The Bloody White Baron (34 page)

As ever with Ungern, such ambitions unnervingly portend something much worse. One of the elements of Ungern's plan that is most striking with hindsight is how close it was to the Japanese blueprint for expansion into Asia during the 1930s and 40s. The kick-starting of conquest from the north-east of China, the restoration of the Qing dynasty - albeit by the installation of the hapless puppet Pu Yi as ‘emperor' of Manchukuo - the unity of pure and uncorrupted Asian peoples against the degeneration of the West, the attempt to instil worshipful respect of a dynasty that linked heaven and earth; all this would come to fruition under the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. As Ungern did, the Japanese tried to reach out to the Tibetans and Uighur, sending secret agents to propose treaties guaranteeing independence in return for support against the Chinese.

There was clearly a measure of disgust with his own side here, too. The rest of the White movement had repeatedly proven weak, cowardly, corrupt, demoralised. Perhaps the separation from Semenov had stung more than he admitted. Not just the Whites, but all Russia had proved unworthy. They were more redeemable than decadent Europe, but they had turned away from the truth none the less. He would never see his yellow empire built, but he would bring his fevered vision back into Russia. Soon, as they had been seven hundred years earlier, the Mongols would be the scourge of God to punish a sinful people.

EIGHT

A Hundred and Thirty Days

I was nosing around a small Mongolian town, looking for traces of Ungern, when I came across a man who knew about a battlefield. A detachment of Ungern's men had destroyed a group of Mongolian soldiers there eighty years ago, riding over a hill with the sun at their backs and charging down on a blinded enemy. His grandfather had told him about it. To reach it entailed a bumpy ride over the grasslands, and a nervous one, because our car had broken down the evening before. Nobody had stopped to help, which surprised me. My driver explained that this was how roadside bandits got people nowadays, fake breakdowns in the night, preying on the Mongolian instinct to aid unlucky travellers. He was full of bandit stories, as were the Mongolian tabloids; highway robbery was on the rise again that year. There were a lot of places where people could just disappear out in the steppe.

On the way to the battle site, our guide reconsidered. It might not have been Ungern's men who did the killing there, he thought. Perhaps it was them who were killed, ambushed by revolutionary soldiers or just angry locals. Or maybe the revolutionaries ambushed the Chinese. Or the Russians ambushed the Chinese. It was a long time ago, and it was hard to tell, but there had definitely been bloodshed; that was part of the landscape now, and you didn't forget it. You didn't graze your herds there, either. Unlucky, grass fertilised by the dead. There was nothing much to the site itself when we arrived; just a low hill and a natural ditch where the soldiers, whoever they were, had been killed. It was probably an illusion, but the grass seemed brighter and greener there.

There were dozens of incidents like that over Mongolia during the spring of 1921, miniature battles that left the faintest mark on the collective memory. Here and there were clusters of Chinese soldiers who had escaped from the collapse of their garrisons, desperate to make their way back home. Bands of Russians were everywhere, either trying to join Ungern's forces or looking to escape to exile in China. The revolutionaries in the north were gradually expanding their territory, calling upon their fellow Mongolians to join them in throwing out the Russians. Various local leaders had mobilised their men, and plenty of Mongolians were practising simple banditry without any ideological excuse. All of them were living off the locals. There were no supplies coming into Mongolia from abroad, nor any large stores of food, so every army was accompanied by stolen herds, meals on the hoof. The Whites were among the worst of the pillagers. They were all over the country and, although the main groups had tentatively accepted Ungern's leadership after his seizure of Urga, many still operated autonomously. By now many of them had abandoned any hopes of a return to Russia, and were taking whatever valuables they could in order to fund a new life abroad.

Chinese merchants and Russian businesses, the main sources of wealth in the country, were particularly vulnerable to looting, though after a while it must have been hard to find one that hadn't already been targeted. The monasteries were the greatest potential treasure-houses, but, while some were pillaged, many were protected by Mongolian reverence and White caution. All sides practised gunpoint conscription, and it was a lucky young Mongolian who wasn't drafted into one army or another. Some escaped their abductors only to be captured by others, and found themselves fighting for yesterday's enemies.

Ungern needed men and arms as desperately as anyone else. Mongolia was hardly an industrial powerhouse, and Ungern's army was still badly under-equipped, especially with heavy weaponry. Fortunately, the Chinese leadership had been so desperate to flee that they had left behind the entire war chest for their expedition; over nine million Mexican dollars. The army was also able to scavenge four thousand rifles, but ammunition remained a worry. His letters fret about calibre, manufacture, quality.

The Mongolian banner system provided a quick and easy way to mobilise more men for the planned army. The Bogd ordered the
conscription of a thousand men from each of three different districts. Ungern, meanwhile, wrote an ultimatum to the Russian Buriats in Mongolia, a major force among his men, ordering them to ‘join the army within three days; those who don't come will be arrested'.
¹
Ungern had roughly four thousand local soldiers under his command, about two-thirds of them Khalkha Mongols and the rest mostly Buriats, with a smattering of other Mongol-descended groups. Their leaders were also Mongols, mainly nobles, and several of them were veterans of the skirmishes in Inner Mongolia against the Chinese. In Urga, he also had about fifteen hundred foreign troops. Elsewhere in the country, around three thousand Russian soldiers were now nominally attached to Ungern's forces.

By April it had become evident that the only way for Ungern to sustain his new army was by wholesale plunder and seizure of assets. Ungern had a deep-rooted distrust of trade and merchants; they were too close to Jewish-capitalist ideals. Better than Jewish-revolutionary, but only just. There were to be no fripperies in a society at war, and trade should be directed purely towards military goals. He fixed the prices of goods in Urga, a move which would have been welcomed by ordinary Mongolians except that he set them so low that businesses were forced to operate at horrendous losses. Unsurprisingly, the flow of Chinese imports into Urga soon slowed to a trickle. White commentators noticed the bizarre similarity between Ungern's ideas and those of his communist opponents; collectivisation, terror, torture and the sustaining vision of a utopia, monarchist or proletarian, seemed to drive them both.

