The Bloody White Baron (2 page)

The ferocity of Ungern's crusade was surprising, given his Buddhist connections. Buddhism has always been one of the most accessible Asian religions to Westerners; appealingly philosophical, pleasantly pacifist and, compared with Hinduism or much of Chinese religion, supposedly free of ‘superstitious' or ‘primitive' beliefs in the form of gods or magic. Many writers ignorant of Asian history - particularly, for some reason, anti-religious science writers - also claimed that Buddhism lacked the history of atrocities and intolerance that marked Western religion, despite, for instance, the many Buddhist-inspired messianic revolts in China, or the deep complicity of Zen Buddhism in Japanese militarism during the Second World War. It especially appealed to the English because, like the Church of England, it seemed not to demand that you believe in anything. To be a Westerner and call oneself a Muslim, or even a Hindu, makes some definite statement about your beliefs and perhaps your actions; calling yourself a Buddhist in the West, however, does not define your identity in any fixed way. Western Buddhism resembles Unitarianism without the harsh dogma.

The emphasis on the philosophical aspects of Buddhism in the West also means that the reality of Buddhist religious practice worldwide tends to be eclipsed. For instance, Buddhists are often portrayed in the West as not believing in a God or gods, and most Western Buddhists don't. The vast majority of Buddhists worldwide, however, are enthusiastic believers in all manner of gods and spirits, often drawn from local traditions or taken from older religions such as Hinduism or Daoism.

At first I found it hard to understand why Mongolian Buddhism made a particularly strong and fearful impact on Westerners such as Ungern. In the Chinese variety with which I was familiar the most ferocious of the gods are the guardians found at every temple entrance. Their expressions of earnest intensity, combined with their elaborate martial stances, make them look like Morris dancers. Temple complexes as a whole feel gentle and benign: quiet gardens, the slow chanting of prayers, the gods
and Buddhas set to the back of spacious halls, their hands raised in benediction.

Buddhism in China, introduced by missionaries from India in the first century AD and rapidly incorporated into the happy melange of Chinese folk religion, was part of the mainstream of the Mahayana tradition, the largest school of Buddhism. It focused upon salvation, mercy and release from the wheel of suffering; although there were Buddhist monks and nuns, it remained a populist religion at heart. The chief figures were the various bodhisattvas, beings who had turned back at the threshold of enlightenment in order to work towards redemption for the rest of the world.

However, Chinese Buddhism was - and is - very different from the Mongolian variety. Mongolian Buddhism was an offshoot of the Tibetan religion, also known as Lamaist or Tantric Buddhism. The country had converted as a result of a deal struck in the sixteenth century, effectively giving the Mongol khans temporal authority over Tibet in return for the Tibetans assuming spiritual authority over Mongolia. The relationship was not particularly easy; the Fourth Dalai Lama had been Mongolian, and had been murdered by the Tibetans for being so. Though based in the Mahayana tradition, Tibetan Buddhism focused on magic, secret teachings, spirits and demons, the acquisition of special powers, and the superior status of the monk or lama - all of which were to play an important role in Ungern's story.

Many foreigners were suspicious of Tibetan Buddhism. One seventeenth-century Jesuit text on China depicts in wonderful hand-drawn illustrations the various idols the missionaries encountered. The pictures of solemn monks standing next to smiling statues of Chinese Buddhist gods, resting one affectionate hand on their backs, look like holiday snaps in comparison with the Tibetan deities, which stand on their own, sharp and fierce. There is a distant respect about the pictures, mixed, perhaps, with a touch of fear. By far the most commonly worshipped deity in Buddhism is Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, similar in many ways to the Virgin Mary in Christianity. Merciful goddesses have their place in Tibetan Buddhism, but more prominent is the child-devouring figure of Palden Llamo, a ferocious figure close to the Hindu death-goddess Kali.

