The Bloody White Baron (29 page)

Monarchs were the ultimate bulwark against revolution and chaos, only they could keep ‘truth, kindness, honour and tradition from being trampled from impious people'. A state could no more exist without a king than ‘the earth exist without the sky'. Without the monarch the apocalyptic End Time would come when, as he wrote to one Mongol leader, ‘there was no happiness and even those looking for death could not find it'. (This letter, with its oblique reference to Revelation 9 : 6 - ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.' - must have left its Buddhist recipient somewhat confused.)

Ungern's faith in monarchy drew upon many Russian ideas, though typically went beyond them. The God-given nature of the tsarist system was taken for granted by many of its supporters, and it was deeply tied into the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia claimed to inherit the divine and imperial destiny of both Rome and Byzantium, and the tsar, according to the Church, was ‘God's viceroy on earth'. Disobedience to the tsar was rebellion against God; as the school catechism taught, it was every subject's religious duty ‘to obey from the inmost recess of the heart every authority, and particularly the Tsar'. These were stronger claims of divine favour than those of any other contemporary European monarchy, and were sustained right up to the revolution - if anything, Nikolas II demanded more ridiculously sycophantic praise from the Church than his predecessors, and in turn rigorously supported Orthodox dominance.

For Ungern, of course, monarchical authority went far beyond a single dynasty, or even a single religion. He saw heaven's stamp on all emperors, regardless of their faith. He showed even more enthusiasm for the (quasi-)Buddhist Qing dynasty or the Shinto-rooted Japanese monarchy than for the Orthodox monarchy in Russia, and was always keen to get in touch with the Chinese Muslims, believing them to be
possible supporters of the restoration of the Mongolian Empire. His belief in cross-cultural aristocracy was not unique. In Europe, even at the height of imperialism, there had always been a tendency to suspend the rules of race for the nobility, no matter how ‘savage' or ‘primitive'. One of the attractions of foreign empire for many was the preservation of hierarchies abroad that seemed to be threatened at home. The vast masses of the East were not so different from the vast masses of peasants and workers in Russia, and there was a natural sympathy among those ‘appointed to rule' in both cases. There could be a surprising egalitarianism, regardless of race, among those who believed in the inherent inequality of most of their compatriots. For Ungern there was far more intrinsic difference between a noble and a peasant than between a Russian and a Chinese.

Indeed, his conception of divine monarchy seemed to owe much to the Chinese and Japanese empires. He rarely wrote of ‘God' when talking about monarchy, instead preferring a more ecumenical ‘Heaven' which seemed closer to East Asian concepts of a generalised divine authority and certainly accommodated the possibility of polytheism. He wrote that ‘the highest embodiment of the idea of monarchy, this connection of a deity with human authority, was the Bogd Khan in Mongolia [. . .] and in the old times the Russian tsars'.
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Not only was the ‘deity' unspecific, but the Russian tsars were roughly shunted into the past. When Ungern spoke of the restoration of kings being ‘predicted in the Scriptures', he was as likely to mean Buddhist prophecies as the Book of Revelation. The closest contemporary example to Ungern's essentially medieval ideas of heaven-blessed kingship was the Yamato dynasty in Japan, with an emperor considered by many to be, quite literally, a living god and the descendant of the Sun. Ungern had fought the Japanese as a young man, consulted with them in Siberia, and had Japanese officers with him, and it seems likely that he had picked up some ideas from them. Their system seemed to have all the symbolic and political force that Ungern wished to impart to the monarchy he had ‘restored'.

However, the Japanese imperial system in its current form was itself a recent creation. The emperors had been powerless, largely meaningless puppets until the Meiji restoration, barely twenty years before Ungern's birth, and even now they were surrounded and controlled by political and military cliques. Even among true believers, the
emperor's divinity was always tempered by political reality. It was particularly hard to see the heavens at work in the ruling Taisho emperor. As a result of childhood meningitis, he was a mental and physical cripple kept locked away from the public and utterly incapable of ruling the country, but the sacred nature of the monarch as the ultimate expression of Japan transcended his human frailties. In a few years this would evolve into the principle of ‘double loyalty' invented by the Japanese right-wing, whereby a truly loyal follower could take actions that, while seeming to go against the emperor's will, were in fact fulfilling Japan's destiny.

In the same way Ungern's respect for the Bogd as ‘the perfect embodiment of divine authority' co-existed with an appreciation of his many flaws and a willingness to engage him in political struggle if need be. Ungern was well aware that the Bogd was an alcoholic, and spoke disapprovingly of his drinking binges and secret stores of champagne. He was important, but he was also, ultimately, secondary to Ungern's wider schemes of divine restoration. Ungern claimed later that the Bogd was ‘petty, and unable to understand wide ideas'.

The Bogd Khan was also hedging his bets. He remained an astute politician, and his main goal, as ever, was to secure a comfortable living for himself and his entourage. Only a few days after being rescued he was writing to both the Bolshevik government in Moscow and the Republican government in Peking. He maintained his willingness to work with both regimes, protesting to Moscow that he had nothing against revolutionaries and to Peking that he had nothing against Chinese rule, and claiming that he had been ‘abducted by force' by Ungern's men. Meanwhile, the two strange and wary bed-fellows turned their mind to the business of government.

Later, when he was trying to ingratiate himself with the new Red regime, the Bogd Khan would vigorously protest that he had had no real political role under Ungern, but had been sidelined and powerless, used as a symbolic figurehead. Ungern would counter-claim that all power had been concentrated in the hands of the Bogd Khan, and that he had ‘no political influence' in Mongolia and was valued by the Bogd only as the head of an army.

