The Bloody White Baron (3 page)

Ungern was christened Nikolai Roman Maximilian, a mixture of Russian and German names befitting his heritage. He added a patronymic, in common with most Germans in Russia, transforming his father's German Theodor into the Russian Fyodorovich. Even the date of his birth reflects the split between these two worlds, for he was born in two separate years: on 10 January, 1886 by the Western Gregorian calendar and on 29 December, 1885 by the Russian Julian one, which ran twelve days behind. Errors in conversion from biographers and bureaucrats alike have produced birthdates ranging from 23 January to 16 December! Similar cross-cultural confusion and misinterpretation would mark Ungern's whole life.

In truth, he had barely any Russian ancestry, his family were thoroughly German and warlike; in his own words, ‘crusaders and privateers'.
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There was a weak family connection to Russian royalty many generations previously, true, through the Romanov intermarriage with German nobility, but this was hardly unusual for an aristocratic central European family. Through them there was an even more tenuous claim to distant Mongolian ancestry. The family had a tradition of pride bordering on arrogance. One of their ancestors was supposed to have been an ambassador to the court of Ivan the Terrible, and to have had his hat nailed to his head after he refused to lift it to the tsar; it was said that they would have boarded the Ark only reluctantly, hence the origin of the name. (The real origin of ‘Ungern' lay in the family's distant Hungarian roots; ‘unwilling' was a linguistic coincidence.)

Young Roman could, in fact, claim descent from any number of royal bloodlines, including the Plantagenets and the Habsburgs, but it was the Russian imperial connection that he always liked to assert and it was as a Russian that he always, first and foremost, presented himself. An intense programme of Russification had taken place during the 1860s as part of a wider Russian effort to strengthen the ties of the border provinces to the central Empire,
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and it had had a deep effect on the Ungern-Sternbergs. Even so, the Baron's sense of attachment to the Russian Empire was almost pathologically intense; in some ways he had what Isaiah Berlin described as ‘borderlands syndrome', the insecurity that comes from being on the fringes of a great empire, and which seems to produce an unusually high frequency of the most blindly cruel servants or leaders of these empires. Such men, including the Austrian Hitler, the Corsican Napoleon or the Georgian Stalin, developed, according to Berlin, either ‘exaggerated sentiment or contempt for the dominant majority, or else over-intense admiration or even worship of it . . . which leads both to unusual insights, and - born of overwrought sensibilities - a neurotic distortion of the facts'.
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His homeland, Estonia - then known to both the Germans and the Russians as Estland - had been carved into existence by the crusading order of the Knights of the Sword in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Northern Crusades against the pagans of Lithuania and Livonia have received scant attention compared with the crusades for the Holy Land, but they were long-lasting and bloody affairs,
undertaken more out of a desire for land than any genuine missionary impulse. It was the first clash in what was to become the long history of German-Eastern conflict.

Initially the native peoples, primitive and idol-worshipping, had little hope against the iron-wrapped charges of the German crusaders, and were slaughtered in droves when they tried to confront the crusading armies directly. Some of them were not even pagan, but had been converted to Orthodoxy by Russian missionaries; this made little difference to the Germans. The locals fought viciously enough themselves when they had the chance, often targeting the preachers who followed in the armies' wake; many a priest was martyred, burnt as an offering to Perun the Sun God or quartered in homage to the Lord of Horses. After some time the pagan forces settled into a long colonial border war between Estonia and Lithuania, forcing the knights into the forests and swamps where their horses were useless, concealing themselves among the peasantry, and making hit-and-run attacks where the knights were weakest.

The Ungern-Sternbergs were direct descendants of these proud crusaders. The Knights themselves had been eclipsed by Lutheranism and the new Russian kingdoms, and eventually disbanded by Napoleon, but many of the Baltic Germans, including Ungern's father and step-father, were members of the successor charitable organisation, the Honourable Knights of the Teutonic Order, based in Austria. This gave the family a somewhat ambiguous position within the Russian Empire; one of the foremost triumphs of Russian history, after all, was Alexandr Nevskii's defeat of the Teutonic Knights on the frozen ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, halting their advance to the east. Later, as a story of heroic Russian victory over German invasion, it was given great play during the Second World War. Nevskii's triumph was made possible only by his striking a submissive deal with the Mongols, turning his princedom of Novgorod into a tributary state, something that did not often feature in Russian histories.

