The Bloody White Baron (20 page)

For a while the White-held territories to the west had provided the Transbaikal with a measure of insulation against Red attacks. Now, as the Bolshevik assaults tore ever bigger holes in the White defences, it became easier for large groups of Red partisans to enter Semenov's territory. Sometimes they did things on a grand scale, as on the morning of 31 October, 1919, when two thousand men took over six miles of railway near Khada-Bulak, up the line from Dauria, and spent the day systematically destroying track, telegraph lines and bridges. By the time a furious Ungern arrived, along with his Cossacks, they had melted away into the landscape, and although Ungern and his men spent the night searching for them, they found not a single partisan.

Entire towns were taken over by partisans, an experience that was often less painful than being scourged by the Whites afterwards. One notorious example of this was in the small station of Zilovo, which was occupied by the Reds for eight days in September 1919. When the
armoured train
Avenger
arrived in response, captained by Colonel Popov, one of Semenov's cronies, it lived up to its name. The Reds had all left, so Popov shot the village elders who turned up to welcome him, then proceeded to shoot a dozen more villagers at random and rape two local girls.

Such behaviour prompted the formation of a growing number of partisan groups with no connection to the Bolsheviks; they were simply peasants who, tired of having their daughters raped, their houses burnt and their stores confiscated, had taken to the forest to fight the Semenovites. By the end of 1919 there were around a hundred thousand anti-White partisans operating in Siberia, and approximately thirty thousand in the Transbaikal alone. Many of Semenov's soldiers, sick of the random cruelty of their superiors, deserted to join the partisans.

Despite his growing distance from Semenov, Ungern's base at Dauria still played a crucial, gruesome part in the White infrastructure; it was the execution camp. Prisoners were sent there in trainloads to be disposed of by Ungern's killers. As with the ‘death trains', front-line soldiers were often too squeamish to dispose outright of men who, only a year or two before, had been their compatriots. At Dauria, Ungern's men had no such compunction about executing the Red captives who arrived there. Many of the White leaders in the west believed - or claimed to believe - that a system of prisoner-of-war camps still existed in Siberia, and that the men they sent there would be treated humanely. Some prisoners had been ‘processed' through the torture chambers beforehand; others were civilians, suspected Bolshevik sympathisers put through a quick and farcical trial before being sent to Dauria for execution. Men were hanged or shot in batches of seventy or eighty at a time. The bodies were left in the open to rot, and surrounding hills came to resemble the aftermath of a battle. Body dumping, unhygienic as it was, was standard practice around Semenov's execution and torture centres. At Makkaveevo, so many bodies were dumped into the nearby river that it became polluted, and after local peasants complained Semenov ordered that the bodies be burnt instead.

Ungern, one of his officers claimed, found the macabre atmosphere relaxing. ‘On these hills, where everywhere were rolling skulls, skeletons, and decaying body parts, Baron Ungern used to like to go to rest.'
³⁸
Perhaps it reminded him of the Mongolian temples. The killings reached a peak in the spring of 1920, as the Red tide threatened to
wash over Siberia and the Semenovites became more desperate and vicious in response. In April 1920 an American report noted that two thousand Chinese prisoners had been dispatched in two weeks, and that Dauria was known as ‘the gallows of Siberia'.

This grisly work was managed by Colonel Sipailov, one of the many petty sadists among the Semenovites. A former mechanic, he suffered what appears to have been Tourette's syndrome: ‘He was always nervously jerking and wriggling his body and talking ceaselessly, making most unattractive sounds in his throat and sputtering with saliva all over his lips, his whole face often contorted with spasms.'
³⁹
He had ‘cold colourless eyes under dense brows' and the ‘strange undulating line of his skull' made his head look like a saddle. He was despised for his ‘scandalous meanness and cunning, his bloodthirstiness and cowardice' by Ungern's other officers. He was supposed to have been tortured by the Bolsheviks, and his family murdered by them, though this was a common excuse used to explain the excesses of White torturers. He had been involved in an infamous massacre on Lake Baikal on 6 January, 1919, where Bolshevik hostages had been herded on to a ship and then, after being promised freedom, brought up on deck one by one to have their heads smashed in by a Cossack with a ice-breaking mallet on the top of the gangway.

He did similar work at Dauria, after Ungern ordered one of his first executions, that of Lieutenant-Colonel Laurent, shot on suspicion of treason. Dmitri Alioshin was informed that

Dauria's grim reputation was made worse by rumours of Ungern's policies during the typhus and cholera outbreaks which swept through Siberia in 1919-20. He ordered those unlikely to recover to be shot in the hospital in order to prevent further infection, a policy he continued during his later campaigns. The atrocities at Dauria outraged American observers. One, Major Flanagan, was able to intervene to have forty prisoners - a drop in the ocean - released, telegraphing Semenov and imploring the Japanese. Ungern was furious with him, and when
Flanagan suffered a nervous breakdown three weeks later, his friends, according to American reports, suspected ‘Mongolian poison' administered by Ungern's agents. It seems highly unlikely, especially since the sights in Siberia were enough to inspire nightmares in anybody, but it was an indication of how powerful the Baron's legend was becoming, and of how closely he was associated with Mongolia.

