The Bloody White Baron (41 page)

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. Oparin's final judgment stated that, ‘for such a one as Ungern, execution, an instant death, will be the most easy end of its tortures. It will be similar to the compassion we show to a sick animal in finishing it off. In this respect, Baron Ungern will accept our mercy with pleasure.' Ungern received the news stoically; he can have expected nothing else. Finally, Oparin turned to the man he had just sentenced to death:

‘Citizen Ungern, you may have the last word.'

‘I have nothing to say.'

Sentence was passed at a quarter past five, and the execution was carried out the same evening. It was a cleaner death than most of those Ungern had overseen himself; just him and the firing squad. He faced them with stoic courage. Before the shooting he posed for two final photographs with his executioners. In one, he stands straight and tall, as though he were on parade. In the other, his hands seem to be folded together in prayer. When he learnt of his death, the Bogd Khan ordered prayers for his soul to be read throughout Mongolia. They were undoubtedly needed.

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. ‘When told he could buy freedom by singing the first verse of the “International”, he asked his judge first to sing the Russian National Anthem!'
²⁰
He was so fearsome that he had been executed in secret, shot in the back of the head by the local Cheka commander. 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.

Epilogue

In the Zanabazar Art Museum in Ulaanbaatar, named after the first Bogd Gegen, there is a remarkable picture. Drawn in the simple, colourful style of Mongolian popular art, it seems at first to be a hell scroll like those in the temples. Monasteries and monks perish in flame. Men kneel for execution. Women throw themselves in rivers, or have babies torn from their arms. Lamas are decapitated. Horsemen drag victims by their hair. This is no fantasy, but a depiction of Mongolian life in the late twenties and early thirties. It is a kind of parody of two famous paintings showing pre-revolutionary life, grand canvases full of everyday Mongolian vignettes, trading, bartering, lovemaking, laughing. In this picture, though, everything good and human about ordinary life has been replaced with nightmare.

Nearby, in an undistinguished building just off Suhbaatar Square, there is a collection of skulls on a table. Each skull has a single bullet hole in the crown. They were dug up after the collapse of communism; there are thousands upon thousands of others scattered in graves around the country. Their new home is the Memorial Museum for the Victims of Political Repression. It has six rooms, in which it makes a heroic attempt to commemorate somewhere between one and two hundred thousand victims. The Bogd Khan's court had been thoroughly self-serving when they spoke of the revolutionaries as a poison, a plague, the enemies of religion, destroyers of the faith. In the event, they were also right. Organised Buddhism was almost completely eradicated in Mongolia, but this was only part of a series of terrible purges directed from Moscow. For all the chaos and horror he had brought, the Soviets, operating on a scale he could
never manage, made Ungern look like an amateur piker when it came to mass murder.

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 travellers 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'.
¹
There was the normal spurt of idealism among the early communists, with attempts made to improve literacy, reduce the horrendous child mortality rate and introduce foreign culture to Mongolia.
²

The Bogd Khan was allowed to live out his life in peace, still nominally the head of state. He, and many of the other nobles and officials who had worked with Ungern, initially suffered no persecution. Notable exceptions included Togtokh and Dambijantsan, both of whom refused to co-operate with the new regime and were killed in skirmishes in 1922. Their widespread popularity made them far too dangerous to be allowed to live. Dambijantsan's death, like Ungern's, rapidly acquired the characteristics of legend: shot by a Mongol betrayer who infiltrated his camp and then, according to the stories, ripped out his heart and displayed it to his followers.

After the Bogd died in 1924, the Party declared that he was not returning. Ironically, they did so by turning to Buddhist tradition and visions, stating that

 

Later in the twenties, there was a systematic campaign to smear the Bogd's memory and turn people against Buddhism. However, until the beginning of 1930, the temples still controlled large amounts of land and livestock, although the number of lamas had decreased by a third. Party congresses had resolved that the nature of religion was ‘reactionary' and the lamas ‘parasitic', but anti-religious measures were cautious and restricted in scope. As Stalinist oppression got into full swing in Russia, Mongolia, Russia's only satellite state, began to imitate it. Unlike Russia, where persecution of Orthodoxy was secondary to purging the party itself, in Mongolia Buddhism was one of the main targets. ‘The most aggressive methods' had to be applied in the ‘struggle against religion'.
⁴

