The Bloody White Baron (30 page)

For a time the city became busier than ever:

 

Ungern was keenly aware of the polyglot nature of his new domain, and established a multilingual group of scribes, nearly a dozen in all, who worked to translate his pronouncements into four languages: Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan and Manchurian. By this stage he spoke reasonable Mongolian, and pidgin Chinese, but conducted most of his personal business in Russian. The first few weeks of his rule were, in some ways, surprisingly constructive, going far beyond anything he had done at Dauria. He bucked his normal reactionary and archaic tendencies, and attempted to modernise the city. The retired British army official who had originally helped set up the power station, Major S. T. Dockray, greatly approved of the reopening of the electric station, allowing ‘splendid great arc lights' to illuminate the city for the first time, which, for a people who had been quite literally shocked by the Bogd's car battery, must have seemed almost miraculous. Dockray himself agreed with Ungern to repair the wireless station built by the Chinese.

Having no tolerance for what he saw as idleness, Ungern ordered his men to ‘clean and disinfect the city which had probably not felt the broom since the days of Genghis Khan'. In early March we find him writing letters demanding that expert engineers be sent to the city as soon as possible and he tried to put the city back to work, reopening the mines previously run by Mongolore, a Russian mining company, and even a textile factory, which was kept busy producing uniforms and flags. At the same time he began a series of construction projects, ranging from new river bridges to veterinary laboratories, hospitals and schools. His actions seem to have been motivated primarily by a desire to win Mongolian popular support and most of the projects never saw completion, not least because within a couple of months the staff required to run them had often either died or fled.

Maintaining his principled dislike for bureaucracy and codified law, he made no effort to establish a regular police force, judiciary or any kind of formal legal system. Instead, law and order were maintained through on-the-spot penalties. Although not quite as ferociously harsh as the discipline he imposed on his army, Ungern's idea of justice remained arbitrary and sadistic. Minor offenders were punished by banishment to the rooftops for up to a month at a time, where they lived precarious, bird-like existences, relying on food passed up by their friends. It was a version of the familiar tree punishment, only longer and less lethal. Discipline for the Baron, as ever, was all about display, and the unfortunate roof-dwellers served as an example for others, as did the corpses strung up at gates. Merchants protested that the bodies hung above their doors drove away business.

Terrifying potential thieves was only a small part of Ungern's plan to purify Mongolia. Before monarchy and order could be restored in full, the impure elements had to be cleansed from Mongolian society. To Ungern, the defeat of the Chinese had been merely the first stage in this. The Chinese garrison had, in truth, exhibited no discernible trace of communism, though undoubtedly there were a few soldiers who were vaguely sympathetic to the cause. In Chinese the occupiers had been called
ge-ming
, in Mongolian
gamin
, both meaning ‘revolutionary' soldiers, but this was a misnomer. Since the revolution of 1911 in China, any soldier associated with the central nationalist government, as opposed to the ‘counter-revolutionary' forces of some provincial warlords, had been known thus.
¹⁴
The 1911 revolution in China had no Bolshevik involvement at all, and the Chinese Communist Party hadn't even been founded then, but Ungern understood Chinese politics only in the context of his own country's civil war, and the wider struggle against revolution. He claimed that the dead Chinese soldiers were Bolsheviks, corrupted by the insidious evil of foreign agitators, who had to be purged root and branch. ‘Bolshevik passports' were said to have been found on the bodies of dead Chinese officers.

The arrival of the Whites also brought about the release of the many Mongolians and Russians who had been prisoners of the Chinese, one
of Ungern's most popular achievements. The prison dungeons were soon refilled; revolutionaries, traitors and Bolshevik infiltrators were everywhere, and they had to be dealt with. A Bureau of Political Intelligence was duly established and soon set to the grim business of the political purge. The whole operation was run by Colonel Sipailov, the spasming psychopath who had been with Ungern since 1918. It was the same kind of work he had done as part of the White counter-intelligence network in Chita, but now he was completely unsupervised. Ungern gave him free rein to conduct his operations, and turned a blind eye to the resultant excesses. Unlike Ungern, he was sexually sadistic, personally greedy and derived great pleasure from the suffering of his victims. As with Ungern, other Whites blamed his cruelty partly on Mongolian influence, claiming that he had studied under Mongolian executioners. He was an alcoholic, and was often half-drunk while doing his work. Ungern had whipped him for it before, but some Russian observers thought that Sipailov must have a special hold over him to get away with such behaviour.

With the logic of the witch-hunt, victims were tortured to reveal other sympathisers and gave up random names in desperation, so providing the torturers with new victims. The process was observed nervously by other foreigners; an American commentator noted that one victim had surrendered twenty-eight names before being ‘cut in pieces' himself. They concentrated on the Russian refugees in the city, who were most likely to have been infected with the virus of revolution, but Mongolians suspected of collaborating with-revolutionaries were butchered as well. There were genuine revolutionary sympathisers in Urga, and there had been attempts to organise a soviet. Knowing what awaited them, many of the would-be communists attempted to volunteer for Ungern's forces, but were found out and executed. A few escaped; one Buriat revolutionary, Ajushi, managed to get a job as a supplier of hay to Ungern's army, used his credentials to get to revolutionary-held territory in northern Mongolia and ended up returning to Urga with the Russians months later.

