The Bloody White Baron (31 page)

His own methods of detecting revolutionaries were more direct than the Bureau's. Bolshevik scout parties were becoming increasingly common, and he liked to deal with them personally. He claimed to be able to discern commissars by sight, a kind of mystic vision which allowed him to see the traces of evil. Perhaps he believed Keyserling's claim that he had ‘peculiar clairvoyant gifts'. After the capture of six Red soldiers,

He identified the two as commissars, and passports were found marking them as such. ‘Beat them to death with sticks,' he ordered. The others were ‘peasants mobilised by the Bolsheviki' and were enlisted into his army. His perceptions were rarely so accurate. To most witnesses, Ungern's screening process was a random absurdity, life and death
hanging on what resembled a medieval priest witch-sniffing for evil, yet the techniques he employed to screen out those undeserving of life would be taken to far greater extremes a couple of months later.

Ungern often interrogated people personally to determine their sympathies. N.M. Ribo, an émigré doctor working with other White forces, was interrogated by Ungern personally. Throughout their dialogue Ungern fixed him with his ‘inflamed stare' as if ‘he wished to glare directly at my soul'.

This impressive listing of Ribo's anti-revolutionary credentials was not quite enough for Ungern, however, who went on to ask accusingly why he had tried to intervene to prevent the executions of two other Russians, ‘known socialists whom I had ordered to be finished off'. Ribo knew his life hung on the answer, but decided to be direct, firmly answering that, having known the accused in Urga before Ungern's conquest, he was ‘confident that both of them were enemies of Bolshevism and sincerely loved Russia' and so it was natural for him to protest their arrest. He was reluctantly accepted as a genuine White - for the moment - but Ungern shrieked at him in his shrill voice, ‘I shall not suffer any criminal criticism or propagation in my armies! Remember this and know, my eyes and ears are everywhere!'

Ungern used terror not only in Urga, but in order to bring White groups into line elsewhere in Mongolia. The other White groups, in Ungern's opinion, were doomed unless they had a single leader, and harsh measures were justified in order to unify them. He ordered, by
his own estimate, the execution of one or two hundred people, sending out executioners and death warrants for any leader he perceived as disloyal, potentially revolutionary, or a challenge to his own power. The threat of execution hung over every other White in Mongolia. The machine guns and artillery he sent them from his stocks in Urga can hardly have been adequate consolation.

Despite Ungern's paranoia and Sipailov's greed, there were real revolutionaries in Mongolia. In 1919, with the abolition of autonomy, several groups had formed which espoused socialist views mixed with nationalism. They comprised mostly young officials and army officers, intellectuals by the standards of Mongolia at the time, with a smattering of foreign education and a vague ideology. They had established contact with the Bolsheviks in 1920, talking up their strength in an effort to secure aid against the Chinese - claiming, for instance, that they had thousands of members and hundreds of rifles, when the real numbers of both were in the dozens - and had formally organised the Mongolian People's Party on broadly Leninist principles.

Sensibly, most had left the city long before Ungern arrived, not least because the Chinese liked them no better than the Whites did. The few that remained went into hiding, while their colleagues embarked on their own mission of liberation - with the help of the Soviets. Two of their leaders, both in their twenties and from poor backgrounds who were to become Soviet-era heroes in Mongolia, were Damdin Suhbaatar and Khorloogiin Choibalsan. Suhbaatar (the name means ‘axe hero') was a young, passionate former officer, who had served against the Chinese in border skirmishes in 1917. Choibalsan was a former Buddhist novice who had managed to get himself sent to Russia for formal education, but had been recalled by the Mongolian government after the outbreak of the Russian revolution.

In mid-1920 they both travelled to Irkutsk, where they joined representatives of many other ethnic minorities seeking Soviet help in their struggle for freedom. Unsurprisingly, both of them became more doctrinally Marxist-Leninist, but their quest for aid was at first largely futile. They lived on the margins of the new order, constantly trying to raise awareness of Mongolia's plight. While some Soviet
authorities, particularly in the Comintern, remained enthralled by the romance of igniting revolution in far-flung states, central foreign policy was more pragmatic. Still nervous about the risk of conflict with China, and struggling hard to maintain the pieces of the former Russian Empire they had left, they saw Mongolia as a step too far. Marxist doctrine held that the oriental nations were centuries behind Europe in their development. Rustic, underdeveloped and monk-ridden, the country was considered a long way from ready for the proletarian revolution.

All that changed with Ungern's arrival. The risk of Mongolia becoming a permanent base for further White incursions into Soviet territory, combined with the brutal reputation Ungern had acquired in Siberia, prompted a shift in policy. Although the Red Army was clearly on the brink of total victory in Russia, with the few remaining Whites contained in the Maritime Province in the Far East, the threat of counter-revolution still haunted many of the Bolshevik leadership. There remained an eagerness to work with the Chinese if possible - and, indeed, the Peking government was making cautious overtures to Moscow for help against Ungern - but Mongolia had become a clear strategic objective. The Red Army began to be readied as soon as the first false reports of Ungern's capture of Urga were received in Moscow in November 1919. The Fifth Red Army was ordered to prepare the 104th Brigade on the border in order eventually to ‘cross the Mongolian border and attack the detachment of Baron Ungern with the aim of smashing and destroying it',
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though the terrible condition of the Trans-Siberian Railway and food shortages throughout the region left the Red Army in no position to launch an immediate offensive. Things were made worse in February 1921 when, in preparation for the Russian attack on Poland, all available resources were shifted from the Eastern to the Western Front. For the moment, there could be no invasion - but the Mongolian revolutionaries looked like a playable alternative.