First to suffer, though, was the traditionally nomadic Mongol way of life. Under the tsars, Russian nomadic groups had managed to evade the gaze of the state but there was no hiding from the Soviets. As among the nomadic tribes of Siberia, the Mongolians were forced off the steppe and into more ‘progressive' collective farms, regulated and controlled. Rich herdsmen were condemned as
nodargan
, the Mongolian equivalent of the Russian
kulak
, and particularly persecuted. Collectivisation destroyed a third of Mongolian livestock, since the new collective farms were disastrously badly handled. Many nomads slaughtered their herds to eat the meat rather than handing them over to collective authority. Alongside the forced confiscation of private herds went the seizure of the property and livestock of the temples. Not everything was confiscated; young Mongolians were encouraged to treat the religion of their fathers with contempt, which no teenager ever needs great encouragement to do, and were formed, like the Red Guards into China and Tibet just over a generation later, into an ‘Anti-Religious Brigade'. They smashed statues, vandalised frescoes and
burnt paintings, banners and masks. The Mongolians fought back as best they could. The easiest form of resistance for a nomadic people was flight; over thirty thousand people crossed the border into China.

The most direct forms of resistance were directly inspired by prophecy. Belief in Shambhala, in some foreign saviour, had not lost its power since Ungern's time. Rumours 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. As before, political grievances and anger at foreign repression were transformed by prophecy into sacred war.

In early 1932 the rebellion erupted. The partisans fought for the Buddhist cause with a cruelty that would have made Ungern proud. It is hard to know how plausible accounts of the revolution are, since most were derived from torture-tainted interrogations, but revolutionaries confessed to ripping the hearts from captured enemy soldiers and carving holy swastikas into their chests. Certainly anyone associated with the regime was in danger, and the revolutionaries murdered both communist cadres and their families. Symbols of Russian power were burnt; co-operative farms in particular were a favourite target. Many of the fighters were Buriats. They had fled collectivisation 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.

Now the killing began in earnest. Any old grievance could be used as an excuse for political murder, including having worked with Ungern. Sundui, who had captured Ungern, was executed, despite his protests that he had intended to hand over the Baron. Thousands upon thousands were killed. The Buriats, particularly hated by the Russians for having fled from the collective paradise of the Soviet Union, were targeted with a special intensity, as were the monks, sixteen and a half thousand of whom were shot in one year, and tens of thousands more forcibly laicised. Bizarre conspiracies were invented; monks were accused of sending secret telegrams to Japanese conspirators, or of flying private aeroplanes to meet German fascists. By the end almost nothing remained of the country's religion. A report to Moscow in 1938 stated, ‘The top ecclesiastics have been eliminated. By 29 July, out of 771 temples and monasteries, 615 have become ash heaps. Today only 26 are functioning. Out of a total of 85,000 lamas, only 17,338 remain. Those who were not arrested have decided to turn lay.'
⁵
Religion and learning had been closely linked, so Mongolia's system of education was also devastated. There was more in it for the Russians than mere ideological satisfaction; the Mongolian temples contained the accumulated wealth of centuries, and trucks loaded with gold and silver, produced from melted-down statues, rolled across the borders.

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. The massacres in Tibet had initially taken place as a result of an outside agency; in Mongolia, while the
Russians had been the instigators, young Mongolians themselves had enthusiastically participated in the destruction of their own culture, foreshadowing the later barbarities of student mobs in the Cultural Revolution in China and Tibet. Most crucially, though, many Tibetans escaped to form the large and vigorous exile community in India. In Mongolia, nobody made it out.

Part of this is simply victim chic; the invasion of Tibet and the persecution of Tibetan Buddhism naturally garners sympathy. It is the perfect cause: intriguingly exotic and appealingly distant, with a convenient and clearly defined villain in the Chinese and a highly visible and likeable spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Tibet has also has a long history as a land of mystery, concealed by mountains and sealed from Western intrusion, a reputation enhanced in the 1920s by books such as James Hilton's
Lost Horizon
and the subsequent popularisation of Tibet as a utopian Shangri-La. In the light of this reputation, the Chinese invasion of 1950 was akin to a violation of Eden. In the 1930s communist idealism still formed a sufficiently protective veneer for the very few stories that did emerge from Mongolia to be ignored or dismissed. As with the Chinese and the Whites, Mongolia had been devastated by those who claimed to be her protectors.