The Bloody White Baron (12 page)

For ordinary Mongolians, the terrors of the spiritual world were offset by the security it offered. Living on the hard steppe and at the
mercy of plague, weather and bandits, any form of control, no matter how illusory, was comforting. For the destitute widows and scavengers who made up so much of the population of Urga, the possibility of spiritual salvation was perhaps the only hope left. It could also assert humanity and happiness; the rituals, no matter how menacing, contained an element of celebration and glamour.

It is likely that most Mongolians did not live in the state of spiritual paranoia that a cold reading of their belief system might indicate. Today, after all, we live in a world of invisible, intangible life forms that can, if we fail to observe the proper rites and taboos, strike us down with uncomfortable, agonising or even fatal results. A few people are obsessed and terrified by these beings, but most of us merely make sure we wash our hands and then forget about them most of the time. The Mongolian attitude towards the spirit world was, perhaps, often the same as ours towards bacteria: a fixation for some, a living for others, just part of everyday life for most.

The terrifying nature of some of the images was also somewhat diluted by their entertainment value. The fear they inspired was part of the thrill, and even the most serious rituals could also be an excuse to party. There was aesthetic pleasure there, too; virtually all Mongolian art was religious and much of the more transitory art, such as banners and paper hangings for poles, was produced communally. Although it was usually more vivid than beautiful, it gave people an opportunity to express and enjoy values that didn't otherwise feature on the steppe.

Some of the enjoyment was a little more prurient; the religious art occasionally strayed into outright pornography, and even the most devoutly depicted female deities were often remarkably nubile. The temple of the Mongolian state oracle contained a private building full of images of divine couplings, where, according to the temple records, it was possible to ‘meditate upon the secret Tantra'.
²⁸

Such comforting, reassuring, occasionally erotic aspects of Mongolian religion were unfathomable to most Western observers. European visitors to Mongolia regarded its religious medley and semi-theocratic society with a mixture of contempt and fear. On the one hand Mongolians were superstitious, priest-ridden, ignorant, fanatical, classically heathen. Those travellers who had some knowledge of Buddhism tended to look down on the Mongolians as practising a debased version
of what they saw as a philosophical and refined religion. On the other hand, Mongolian religion was seen by outsiders as both frightening and powerful. Certain phrases recur in the European accounts: ‘hidden powers', ‘strange and dreadful things', ‘demon-haunted land', ‘mysterious abilities' and so on.

These occult fantasies were related to the fear of the rise of the East expressed by so many thinkers of the time. The mirror image of these nightmares of oriental domination was the utopian hope that ran through Tibetan and Mongolian folk legend, focused around the hidden kingdom of Shambhala. Familiar to us as the peaceful retreat of Shangri-La, Shambhala was, to the Mongolians, the hidden kingdom of the Pure Land, containing the unknown King of the World. The myth came from the Tibetan
Kalachakra Tantra
, traditionally (but falsely) dated to the ninth century BC. Traditional Buddhist interpretations saw it as a metaphorical text, and Shambhala as a state of being rather than an actual location, but many Mongolians were having none of that.

Ideas of Shambhala were common among the Russian occultist intelligentsia. Theosophy drew heavily from second- or third-hand notions of Tibetan theology, especially the mystical Kalachakra scriptures, so the Shambhala legend featured heavily in Blavatsky's writings as one of the Hidden Masters' bases of operation. Importantly, Shambhala was traditionally associated with the north, and so with Russia. The Russians were aware of this, and in the 1900s the Russian secret agent Agvan Dorjiev, a Buriat monk with strong political links to Tibet, attempted to spread the belief among the Tibetans and Mongols that the Romanovs were the descendants of the rulers of Shambhala. Dorjiev claimed that the ‘White Tsar' Nicolas II was a reincarnation of Tsongkapa, the founder of the dominant Tibetan Gelugpa tradition, pointing to the tsarist patronage of Buddhism among the Buriats and Kalmyks as evidence. He managed to get a Kalachakra Tibetan temple opened in St Petersburg in 1913, which was inaugurated with a celebration of the Romanovs' 300th anniversary.

