The Bloody White Baron (25 page)

The Baron's punishment tariff was denounced by European officers as ‘insane', ‘inhuman' and ‘incomprehensible'. To the Baron, however, it made perfect sense. Sadism exists in all cultures, and is given its opportunity in all wars, but its practice is infinitely various. During the Russian Civil War the regalia of White officers provided great sport for their captors; they replaced the pips on their captives' ornate epaulettes with nails driven into their flesh, and boiled the skin off their hands in imitation of gloves. Other Bolshevik tortures were
derived from the practices of the Okhrana, the old Russian secret police; the Cheka, their revolutionary successors, quite literally used their manuals as examples. White violence was that of an outraged upper class, often - like the Ku Klux Klan in America - holding mock trials in kangaroo courts and carrying out mass hangings. Other communist prisoners were crucified, nailed to trees with railway spikes. Peasant armies buried their Red victims alive, entombed in the earth they had tried to take from the villagers.

Ungern's formalised sadism was of a different order. It was appalling and inexcusable, but also explicable. The obsession with lashing and whipping was an exaggerated version of the discipline of the old Russian imperial army, where fifty lashes were considered a light punishment. Ungern favoured ‘a hundred blows to each part of the body' as an average punishment, which left men staggered and blinded by blood. Ungern's excesses sometimes surprised even him. ‘Did you know,' he mused, ‘that men can still walk when the flesh and bone are separated?'
²⁶
The rest of his ideas come straight from the Buddhist hells, of which there are a great variety, with numerous punishments for each sin. Popular literature in both China and Mongolia included compendiums of these; the worst sin, according to one, was murdering your grandmother and feeding her to Buddhist monks, thus simultaneously violating filial piety, insulting the aged, promoting cannibalism and transgressing against vegetarianism.

It seems unlikely that this particular offence was rife, but even relatively small sins mandated a grim range of soul-purging retribution. Hammering home the point to the illiterate were the hell scrolls: lurid depictions of the fates awaiting the sinful deceased. These were sometimes given three-dimensional form in the hell galleries, annexes of Buddhist monasteries that contained realistic sculptures of demons gleefully torturing sinners. All of Ungern's favourite tortures were prominent in the hell scrolls of the Mongolian monasteries: exposure on the ice, burning alive, rending by wild beasts.

There was clearly a strong sensational aspect to these displays and also, since a majority of the victims were naked and female, a pornographic one. The various Christian depictions of hell and judgement that the young Ungern had been raised with, including the portrayals of the Last Judgement he must often have seen on the porticoes of Orthodox churches, also showed the torments of the damned, writhing in flame or
speared on pitchforks by demons. However, in the Christian tradition the emphasis was on terrifying the sinner into obedience. While this was one of the goals of the Buddhist images, there was also a more mystical purpose. Just as the souls in torment were ultimately undergoing a redemptive journey, so contemplating their fate could effect the same process of soul-cleansing in those still living - a purifying experience rather than a terrifying one.

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.'
²⁷

Such language was not necessarily meant literally. The
Mitteilungen für 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'.
²⁸
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.'
²⁹

Despite all this, the army was growing every day. Troops were arriving from all over Mongolia. For the Russian troops who arrived, it was a trap. Often initially sceptical 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 rumour 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 organised under the same militaristic banner system as the Manchurians in China, so that nobles could mobilise 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 1911 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.

Not every Mongolian was a volunteer, or even conscripted through the banner system. Many, particularly young men, were simply drafted into the army, snatched from their homes and families. Ungern had a high opinion of the fighting quality of Mongolians, but many of his draftees were deeply unhappy. Villages, Mongolian and Russian, had little choice but to turn over their sons to Ungern's army; one Russian came across the ‘smoking ruins of the settlement of Mandalas, whose inhabitants had been exterminated only because they had not wished to turn over volunteers for the Baron's army'.
³⁰

As ever, the exact strength of the army was almost impossible to evaluate, since there were so many separate contingents, and recruitment and desertion were continuous. Ungern's own staff recorded them only to the nearest hundred. At most, Ungern had something between five and six thousand troops, with probably about half of them Mongolians. It was a colourful force, with no common uniform or doctrine. Ungern's Cossacks wore long blue coats while the Mongols and Tibetans wore ‘red coats with yellow epaulettes bearing the swastika of
Genghis Khan and the initials of the Living Buddha'. Most of the army were equipped with Japanese rifles, accumulated during Ungern's reign at Dauria, but Ungern had also acquired Italian machine-guns, originally purchased during the Great War by the Mongolian military. However, many of the Mongolian troops had no guns, but brandished pikes and lances.

