The Bloody White Baron (40 page)

 

As Trotskii said, Ungern had become more or less reconciled to his captivity. He knew that there was no hope left, and that his death was a few weeks away at best. He began to regard his interrogators, who included the Red commanders who had defeated him, as military equals, complimenting them on the Red Army, which he had once thought to be a ‘degenerative rabble'. Meeting them in battle had changed his opinion, however, and he now found them to be ‘very well-organised, operating under very strict rules'. Military discipline, even on the side of evil, was to be respected. They, in turn, questioned him over his war decisions, the routes he had taken, the order and strength of his army. When they asked him about his disciplinary methods, he ‘spoke easily about executions, murders, punishments of every kind and degree'.
¹³
He insisted that everything he did had been intended as punishment, not torture.

A Soviet report wrote that he was

He was sent to the major Siberian city of Novonikolaevsk for trial. It still had its embarrassingly imperial name, ‘New Nikolasville', but in a couple of years it would become Novosibirsk. The journey took him back along his old fighting route on the Trans-Siberian; he stared out at stations he had spilled his men's blood to capture and hold, now firmly in the grasp of Red power.

Ungern was treated well; certainly better than the prisoners he had taken. He was a high-profile item, the first major White leader to be captured alive since Admiral Kolchak. The Bolsheviks had been nervous around the time of Kolchak's capture, and had disposed of him straightaway; Ungern could be dealt with at greater leisure. Along the way he was displayed to selected journalists; crowds came to gawp at the train bearing him. Interrogations continued at each stop: What was his family background? Was he psychologically healthy? Had he had help from any other enemies of the revolution? He gave the same clear, peaceful answers; there were endless repetitions of favourite phrases. ‘Hanging, shooting, flogging.' ‘About the children - one should not leave a tail behind.' ‘The rule of the rod.' Unlike a later generation of murderers, he made no attempt to make excuses or deny his actions. There was no hiding behind soldier's oaths or higher orders; for Ungern his atrocities had been divinely sanctioned.

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?'
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He looked curiously at everything, like a man who knew these sights would be among his last.

As Ungern's train chugged slowly towards his trial, the beaten and weary men of his division made their way towards Manchuria. The former conspirators took control of the troops, abolishing corporal
punishments. They outdistanced the Reds and crossed the Selenge, pausing to regroup on a large island in the centre of the river. There they held a short ‘trial' and shot eleven of Ungern's enforcers. Ironically, discipline collapsed almost immediately; without the constant fear of Ungern's whip there was nothing holding the division together. Dozens of men, particularly the Cossacks, deserted, riding back north to surrender to the Red Army. The division began to implode, fighting over food and water. After appeals to their better nature - ‘Shame upon shame! In these times when everyone should think as one, friend to friend, you turn traitor?'
¹⁶
- corporal punishment was reinstated, providing a modicum of discipline.

Some few men chose to stay behind and continue the futile struggle against the Bolsheviks; the core of persistent survivors, after skirmishes with Red cavalry and Mongolian bandits, finally made their way to Manchuria. There were only six hundred of them left. They were helped by a secret order of the Bogd Khan that they should be given food, supplies and directions. Locals warned them of the approach of the Red forces and showed them which paths to take through the hills. On 6 October they arrived at Khailar in Manchuria, where they were able to use Ungern's old contacts to negotiate the surrender of their weapons to the Chinese army in return for food, money and transport to the last bastion of White resistance in Vladivostok. Taken there by train, the Asian Cavalry Division finally disintegrated, its members making their separate ways among the great White diaspora. The other White groups in Mongolia either did the same, often after killing their leaders, fell victim to the Red Army, or were wiped out by former Mongolian allies who decided their best chance lay with the revolution.