Though unpopular with the masses, the Germans were regarded within the imperial system as the de facto equivalent of the Russian nobility. The high rate of intermarriage between the Romanovs and German royalty contributed to their social status, and a German was just as likely to rise to high military or civil rank as a Russian. There were mutterings, particularly during the First World War, of how much
influence the Germans had; certainly a goodly number of the Russian commanders on the Eastern Front had German family names.

The division between conqueror and conquered was still highly visible in Ungern's day. As in Russia, the noble estates were surrounded by a sea of peasantry, but here the class distinction was also ethnic, a clear divide between poor Slavic natives and Teutonic aristocracy. What middle class there was comprised mainly later German immigrants, sometimes Jews, although by the turn of the century there was an emerging Estonian middle class. The whole country had just under a million people, roughly 5 per cent of them German, and maybe a fifth of those Jewish. The justice system was traditionally based around social class, and consequently ethnicity; the word of a baron or a knight weighed considerably heavier in the scales of evidence than that of a peasant, hence that of a German heavier than that of a Slav. Although this system had been reformed before Ungern's birth, the attitudes it reflected still survived.

As elsewhere in the Russian Empire, the peasantry lived a virtually medieval lifestyle, scraping a living from farming and fishing. An outward layer of deep devotion to the Lutheran Church concealed a multitude of incongruous, semi-pagan superstitions. There were some shamanic elements in the folk tales, similar to those of neighbouring Finland. During the 1920s these were formed into Tassi, an outlandish neo-pagan religion something like modern Wicca, which fused supposedly ancient beliefs with a nationalist, right-wing agenda. Tassi never attracted more than a few thousand believers and was crushed as counter-revolutionary in Soviet times, but it is, nevertheless, a fine example of the way nationalism and esoteric beliefs sometimes crossed. Tiny, near-medieval, aristocratic, freezing in winter but burning hot in summer, on the fringes of a great empire, with a muddle of earlier beliefs lying under a late-imposed religion - Estonia was not unlike Mongolia.

Ethnic Germans such as the Ungern-Sternbergs did not regard themselves as belonging to their adopted country. In some ways they were still colonists, overseers of vast estates powered by native labour, nostalgic for the bright lights of the city. Like Ungern's parents, they frequently holidayed in, or even moved back to, Austria or Germany.

They were widely known for being proud, even by Russian aristocratic standards, and looked down on Jews, ‘native' Estonians and
Russians, roughly in that order. Until late in the nineteenth century there were hardly any Jews in Estonia, since it lay outside the Pale established for Jewish settlement in Russia. The Baltic Germans in all three countries, on the other hand, were effectively one community, having far more to do with each other than with the locals, and the Germans in Estonia picked up on the prejudices of their Latvian and Livonian relatives.

The incestuous nature of the community was reflected in their large manor houses, which frequently changed ownership as various nobles drank or gambled away their family fortunes, but which almost always passed to other German families rather than to Estonians, or even the Russian nobility. The Baltic German community was closely associated with the
Volkisch
pan-German movements, and produced a remarkably high number of Nazi leaders and thinkers; the Nazi ‘philosopher' and neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg, hanged at Nuremberg for his anti-Semitic propaganda and his brutal administration of occupied eastern Europe, grew up in Reval only a few years behind Ungern. Like most nineteenth-century aristocrats, Germans were frequently in debt, living a long way beyond their means in order to sustain their fantasies of noble life. Yet, like the Russian aristocracy, their children spent a lot of time among the peasantry, and some of them found the peasant lifestyle more appealing than the cold and restricting world of their parents.

The Germans in Estonia were divided between their identity as Germans and their role as servants of the Russian Empire. It was a conflict full of contradictions. The wider German world was more modern, more liberal, more civilised than most of the Russian Empire, but many Baltic Germans maintained virtually medieval privileges and prejudices, and it was the Russians who had begun to abolish much of the legal basis on which German superiority over the indigenous population rested. Reval reflected these tensions. In this fortress city the crusader-built castle set on a hill in the centre - a visible symbol of German power - vied for architectural prominence with the Orthodox cathedral, a glitzy pseudo-Muscovite construction built in the 1880s and designed to overshadow the Lutheran cathedral nearby. (It was named, none-too-subtly, after Alexandr Nevskii, the great Russian hero of the medieval wars against the German invaders.)

