The Bloody White Baron (24 page)

For now, though, Ungern had been beaten. The army retreated to Zam Kuren, a hundred and sixty miles east of Urga, and made camp. The worst result of the failure to take Urga was that the army was left exposed to the fierce Mongol winter. Up until then it had been a cool, dry autumn, but now the serious cold had come. Temperatures sometimes dropped below minus 40 °C, and normally hovered around minus 20 to minus 30. The European soldiers copied their Mongolian neighbours, sleeping in insulated gers, wrapping themselves in several layers of clothing and huddling around the central stove for warmth. Most of them came from countries with similarly awful conditions, and many had already survived at least one Siberian winter. There was little spare clothing, though, and they had to make do with whatever bizarre array of rags was available. Comradeship was a forgotten virtue, and the strong preyed upon the weak and old, especially those hapless villagers Ungern had mobilised from the Russian borders. Stripped of clothes by their fellow soldiers, many died of the cold. A favoured item of footwear was the ‘eternal boot', whereby a soldier took the fresh skin of a slaughtered sheep or cow, wrapped it round his foot and let it harden. By the end of the winter the soldiers had been wearing the same clothes for three or four months, without changing or washing, and must have stunk to high heaven.

In such conditions reserves of body heat ran down quickly and almost all activity stopped as a result. The army could move, en masse, only a few miles each day. Men slept as much as they could, passing the short days with the normal amusements of soldiers: gambling, fighting and lewdness. With no outside support, they survived mostly by plunder. One small expedition went three hundred and fifty miles out of their way to raid Lamyn Gegen Dedlen Khid, the third largest monastic settlement in the country. It had around ten thousand monks
and their considerable provisions for the winter, which the Russians stole. Any settlement they encountered, especially the farms of Russian refugees, was ransacked. Along the way they commandeered hundreds of sheep and cows, which were herded by the Buriat soldiers. As a result meat, at least, was always in good supply.

What was missing, fatally for some, were vegetables and fruit. The Mongolian word for vegetables - all vegetables - was the same as that for grass. As a result of the lack of greens many of the soldiers, particularly the Russians, developed scurvy and similar diseases. The general state of health of the army was poor. There were even been minor outbreaks of bubonic plague, caused by eating the flea-infested marmots that were common in the Mongolian hills and perhaps related to a major outbreak of the disease in Manchuria that same year. The field hospital set up by the Baron soon became full - but not for long. It was run by Dr Klingenberg, who had joined the camp in the winter, a fellow Baltic German who was keen on ideas of fitness, evolution and survival. As a matter of both practicality and ideology he suggested to Ungern that those men who were so sick as to be worthless for any future fighting be poisoned, continuing the policy instituted in Dauria during the typhus outbreak. Dozens were murdered by him as a result.

The healthy were not much safer than the sick. Ungern's obsession with sadistic discipline, already well nurtured in Dauria, had grown even stronger. He would stalk around the camp looking for offenders to punish, and the terrified soldiers would hide from him ‘like mice from a mean cat'.
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Alioshin wrote:

Ungern spoke of the necessity of the ‘discipline of the rod' which had served his military heroes, Frederick the Great and Nikolas I. Nobody was immune from being seized and beaten; Rezuhin,
Klingenberg, Sipailov - all of them were publicly and humiliatingly beaten by Ungern at one time or another. These beatings, interspersed with sporadic praise, seemed only to increase their loyalty to him.

Flogging was the most straightforward of Ungern's punishment techniques. His cruelty took on much more varied forms, such as a peculiar fascination with torments involving trees. One punishment involved forcing the offender up to the top of a tall tree and making him remain there all night. Those who faltered in this ‘acrobatic farce' and fell broke their arms or legs and were shot as useless mouths. For executions, he sometimes ordered his men to bend back a tree, then bound the victim to it to be ripped apart by the branches when it was released. He also employed execution by fire, particularly of deserters or recalcitrant recruits. They were tied to a tree, or herded into barns or houses, then burnt alive.

Some of the stories are so extreme that they have sometimes been attributed to Red propaganda. However, many contemporary accounts, whatever their writers' feelings about Ungern, agree on the range and inventiveness of his sadistic discipline. Red propaganda about Ungern inevitably concentrated on the atrocities committed against loyal Soviet citizens, not reactionary Whites. Nor did Ungern, when questioned, ever deny any of these cruelties. He was not the only perpetuator by any means, but he was the prime mover.

A culture of cruelty evolved around Ungern whereby officers, both fascinated by and terrified of him, would attempt to imitate and impress him by devising increasingly horrific punishments. Rezuhin, Ungern's shadow, was particularly keen to copy his master. The physical and cultural isolation of being in the wilderness, surrounded by strange ‘Asiatics', made the Russians behave even more badly than their contemporaries in the civil war back home. After the war Russian memoirists preferred to blame the majority of the horrors either on the dead or on the ‘Mongolian cruelty' of Ungern's non-Russian troops. When they did admit to their own involvement in murder and torture, they found excuses in the madness of war, pressure from their comrades or an understandable terror of Ungern. ‘It was kill or be killed in those days,' wrote Alioshin, ‘and we fought like demons from hell.'

