The Bloody White Baron (33 page)

As we saw earlier, such universalising language was common in the Western esoteric tradition in the early twentieth century. The next step of Ungern's thought was more unusual. Socialism was blasphemous not only because it went against divinely ordained order, but because it was a false religion. Communism was, according to Ungern, ‘a kind of religion. It is not obligatory for a religion to have a god. If you are familiar with Eastern religions, they present the rules of how to order your life and the state. Ordering your life based on Lenin is also a religion. ' The issue of true and false religion was far more important than nationality; people did not go to war for their ‘tormented homeland' - you can almost hear the sneer in his voice there - but for religion, the only thing that ‘made war possible!' To us this might sound like a criticism of religion, but for Ungern, still as enthusiastic about the vital qualities of war as ever after seven grim years of slaughter, it simply meant that religion was an essential part of a serious life.

All this said, his knowledge of both Christianity and Buddhism was rudimentary. He had never formally abandoned his family's Lutheran faith, but his thinking was clearly far more Orthodox, drawing upon traditions of hierarchy, stability and monarchy that were deeply rooted in Russian religion. Although he constantly made reference to ‘the Scriptures', he barely knew the Bible at all, with the exception of the great, awful images of Revelation and portions of the Old Testament prophets. When he was asked for the specifics of a supposedly biblical prophecy to which he attributed such authority, his response was that it was ‘somewhere in the Scriptures' and that although he had looked, he had been unable to locate it. Perhaps he found it easier to believe in
their truth if he only engaged them at second hand, like a fundamentalist churchgoer who never reads the Bible in full. He maintained that all his cruelty and terror in no way ‘contradicted the doctrine of the Gospel'.

He certainly doesn't seem ever to have attained any deep understanding of Buddhism. It was the surface trappings that appealed to him: ritual, order, ceremony. Most of all he valued its purity, the preservation of the old and correct order of things. This applied not only to Buddhism but to all the beliefs and practices of Asia. The restoration of divine monarchy would come not from the ‘rotten West, which is under the influence of mad revolution and the decline of morality in all its manifestations, both physical and spiritual',
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but from the ‘yellow Eastern culture, which was formed three thousand years ago and has been kept inviolable'.
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It was ‘impossible to aspire for the restoration of European Monarchs, owing to the deterioration of public mind and science which has driven the nations out of their minds'. The East would rise, and replace the irretrievably corrupt West, from which ‘no deliverance could be expected'
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and which brought ‘corruption to mankind'. There was no ‘Yellow Peril', but instead, in Ungern's mind, a deadly ‘white peril'. He considered ‘the yellow race more vital and more capable of state-building, and the victory of the yellow over the white both desirable and inevitable'.
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He had taken the old Russian and German fears of Asia and reversed them, seeing in the ‘Yellow Peril' the triumph of righteousness rather than a wave of barbarians.

All this was, apparently, predicted in the Bible. Ungern was uncertain exactly where, but he assured anyone who would listen that, according to biblical prophecy, ‘The yellow race will move against the white, both in ships and in fiery chariots. The yellow race will gather together and fight the white; eventually the yellow will be the masters.' This was probably a confused memory of Ezekiel, which is full of foreign armies descending in ‘chariots, wagons and wheels' to punish the faithless and also features the famous ‘chariots of fire' which bore Ezekiel to heaven, and which have fascinated wacky biblical theorists from William Blake to UFO cultists ever since. Ungern also drew upon Buddhist prophecies to bolster his assertions, saying, according to
Ossendowski, that ‘in the Buddhistic and ancient Christian books we read stern predictions about the time when the war between the good and evil spirits must begin. Then there must come the unknown “Curse” which will conquer the world, blot out culture, kill morality and destroy all the people.'
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Russia existed half-way between the pure East and the corrupt West. It was still redeemable, but its ‘future, crushed morally, mentally and economically, is terrible and can not be imagined'. However, Russia could ‘rise unanimously against the revolutionary spirit' which ‘cannot be expected of the Western Powers now'. The monarchy could be restored, but only ‘on the condition that the Russian people would regain their common sense, otherwise they would be subjugated to acknowledge such necessity'.
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Ungern, and others like him, would whip the country into shape, but first it had to undergo a cleansing period to rid itself of corrupt Western influence, particularly that of the Jews.

Against Asia's preservation of the truth stood the lie of Jewish Bolshevism. ‘Eastern culture' had been founded three thousand years ago; so had Judaism and the International, in ancient Babylon. The Communist Party was ‘a secret Jewish party which arose 3000 years ago for the capture of authority in all countries, and its purpose now is being carried out'.
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This was the climax of a long war. Hidden oriental wisdom contrasted with hidden Jewish evil. Knowledge of their true purposes was another hidden secret, ‘known only by a few people', while ‘all the Jewish states have followed their plan'. The Jewish hand could be seen in more than just revolution, however. Like many anti-Semites, Ungern believed the Jews were sufficiently cunning as to be simultaneously behind both capitalism and revolutionary socialism. As he outlined in a letter to a friend in Peking, the West was fundamentally corrupted by Jewish capitalists, an ‘omnipotent, though very often undetected, enemy'. The Western Powers cared

Judaism, socialism, capitalism - all were fundamentally corrupt.