Baron Witte, the finance minister, was ordered to find three million taels of silver in order to support Ungern's military plans. The Chinese banks had their treasuries plundered, yielding an enormous sum of money, and every business that could be stripped, was. Russian enterprises were no less vulnerable. One of the murders that most shocked the Russian expatriate community was that of the head of the Mongolore mining company, the popular and friendly Dr Gay, along with his wife, mother-in-law and three small children. The usual excuses were given, and Ungern later claimed, without the slightest justification, that Gay was an ‘adventurer'. The truth was simply that Ungern wanted the company's assets. Within a month he accumulated an enormous pile of currency: Soviet and old tsarist roubles, Mexican
dollars, credit notes. In those days of spiralling inflation, it was hard to judge exactly how much any of it was worth; the value of the gold and silver pillaged from the Chinese was far more certain.

Mongolian humour runs along predictable lines. The central figure is usually a sly guest, one of the class of professional itinerants living off the country's code of hospitality, like the old Yiddish jokes about
schnorrer
. He either successfully cheats a mean host, or his cheating leads to disaster.
²
They're very, very tedious, but they highlight one of the great Mongolian social dilemmas: a guest overstaying his welcome. This was the problem facing the Mongolian government in April and May 1921. The stresses of supplying Ungern were beginning to tell; after the revolutionary seizure of Kiatkha and the final driving out of the Chinese Ungern's appeal as a liberator was seriously eroded, and there were increasing conflicts between his men and the Mongolian officials. Ungern later spoke bitterly about their pettiness and corruption - though that was his opinion of all bureaucrats. The turning point came when Mongolian officials began to ask openly, ‘Until when will the Russians live off us?'

The crowds had lost their old affection for him. If his depredations had been limited to the Chinese and Russians, his popularity among ordinary Mongolians might only have risen. Increasingly, though, he ordered the seizure of livestock and goods from locals, taking, according to one ridiculously precise tally, 4,635 camels, 40,174 horses, 26,407 head of cattle and 100,729 sheep and goats. By any standards these so-called ‘requisitions' represented a small fortune; for the Mongolians it was seized from, it was their entire living. If Ungern was a god, his demands for sacrifice were distinctly out of proportion to the protection he was giving.

The areas around Urga and other White-held settlements became more and more desolate as the Mongolian herders retreated further into the steppe to avoid the attentions of Ungern's men. Families were devastated not only by the loss of their animals, but by the drafting of the young men who did the heavy work necessary for survival. Young Mongolians who had arrived in Urga on pilgrimage, or to try to sell furs, or to gawp at the Bogd Khan's coronation, were drafted;
any who tried to flee were hanged, their bodies left on display as an example to others.

Most of all, the army needed feeding. Pay was optional, as it had been for the last four years, but food was not, and the lack of it was increasingly telling upon the soldier's morale. Thinking it over later, Ungern reflected, ‘To be fed is necessary . . . it is difficult to express . . . if only I could just have put on a cap and vanished!'
³
It was a problem facing any army that stayed too long in one place, when, according to Ungern, ‘the signs of corruption would inevitably set in - drunkenness, robberies . . .' Ungern also knew the solution. In the north, the Bolsheviks and their Mongolian allies had violated the territory of Mongolia itself. It was time to take the fight to them. War would lift the spirits of the army, for ‘a soldier at work cannot be demoralised'.
⁴

It was an odd choice, for there were other ways out. In the Transbaikal, facing the complete collapse of his forces, Semenov was already planning his final evacuation to Manchuria, which was fast becoming virtually a White colony. Harbin was crawling with White refugees, and from the Chinese ports a man with money - and Ungern had plenty of that now - could make his way anywhere in the world. Even in China there was no shortage of opportunities for a man with a taste for killing; warlords needed lieutenants, gangsters needed bodyguards. The civil war had not yet taken on the clear outline of nationalists against communists - and Ungern anyway still branded most of the Chinese leaders as ‘revolutionaries' for overthrowing the Qing - but there were leaders out there who shared at least some of Ungern's worldview. It was rumoured that Zhang Zuolin, with whom he had been corresponding, even offered him a job as commander of his cavalry.

So why head north? There was no rational way to believe that invading Russia again would prove anything but disastrous. Ungern's total force was less than half the size of the Soviet forces along the Mongolian border alone, and a minnow compared to the shark-like reserve forces in the Far Eastern Republic. He had devoted minimal resources to intelligence, believing it to be a military irrelevance, but he must have had some inkling of the disparity between the two sides.

His strategy was not quite so insane as it must have appeared to many around him. At least at first, Ungern had no plan to try to
conquer Russia with the handful of men at his disposal. He was convinced that he could ‘destroy any Soviet division' on its own,
⁵
but knew that his supplies were not sufficient to sustain a long war. Instead, he would strike a blow at the Bolsheviks which would ‘strengthen his position in Urga' and improve his reputation. After this grand raid, and the elimination of revolutionary forces in Mongolia, he could return to Urga and begin the work of building the grand Asian empire he envisaged, or, if things went right, liberate the Transbaikal and transform it into a renewed centre of counter-revolutionary resistance, reinforced by White and Japanese forces from the eastern provinces. There were twice as many soldiers on the other side, true, but hadn't he beaten the Chinese when fighting against similar odds? If he could lure the Soviet forces deeper into Mongolia, then surround and destroy them, it would be a blow to Soviet prestige in the region and a great boon to his own.