The Bloody White Baron (10 page)

His present incarnation, his eighth, offered an unusual perspective on the Buddhist notion of enlightenment, a man bloated through overeating and binge drinking. The cruelty and carnal appetites of the Bogd were legendary in Mongolia. The communist regime was later to claim in its propaganda that he violated children of both sexes while performing Buddhist rites. He was certainly an enthusiastic whoremonger.
European and Tibetan travellers commented disapprovingly on his apparent penchant for young boys, but it was considered an entirely acceptable vice among Mongolian monks. (The Japanese spy Hideo Tasuki was told in the 1940s that ‘Mongolian [monks] prefer boys front-side up, Tibetans from behind.'
¹⁵
) It was widely believed that he had had a homosexual relationship with at least one of the monks at his court, Legtseg, who eventually fell out of favour and was exiled, then, on the Bogd's orders, executed. Almost inevitably he contracted syphilis, endemic in Mongolia at the time, and it was slowly blinding him, a condition charitably blamed by his contemporaries on his drinking rather than his sexual adventures. That his cabinet meetings invariably turned into night-long drinking binges added plausibility to the claim.

Whatever the cause, disease had affected his eyes, but by no means his mind. Though of noble Tibetan stock, the Bogd Khan was a fervent advocate of Mongolian independence, chiefly for self-serving ends. In the eighteenth century one of his predecessors had supported Mongol rebels against the Qing dynasty in China, and as a result the Qing had declared that future incarnations of the line could be discovered only in Tibet. However, after the rebellious clans had been subdued by the Qing armies, native Mongolian political power shifted largely to the Buddhist theocracy. As the head of the Mongolian Buddhist hierarchy and a figure of immense spiritual importance, he knew that any increase in Mongolian autonomy would inevitably lead to an increase in his own power and wealth. At the same time, he was a canny political operator, unwilling to commit to any cause unless certain of its success. Although not a leader of the initial independence movement, he was more than willing to support the declaration of independence after it flatteringly declared him ‘radiant as the sun, myriad aged, the Great Khan of Mongolia'. His presumably long-suffering wife, the Ekh Dagina, an incarnation of the important Buddhist goddess Tara in her own right, was simultaneously declared ‘the Great Mother of the Country'.

In the 1890s, he had a new palace built for himself. At first, this aroused considerable resentment in Mongolia, causing him to write petulantly in an encyclical letter,

 

He was lying; it was for himself, and he filled it with magazines and toys from the West.

At first the stories about the Bogd seem suspiciously lurid, the product of the considerable effort by Soviet authorities to smear his memory after his death, or the Fu Manchu-like fantasies of Western travellers. Some of the legends are certainly exaggerated, such as the claim that he fed his enemies to his collection of exotic animals. However, both contemporary Mongolian and foreign witnesses, including prominent lamas and anti-communists, have testified to his ruthlessness, alcoholism and greed. Only one Western writer, the Danish-American Erik Larson, thought well of him, and even he tells stories that, stripped of Larson's general good nature and love of all things Mongolian, seem petty and sadistic, such as his habit of dangling an electrified rope over the wall of his palace so that innocent pilgrims would touch it, receive a shock and believe themselves to have received a spiritual blessing. A pair of guns presented to him by a Russian visitor gave him particular joy, and were often fired at random targets when he was bored. They still survive, little eight-pounder cannon, unmounted and lying on his palace lawn.

His political policies often extended to murder, notably of his opponents, and he acquired a notorious reputation as a poisoner. Some laid the blame on his wife, but this seems to stem from a combination of misogyny and an understandable reluctance to admit that the spiritual leader of the country was an assassin. His own theology preached a twofold path to enlightenment, one road of asceticism and meditation and another, reserved for particularly wise individuals such as himself, upon which the traveller was free to indulge in whatever debauchery he chose as he ‘strolled along the mantra path'. Fool-saints who stood outside conventional morality, such as the notorious but beloved Sixth Dalai Lama, a flamboyant bisexual poet, were part of the Buddhist tradition, but the Bogd Khan's eminently materialistic concern with power and influence put him firmly beyond the pale.

Monks who preached against him rarely survived their dinner invitations. According to Ossendowski, ‘The Bogd Khan knows every thought, every movement of the Princes and Khans, the slightest conspiracy against himself, and the offender is usually kindly invited to Urga, from where he does not return alive.'
¹⁷
Those who declined were usually later found strangled. One notable banquet, given for a group of Tibetan emissaries from the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who, no political slouch himself, was uncomfortable with his supposed underling's debauchery and independence, ended with all the representatives perishing that very night. He could be more direct: a monk who drunkenly wondered aloud, ‘Is that miserable old blind Tibetan still alive? What do we call him our king for? I don't care a fig for his orders and admonitions' was executed for blasphemy.
¹⁸
To us it might seem that the spirit of an especially degenerate Borgia had entered the Bogd in some kind of terrible metaphysical mix-up, but in fact such murderous tactics were hardly unusual in the cut-throat politics of Buddhism.

The Bogd was the son of a monastic Tibetan administrator in Mongolia. Recognised at four as the new incarnation of the Bogd Khan, he would have been all too aware of being surrounded by enemies. Reincarnated lamas retained their possessions between lives, but until they came of age these were in the hands of their regents. Consequently, many met with fatal accidents before they reached adulthood - the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Bogd Khan's contemporary, was the first to make it to his thirties in nearly a century.

