The Bloody White Baron (7 page)

His was a romantic version of what was, in fact, an entirely pragmatic approach towards the Russian borderlands. Like most imperial peoples, the Russians soon realised that it was easier to co-opt than coerce. They lacked the numbers to try the Chinese or American approach to dealing with areas dominated by minority ethnic groups; open up the borders, encourage (or coerce) hundreds of thousands of your own people to settle the region and outnumber the locals within a generation or two. With the borderlands so strategically crucial, they had to be secured another way. Membership in the Russian Empire had to be made attractive, particularly to the local elites. Old tribal structures and religious hierarchies were maintained, but were incorporated into the imperial bureaucracy. As a result Russian officials found themselves deciding obscure questions of tribal inheritance, or determining whether a new visionary religion among the Oirat Mongols threatened imperial stability, or funding the construction of Buddhist temples. Local leaders or priests were paid off with lucrative government jobs or posts in the army. If these tactics failed, though, imperial policy could demonstrate a Roman ruthlessness, crushing rebellious tribes and salting their fields.

The Buriat provide a good example of the ambiguous attitude of the Russian Empire towards its ethnic minorities. On the one hand, it had
conquered and (theoretically) subjugated them, and the majority of ethnic Russians maintained profoundly racist attitudes towards the various Asian peoples. Russian settlement had driven some, particularly the various Siberian tribes, away from their traditional territories, brought disease and stripped them of their traditional independence. On the other hand, the empire had a vested interest in keeping the Buriat and other large groups happy. In many ways they had more rights than the average Russian - they paid less tax, they were exempt from conscription,
¹⁵
they were able to keep their traditional leadership. Many of the Asiatic minorities were actually more privileged than the Ukrainians and Poles, who were forbidden even from using their own languages. The Asiatic minorities benefited from their very foreignness. The Western minorities were seen as a plausible target for Russification, but the Mongol-descended peoples, far more ethnically and religiously distant, were left to their own devices.

The empire remained focused around its Great Russian and religiously Orthodox core, but at the same time was able to embrace numerous diverse groups at its edges. Sometimes members of these groups could be the most ardent proponents of imperial expansion. For instance, the Buriats' place within the empire was made even more secure by the rise to power and influence of one of their compatriots, Piotr Badmaev. A convert to Orthodoxy and practitioner of Tibetan medicine, he had the ear of both Alexandr III and Nikolas II, and considered himself the protector of the Buriats. He also pushed for plans, never realised, to expand the empire yet further, annexing Tibet and parts of western China.

With the exception of his time in St Petersburg, Ungern's whole life was spent on the fringes of the empire. They would come to define the Russian Empire for him, even when its core was abandoned, but his idealistic vision of it didn't make the mundane work of guarding its frontiers any less boring. Ungern was stationed in Dauria, a town which existed only because of the nearby border and the railways (it sat on the main line to Manchuria); all it had were barracks, a station and a smattering of camp followers, and the tedium of life was enlivened only by traders occasionally passing through.

It was the kind of place where younger sons gambled away the family fortune for lack of anything better to do. The historian Willard Sunderland sums life there up as

The nearest settlement that even resembled a real city was the large town of Chita, two hundred miles down the railway. The surrounding countryside was beautiful but bare, a dry plain broken only by small clusters of hills. It was sparsely populated, with scattered villages of poor illiterate peasants eking out a living.

The broken landscape and lack of roads meant that horses were the only practical way to patrol the border, and this was good horse country, which pleased Ungern. He had chosen to join a cavalry division not only for its glamour but also because he loved horses. The Buriat, like their Mongolian cousins, were excellent riders and good judges of horseflesh. Ungern was already a talented rider, but under the tutelage of more experienced officers his skills improved further. He soon mastered the art of mounted combat and became respected in the regiment for his riding skills. Warfare on horseback has a romanticism which has not quite disappeared from the Western consciousness,
¹⁷
and Ungern would remain eternally enthusiastic, to his later tactical disadvantage, about the possibilities of the cavalry charge and the lightning raid. He had other diversions too; one report mentions his interest in ‘general' as well as ‘military' literature and European philosophy.

Ungern would make an extraordinary claim about his time in Dauria:

The Order apparently had strict rules, which Ungern's companions were unable to live up to. In response,

 

A bunch of supposedly Buddhist officers wandering around the Transbaikal, drunk and stoned and preaching the ‘Yellow Faith' is a wonderful picture, but that Ungern actually organised such an Order seems unlikely. One would expect somebody else to mention it, for one thing. The witness to this speech of Ungern's, Ferdinand Ossendowski, was not always the most reliable of storytellers. The account is repeated in one other memoir, where ‘Nikolay looked at me with the wide, staring eyes of a fanatic. I knew he was a Buddhist, as were Baron Ungern and some three hundred of the others around them,'
²⁰
but this in turn is probably culled from Ossendowski.

