The Bloody White Baron (18 page)

Semenov rewarded Ungern in March 1919 with another Cross of St George, fourth class, for his disarming of the garrison at Hailar; he also promoted him to lieutenant-general. Ungern was proud of these awards, although there was something of an excess of generals among the Whites. Nevertheless, he disapproved of his old friend's growing corruption, of the extravagance of his lifestyle and of his tolerant attitude towards Jews. Semenov had expressly forbidden pogroms under his command, kept a Yiddish theatre and a synagogue running in Chita and had a favourite mistress who was strongly rumoured to be Jewish, upon whom he lavished plundered jewellery. (Perhaps
Ungern didn't believe the rumours, since he asked after his friend's mistress in terms that implied some kind of private joke between them - ‘How is your Masha? Do not fall asleep again.'
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He named a white mare given to him by Semenov Masha, too, which could be either an affectionate tribute or an insult.) Semenov even attempted to raise a Jewish Cossack division, reviving the short-lived and bizarrely titled Sons of Israel regiment formed by Potemkin in 1787 to help liberate Jerusalem from the Turks.

Ungern and he were drifting apart. On 17 September, 1918 Ungern thanked a Russian friend in Manchuria for his previous two letters, which had ‘breathed faith in success. I lost this faith myself on my last trip to Chita. It is a shame to admit it, but be assured that when we last talked I did not think that this would be an uphill battle. Now it is time to change colours. The passivity and apathy of some people have ruined everything.'
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He also disagreed with Semenov on the nature of the government they were fighting for. Semenov advocated the restoration of the Romanovs, but he envisioned a constitutional monarchy with limited powers, a semi-democratic system with a parliament and a cabinet, such as had existed, at least in theory, before the revolution. Ungern, however, was a committed monarchist. Since the murder of the imperial family, he had pinned his hopes on the tsar's younger brother, the amiable but dim Prince Michael. Unknown to Ungern, the man he was championing had been murdered in secret by the Bolsheviks in 1918, but rumours of his supposed whereabouts circulated throughout Russia and Ungern was determined to put him back on the throne.

Of all the great vanished ideologies, monarchism, especially religious monarchism, often seems to be the most ridiculous. It is hard to imagine that anybody could regard the deeply stupid Nikolas II or the drooling, retarded Taisho emperor, for example, as the representative of God's will on earth. For Ungern, though, this was the natural order of things; the monarch, however flawed, was ‘the first person in the state'.
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He could stand apart from all the classes, and as such treat them all equally. Nevertheless, he would be supported by the advice of aristocrats such as Ungern. Aristocrats had to be loyal, since ‘history showed that they were the class that had the power to destroy the monarchs'.
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Beneath them would be a solid base of faithful peasantry who would labour to support the monarchy and defend it with their lives. This ideal system of rule had been in decline for a long time before the revolution, in Ungern's view. Liberalism and capitalism, which was ‘only good for exploiting the blood of the people', had weakened the natural order, allowing the final triumph of revolution. The workers had been spoilt, become lazy, and had spent ‘the last fifteen years just sitting around'. Behind it all, of course, was the diabolical hand of the Jews, who had worked throughout the nineteenth century to cause ‘revolutions, rebellions, and the overthrowing of monarchy and authority'.
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In Russia, only the power of the foreign aristocracy, such as the Baltic Germans, had prevented the corruption of the country by the perverse talents of the Jews. After the revolution Ungern was firmly convinced that ‘aristocracy will pass to the Jews, since the Slavs are not capable of building a state, and the only capable people in Russia are the Jews'.
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Ungern was never shy of acknowledging Jewish ‘cleverness', especially in contrast to the idiotic nature of peasants and workers left without guidance; he just believed it was always put to evil ends.

Ungern's faith in Prince Michael's eventual return echoed old peasant stories of the ‘tsar-deliverer', an idealised version of the tsar who would, it was often believed, miraculously appear to smite corrupt local officials, give the peasants back their land and generally put the world to rights. Among the peasants it was an extreme form of the common belief in the ‘good tsar', kept from knowing the people's true state by his corrupt officials. The tsar-deliverer was often believed to be hiding in some secret place until the time was right. Then he would return to destroy his enemies and a golden age of peace and harmony would follow.

It was a powerful myth; Lenin saw it as the major obstacle to peasant rebellion. Until the events of Bloody Sunday in 1905 destroyed trust in the tsar for good, he believed that peasants ‘have been able naively and blindly to believe in the Tsar-Deliverer [. . .]
Peasants could not rise in rebellion, they were only able to petition and to pray
.'
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For reactionaries like Ungern, such legends were evidence of the peasants' ultimate faith in the tsar and the imperial system. In fact, the legend of the tsar-deliverer had inspired far more rebellions than it had restrained; it empowered peasants to act ‘in the name of the Tsar' while really asserting their own rights. As the situation worsened for
the Whites, many of them developed a naive faith of their own in the peasants, who, so Ungern and others believed, would ultimately rise up against the Bolshevik usurpers and restore the monarchy they clearly longed for.

Before monarchy could be restored, however, the war had to be won. The Siberian front was both highly mobile and deeply constrained. The territory was so vast that scouts, raiding parties, even entire battalions, could move undetected through land theoretically controlled by the enemy, but at the same time the strategically important areas were incredibly narrow. The rail tracks and stations were the lifeblood of the region, and their sabotage, capture or protection the daily work of the war.