Those who did survive faced a lethal combination of Buddhist theological and temporal politics. The history of Tibetan Buddhism is a corrupt and Byzantine affair, seemingly tailor made to suit old-fashioned anti-clericalism. It is like
I, Claudius
with silk scarves: in every scene somebody is either poisoned, stabbed, caught
in flagrante
or shoved over a cliff. The Fifth, or Great, Dalai Lama established himself as the ruler of Tibet chiefly through the exile, disgrace or murder of most of his opponents, and some of the Bogd Khan's previous selves had shown a similarly direct approach to their opposition.

His paranoia and taste for power went along with a desire to add to the material possessions he had accumulated over the course of several lives. In this incarnation they were frequently supplemented by expensive imports from America, Britain and China. ‘Motorcars, gramophones, telephones, crystals, porcelains, pictures, perfumes, musical
instruments, rare animals and birds; elephants, Himalayan bears, monkeys, Indian snakes and parrots - all these were in the palace of “the god” but all were soon cast aside and forgotten.'
¹⁹
His macabre collection of stuffed animals; puffer-fish and penguins and elephant seals may still be viewed, laid out in a back room of his palace. Sadly, the mirrors with ‘intricate drawings of a most grossly obscene character'
²⁰
have been removed. His zoo was particularly infamous, including giraffes, tigers and chimpanzees preserved in a miserable half-life of cruel teasing and desperate cold. One unfortunate elephant had to walk to Urga from the Russian border, a three-month tramp. He valued human oddities, too; the elephant was looked after by Gongor, a seven foot six inch giant from northern Mongolia.

Despite the Bogd's dubious ethics and repellent appearance, most European visitors were rather charmed by him. Some claimed to find in him a true example of the duality of Buddhism, embracing both good and evil. Others found him an amusing and witty conversationalist, knowledgeable about political dealings in China and Russia. Ungern's relationship with him would be half-wary, half-worshipful, although in 1913 he had no inkling that his path would eventually bring him into the closest contact with the ‘great, good Buddha'.

Soviet accounts would later claim that after Ungern was ‘cashiered from the army' he was driven to a life of crime, forming a group of brigands that preyed on Russian and Chinese alike. This was certainly not the case - apart from the lack of any evidence, it was the kind of thing Ungern would have boasted about, or at least used to enhance his credibility with the Mongols. Among the Russians, claims of Ungern's achievements became equally exaggerated. He was ‘the commander of the whole cavalry force of Mongolia',
²¹
claimed one of his later superiors. In fact, his journey in 1913 left little trace in the historical record. And he was not the only Russian interested in the country.

The Russian government was only too happy to provide aid to the new Mongolian government, which had approached them as early as July 1911, six months before the actual expulsion of the Chinese. By December 1912 there were treaties of mutual aid and support in place. The humiliation of the Russo-Japanese war still smarted, and Korea
and Manchuria were, at least for the moment, outside the Russian sphere of influence, but Mongolia was a perfectly plausible option. China, weak and backward, was a much easier target than Japan, and Mongolia, while neither rich nor populous, was a perfect location for a base to exert further influence on the region. Relations between China and Russia were customarily peaceful, thanks to the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1687, which had ended twenty years of border conflicts and neatly divvied up north-east Asia between them. Yet the opportunities for expansion as China's border territories started to fall apart had been too good to miss, and Russia had extorted considerable land concessions in the nineteenth century. Mongolia was merely an extension of this policy.

Consequently Mongolian independence, while given no outright backing from Moscow, was tacitly encouraged from 1905 onwards. The Russians began to compete in earnest against the Chinese, building their own railway through Mongolia and dropping none-too-subtle hints to the nascent independence movement that they might find Russian aid in their time of need. A small-scale trade war began between Russian and Chinese merchants, both competing to offer the most favourable terms to their Mongolian suppliers. Although they rejected an initial approach by the Mongolians, their policy soon changed when it became apparent that the Chinese had neither the power nor the troops to keep control of Mongolia.

In the long run, the Russians had no interest in Mongolian independence. Aleksei Kuropatkin, the general responsible for the farce of the Russo-Japanese war and leader of a clique at court dedicated to Asian expansion, wrote that ‘in the future, a major global war could flare up between the yellow race and the white. [. . .] For this purpose, Russia must occupy north Manchuria and Mongolia [. . .] Only then will Mongolia be harmless.'
²²

Kuropatkin's words perhaps indicate another source of Russian anxiety about Mongolia; a deep-rooted memory of the Mongol conquests that gave this otherwise minor country a greater importance. His real worry, though, concerned the waves of Chinese immigration into Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which he and other military and political leaders saw as ‘the first blow of the yellow race against the white' - the ‘Yellow Peril' feared throughout Europe. Indeed, in European eyes the Mongols often stood in for the whole of Asia, over-breeding and
posing a constant threat to Western civilisation. In the pseudo-science of racial hierarchies, ‘Mongol' was used for the whole of East Asia, and the spectre of Genghis Khan was raised time and time again during the early twentieth century, especially as Japan began its rise to power; convenient shorthand for the ‘Yellow Peril' as a whole.

One party in the Russian government seriously considered annexing Mongolia outright in 1912, but more cautious voices prevailed. Instead they would arm and train the new regime as a buffer against China. In the summer of 1912, then, the Russians dispatched a small group of military advisers to train the Mongolian army, some twenty thousand strong but completely unskilled in modern warfare. Many of the troops didn't even have guns, preferring the composite bow, taut and powerful, that dated back to Genghis Khan's mounted archers, and military discipline had become a foreign concept. Under Genghis and his immediate successors, the Mongolians had been a more streamlined, disciplined and deadly war machine than any army until the Second World War, but nothing of this remained; now the emphasis was on individual glory, outdoing rival clans, and plunder. They needed to be licked into shape, and the Russians had the men for the job.