It may be that Ossendowski made up the story himself, but it seems more likely that it was a later fantasy of Ungern's, perhaps rooted in some drunken scheme. The language is distinctly Theosophical, with its talk of ‘the evolution of humanity', and perhaps it reflected his thinking and reading at the time - or perhaps it reflected Ossendowski's own esoteric interests. The close connection of war and religion was certainly part of Ungern's later thinking; perhaps he was considering, even then, how Buddhism could be harnessed to raise an army for a holy war.

One trait that certainly wasn't fictional was drunkenness. Alcohol was a staple of garrison life everywhere, and Ungern developed a ferocious love of it. The toast to the ‘white fever' sounds worryingly plausible for a group of young, bored soldiers. Ungern was not a gentle drunk, and his drinking led to his departure from the Transbaikal Host. The circumstances are unclear, but he got into a duel with another officer, which resulted in no serious harm to either party - it may not have actually been fought at all - as a result of drunken insults, most probably at a ‘wine party'. As a result he felt obliged or was pressured to resign from the regiment so as not to serve with the man he had fought. That it was Ungern who resigned, and not his opponent, suggests where the fault lay. Using family influence, he found a new posting easily enough with the 1st Amur Regiment of the Amur Cossack Host, in the extremes of the Russian Far East near Blagoveshchensk. It was another bleak garrison
town, even further from civilisation than Dauria. The Chinese border was close by, and raids by Chinese bandits commonplace.

Before Ungern set out from Dauria, he made a wager with the local officers that he could ‘travel the more than 400 versts [around 270 miles] to Blagoveshchensk, where the Amur camp was located, only on horseback, eating what could be found along the way.'
²¹
This kind of long solitary ride was a common form of macho display among soldiers and travellers in the region. Ungern's was relatively short, but an excellent chance to show off his riding skills and toughness, and to make an impression upon his new comrades in the Amur Regiment. It also deepened his familiarity with the region. It is unclear how long Ungern took to make the journey, but he won his bet. Some writers suggested that he veered into Mongolia, and even served with the Russian Consulate Guard there, but he would not have had the time to do so before taking up his new posting.

Ungern found the Amur posting even more tedious than his life in Dauria, despite the fact that during his time there he was posted to the machine-gun division, served as head of the intelligence division and led patrols along the Manchurian border. His record mentions various ‘incidents', for which read quarrels, fights and duels. He took a six-month leave in 1911, returning home to see his family. Once back at Blagoveshchensk he continued quarrelsome as ever, and soon found himself in another duel. This was probably the source of his famous forehead scar, inflicted by a sabre-wielding opponent. Partly because of this incident, partly because of his own dissatisfaction, he sent a letter to Petersburg on 4 July, 1913 requesting a discharge from active service and a transfer to the reserve.

This was the second time he had left a regiment because of a duel, and the fourth time he had been effectively expelled from an institution following a breach of discipline. In some ways Ungern's antics harked back to the traditions of the archetypal eighteenth-century officer, Russian or Prussian: an exaggerated sense of honour, a disdain for inferiors and, above all, a propensity to use force to make one's point. At that time throwing a merchant out of a window for having the effrontery to present a bill, or slapping a peasant down the street
with the flat of a sword had been fairly regular occurrences. For a Russian officer in the twentieth century, the occasional beating, or even drunken duel, might remain acceptable, but getting roaring drunk and firing at random at the patrons of cafes and taverns to prove your marksmanship, as Ungern is alleged to have done, was now considered excessive.

The Russian army had a long tradition of institutionalised violence, too, especially towards recruits, and had abolished flogging only with the reforms of 1864, decades after other European armies. The documented evidence of Ungern's attacks probably excludes numerous assaults against servants, enlisted men, peasants and other such lowly specimens. By the standards of both the Baltic aristocracy and the Russian army, these were effectively non-people, and violence against them left no mark on the record. It is reasonable to assume that the reports of assaults on fellow cadets at school and outbursts against officers represent only a small fraction of Ungern's thuggery.

Many who knew him later were forever seeking the root cause of Ungern's wild rages. One theory was that his wounded forehead, injured either in his duel of 1913 or while fighting in the Caucasus in the Great War, sometimes flared up painfully and prompted Ungern's wrath. Such a simple and organic explanation seems unlikely. Perhaps it was genetic, for his great-great-grandfather, his father, and Ungern himself were all prone to outbursts of rage. Privilege certainly had something to do with it; despite all his expulsions, there had always been a way back in for Ungern. Now, however, even the army was unwilling to offer a welcoming home. The combination of bureaucracy, tedium and alcohol finally became too much for him. His spirit was better suited to a land of magic and adventure.

THREE

Suspended Between Heaven and Hell

By the time the letter releasing him from duty arrived at Blagoveshchensk, Ungern was well into Mongolia, ‘in search of bold accomplishments', as the letter he carried with him from his commander attested. Hermann Keyserling, a fellow Baltic noble, thought that Mongolia was a natural destination for him. He had a strong impression of Ungern: