The Bloody White Baron (19 page)

Ungern's ties to Mongolia inevitably involved him in one of Semenov's grandest schemes, the plans for ‘pan-Mongolia'. This was an idea that had been popular among some Mongol intellectuals since the beginning of the century, particularly among the Buriat. It was a scheme for unification of the Mongol peoples, creating a new state that would unite Outer and Inner Mongolia with the Buriat and Bargut territories. Semenov was keen on this plan, seeing in it an opportunity to become ‘King Gregorii I', as the sardonic White diarist Baron Budberg put it.

Some among Semenov's Japanese backers were also eager to test pan-Mongolia's feasibility; a Japanese-backed puppet state would immeasurably strengthen Japan's power in the region, giving her a base for future assaults on Russia and China. They had already created a pan-Buddhist society in 1918 as a front to promote pan-Mongolian ambitions, hoping to foment anti-Chinese feeling in Inner Mongolia in particular. It tied into the popularity in Japan of pan-Asiatic thinkers, who saw Asian unity as a spiritual and political necessity for Japan. All the peoples of Asia, linked by faith, ethnicity and culture, could come together - under suitable Japanese guidance.
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Under Semenov's sponsorship, and with Japanese observers, two congresses were called; one in Dauria in early February and a later one in Chita on 25 March. Representatives from Inner Mongolia, Bargut and Buriatia attended, though the Buriats dominated. A grand state was sketched, with Hailar, in Bargut territory, as the capital of the new country, though the provisional capital was to be Dauria. The delegates proclaimed a respected Inner Mongolian lama, the Niis Gegen, prime minister of the nascent state, and sent a representative to the Paris Peace Conference, then seeking to reorder the post-war world.

Although he arranged the initial conference, Ungern was opposed to the idea. The thrust behind it was a modernising one, an attempt to create an organised state from disparate peoples, with a federal government and an elected parliament. It was the antithesis of all that Ungern valued in the Mongols: tradition, leadership, the preservation of values that had been lost in the West. Nor were the delegates his kind of people. He disliked European intellectuals quite enough; to have to deal with Mongolian ones, polluting the purity of his beloved nomads, must have been even more irritating. His relationship with Fushenge, the Inner Mongolian prince and enthusiastic pan-Mongolist to whom he had been providing military advice for over a year, was also deteriorating. He wrote about the conference with indifference, even bitterness, and noted to a friend that he had forgotten to ask him for help to send the delegates to Paris. Later he spoke of the plan as a ‘soap bubble' and its proponents as ‘empty-headed'. Its main virtue to him was as a recruiting tool to amass more Mongol troops.

Fortunately for Ungern, the idea was stillborn. The meetings were attended by only sixteen representatives, and none from Outer Mongolia. Three delegates, including Fushenge, were sent to Urga to try to raise support for the idea among the Bogd's court and the nobles. They were snubbed; not only was the Bogd, like Ungern, opposed to the idea of a modern state but he could see the risk of threatening China with further loss of territory and a new, hostile power, and knew that the chances of his having any real power in a Semenov-led, Japanese-backed puppet state were exceedingly small. The pan-Mongolian delegates were forced to return to Dauria, where they proposed an attack on Urga to drive out the Chinese and act as a spark for pan-Mongolian feeling. It was a bluff; with the Japanese backers gone, funding was limited and barely three thousand troops could be raised for the threatened assault.

In Paris, Kolchak's representatives and the Chinese both manoeuvred to prevent the pan-Mongols from being represented at the conference, and nobody was anyway in much of a mood to listen to idealists from the backwaters of the world. Optimistic telegrams seeking recognition were dispatched to world leaders, without result. After the meeting at Dauria was reported in the Chinese newspapers, the Japanese cabinet grew nervous of the risk of alienating the other great powers, who had guaranteed the integrity of Chinese territory. On 16 March Japan
forbade its citizens, military and civilian, from participating in the pan-Mongolian movement in any way. It was to be another decade before Tokyo took up the idea again.

Like many pan-national movements before and since, the main cause of its disintegration was disagreement about who was the most truly ‘national'. Outer Mongolians had no interest in a Buriat-led movement, and considered themselves the largest and most important group; Inner Mongolians believed that they represented an older and purer form of Mongol culture; and the Buriats argued that, as the most advanced and modern group, and as the originators of the idea, they should obviously take the lead.

Tensions between the Buriats and Fushenge's Inner Mongolian fighters grew. In anticipation of the threatened attack on Urga, both had been stationed at Dauria, where they were being trained by Russian officers under Ungern's command. On 3 September, 1919, under Fushenge's leadership, fifteen hundred Inner Mongolians mutinied, killing their Russian officers, disarming their Buriat comrades and seizing an armoured train. The exact cause of the revolt is unclear, but there were stories of plots and counter-plots, and rumours that the Karachen were planning to defect to the Chinese side. The cause may have been more mundane; it had been a long time since most of the soldiers had been paid. Whatever the catalyst, Dauria became a battlefield for two solid days, as more armoured trains were rushed down to pound the rebels into submission, and the Cossack and Buriat troops fought against their former comrades. All the revolt's leaders were killed, including Fushenge, and the remnants escaped into Mongolia, where they were captured and executed by the Chinese army. Pan-Mongolism had been a political farce that ended with Mongol killing Mongol, but to Ungern's fertile imagination it suggested unfulfilled possibilities.

