The Bloody White Baron (16 page)

In August 1918 they returned to the Transbaikal yet again. This time, with Czech and Japanese assistance, they were finally able to drive the Reds out of the region altogether. By September Semenov was installed in Chita as de facto dictator of the entire Transbaikal. With him came the Japanese army, raising the flag of the Rising Sun across the railways and placing tens of thousands of troops in the region. Along with the Japanese were other foreign soldiers, the
Siberian Expeditionary Force, comprising mostly American troops, which had been sent by the Allies to help retrieve the Czech Legion and with the secondary aim of frustrating Bolshevik ambitions without being drawn into open warfare. It was a farce; the troops froze and grumbled and fought with their supposed Russian comrades, and the foreign intervention or ‘imperialist invasion' gave Soviet apologists an excuse for the atrocious Bolshevik policies of the civil war era for decades afterwards.

For now, Semenov's court became stuffed with Japanese ‘advisers' and Allied observers. He assumed the Cossack rank of
ataman,
‘chief', but true power lay with the Japanese. His foreign policy, his attitudes towards other White leaders, even the movements of his armies, were all directed from Tokyo. Ungern, in turn, became commander of Dauria. Along with the post went a new rank, granted by Semenov; he was now a major-general, a title of which he was inordinately proud. Semenov's new slogan was
For Law and Order!
The residents of the Transbaikal, and especially of Ungern's new fiefdom, would soon find only grim irony in this motto.

FIVE

Carrion Country

Siberia was wolf-haunted that year. They followed close on the scene of battles, feasting on the dead. Both sides strung enemy corpses on trees alongside the roads and the wolves gnawed off their feet. Perhaps it was these images that Ungern remembered when he spoke later of leaving ‘an avenue of corpses' from Urga to Moscow. Sometimes, emboldened by the abundance of human flesh, the wolves grew bold enough to attack men, even - barely known before - men in groups.

The whispers of war said that Ungern and the wolves had an affinity. He certainly kept some ‘in an attic in his house in Dauria, for an unknown purpose',
¹
reported a friend who often stayed there. A legend arose that he fed his tame pack on prisoners and mutinous soldiers. Sometimes, the stories had it, he would harness them to his sleigh and ride through town, whipping them on as they howled in terror. He was supposed to walk out in the hills on his own in the evening, striding like a grim pagan god through a landscape of wolf-gnawed bones. He suited this carrion country all too well.

His new base at Dauria was not a prepossessing site. One White officer, Dmitri Alioshin, wrote that he

 

Here Ungern began to build his own regime. He was to remain at Dauria for nearly two years, and made it and the surrounding region unquestionably his personal domain. It was a near-medieval polity, like one of his knightly ancestors establishing a border fortress six hundred years earlier. Virtually every witness used the word ‘feudal' to describe his rule, and Ungern would have approved. Power revolved around him. He had been stationed here before, and it had been the scene of one of his many disgraces. There must have been a certain satisfaction in being master in this place, barren as it was. Semenov had become the
ataman
; now Ungern became the Baron. There was no shortage of titled nobility on the White side, but everyone in Siberia knew who ‘the Black Baron', ‘the Bloody Baron', ‘the Mad Baron' or simply ‘the Baron' was.
³

Here, as elsewhere in Russia during the civil war, social norms had broken down entirely. Violence, or the threat of violence, became the stuff of everyday life. Even between groups supposedly allied with each other, confrontations were common, as when a drunken American infantry unit beat up a trainload of Whites. Some tried to keep a semblance of normality, to maintain shops or stations or hospitals, but they were always vulnerable.

Semenov's soldiers became particularly infamous for casual thuggery. They assaulted railway workers, harassed refugees and pressed men into service. The foreigners working with them were often shocked by their brutality; one noted how the Russian officers, in particular, ‘remarked almost daily that it was necessary for them to whip, punish, or kill someone every day in order that people know who was protecting them from the Bolsheviks'.
⁴
Even in this atmosphere Ungern stood out. Beforehand there had always been restraints on his rages, or at least consequences following them. Now he had his own fiefdom, and was part of a movement where extreme violence, especially against acceptable targets, was applauded rather than condemned.

Something about Ungern's rule at Dauria naturally attracted myth-making. Elsewhere in the Russian Far East, another of Semenov's protégés, Ataman Kalmikov, was managing a regime of unbelievable cruelty. His prisoners were reduced to flayed meat by days of torture,
then finally disposed of by having a live grenade forced into their mouth or anus. Yet Kalmikov's actions didn't result in even a fraction of the stories that arose around Ungern. This was due partly to his sheer strangeness, and perhaps his aristocratic heritage, but his territory was also well positioned. Dauria sat on one of the main railway lines to Manchuria - it can still be seen, red-brick and miserable, from the train - and refugees trying to reach relative safety in China had to run the Baron's gauntlet. Anybody with useful skills, especially trained soldiers and medical staff, were liable to be commandeered on the spot. Elsewhere in Siberia, refugees and travellers warned others not to fall into the hands of the Baron. Rumour spread fast. By the time the young White officer Dmitri Alioshin arrived in Dauria, he had already heard ‘fantastic stories of the Baron's mad bravery, of his justice to horses and cruelty to his own officers'.
⁵

Kalmikov also alienated his own men; hundreds of his Cossacks fled from him. In contrast, Ungern seems to have been extremely popular among many of his troops. His sharing of their lifestyle, which had made him an outsider as an officer, his distaste for bureaucracy and his concern for their wellbeing led them to overlook his eccentricities and cruelties. Among them he was known as the ‘stern grandfather', despite being barely in his thirties. There was no doubt of his ability to inspire loyalty; many of them were to follow him for the next three years, until his fanatical ambitions stretched even the most committed of them to breaking point. Although a relatively late arrival at Dauria, and, he claimed later, a constant sceptic about Ungern, Alioshin remarked repeatedly on the devotion of Ungern's troops, particularly the ordinary soldiers.