The truth was that both of them tried to maximise their personal political power and, while rarely at loggerheads, each followed his own agenda. Ungern protested that he ‘tried to stay out of Mongolian
affairs, but my soldiers were Mongolian, so it was necessary to get involved',
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but his ambitions went far beyond the military. Initially at least, he effectively controlled the government, running taxation, administration and his own peculiar version of law and order. He re-established the five ministries of the old autonomous government - Foreign Affairs, Finance, Defence, Justice and the General Command of the Armed Forces - and placed Mongolian nobles, chiefly those who had helped him in the initial stages of the campaign, in charge. Ungern insisted that, at first, ‘I just made suggestions, because the politicians were very slow in deciding their own affairs. Even when they see something good for them, they still can't decide what to do.'
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However, from the start each department also had White Russian ‘advisers' attached to it, and it was clear where the real power lay.

A telling example of the peculiar relationship between the Bogd Khan and the Baron was the paper bills issued by the Bogd Khan on behalf of Ungern, $250,000 worth in total, which entered circulation on 20 April, 1920. They were wood-block printed, hand-coloured and rather flimsy, and with no gold in the treasury to back the new currency, the Bogd was forced to guarantee them in an authentically Mongolian way; against his personal herds of livestock. Perhaps in recognition of this odd arrangement, each denomination had a picture of a different animal; a sheep on the ten-dollar bill, a cow (in the auspicious and unusual colours of red and white) on the twenty-five, a horse on the fifty, and a camel on the hundred. They carried a long explanation in Mongolian as to their value, and, in English, the words MONGOLIAN GOVERNMENT'S TREASURE and their nominal interest rate, 6 per cent per annum. Although issued by the Bogd Khan's government, with no mention of Ungern on them, they were universally known as ‘Barons' among the Mongolians. Linked to the Mexican dollar, a key international currency of the time, at first they were accepted at close to their face value, but as Ungern's fortunes declined, so did their worth.

Although he was now both a Russian and a Mongolian noble, a lieutenant-general and, to all intents and purposes, the dictator of Mongolia, Ungern kept to his old ascetic habits. Not wanting to be
softened by city life, he slept in a ger set in the courtyard of a Chinese manor, and conducted business in a small two-room house in Maimaichen, ‘without a hint of any comfort', taken from a ordinary Chinese merchant. It was cold and bare, with paper strips covering holes in the windows, a smoky stove and a couple of wooden benches. Ungern was as slovenly as ever, and the house was ‘intolerably dirty'. In the room referred to as Ungern's ‘cabinet', he had only a single chair and desk, and forced visitors to stand. He wore a Mongolian
deel
, the long robe often mistaken for a dressing gown by his Russian officers, but now it bore some of the decorations of his new Mongolian rank: alongside his Cross of St George he also wore a swastika-emblazoned ruby ring he had been given from the Bogd's personal treasury. He left the peacock feathers in his wardrobe.

In contemporary photographs of him wearing Mongol costume he sits awkwardly, hair combed back, staring at the camera, his arms folded and the Cross of St George prominent on his chest. His gaze has a mad intensity that stands in stark contrast to his nervous glances at the camera in his photos as a young man. In one picture his moustache is overgrown and lopsided, his hair wild; this was clearly remarked upon, for in others apparently taken later the same day both are trimmed. His self-confidence carries through, and even in these exotic conditions he retained traces of his aristocratic upbringing. Another picture shows him striding out of the doorway of his house, giving orders to his underlings. Pershin, visiting him immediately after the fall of Urga, remarked dryly, ‘If the Baron had been dressed in a good fashionable suit, his chin shaved and his hair brushed, [. . .] he would have been quite at home in any luxurious drawing room among polite society.'
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Much of the business of the new state was conducted from Ungern's two small rooms, or in private meetings in his ger. He roamed about the city and the outlying territory, making surprise inspections at all hours of the day and night. He had commandeered a swift motor car, a Fiat, and was driven around at terrifying speeds, the horn blaring out to alert passers-by. His every waking moment seemed to be taken up with meetings, consultations or drill, and his attention to detail amazed his staff; he demanded reports on every aspect of state affairs, but particularly on military matters, and devoured them at night. They wondered when he slept.

The liberation of Urga made Ungern extremely popular among the Mongolians. Widely viewed as a saviour and Buddhist hero, his reputation as a living god spread throughout Mongolia. He had addressed the gathered crowds at the Bogd Khan's coronation personally, reminding them of the glory of the moment, to great applause. The Bogd Khan's grant of noble rank and his recognition as a reincarnation of an earlier leader added greatly to his kudos, and as he rode or drove through Urga, mutters of ‘God of War!' half-respectful, half-fearful, could be heard among the crowds. He was particularly popular among the Buriats, who were highly sympathetic to both his pan-Mongolism and his anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiments. As Mongols living outside the country's borders, they were seeking to forge their place in the new state. Many had fled to Mongolia after 1917 from the Transbaikal and almost every Buriat in Urga volunteered for Ungern's forces, probably around a thousand or more.

The injection of Ungern's mongrel army brought new life to the city. The Russians already there remarked on the multitude of races among his men, mixtures of Buriat, Mongol, Siberian, Turkish and others. For many of them it was the closest they had come to normal life in four years. They billeted themselves in Chinese houses, took Mongol girls to the Chinese brothels or set up gers around the city. When not dashing to fulfil Ungern's orders they traded with the locals or consulted the Mongolian soothsayers. Recognising that the Chinese merchants, however disliked, were vital to the city's commercial life, Ungern did his best to protect and reassure them, succeeding, at least at first, to the extent that the Chinese banking community held a banquet - which he declined to attend - to praise the ‘saviour and defender from the arbitrariness of the Chinese authorities'.
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