Ungern's train arrived in Novonikolaevsk on the first day of September, whereupon he was taken for yet more interrogation and examination. 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'.
¹⁷
He was ‘pathologically impulsive', and the only rule he could imagine was a totalitarian military order. He had been ‘infected by mysticism'.
¹⁸

His trial was held two weeks later, on 15 September, 1921. There was never any question as to the verdict; Lenin had sent a telegram with clear directions: the tribunal should proceed with all due speed, and pronounce a sentence of death by shooting if the evidence against him was valid, ‘of which, apparently, there can be no doubt'. The London
Times
was so confident that it jumped the gun, reporting his execution on 13 September, two days before the trial started, and the New York Times
four
days beforehand - both of them apparently working off a Soviet news bulletin.

The Soviet authorities had no time for legal niceties. Unlike later show trials, this was no drawn-out, months-long affair but a brief display of revolutionary triumph over aristocratic decadence. There was, however, a considerable element of display in bringing him such a long distance from his point of capture, unlike other White leaders, such as Kolchak, who had been shot more or less on the spot. The trial of Ungern, a freakish sadist, would provide a splendid example of the horrors of the old regime. Appropriately enough for a staged trial, it took place in the Sovnoska Garden Theatre, in the centre of the city. The crowds were eager to see Ungern, gawping at him like a freak at the fair, jostling for places in the overcrowded theatre and grumbling when they couldn't get in. According to the official report, several thousand people were present. In a dramatic touch, Ungern's yellow coat was hung above the stage. From beginning to end, the trial lasted five hours and twenty minutes. Witnesses were deemed unnecessary, since Ungern freely admitted his guilt. There were five judges, all stalwart members of the communist hierarchy, and led by the old Bolshevik Oparin. One had been a renowned partisan leader in Siberia, fighting the Semenovites. The prosecutor, Eme'lian Iaroslavskii, was a Siberian Jew, which must have given Ungern a certain resigned satisfaction.

Ungern faced the tribunal and the crowd with cold resignation, sitting on a bench on the theatre's proscenium, eyes downcast much of the time, and his hands wrapped in the sleeves of his new robe. The onlookers wondered if this stiff, odd man could really have been such a horror, but occasionally he would look up and there would be a glimpse of something fierce in him, like ‘a fire covered with ashes'. Many of his answers were melancholy. Iaroslavskii, trying to set a final stamp on the White movement, asked him, ‘Do you consider the end of your campaign to be the last of all the adventures of the past few
years and do you not believe that it was the last attempt to bring about the ideas which you profess?' Ungern replied, ‘Yes, the last. I suppose I am the last.'

Proceedings opened with Ungern being asked which political party he belonged to. ‘None,' he replied.
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There were three charges: treason, in collusion with Japan; attempting to overthrow the revolution and restore the Romanovs; and perpetuating terror and atrocities. The meat of the trial was over in seconds, when he was asked, ‘Do you admit the crimes you have committed?' ‘Yes, but there is one point. I had no connection with the Japanese.' With a typical Soviet interest in class background, Iaroslavskii proceeded to question him about his family. Ungern perked up at this point, and gave proud answers. Seventy-two of his family had died serving Russia! They had been around for a thousand years! Moving on to his crimes, Iaroslavskii asked, ‘Do you often beat people?' Ungern dryly answered, ‘Not enough - but it happened.'

His atrocities were related for the court, focusing particularly on the murder of Jews and commissars. His time in Russia and his attempt to rouse the people there naturally interested them more than his Mongolian activities. Determined to demonstrate the decadent nature of the aristocracy, Iaroslavskii dwelt at some length on his drunken beating of an aide-de-camp, using it as an example of typical upper-class violence against the lower orders. Ungern made no real effort to defend himself, except that he protested that he had never ordered violence against women. Occasionally he tried to claim that his punishments had been administered only to soldiers, not civilians. When the prosecution produced evidence, he admitted that it had occurred in at least one instance. His memory failed him at several points; he could not remember the name of the priest he had ordered killed in Urga, and thought that it was because he, not his son, had been involved in revolutionary activities.

As befitted a future leader of the League of Militant Atheists, Iaroslavskii zeroed in on religion. ‘Why, if you are a Christian, and you believe Christianity was the basis for your actions, did you do so many cruel things, including killing children?' ‘Because they were all sinners.' 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
by the Jews in Babylon. All of Ungern's horrors, 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.'