By the summer of 1920 there was little hope left for Semenov's men. White resistance in Western Siberia had collapsed the previous winter, and Omsk had been evacuated. Kolchak fled to Irkutsk, but it had been taken over by a leftist faction, who handed him over to the Bolsheviks in January. After a brief ‘investigation', but not even a show trial, he was shot on 7 February. Before his death he had written an order handing over control of his remaining troops to Semenov, since, however much he disliked the
ataman
, he was the only effective White leader remaining in Siberia. The White position in Crimea was also untenable, and Wrangel evacuated the last of his men in November 1919. The White cause was obviously doomed. Semenov's control over the Transbaikal could last a little longer, but only because of the huge distances involved, the chaos throughout Soviet Russia and the support of the Japanese. There was no future in it, and Ungern knew it. He needed a way out.

Ungern met Semenov for one last time, in the tiny station of Olovyan. Later, Semenov would take credit for planning the whole Mongolian expedition, claiming that the Asian Cavalry Division was intended to be the core of a new Mongolian army which would liberate the country from Chinese imperialism, a cause that had been close to his heart since his time there in 1911. It was probably true that his pan-Mongolian schemes were part of Ungern's inspiration, but the true plan was different. Ungern was directed by Semenov to take the town of Aksha, on the Mongolian border, as part of a scheme for the Asian Cavalry Division to operate as a guerrilla force against the Bolsheviks. The ultimate aim of the original plan was probably to work their way up through Siberia, living off the land and mobilising the peasantry against the Bolsheviks, and meet up with one of Ungern's old comrades, Colonel Rezuhin. Rezuhin was a small, dapper man, known for his
loyalty to Ungern and his brutality; his name meant ‘cutter' in Russian, and he lived up to it. On 15 August, with very little warning, Ungern gathered his men and rode for Aksha, where they skirmished with Bolshevik fighters. Some of his Chinese troops deserted, perhaps sickened by his rule. From Aksha, Ungern's army crossed the border into Mongolia.

Before he left, he sent a note to his wife, divorcing her. Their marriage had, at least theoretically, been made under Chinese law, and only the husband's will was necessary for a divorce. Perhaps she was grateful enough to be rid of a politically burdensome husband, and to be free to make a real marriage. He gave his wedding ring to a friend for safe keeping. Of his wife, we hear no more. His marriage was behind him, his service to Semenov was at an end and he had had no contact with his family for nearly two years. There was nothing left to tie him to his old life.

Ungern claimed that the move to enter Mongolia was a spontaneous one, after some of his Chinese units had revolted and after he realised that Semenov was not going to complete his part of the plan. It was a disingenuous claim. Others believed that he had been driven over the border by Bolshevik forces and had simply fled to the only refuge left to him, though if driven by pure pragmatism the Far Eastern provinces under the protection of the Japanese army would have been a more likely destination. Later the Soviets would accuse Ungern of being in the pay of the Japanese when he invaded Mongolia. Japan's interest in pan-Mongolian schemes had been very real, but they had no involvement in Ungern's plans - Tokyo had called a halt to pan-Mongolian activities months beforehand. Although there were Japanese officers attached to his army they were not on active service, but mercenaries and drifters of the type that adventurers such as Ungern always attract.

More probably, he had planned to take the division into Mongolia from the start. Mongolia had been in his thoughts for many years, and more powerful than any order was the call of fate. It was fate that ‘was always making my decisions' whereas ‘orders were merely pieces of paper'.
⁴¹
Ungern had always felt his destiny was wrapped up in Mongolia, ‘the land of great conquerors'. Now his path was even more certain. Everything had been stripped away from him. The empire whose boundaries he had struggled to defend and define had been fragmented by a civil war in which the forces of evil were triumphing.
His closest friend had become a degenerate tool of a foreign power. His childhood homeland had been taken over by peasants. The only thing that was constant, unchanged, was the purity of the Mongolian peoples, who had ‘not forgotten their ancient faiths and customs'.
⁴²

He had striven to save the empire he had been raised in, but it was almost irretrievably corrupted. Russia's core had been lost to the Bolsheviks. A new empire would have to be created, and he had the model for it in the empire of Genghis Khan, which had once stretched ‘from the Amur Mountains to the Caspian Sea'.
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Ungern did not believe himself, as some later claimed, to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan;
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instead, he saw himself as restoring his legacy. He dwelt on Genghis on occasion in conversation, referring to him as ‘the Great Leader'
⁴⁵
and claiming, later, that his army was ‘the equal of Genghis Khan's'.
⁴⁶
Like the steppe tribes before Genghis who had once fought to recreate the empire of the Huns, Ungern would recreate the empire of the Mongols.

Attempts to claim the legacy of Genghis were common in Mongolian political culture, as Ungern would have known from his interest in Dambijantsan. This was not a complete fantasy, although it was supported by Mongolian religious beliefs, such as the prophecies he heard from Mongolian travellers, and from his Buriat troops. Variants of the ever-fresh Shambhala legend, they spoke of a saviour from the north who would save the Mongolian people in their time of crisis. Transmitted orally, only scraps and hints of these prophecies survive. Like the oracles circulated around the time of the first Mongolian declaration of independence, these prophecies were rooted in political reality. Mongolian independence was threatened once again by the Chinese, and so they naturally looked towards the other great regional power, divided as it was, for protection. Ungern took these prophecies and exploited them, claiming to be the saviour the stories spoke of.