The Bloody White Baron (35 page)

It may be that Ungern had other reasons for striking against Russia, motives tied up with his ever-present obsession with prophecy. According to Ossendowski, he had an exact sense of his own doom. He went to fortune-tellers and oracles, looking for guidance on what to do next. At the ‘old Shrine of Prophecies [. . .] a small building, blackened with age and resembling a tower with a plain round roof', he consulted two monks and said, ‘Cast the dice for the number of my days!' The priests rolled the dice and ‘the Baron looked and reckoned with them the sum before he spoke “One hundred thirty! Again one hundred thirty!”' Later he went with Ossendowski to an audience with the Bogd Khan and was told, ‘You will not die, but you will be incarnated in the highest form of being. Remember that, Incarnated God of War, Khan of grateful Mongolia.'
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The most ominous prophecy, though, was given in consultation with a Buriat fortune-teller in the ger of Ungern's Buriat friend Djambolon. Ossendowski was with him again, and turns it into a long and dramatic set piece. He describes the fortune-teller as

 

Ossendowski, meanwhile, managed to get himself assigned to a dubious ‘diplomatic mission' to Japan, taking him conveniently out of the upcoming war. As ever with Ossendowski, it's hard to know how seriously to take his account of Ungern. Ungern was certainly obsessed with his own fate, and convinced that biblical prophecy sanctioned his expedition; it would be entirely in character for him to consult with Mongolian oracles, as he did with the fortune-tellers who travelled with him. Elsewhere, though, he seems confident in his mission, not overshadowed by doom. It's possible that the Mongolians played Ungern's own superstitions against him. Eager to see the city rid of his men, it would have been relatively simple - and with some precedent - to influence the oracles to push him in a certain direction.

Whether motivated by oracles or logistics, the army began to move north. It was still the same ragtag mixture of nationalities - sixteen in total, according to Ungern - but bolstered with substantial contingents both of Mongolians and of former Chinese prisoners-of-war. Supplies were drawn by cart or carried by columns of camels, a
favourite Mongolian beast of burden. Before they rode out, Ungern issued a proclamation to the whole army, sending it by horse messenger to each White group. The Urga presses ran off hundreds of copies, and it was distributed not only in Mongolia, but among Whites elsewhere in Asia. It was the first such order he had made, but it was titled Order No. 15 for both political and superstitious reasons. It gave the impression of previous orders, and so of a more sizeable and organised force than actually existed. His fortune-tellers had also advised him that fifteen was his lucky number; the Bogd Khan had been crowned on the fifteenth day of the lunar month, after all.

It had a long, strangely academic opening, describing how

 

The opening text was not composed directly by Ungern, but written by Ossendowski. This was reflected in the historical-analytical language of the passage, some way removed from Ungern's own style. The ideas, however, were Ungern's, albeit tempered somewhat by Ossendowski's more moderate views. There was the appeal to the unity of nation and empire, the locating of the source of degeneration and chaos - the ‘revolutionary storm' - in the West, and the disdain for the intelligentsia. The view of the ordinary Russian people was pure Ungern; their hearts remained pure, but they had been corrupted by revolutionary influence.

The Order went on to explain how ‘revolutionary thought flattered the vanity of the mob, but it did not teach the people the first principles of freedom or construction'. Peasants, as Ungern had stressed
before, were not capable of doing anything without higher leadership. It echoed, too, a statement in the Russian edition of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion' that ‘the crowd is a barbarian, and acts as such on every occasion. As soon as the mob has secured freedom it speedily turns it into anarchy, in itself the height of barbarism.' It continued, ‘First the year 1905, and afterwards 1916-1917, witnessed the criminal, horrible harvest of the seed sown by the revolutionaries. [. . .] Three months of revolutionary licence sufficed to destroy what many centuries had achieved.' The emphasis on 1905 was straight from Ungern, remembering his wrecked home and ruined estates; Ossendowski, after all, had been involved in revolutionary activity himself at the time. It also reasserted Ungern's place among the most reactionary White faction for whom 1905 had been the beginning of the end, rather than an aborted opportunity for reform. Tradition and unity, preserved over generations, had been destroyed by the black forces of revolution.

There was still hope, though. ‘The people feel the need of a man whose name is familiar to them, whom they can love and respect. Only one such man exists; the man who is by right lord of the Russian earth, THE EMPEROR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS, MICHAEL ALEXAN-DEROVICH. ' The capitals give the pronouncement a cranky edge, like a letter written in green ink. Prince Michael had been missing, presumed dead for three years, and most of the Russian people didn't give a damn about him, but that no more dissuaded Ungern than the lack of support for the Qing among the ordinary Chinese had. Monarchy was the only right way to order the people, and they ought to long for it. If they didn't, they had been corrupted and would have to be punished.

The next few passages dealt with matters of logistics, organisation and movement, detailing how the various White groups should coordinate their assault. They outlined a tightly controlled partisan war, striking at the railways and using ‘Poles and foreigners who have suffered from the Bolsheviks' to replace Bolshevik leadership, rather than trusting to local authority. Most of them were composed by Ungern's chief of staff. The most important of them was the fourth statement, that ‘I recognise the authority of Ataman Semenov.' Asked about this, Ungern commented that ‘he did not consider himself Semenov's subordinate, but recognised Semenov only in order to favourably influence the armies'.
Mixed in with the instructions to other White units was a typically obsessive interest in the maintenance of discipline. The order regretfully stated that ‘because of the distances involved, I am deprived of the opportunity to administer punishment in person' and so order had to be upheld instead by each individual commander. ‘Future generations would bless or damn their names', depending on how well they performed. Everyone must ‘submit implicitly to discipline without which, as before, everything will collapse'.

So far, the Order could have been issued by many White commanders; there was nothing particularly unusual in it. The next passages, however, were entirely Ungern's:

 

This was the ultimate expression of Ungern's belief in the counter-revolutionary struggle as essentially a metaphysical one. Evil, as represented by Judaeo-communism, threatened everything. To oppose these evils, ‘mercy' had to be replaced with ‘hardness'. This was Nietzschean language, showing some of the same contempt for the old Christian values of softness and mercy. For Nietzsche, though, hardness was attained by discarding the old religious falsehoods and finding a new sense of values, a personal integrity. In Ungern's thought, the new moral values were still drawn from an ultimate divine authority, the ‘truth' that, for Ungern, represented divine revelation. The old values were not false; they were just no longer admissible in a time of such struggle. Facing a merciless enemy, it was necessary to be merciless in return. Ungern had praised war for scouring away
weakness; now, souls fired and hard, he and his followers could become the scourge of God. Only when Judaism and communism were removed would ‘Peace - the greatest gift of Heaven' be restored to earth.