One day, according to the legends, the King of the World would burst forth from Shambhala at the head of a conquering army, bringing the world to the true faith - through the sword. Mandalas depicting Shambhala inevitably included scenes of the last King, Rudrachakrin,
spearing the barbarian enemies of the faith. The idea of the righteous crusading army was a familiar one in Tibetan Buddhism, where the Indian emperor Ashoka, who is viewed by most Buddhists as heroic for his
renunciation
of war, was instead lauded for conquering in the name of the Buddha. Provided war helped spread the word of the Buddha, it was deemed entirely acceptable by many Buddhist thinkers.

The mystical Russian artist and orientalist Nicolas Roerich, travelling through Mongolia in 1926-27, heard legends of Shambhala wherever he went. Of course, he was listening for - and occasionally inventing - them, but so was Ungern. The two were connected; Roerich's brother, Vladimir Konstantinovich, had been a supply officer in Ungern's army.
²⁹
Roerich drew images of the warrior kings riding forth from Shambhala, modelled on the statues of the Mongolian war gods. He recorded war songs, sung by Buddhist revolutionaries:

And another:

Prophecy was central to Mongolian political activity. There was a long tradition, known as
lungdeng
, of prophecies being discovered, invented, or reinterpreted as needed. To drive away the ‘yellow Chinese population', the Bogd Khan had called for Mongolians to ‘read the
Mani Megjim
[a mystical text] for the sake of supporting the good and make it your protector. Place wind-horses at the door. Women should tie their hair into two tails and wear white on the breast - it is good. Do not eat goat meat, chicken meat, and eggs. Do not buy Chinese tobacco!'
³⁰
This combination of magical and economic warfare - goats, chickens and eggs were usually brought from Chinese merchants - was typical of the confusion of political and religious-apocalyptic vision in the period. The Russians had tried to
foster these beliefs to their own ends through Dorjiev and others, and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had fled from the British to Mongolia at the beginning of the century, trying to whip up military support through the myth of Shambhala. None of these had worked; the messiah-King had not yet come.

Imagine, then, Ungern, head bent in supplication, in the Choijin Temple in Urga, contemplating the lurid images of the gods. Above him are severed heads and flayed skins, desecrated corpses blossoming into gardens of blood, eyeballs dangling from sockets, bones poking from mangled limbs. This is only wood and cloth, but in the smoke and the darkness it seems all too real. There are images of the many Buddhist hells, too, pink naked bodies of sinners speared by pendulous-breasted demonesses, frozen in icy lakes, consumed by scorpions.

He is duly afraid, as are the pilgrims milling around him, of the awful forms of the divine. It is frightening and alien to him, but also attractive, the hint of mysterious powers, the echoes of the peasant beliefs of his homeland, the skulls and swords and corpses that call to his urge to battle and the twisted and mangled bodies that tantalise his sadism. They would have reminded him, too, of the scenes of the Apocalypse that traditionally decorated the entrances of Orthodox churches; grislier, certainly, but in the same spirit. There is a cannier, more pragmatic side to his observations; perhaps he senses the power of this faith, the potential for devotion, contained in the crowds around him. They have just cast off one empire and they built one of their own in the past. He sees the potency of the ‘militant Buddhism' that he will speak of so often in the future, and, perhaps, he senses the longing for a messiah, for a saviour from a foreign land.

He will remake Urga in the image of hell; every one of the tortures shown in miniature in the temple's paintings will be enacted in reality. And it is in this temple that, ten years later, Ungern will learn of his doom - and will do his best to take the rest of the country with him.

FOUR

Things Fall Apart

Despite his earlier hopes of great accomplishments, Ungern left Mongolia without having achieved much. He had familiarised himself with the country, the faith and the people, but he had accomplished no significant feats, and his future looked equally unpromising. At the beginning of 1914 he was kicking his heels in Reval, without employment or money, living off his savings and handouts from his family. It seemed as though his career had ground to a halt, brought down by his reckless violence. The Great War saved him. Before it broke out he was a hopeless drunk, expelled from school, academy and two regiments in turn. He was a loser - albeit an upper-class one who would always be sheltered from the consequences of his own actions - but a loser none the less. By the time it finished he was a hero; the character traits that had hampered his pre-war career - brutality, impulsiveness, coarseness - had become his greatest assets.