Ungern used a small group of executioners to enforce his punishments. These were hated by even his most dedicated followers, and all
witnesses write about them in dramatic and unflattering terms. One particularly loathed figure was Evgenie Burdokovskii, his Cossack ensign. He was

 

Another witness wrote of his ‘wide mouth, capable of swallowing ten cutlets and a quart of vodka at a time, his Mongolian yellow peaked cap with hanging flaps [. . .] and an enormous cane in his hand'.
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He was known as ‘Teapot', since in private audiences pouring tea was the sign Ungern would give him to seize a victim from behind and choke him to death. He seemed to live only to obey Ungern's orders, and could knock a man unconscious with only five blows of his light bamboo cane. He had been with Ungern since the disarming of the mutinous troops in Manchuli, where he had specialised in clubbing revolutionaries with his rifle. Another favoured executioner was Captain Veselovskii, Rezuhin's adjutant, a young man with ‘long curly red hair and an unusually white face, though heavy and stolid, with large, steel-cold eyes and with beautiful, tender, almost girlish lips. But in his eyes there was such cold cruelty that it was quite unpleasant to look at his otherwise fine face.'
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Casualties from the attacks on Urga had been heavy, and the army was shaken. Desertions began to increase, particularly among the Russian officers. Ungern showed a growing fixation with desertion and treachery. It was revolution, weakness, caused by infiltrating Bolshevik agents. He used his most loyal troops, most often Inner Mongolian Chahars, to chase down those who deserted, hanging them on the spot or ordering them lashed to death. One of the things he scribbled most commonly as a postscript to letters was ‘Do not trust . . .', followed by the names of various faithless officers. Alioshin described how he learnt of the

The Mongolian regiments were often quick to desert, though Ungern seems to have treated them with considerably more forbearance than he did European or Japanese deserters.

Siberian political divisions carried over into the new army. A split developed between the new Russian troops, the majority of whom had been followers of Admiral Kolchak, and those who had been with Ungern at Dauria. One of the former, dragooned into Ungern's army after the fall of Urga, wrote,

There was a good deal of self-protection in such comments. After the war, Ungern's reputation was so infamous that anybody who had been in Mongolia during his reign had to excuse themselves from any association with him. Dozens of ‘decent' Whites who successfully escaped persecution in Ungern's Mongolia berated him from exile in the Harbin and Peking press. Ungern remarked dryly that ‘the White newspapers write worse things about me than the Reds'.

The Russian officers were certainly the most wretched members of the army, particularly the former officers of the regular army, and were treated roughly by the other soldiers. Alioshin, one of this caste himself, described them as being ‘dressed in rags, with pieces of leather tied to the soles of their feet. Unshaven and dirty, cynical and cunningly cruel, they were lost to the world. Death was always welcome to them, and they fought like devils.'
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Ungern spoke of them as ‘rotten through and through, demoralised, sunk into the depths'.
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Apart from the White officers, numerous ordinary Russian refugees and émigrés, some of them with no military training whatsoever, were drafted into the army. Both groups were under a cloud of suspicion as potential revolutionaries or even Jews, and they became the focus of Ungern's growing paranoia. There was a political reason for their low status, too; Ungern could obviously not treat the new Mongolian troops with anything like the same contempt without risking losing the support of the Mongolian leaders. Maintaining ethnic divisions within the army also strengthened the loyalty of various favoured groups, such as the Buriats. As Alioshin bitterly put it, ‘What the Baron dared not do to his Orientals he did all too readily to his own countrymen.' Given half a chance they deserted, fleeing to Manchuria or even to Bolshevik territory; one of them remarked when informing Alioshin and others of his plan to escape: ‘Even death is better than the Baron!' He was caught and hanged.

Now sober, if drug addled, Ungern was particularly intolerant of drunkenness in others. Mongolians have an astonishing ability to produce alcohol from the most unlikely ingredients, and vodka and
airag
(fermented mares' milk) was often brought into the camp. Anyone drinking to excess risked one of Ungern's favourite punishments: a night on a frozen river or lake without shelter. Sometimes they were stripped naked first and, if Ungern was feeling especially vindictive, left to shiver for several days on a diet of raw meat. On one particularly gruesome occasion an entire group of men who had been forced to the centre of the frozen Tula river attracted the attention of a pack of wolves. Naked and unarmed, the soldiers tried to fight off the animals with their bare hands. Only half the men survived. Even being hung-over was dangerous. One group of officers who missed roll-call were forced to stand to attention through an entire night, ceaselessly repeating their names and ranks.