The Jesuit illustrations capture something that photographs never can; in the harsh light of the lens the Buddhist deities appear cheap
and gaudy, painted in bright colours and hung with fake jewellery. The accoutrements don't help; in most cases an excess of weapons, skulls, corpses, rats, and spikes serves only to make them look a little ridiculous, like a group of middle-aged heavy-metal fans.

In the flesh - or the wood, rather - the Mongolian gods have an even fiercer presence. I first encountered them at the Seven Towers Temple in Hohhut, the capital of Inner Mongolia. Squashed between old houses, with narrow hallways and tiny courtyards, it was a disturbing place. Despite the high, bright afternoon outside, almost everything was shadowed; the only light was from very dim, shuttered lanterns. I could hear a ragged chanting everywhere I went, adding to the general eeriness. I was reminded of the Yonghe Gong, the Lama Temple in Peking, where in the 1930s Western visitors were warned to keep to well-lit corridors for fear of assault by rogue monks.
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I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I wasn't certain who he was, since the Tibetan pantheon inherited by the Mongolians is replete with such figures. In a small dark room, with incense burning and other gargoyles looming, it seemed capable of an awful, twitching animation; I felt it might lick its lips at any moment. A rural Mongolian couple were kneeling on the floor before it, chanting and kowtowing; they'd brought oranges to feed the god, and cash to bribe him. Even after the pilgrims had left, I didn't want to stand in front of the thing, let alone examine it closely; it was the first time I'd had any concrete sense of the word ‘idol'.

Elsewhere in the temple, small-denomination notes were tucked into the armpits and behind the ears of most of the gods, and ageing fruit lay before them. I wondered whether the purpose was prayer or appeasement. The assembled gods trampled bodies, gripped weapons and had fixed, bloody smiles. The last time I'd visited a Chinese temple I'd spent my time wisecracking about the ‘war umbrellas' the gods carried, much to the horror of my Chinese companion, who, despite being Muslim, was convinced I was drawing some awful curse down on myself. I was raised Anglican, which takes most of the fear out of religion, but I wasn't making any jokes in this place. I could see chipped paint and worm-eaten wood, the cracks and hollows of years of neglect. It didn't make me feel any more at ease; it just made the gods seem older and darker and angrier.

The temple's gift shop sold plastic versions of the monstrosities inside, grinning horror reduced to plastic kitsch. I bought some oranges and a few sticks of incense before returning inside with a bunch of schoolchildren, their laughter and joking soon silenced in the shadows before the gods. I stuck the incense in the sandbox before the biggest and grisliest of the lot and placed a five-yuan note alongside the oranges at its feet. Better safe than sorry, after all.

Such a temple, with its close, fearful atmosphere would surely have made a deep and lasting impression on Ungern. He had not come to it a blank slate - he was a cruel and ruthless man long before his arrival in Mongolia - but the images of Mongolian Buddhism, filtered through the perspective of the equally murky world of Russian and European mysticism and its fascination with the ‘Orient', had shaped his thinking and his actions. This fascination was mingled, in Ungern's time, with deep fears of the ‘inevitable' rise of the East, creating the myth of the ‘Yellow Peril', the hordes of sinister Orientals who threatened the West.

Beyond the religious aspects, Ungern's actions had to be understood as part of the regional clashes in the first half of the twentieth century between Russia, Japan and China. Mongolia and Manchuria had been the fault line for conflict between the old and crumbling tsarist and Chinese empires, but also the focus of the new imperialism of the Soviets and Japanese. Mongolia, an impoverished, seemingly unimportant country of fewer than two million people, became a key part of these struggles, and Ungern's thinking and strategy made sense only in the context of these conflicts.

I was beginning to develop a sense of what lay behind the Baron's terrible deeds, but definite information was still hard to come by. Even in the 1930s the Russian-French writer Vladimir Pozner had found that Ungern Nobody died while I was tracking Ungern, but he remained elusive.