Thousands of people lived on the railway, travelling from station to station without a fixed home. Whole communities became mobile, and great trains of carriages bore generals from place to place. Amazingly the employees of the old Trans-Siberian, often coerced and bullied by Semenov's men, still made up the majority of those who kept the network running. The railway was a mobile city: there were hospital cars, headquarters, brothels, travelling theatres, dining cars appointed like opulent Moscow restaurants, libraries, motor work-shops, churches, mobile electric generators, printing shops, offices, and torture chambers. White generals especially liked to travel in style, recapturing some of the glory of the good old days.

Armoured trains were the dreadnoughts of this war. Huge and expensive, they could bring a devastating amount of firepower to bear - albeit upon a necessarily limited area. Three standard types of armoured train had been manufactured during the war, but in Siberia many of them were unique, improvised creations; engineers took an ordinary train and bolted great slabs of steel to its sides as armour, then took whatever guns could be found and attached them to the roof of the carriage. Some were merely semi-armoured, their wooden carriages reinforced only with bricks or sandbags - enough to deflect rifle bullets, but useless against serious artillery.

Most comprised eight to ten carriages, but they could be much longer. Their modular nature made for both flexibility of purpose and
ease of replacement; damaged rolling stock could be cannibalised for spares. Some of these snaky juggernauts were painted in camouflage colours, greens and browns, while others were liveried in menacing black. Churchill wrote of armoured trains that ‘the very name seems strange; a locomotive disguised as a knight-errant, the agent of civilisation in the habiliments of chivalry', but there was nothing either civilised or chivalrous about their use in the Transbaikal. Semenov's trains had no effective opposition, and to be the commander of one was like being captain of a pirate vessel; one could simply roll into a small town and demand that the locals either hand over whatever they had or be blown to smithereens. The Reds strove to set up their armoured train crews as a trained, organised force, and tried to use them as massed artillery. In contrast, Semenov's captains recruited or press-ganged their own men, often acting on their own initiative rather than any higher orders. Crew sizes ranged from forty to nearly two hundred, sometimes with an auxiliary infantry force of two or three hundred men. Many were armed with naval artillery, stripped from the gun-boats of the Siberian lakes. They were given names fit for machines of mass destruction; the Reds had the ideological
Death to Parasites, Ruin of the Counter-revolution, Liberty or Death,
while among the White trains in Siberia were the
Valiant, Swift
and
Just,
along with the more aptly named
Master, Avenger, Destroyer, Terrible
and
Merciless
.

Behind them followed the death trains. Both sides rarely took prisoners, and neither wanted the burden of looking after them. The repatriations of the first tentative stage of the war, when Red troops could simply be disarmed and sent back to Bolshevik territory, were a thing of the past. Now prisoners of war taken by the Whites were simply herded into railcars, stuffed fifty or so to a wagon, and carried aimlessly from station to station with neither food nor water. Their guards had no idea what they were supposed to be doing with the prisoners, and when the trains ran out of fuel they were often just shunted into a siding and abandoned. Local people were forbidden from giving the desperate prisoners food. Often 30 or 40 per cent of the prisoners on a single train perished in the weeks spent chugging aimlessly back and forth; the eventual fate of the rest was to be secretly executed in some nameless patch of Siberia.

Although the Transbaikal was under the nominal control of Semenov and his lieutenants, their grip on the area was weak, especially outside
the zone of the railway. They terrorised the railway workers, causing many to become Bolshevik sympathisers. Red partisans began to infiltrate into White-held territory, sometimes in groups several hundred strong. Their object was to do as much damage and cause as much mayhem as possible and then disappear; the goal of their opponents was to exterminate them like vermin. The partisans tried to terrorise the peasants into giving them food, the Whites tried to terrorise the peasants into not supporting the partisans.

The partisans were helped by the many Bolshevik sympathisers who had gone underground when Semenov took control of the region. Chita was the centre of Semenov's regime, but it was also the lynchpin of the underground; officers going out at night had to be careful of wandering into dark alleys, or of getting sniped at from a high building. Semenov and Ungern both acquired Mongol bodyguards to protect themselves from would-be martyr-assassins. Some of the partisans hid among ordinary villagers and townsfolk, but most made their bases in the great dense forests. The railway lines, the backbone of the regular armies, were their primary targets. They tore up track, sabotaged repair facilities, ambushed trains and placed rocks and logs across the tracks.

Ungern's men were often called out to deal with the aftermath of partisan attacks, or to sweep the forests for their hideouts. Villages would be combed for signs of partisan support, an exercise which invariably turned into another opportunity to steal from the locals. Such operations were similar to those his regiment had carried out in Dauria before the war, when suppressing banditry had been a regular part of their routine. Here, cultural differences exacerbated the situation; Ungern's Mongol troops looked down upon the ethnically Russian villagers with the age-old contempt of the nomad for the soft, settled farmer, an attitude that Ungern encouraged. He received occasional notes of congratulation from other commanders for the successful ‘cleansing' of villages.

Partisans were not the only threat. The very nature of the civil war and the divided factionalism of the anti-Bolshevik movement fomented constant suspicion about political loyalties. Counter-intelligence was an obsession of most of the Semenovites, who often devoted more time to sniffing out supposed traitors than to fighting the Bolsheviks. A series of torture chambers was established across the Transbaikal,
choked with Red prisoners and suspected traitors. One was established at Dauria. Many of Ungern's soldiers were veterans of these grisly institutions, which deeply shocked foreign observers. One of the most infamous was at Makkaveevo, where over five thousand victims were murdered. After the war visitors recalled seeing ‘dried slices of human flesh dangling from nails. Blood had so saturated the ground under the building that the soil was discoloured and befouled.'
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