reason to return there. Later, asked whether he had wealth and property, he said, ‘Yes, in Estland I used to, but now, really, no.'
¹⁴

In early November came the Bolshevik coup in St Petersburg.
¹⁵
The Winter Palace, symbolic heart of government, was seized by a tiny band of revolutionaries, led by Lenin, freshly returned from German exile. The new Soviet order was established by bluff and chutzpah, and solidified by the revolutionaries' determination to use any means to hold on to power. Bolshevik ruthlessness disturbed many leftists, but reactionaries such as Ungern were more troubled by the prevalence of Jews among the revolutionary leaders. Jewish traditions of education and social justice, combined with the indignities heaped upon Jews by Nikolas's government, resulted in them being over-represented among the leaders of revolutionary groups. Anti-Semites came to regard Bolshevism and Judaism as identical. In the anti-revolutionary press, Trotskii was usually referred to by his original, distinctly Jewish name of ‘Bronstein', and even the non-Jewish revolutionary leaders were claimed to possess Jewish blood. Lenin's Mongol ancestry gave him distinctly Asiatic features, which were often cited as evidence of his ‘oriental' Judaism.

Wherever Ungern was when the St Petersburg coup took place, his feelings about the Bolsheviks were clear. Anti-religious, anti-monarchist, riddled, in Ungern's view, with Jews, extolling the peasants and seizing land from the aristocracy; they were the antithesis of everything
Ungern held dear. Their worst betrayal was the treaty of Bresk-Livotsk, a shameful peace signed with the Germans that ceded great swathes of western Russia to their rule, invalidating everything Ungern had fought for during the last four years. Now he had a new and greater battle to fight. The Germans had been merely the enemy of Russia; the Bolsheviks were the enemy of good. To Ungern the revolution was a kind of apocalypse, the end of the world as he knew it. Out of apocalypse, though, could come utopia, Christ's return after Satan's reign, the opening of the pure land of Shambhala after the defeat of the enemies of the faith. But before that could happen the world had to be purged. Only the most stalwart crusader could stand against the black curse of revolution, holding the banner of imperialism, divine religion and absolute monarchy. This would be Ungern's role.

For the moment, however, he was playing second fiddle to Semenov. He made his way across Siberia to join him at his old station posting, Dauria, and found himself swept up in his friend's plans to turn Siberia into a centre of anti-Bolshevik resistance. The Bolsheviks had already begun to raise a military force of their own: the Red Army. Inspired by Trotskii's skills at recruiting and propaganda, and drawing upon a generation of soldiers embittered by the war, it was already the most powerful army in Russia. Although at times during 1918-19 the total number of anti-Bolshevik fighters outnumbered the Reds, Bolshevik control of the central portion of Russia and its opponents' vast range of political views, from anarchists to conservative monarchists, meant that the anti-revolutionary forces remained scattered and divided. The Bolsheviks also inherited most of the materiel of the old army, and the industrial capacities of St Petersburg and Moscow, leaving their opponents reliant upon provincial arms stocks and supplies from abroad. Much of the military opposition to the Reds came from the officers of the old tsarist army; they became known, in contrast to the ‘Red' Bolsheviks, as the ‘Whites'.

Ungern and Semenov were in some ways typical of this officer caste, but most of the White leaders were former generals and admirals. Their plan to raise a regiment was a hugely ambitious scheme for two junior officers, but the scale of it deterred neither man. Their resources, however, were limited; they had no money, no troops, and only six other men with them. After months of effort, Semenov had at last achieved some success with his Mongol-Buriat recruitment,
persuading Buriat elders to go along with his scheme and recruiting, on paper, around six hundred men, but he had left the few troops he had back in the west of the country. As a result, the counter-revolution in Siberia began with eight men and a colossal bluff.

Close to Dauria, just across the Chinese border in Manchuria, was the important junction of Manchzhuriya, commonly known as Manchuli or, confusingly, Manchuria. It was a nothing town, a ‘small, wind-swept village, lying in a vast, but naturally not less wind-swept plain'.
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The Russian garrison there was in open mutiny; they were already setting up revolutionary tribunals to try their officers and the local railway officials. The Chinese commander there, Major-General Gan, had been ordered to disarm them, but quailed at the diplomatic consequences and felt he had insufficient men. Semenov caught a train down, invited the commander and other Chinese officials to dinner and proposed that he, as a Russian officer, should disarm the troops without bloodshed. Believing he had a substantial number of soldiers to back him up, Gan gratefully agreed and offered to help if necessary. It was a sign of the total breakdown of Russian military authority that Semenov needed a
Chinese
officer to give him permission to disarm a mutiny.

Semenov now had a mandate to act, but no men to back up his plan. He told the station master to put together a troop train and send it to Dauria to retrieve his imaginary regiment. Along with the train he sent one of his Cossacks with a message for Ungern; grab whoever he could in Dauria, light up the train as though there were soldiers on it, and come back to Manchuli. Ungern's first recorded action in Siberia was simple and brutal. With a single Cossack assistant, he was sent to ensure the co-operation of Captain Stepanov, chief of the railway militia, in disarming the mutinous troops. When Ungern declared that the three of them together were going to take on two armed companies, Stepanov laughed in his face and said he was going home. According to Semenov's memoirs, Ungern promptly smacked him in the gut with the scabbard of his sabre and told him he was going nowhere.