Ungern was mobilised on 19 July, 1914 and returned to the embrace of the Transbaikal host. His new home was the Nerchinsk Regiment, which would have the dubious distinction of fighting in some of the most stupid and bloody actions of the Eastern Front. Among the officers, the casualty rate was 170 per cent. Among ordinary soldiers, it was 200 per cent. (In other words, almost the entire regiment was killed or crippled, and so were most or all of their replacements.) It was a rate three to four times greater than that for the entire Russian army, never noted for being especially protective of the lives of its men. The chances were that Ungern's contribution to history would be as part of a casualty list or the recipient of a posthumous medal.

For the Russians the war began, like the Russo-Japanese conflict, disastrously. Ungern's regiment was part of the infamous march into East Prussia, where General Alexandr Samsonov led a hundred and fifty thousand men to ignominious defeat. Although the initial Russian advance panicked the Germans, and raiding by advance guards of Cossacks was depicted in the German press as heralding a new invasion of barbarians from the East, the entire column was quickly caught in a pincer movement and destroyed.

The final confrontation took place at Tannenberg, the site of a famous defeat of Ungern's ancestors the Teutonic Knights by Polish-Lithuanian forces, whose name was ‘pregnant with painful recollections for German chivalry, a Slav cry of triumph',
¹
according to Paul von Hindenburg, one of two German generals jointly commanding the operation. (Erich Ludendorff was the other.) Now it was the Germans who were triumphant. Thirty thousand Russians were killed, including a cousin of Ungern's, Friedrich Ungern-Sternberg, who died charging the enemy machine guns. A hundred thousand more were captured. Of those who took part only ten thousand, one in fifteen, made it back to Russian territory; Ungern was among them.

Ungern's survival was due partly to blind luck, partly to an almost suicidal absence of fear. As he was to show in winning his medals, he could do things so madly heroic that his enemies would often pause in sheer astonishment. Perhaps it was this very visibility that let him live; among the mass slaughter, it may have been harder, psychologically, to fire at a man who was so determined
not
to be anonymous.

Ungern loved the war. Finally, he had found something at which he excelled: ‘an exemplar to the other officers and soldiers', as one of his superiors put it.
²
He was in the forefront of every charge, constantly encouraged his soldiers and eagerly accepted the most dangerous missions. Living rough with his men, moving from front to front, battle to battle, his life was fulfilled. His letters home, now lost, were, according to his cousin Arvid, full of descriptions of action and adventure. Among the slaughter of his comrades, he thrived. There were tens of thousands like him on all sides, men for whom the war was a release from tedium and a grand advance of the national spirit. For them, peace meant only decadence and sloth, whereas war was dynamic, thrilling, unifying.

For others the issues were less clear cut. As the German forces pushed into the Baltic in 1915, many of the Baltic Germans collaborated with
the occupiers and were often rewarded with positions of power in the new administration. Among the Central Powers, the descendants of the Baltic Germans who had fled Russification in the 1860s were among the most vocal in advocating reclamation of the Baltic lands for Germany. Ungern appears to have felt no divided loyalties, despite his own family links to Germany and Austria. He had sworn allegiance to the tsar and he would keep that pledge. Ungern thoroughly approved of the German system; it was authoritarian, militaristic and monarchist, qualities all dear to his heart. Frederick the Great was one of his heroes. The only thing Germany lacked was the
spirit
of Russia, her connection to the East.

Ungern's later battles - against Bolshevism, for example - were matters of black and white, good against evil. This war was less idealistic, simply an upthrusting of each side's energy. ‘Life', he declared later, ‘is the result of war, and society is the instrument of war. [. . .] To refuse war means to refuse an epic life.'
³
For him war brought out the true essence of things, sweeping away the clutter of civilian existence - such as a poor military record, alcoholism and social failure.