Conspicuously absent from records of Ungern's life is any mention of either love or sex. A common story circulating during the 1920s ascribed to him a wife and children in Estonia who had been brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks, but this was a complete fabrication, an attempt to put a reason to his fanatical hatred of revolutionaries.
It was not unusual for members of the Baltic aristocracy to marry relatively late, but there is no trace of any courtship, infatuation, mistress, or even casual affair. Unlike other officers, he never frequented the many brothels in Chita. When he spoke of women it was either in terms of concern for their morals or the danger posed to them by revolution.

He found the company of women uncomfortable; a friend recalled how ‘It often happened that he would sit with me until my wife or another lady came. At their arrival he would immediately try to leave and say goodbye; he could not stand the company of women.'
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Celibacy was clearly part of his generally ascetic lifestyle; he referred later to ‘the comforts of celibacy, the entire negation of woman, of the comforts of life'.
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He was brutally sarcastic about women's rights, suggesting to a friend that his wife should take up the mock-revolutionary slogan ‘Women of the world, unite!' and that that ‘stupid woman Pankhurst',
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referring to the famous British suffragette, should be forced to come to Siberia.

His passion for military life, his desire to stay close to his men and an indifference to women bordering on misogyny all suggest that Ungern may have been homosexual.
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Perhaps there was even an element of sexual attraction in his close relationship with the young, handsome Semenov. One unverified report of a conversation attributes to him disgust at ‘Those dirty workers who've never had any servants of their own, but still think they can command; those Jews who started the revolution to be revenged on us; those women who lie in wait for you everywhere, in the streets, in drawing-rooms, with their legs spread out - we've got to get rid of all that.'
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Whatever his preference, he seems to have repressed it deeply, for nowhere in the literature is there concrete evidence of any sexual encounter.

The record of his marriage in Harbin on 16 August, 1919 therefore comes as something of a surprise. The bride was an aristocratic Chinese lady, just nineteen years old, with the Russian name of Elena Pavlovna. She must have been from an educated and modern family, since she apparently conversed with Ungern in English. She was supposed by some Whites to have been a daughter of the famous Chinese republican leader Dr Sun Yat-Sen. She was certainly not one of his acknowledged daughters, but he was a notorious womaniser and had numerous illegitimate children, so there is a bare outside chance the
claim was true. Far more likely is that the rumour started simply because Sun Yat-Sen was the only Chinese leader the troops knew of. The marriage was almost certainly a purely political one arranged by Semenov, since the bride was related to an influential Chinese general. Ungern was on a long trip away from Dauria, nearly seven months, meeting with Chinese and Russian leaders in China, which is presumably when the arrangements were made. He returned to Dauria shortly after the wedding. In all likelihood the marriage was never consummated before the bride returned to her parents' house, although Ungern sent money regularly to a bank account in Manchuli set up in her name. Most usefully, it gave Ungern a Manchurian title to match his German one, something he rarely failed to mention when dealing with Chinese or Mongolian officials.

One reason Semenov was eager to encourage closer links with the Chinese and Japanese was that his relationships with the wider White movement were becoming increasingly strained. His old enemy, Admiral Kolchak, found himself reluctantly thrust into leadership of the Whites in Siberia after an officers' coup overthrew the Directory, the supreme body of the provisional Siberian government. Semenov responded immediately, cutting off communications and blocking supplies from the Far East intended for Kolchak's base at Omsk. After protests by railway workers, he stationed troops at every station and began a programme of ruthless intimidation to ensure that they bent to his will. Like rival medieval popes, the feuding leaders began an exchange of ever-more insulting letters, culminating in a public disavowal of the validity of each other's governments in early December.

The schism brought to the forefront already existing dissensions within the White movement. The Japanese backed Semenov, and hinted that if Kolchak attempted to remove him by force, the Japanese army would stand in the way. The Czechs began to distance themselves from both sides. All along the railways, men who found themselves on the wrong side of the quarrel were beaten up or arrested. Kolchak attempted to have the
ataman
arrested ‘for disobedience and infringement of the telegraphic service in the rear of the Army, which is an act of high treason',
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but the punitive expedition he assembled ended up in a tense stand-off with Semenov's men, which broke down only when the White soldiers on either side started chatting and drinking together. Troop movement and supplies snarled to a halt as
crucial railway officials were seized for being pro-Kolchak. In the end the squabble was resolved by the Japanese negotiation of an uneasy peace between the two leaders, who mutually, if reluctantly, recognised each other's authority. The rift, however, remained. Ungern and his men were solid Semenovites; for them the quarrel only established Kolchak's followers as weaklings and traitors. They would mete out their own kind of punishment to them in due course.

Ungern's own links to Semenov were growing weaker. The
ataman
's control of his lieutenants was always dubious, and bit by bit Dauria began to act as an entirely separate force from the rest of the Special Manchurian Division. In February 1920 they were formally organised as an entirely separate unit, the Asian Cavalry Division. Ungern was still in regular contact with Semenov in Chita, but there was little doubt in anybody's mind that he was now an autonomous power in his own right. Semenov publicly recognised that Ungern's forces equalled his own in importance. Soldiers whispered to each other of how ‘Ataman Semenov is afraid of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, for he possesses the only real military power upon which that adventurer can build his career as a sovereign ruler.'
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