My own travels through Mongolia, Russia and China made many aspects of Ungern's campaign clearer to me, as did the work of Russian and Mongolian scholars. I began to see how a small, brutal war in Mongolia fitted into the larger patterns of history, and how Ungern's actions had had a far greater impact than I had ever previously realised. The story often seems medieval, but Ungern's campaign is not even a century removed from us. In Asia the events of the twentieth century are written in the landscape and on the bodies of the people.
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In China I met ancient communists who could just remember when China was an empire, and Mongolia a mere vassal state. I met, too, young nationalists who were all too eager to retake, even settle, Mongolia - and Mongolians who were keen to fight them.

In telling the story of Ungern's short life and brutal death, then, and of the consequences of his actions, I have drawn from many different sources. Some are accounts by his contemporaries, some are later works or my own impressions of a country or its culture. Much of the documentation concerning Ungern is clustered in the last three years of his life, and at times, when describing his early career and beliefs, I have projected later statements backward in time. I also had to make some difficult choices about what to believe; Ungern became a legendary figure even when alive, and his myth grew even more after his death. His own beliefs and actions were deeply bizarre, but so were those of his contemporaries, and often it was difficult to tell whether a particular story was a fantasy of Ungern's or of the witness reporting it. As it happened, I began the book in a greater spirit of scepticism than when I finished it; too many of the oddest stories turned out to be confirmed by reliable witnesses, often more than one. Who would have thought, after all, that Ungern really did keep wolves in his house? Or marry a Chinese princess? Or pause on a reconnaissance mission, in the middle of a hostile city, to chastise an enemy soldier for being asleep on duty?

There is very little to like about Ungern himself. He was an appalling human being in almost every way; virtually his only admirable characteristic was his fierce physical bravery, and perhaps parts of his fascination with the East. There seemed to be very few aspects of ordinary life which could please him; his pleasures were violent and he lived in a world increasingly - and rightfully - hostile to the values he believed in.

Yet he remains fascinating. His voice - strident, sarcastic, vicious - dominates his story. Other voices are absent, or at least muted: those of Ungern's victims and his communist successors'. Peasants, widows, nomads, and monks, they have left almost no accounts of the events of the year in which Ungern's horde tortured and murdered so many of them, or of the terrible years that followed. In the writings of Western or Chinese travellers, the Mongolians, with the exception of a few nobles or high-ranking lamas, are often ignored; it seems hideously appropriate that virtually the only accounts we have from ordinary Mongolians are the interrogation records of the old communist regime, voices bent by torture and distorted for propaganda.

The Mongolians were the tools, and the victims, of a delusional psychopath driven by a fusion of religious, imperial and reactionary ideology. Ungern's atrocities were a foreshadowing of worse things to come for the world, and both his life and the suffering he caused have been eclipsed by the greater horrors that followed. I hope that in this book I have, at least in part, given some accounting of his victims together with their - and his - place in history.

ONE

A Son of Crusaders and Privateers

Ungern was born in Graz, Austria, in 1885 to an Estonian father of German blood and a German mother. Within a few years of his birth his parents had divorced, his mother had remarried and he had moved back to Reval, Estonia (now Tallinn), where he was to spend the rest of his childhood. His sense of family and place was uncertain from his very birth, something reflected in his name. ‘Sternberg', ‘star mountain', an archetypal Jewish name, has an epic ring on its own, but its coupling with ‘Ungern', which translates as ‘unwillingly, reluctantly', is an odd one. It even inspired an anti-Semitic joke, popular during the 1930s: ‘What's your name?' ‘Ungern-Sternberg.' ‘If I were
Sternberg
, I'd be unhappy about it too.' Though there is no evidence that Ungern possessed any trace of Jewish ancestry, he separated out the names, entirely incorrectly, often referring to himself as Ungern von Sternberg. It was clearly an uncomfortable name for him; when he translated it into Mongolian it disappeared entirely, and he became simply ‘Great Star Mountain'.