According to contemporary Russian accounts, the Mongolians believed that Ungern was considerably more than just a general. They called him the God of War, and some temples even began to dedicate services to him. How widespread this belief was, and exactly what it meant, is still unclear. It was, of course, perfectly normal for human beings to be recognised as the incarnations of the gods in Mongolia. Most of the
khutukhu
lineages, the reincarnated lamas such as the Bogd Khan, were considered to be the manifestations of one god or another, particularly of the bodhisattvas, the compassionate souls who turned back from the brink of enlightenment themselves to save others. Mongolian Buddhism was also fairly flexible about its objects of worship; great leaders could easily be assimilated into the pantheon while still alive, or formally acknowledged by the Buddhist hierarchy as a reincarnation of a past khan or the avatar of a god.

There was no official Mongolian recognition of Ungern as an incarnate god, despite all the other titles that would be heaped on him. The belief probably sprang up spontaneously: a mysterious figure from the north, riding a white horse, ignoring bullets and claiming to fulfil ancient prophecies - it was only logical to think him a god. Even the Russians often ascribed a quasi-supernatural element to the myths around Ungern, such as his affinity with the wolves and his fondness for surrounding himself with the bones of his victims. Ungern or his Mongolian allies may have paid lamas to spread the word further; bribing monks for political ends was standard Mongolian practice. As Ungern had seen with the Ja Lama, claiming to be the reincarnation of a past hero, who in turn would often have claimed to be the incarnation of a god, made good political currency in Mongolia.

Quite
which
god they thought he was is unclear. Looking for a ‘god of war' in the eclectic Mongolian pantheon is like looking for a virgin martyr among the Catholic saints. There was the fat, fiery Begtse, with his goat-skin cloak, high boots, drawn bow and garland of fifty freshly severed heads, or Pehar, an old regional war god bound by monks to serve the faith, who rode wolves, bears and elephants to battle. Or there was the Red Horseman, who trampled and speared the enemies of the faith, Geser Khan, a hero who became a god, had his own stupendously gory epic, Mahakala, a tame demon who carried a cleaver to chop up those who strayed from the righteous way, and a skull bowl to mix their remains, and an infinity of other possibilities. To confuse things further, all the great spiritual and martial leaders of the Mongols had had their own tutelary deities, any one of which could reasonably be described as a war god. One witness confidently identified the name of the god that Ungern supposedly incarnated as Tsagan Burkhan. Unfortunately,
tsagan burkhan
is simply the Mongolian for ‘white god' or ‘white Buddha', an obvious name for the white-skinned, White-leading Ungern.

Whichever god or gods were manifest through Ungern, they undoubtedly fell into the category of
dharmapala
(‘defenders of the faith'), the wrathful protectors. This was a general term for the ferocious gods, particularly prominent in Tibet and Mongolia, who defended monasteries, fought off hostile spirits and struck down the enemies of Buddhism. Many of the
dharmapala
were tamed demons, bound into service by the spiritual-magical powers of great lamas. Only a minority of them were considered enlightened beings themselves. They protected the faithful, but they were depicted in the most terrible fashion, festooned with weapons and skulls and claws. They were a good match for Ungern, who professed to be the defender of Buddhism and Mongolia, and who was clearly prepared to do anything, no matter how terrible, to achieve this end. It was a way of saying, ‘This man is a blood-soaked monster - who happens to be on our side.'

There is also a definite possibility that the Russian officers merely misheard, or misunderstood, the Mongolians' references to Ungern.
Bogd
, one of the Mongolian words for ‘sacred' or ‘holy', is easily con-fusible with
bog
, the Russian word for god
.
What Russian officers translated as
bog voiny
, ‘God of War', may have been closer, in
Mongolian, to ‘holy warrior' or ‘sacred warrior'. It would have been commensurate with how Ungern saw himself, as a ‘crusader'.

There is another intriguing possibility, though. 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 colour 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 fulfilment of such messianic expectations.