The plan was simple. The first stage had already been accomplished; the restoration of the Bogd Khan and the creation of a new Mongolian state. This state, especially when reunified with Inner Mongolia, would provide ‘military and moral defence against the rotten West, which is under the influence of mad revolution and the decline of morality in all its manifestations, both physical and spiritual'. Now the other tribes of central Asia, those ‘of the Mongol root', could be united under the banner of Ungern's state. As he wrote, ‘The next stage in the revolutionary movement in Asia, the movement carried on under the watchword of “Asia for the Asians”, means the formation of the Central Mongolian Kingdom which must unite all the Mongolian tribes.'
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The Tibetans, the Kirghiz and the ‘Chinese Mohammedans' - the Uighur of Xinjiang, then Chinese Turkestan - would, Ungern presumed, all join this alliance, along with the various Mongol and Turkic-descended peoples of the former Russian Empire:

An essential part of this was the restoration of the Qing dynasty, so bringing about a resurgent monarchist China. Like the old Russian union, the new empire needed a central core, and ‘the salvation of the world should start from China'.
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After that, Japan and the other Asian countries would naturally join this happy yellow union, and the full power of the yellow race could be brought to bear against the degenerate whites.

There were a few holes in this plan. The most obvious was that Ungern had only the vaguest idea how each stage was to be carried out. He had conquered Mongolia through sheer energy and desperation, but had no clear idea what to do next. His first step towards
broadening his pan-Asian alliance was to send letters to a swathe of prominent regional figures and hope for a favourable response. The targets included Buriat and Altai leaders, Chinese warlords and politicians, the Dalai Lama and the deposed Qing boy-emperor Pu Yi. They were strange communications, a mixture of lecture and sycophancy, with an easy assumption that the recipient shared Ungern's views about monarchy, revolution, the Apocalypse and Judaism. They mirrored, ironically enough, the naive enthusiasm of the International Comintern, which fired off a similar series of letters to a different set of foreign parties and figures. Few of Ungern's letters ever reached their intended recipients, most of their carriers taking the opportunity to desert if they were not intercepted by the Bolsheviks, and those that did were disregarded. In any event, he received no replies.

He placed a heavy burden upon his agents in China and Manchuria, asking them to ‘address your activities to Tibet, Chinese Turkestan, and in the first place in Sin-tsan. You must find influential persons in the mentioned regions to whom you can address yourselves personally. '
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His agents, who were living an impoverished existence on the edges of the White refugee community, did not manage to spin the web of influence Ungern was hoping for. Yet he remained optimistic about his prospects and continued to canvass support for his crusade from visiting foreigners; understandably reluctant to upset him, their response was more often diplomatic than truthful.

The next problem was Ungern's splendid ignorance of the region's politics. He was familiar only with Mongolia and Manchuria, had never ventured further south than Peking, and his grasp of reality about the rest of Asia was tenuous in the extreme. His vision of China, and especially of the popularity of the Qing dynasty, was a mixture of wishful thinking, projection and fantasy. The Han Chinese had no love for their former rulers, who had not only been corrupt, incompetent and arrogant, but had compounded these typical failings of Chinese government by being foreign as well. Ungern maintained a naive faith that, like the Russians, the Chinese people had been led astray by revolutionaries, and that they remained essentially monarchist. Most of the other groups he was so keen to bring together wanted nothing more than autonomy; the Tibetans and the Uighur, in particular, were pushing hard to keep their independence from China. Ungern, however, believed that the ‘majority of the peoples of
Northern China and Manchuria are monarchists, and that the western Mohammedans [the Uighur] will not lag behind in the business of the restoration of the rightful heir to the Chinese throne'. Equally, a resurgent China, free from Japanese control, was Japan's worst nightmare. When he talked with people about his plans, they ‘considered it inconvenient to object to the optimistic hopes of the Baron'.
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But it was precisely Ungern's ignorance of the realities of most of Asia which let him dream of creating an ideal empire there. There is a tremendous sense of fantasy about his plans. They smack of the oriental dreams of European mystics; the preservation of hidden secrets and pure kingdoms. It was also the ultimate exertion of his own sense of will; he could be, if not emperor of China, at least a kingmaker on a grand scale. The pan-Mongolian movement had been distasteful to him because it looked to establish an essentially modern idea of a state, because of the obvious corruption of those involved, and because it was all too clearly a plan to create a Japanese puppet. Nevertheless, it provided the kernel of his own scheme, though Ungern's proposed state would not be a modern country but a revived empire, a re-creation of the legacy of Genghis Khan. It was also a mirror image of the most cosmopolitan dreams of imperial Russia. A single overarching kingdom could take in a multitude of peoples, languages and religions, united by one monarchy and a belief in ‘truth and honour'. Having lost his place in one empire, he could regain it in another. He would be a preserver of the things that had been good and righteous about the old imperial Russia; a carrier of the truth from one race to the next, like the hidden masters of occult tradition.