White terror had been common enough elsewhere in Russia, but the persecutions in Urga exceeded most of the others in viciousness and scope, especially given the small size of the Russian population in the city. With Ungern and Sipailov supervising, and no foreign observers
or political masters to restrain it, the Bureau of Political Intelligence operated effectively without limits. The similarity to the Bolshevik political police, the Cheka, was noted by the more moderate Whites in the city. Sipailov's power was made greater by the lack of reliable intelligence. Urga's isolation and the chaos of the last few years meant that rumour, slander and guesswork were all that Ungern's ‘counter-intelligence' efforts had to go on. New arrivals were constantly coming in from Siberia, or returning from China, and any one of them, to Ungern's mind, could be a potential Red infiltrator. Even having the same family name as a known Bolshevik could be enough to condemn somebody.

In addition there was the division between Ungern's soldiers, among the most reactionary of the Whites, and the ordinary Russians in the city, who were mostly
kolchakovec
, refugees unaffiliated with any White faction, or stranded pre-revolutionary expatriates. Many therefore had moderate socialist or radical connections in their past histories, more fuel for political paranoia. People were targeted for the pettiest reasons. One intellectual and philanthropist, a man named Cybiktarov, was beheaded in a Maimaichen courtyard because of a leftist speech he had given three years beforehand. Father Parnjakov, the Orthodox priest whose baptism of a Jewish baby had saved it from the Cossacks, was one of the first victims. The charge was that he had a son who was associated with the Bolsheviks in Irkutsk.

The most powerful motivation was greed. Ungern had declared that after a political execution, a third of the deceased's property should go to the informer on whose word he had been convicted and the rest to the government. As a result Sipailov's depredations rapidly lost even a trace of political motivation, and became blatant murder. A typical, but unusually well-recorded, case was that of a successful young Dane named Olufsen, who was working for Andersen and Meyer, a Chinese-based Danish-American import-export company. He had wisely also exported his Russian Jewish wife from the city before Ungern's arrival, but stayed behind himself to dispose of the firm's property. He was ‘one of those people who, if they think a fellow is a cad, positively have to go straight up to him and tell him so to his face with due emphasis. [. . .] He found himself obliged to rout round the town until he got hold of Ungern and could hiss the truth in his face.'
¹⁵

Sipailov became convinced that Olufsen had some hidden treasure, and so claimed that he wanted to buy the firm's herds, thus inducing Olufsen

 

In total somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred people were murdered by the Bureau, around 10 per cent of the expatriate community. The survivors were seized by fear, and most of those who could flee the city did so, even if they had previously sympathised with the Whites. Anybody in possession of money or property stood a good chance of having it requisitioned by Ungern's men, and probably being killed to prevent them complaining. Word spread fast, and the exodus of foreigners from Urga caused thousands living elsewhere in Mongolia to do likewise. Ungern soon put measures in place to prevent anyone recruited into the army from ‘deserting', but civilians, at least at first, were free to leave. Nearly thirteen hundred took the railway to Mukden in Manchuria, and over fifteen thousand eventually made their way to China or the Far Eastern Republic. Few ever returned to Mongolia.

Even Ungern was sometimes troubled by Sipailov's excesses. He would hasten his pace when passing the interrogation centre from where tortured screams emanated constantly, and never visited the dungeons in which the suspects were held. He later admitted that he knew about Sipailov's ‘executions, murders, and confiscations'
¹⁷
as well as his drunkenness - he had beaten Sipailov for drunkenness before, in fact - but he was unwilling to acknowledge Sipailov's sexual sadism, which he considered only ‘false rumour'. Corruption and murder were within the possible scope of a purifying army, but to
the Baron sex was beyond the pale. Even those sympathetic to Ungern found it hard to understand how he could tolerate Sipailov. There were widespread rumours that Sipailov had found a Transbaikalian shaman who, like the legendary and canny court soothsayer, had told Ungern that he would die shortly after Sipailov did. The truth was simpler; Ungern needed Sipailov in the same way as he did the Bogd Khan. He was a useful tool, especially since he brought in, despite his own corruption, considerable sums of money from those he targeted.

Ungern did take a more personal interest in certain political killings, especially of anybody who might threaten his position as leader. He probably had General Evtina, an ageing and popular officer who had arrived in Mongolia a few months beforehand, disposed of by the reliable Dr Klingenberg under the guise of treatment. Fear of poisoning was common in Urga; perhaps inspired by the Bogd's own record, both Sipailov and Ungern are widely presumed to have used it against political enemies. There was a certain amount of score-settling, too, as in the execution of one old colonel who had criticised Ungern's reign in Dauria.