The Ungern-Sternbergs had traditionally identified themselves with both the German aristocracy and the Russian imperialists. In the early
nineteenth century more members of the family began to pursue military careers, inevitably entangling them in the sprawling frontiers of Russia's eastern empire. Russia's nineteenth-century drive to the east, a continuation of the great expansions of the previous two centuries, saw the gradual absorption, by diplomacy or by force, of the various petty khanates, tribes and kingdoms of central Asia, followed by Russian colonisation of the newly conquered areas. This mirrored the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when they had swept out of Mongolia to become the masters of Eurasia. In two centuries Russia had more than doubled in size, and a whole new class of diplomats, warriors and spies evolved to deal with the conquered territories, and the often rebellious locals. They fought against an array of small Muslim states, remnants of the Mongol Empire: set-piece battles during which Russian artillery pounded medieval mountain fortresses into dust, and cavalry skirmishes and massacres during which the Cossacks would be loosed against one or other unfortunate tribe. Asked whether ‘his family had distinguished itself on Russian service', Ungern replied proudly ‘Seventy-two killed during wartime!'
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It was a fusion of the Wild West and the Roman Empire, and the transmission of family stories and mementos of far-off campaigns left a deep impression on Ungern. A member of a minority in his homeland, an uncertain Russian, the core of his familial identity was not national but military. He always prided himself upon the warlike nature of his ancestors, talking enthusiastically of such figures as ‘the Axe' and ‘the Brother of Satan'. He was obsessed with their role in the Crusades in particular, a period of history he often referred to in conversation. The Ungern-Sternbergs did have their fair share of military heroes, but the family's history was not entirely glorious; one of their most famous Estonian forebears, Otto von Ungern-Sternberg (1744-1811), was a wrecker, using false lights to lure ships on to the harsh rocks of the coast of the Estonian island Hiiumaa, then killing the surviving crew and plundering the cargo. In his spare time Otto was a poet and mystic, neither of which stopped the Russian authorities from shipping him off to Siberia when he was found guilty of piracy and banditry. In Ungern's own account this gruesome heritage was transformed into the more glamorous practice of privateering. He claimed, entirely falsely, that his paternal grandfather had served
under an Indian prince as a privateer against the British. It's a wonderfully swashbuckling image, and sounds exactly like the fantasy of a young boy.

His fantasies extended beyond the military to the religious. He claimed that the same grandfather had converted to Buddhism as a result of his experiences in India. Since Buddhism was barely known in India at the time, this is rather like saying that someone converted to Islam as a result of a trip to Spain. If anything, the opposite was the case; Western scholars and occultists were influential in
reintroducing
Buddhism to India and some, such as the Theosophist Henry Olcott, are still honoured for doing so. Claims such as this remain common among occult groups and new religious movements, adding an appealing veneer of antiquity to their beliefs.
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In Ungern's case it indicates an interest in Buddhism coupled with a general ignorance of its practical and historical realities that was typical of the man.

Ungern's fantasies about his family's history were, perhaps, the result of one of the most mundane of childhood tragedies: an early parental divorce. His father, Theodor Leonhard Rudolf von Ungern-Sternberg, was an amateur geologist; his mother, Sophie Charlotte von Wimpffen, from Hesse in Germany, was an aristocrat. It was not a happy marriage. They divorced when Roman was six, and he was raised by his mother and her second husband, another baron, Oskar von Hoyningen-Huene. The cause of the divorce was probably his father's gradual mental collapse, which eventually necessitated his committal to a sanatorium at Hupfal for five years. The records tiptoe around the exact nature of his illness, describing him as ‘mentally unsound'.
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The early deaths of the first two children of the marriage, both girls, can't have helped. He may have been suffering from some form of schizophrenia, though he apparently made a strong recovery in later life. We can only speculate as to whether his young son ever witnessed any of his psychotic episodes, and the effect it might have had on him. His mother, unsurprisingly given her own experiences of the marriage, seems to have prevented him having much contact with his father, even after the latter's release from the asylum.