For Suhbaatar and Choibalsan, who had spent months writing importuning letters requesting ‘mercy on the suffering of our people', all this meant that the Soviet government was finally coming through with arms and money. Ungern's taking of Urga clinched the deal, and they returned to Mongolia and began to gather the nucleus of a revolutionary army. Their first unit, formed on 17 February, consisted
of twenty horsemen riding under two yellow-and-red banners. The red was for communism, the yellow for Buddhism. The Mongolian People's Party was not so revolutionary as to give up the faith, or the Bogd. For all their Marxist education, the leaders were almost certainly still believers themselves. They claimed that the Bogd had been forced to become Ungern's puppet, and that they, not the White forces, were the true warriors of the faith and liberators of Mongolia. Still undermanned and mostly unarmed, they relied on a paltry supply of Russian weapons and captured guns from dead Chinese.

After fighting a series of skirmishes and recruiting more men, they decided to target Kiatkha, a trading city on the northern border, conveniently near their lines of supply from the Soviets. The Chinese garrison there, some two and a half thousand soldiers, was partly made up of men who had fled from Urga, had no winter clothing and little ammunition, and were completely demoralised. They had carried out a bloody purge of Russians and Mongols over the winter, killing several dozen as revenge for Ungern's actions, and the locals were keen to see them go. With only a few hundred men, the Mongol revolutionaries successfully took the city on 18 March, a military success on a par with Ungern's capture of Urga.

Renaming the city Altan Bulag (Golden Spring) to symbolise the rebirth of Mongolian hopes, a rival government to the Urga-based regime was rapidly established. Although they controlled only a small part of Mongolia, eighteen hundred square miles or so, stories of their success soon spread through the whole country. They had achieved less than Ungern had against the Chinese, but they had done so using only Mongolians, and without Ungern's excesses. While they still claimed that they were setting out to liberate the Bogd Khan, the Bogd began to issue encyclicals against them, describing them as criminals, Bolsheviks, bearers of ‘a disease worse than the plague', and revolutionaries who would tear down the very foundations of Mongolian life. They represented a direct challenge to Ungern's rule, and they spread the word of White atrocities wherever they could.

For the moment, Ungern had other worries. What the Mongolians valued most about their new state was their independence from China.
Revered though the Bogd was, it was the sight of the routed and shamed Chinese, hated both as usurers and looters, that really solidified the popularity of the new regime. Ungern, however, was deeply concerned about keeping up relations with the Chinese. Although the Chinese in the country were scattered and defeated, there was still the risk of another expeditionary force. With the Bolsheviks in control of most of Siberia, the main line of trade and supply ran from Peking to Urga. The only other possible route was through eastern Mongolia to the territories still held by the Whites and Japanese in the Maritime Province on the edge of the Pacific, but the route was dangerous and bandit-ridden, and it was unlikely that the beleaguered Whites there could spare men or supplies.

A central government still existed, at least nominally, in Peking, but Ungern had no great interest in dealing with it. Centralised power had more or less collapsed, and a series of provincial leaders were vying for control. The key figure in northern China was Zhang Zuolin, the ‘Old Marshal' of the north. A veteran of the Qing armies and an ethnic Manchu, he had begun building a power base in the north as early as 1904, when he had used his troops to aid the Japanese in the war against Russia. Now in moderately firm control of most of Manchuria, he continued to receive orders from the ‘central' government, which he ignored. He was exactly the kind of figure who had risen in the past, after a period of chaos, to found a new dynasty.

Right now, in the swirl of alliances, Zhang was temporarily against the Anfu clique who had sent Little Xu to Mongolia. He also controlled the main line of possible supply for the White forces in Mongolia, coming from the Russian exiles in Manchuria and arms dealers in Peking and other parts of China. His men were thoroughly bribable and most of the rural areas of Manchuria were barely policed, so his approval was not absolutely necessary for supplies to get through, but it was helpful. Beyond the practical reasons for buttering up Zhang lay a deeper-rooted ideological sympathy on Ungern's part. Zhang was anti-republican, pro-Japanese and supported the restoration of the imperial family - so long as it remained under his thumb. For Ungern, the collapse of the old Qing empire had been a calamity, part of the wave of ‘revolutionary death' which had swept over Asia and Europe. The Qing had preserved the Mongolians in their isolated purity, they had ‘covered themselves with undying glory',
and, most importantly of all, they had been a divinely appointed monarchy. The new Chinese Republic, on the other hand, was nothing but a pack of revolutionaries.