One benefit of Ungern's rule for his men was the chance to rob the travellers, mostly refugees, who passed through Dauria. They took particular delight in targeting Chinese merchants, who even in the chaos of the civil war made heroic trading runs through Siberia. Most of those unfortunate enough to pass through Dauria were stripped of their possessions, usually on the pretext that they were communist agitators. One typical case was reported in the
Peking and Tientsin Times
on 25 January, 1919, when six Chinese, innocent traders returning from Irkutsk, were accused of being ‘the first batch of Bolshevik emissaries' and were stripped of six and a half million roubles. Not wanting to be cheated of plunder, Ungern's men sometimes chopped
off fingers in order to remove tight-fitting rings. Rank was no protection; a former governor of the Urals had his money seized and, for protesting, was sentenced to fifty strokes of the whip.

These ‘requisitions' were actively encouraged by Ungern, since they were his main source of funding. Plundered goods would be sent to an agent in Harbin, who would sell them on and use the profits to buy supplies for Dauria. The diamonds or gold that some refugee families hoped would fund their new lives thus became converted into oats, flour, tobacco, boots and mustard for Ungern's men - and on one occasion, coconuts, suggesting some odd craving on Ungern's part. Unlike most of Semenov's cronies, Ungern never took the opportunity to enrich himself; everything went to the division, while he went about in ragged trousers and old overcoats.

Ungern sometimes made inspections of the trains himself, especially when an important personage or suspected spy was passing through. If someone displeased him, he hauled them on to the platform and administered a beating himself. One traveller described how, when Ungern fixed an obnoxious travelling companion with the ‘steel, steady gaze of his grey eyes' and questioned him about his credentials, ‘the arrogance and importance of yesterday's boor disappeared! Entirely disappeared! - and before the iron baron there was a pitiful, cringing coward.'
⁶

While the rest of Semenov's administration attempted to keep up at least a façade of civil order, maintaining courts, paying officials and issuing new laws, Ungern scorned such affairs. He had a dislike of paperwork, and regularly used to heave staff documents into locomotive furnaces when he felt they were no longer useful, but his feelings went beyond mere administrative frustration. He gave his orders orally, rather than go through the bother of writing them down. When asked to acknowledge receipt of one document he sneeringly replied, ‘Paper? You need paper? I'll send you the whole desk.' He ordered one bureaucrat sent from Chita to inspect his paperwork to be flogged and drafted into the army. His short-temperedness with officials became part of his legend; he was supposed to have discovered one day that ‘the salt fish, given every day to the soldiers, was not of the best quality', and so ‘the officer in charge was sent to a military prison where he was fed upon that spoiled fish, and nothing else, for three days. And at no time was he given a single drop of water.'
⁷

Ungern, who had been such an unruly subordinate himself, tolerated no slacking in his men. His own offences were against staff officers and the inconveniences of military red tape; his men, on the other hand, were at war, and as such had to operate under wartime discipline. Slips caused him to break into terrible rages. They had to spend their days drilling and training. Study of Mongolian was compulsory for officers, with examinations supervised by Ungern himself. Like a frustrated schoolmaster, Ungern complained in January 1919 that ‘only two officers had attended the last class' and that missing lessons was tantamount to ‘evasion of duty'.
⁸
There was time off, however. Provided they gave notice, soldiers could specify which national and religious holidays they wished to observe; an incongruously enlightened touch in Ungern's medieval regime. In the evening prayers were held, in which each man could pray to the god or gods he preferred.

Indeed, Ungern was both racially and religiously tolerant. What mattered was the system that men lived under, the way they ordered their lives. He remained a Lutheran himself, at least nominally, but he was also a self-admitted mystic. In practice, Russian mystics of the period tended to fall into one of two camps. Either they became crazy-Orthodox, and all other religions, including other branches of Christianity, were the devil's tools, or they became universalists, looking for a shared core to all religions. Ungern was undoubtedly in the latter camp. Although his view of religion was apocalyptic and fundamentalist, it was also inclusive. The Russian imperial mindset he had worked in was equally expansive; capable of embracing a Muslim-Buddhist fringe around a Russian-Orthodox core.

The great exception to this was Judaism. As with Theosophy, even the most expansive visions of religious unity still seemed to find a special place for the Jews, and not a good one. Both religiously and ethnically they were a fly in the ointment. Ungern had been raised with the normal prejudices of his class and time, which were perhaps heightened by his esoteric studies. He had plenty of reading material to help him clarify his thoughts. Anti-Semitic literature circulated widely among the White armies, often printed and distributed by the leadership. Chief among them was the ‘Protocols of the Elders of
Zion'. This was claimed to be an outline of the Jewish plan for world domination, which would work by spreading such diabolical forces as republicanism, liberalism and social tolerance. Now rightly infamous as one of the cornerstones of Nazi anti-Semitism, its distribution among White émigrés helped kickstart its international popularity.