The Bloody White Baron (36 page)

The same principles would be preached a generation later, in another order given before an invasion of Russia:

 

Hitler's infamous Commissar Order, however, did not include the dramatic prophecy of Ungern's peroration:

 

This was a direct quotation from the opening and closing verses of the twelfth chapter of Daniel, a famously strange and ambiguous prophecy. It was often strongly associated with the purported wrongdoing of the Jews, whose refusal to recognise Christ was taken to be the sign that ‘none of the wicked shall understand', and used to justify anti-Semitism. There is a sense of mystery about the prophecy, too, a suggestion of hidden wisdom and secrets revealed only to the initiate, which appealed to Ungern's esoteric sensibilities. His own
interpretation of the text was that the abomination of desolation referred to was the Bolshevik decree of 20 January, 1918, which had closed the churches and thus removed the ‘daily sacrifice' of communion. One thousand two hundred and ninety days had passed from then to the beginning of his attack on the Bolsheviks. Actually, it was one thousand two hundred and sixteen, but it was close enough, and figures were never Ungern's strong suit. Some kind of blessed relief, then, would come forty-five days after the struggle began. A month and a half was hardly a long time to endure.

The Order was not a success. The
kolchakovec
saw it, reasonably enough, as ‘the product of someone [. . .] suffering from megalomania and a thirst for human blood'.
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Over-long and complicated, it confused even Ungern's most loyal supporters. Few people shared Ungern's wild, prophecy-seeking optimism as his men rode out from Urga on 21 May. Most expected only to inflict a local defeat to the Red Army, perhaps to liberate part of the Transbaikal and inspire further resistance. Many of the Russians, particularly those recruited in the last few months, knew the expedition was doomed and remained with the army only for fear of execution as a deserter. For a large number of the soldiers, particularly the Chinese, it was just another assignment in an essentially meaningless martial career, in which all that mattered was survival and loot. There was not much promise of either in this campaign.

Ungern's main force moved towards Kiatkha, the city the Mongolian revolutionaries had seized in March. Kiatkha itself was a border town, a sprawling mess that was essentially one city with its twin on the Russian side of the border, Troitskosavsk. The Kiatkha river supposedly separated the two, but it was a mere trickle. The Russian town was in Buriat territory anyway, and they were close to their cousins across the border. Although Russian Orthodox churches stood on one side and Buddhist temples on the other, both towns shared the same architecture: low-slung wooden Siberian cabins and tea-trading warehouses. It had been wealthy in the past, when it had been the only funnel for trade between the Manchurian and Russian empires; the magnificent Church of the Resurrection, built by Russian
merchants close to the border, had been the second-richest in the empire, with altar doors of solid silver. By now, these had been long-ago stripped, melted down for funds by one side or another, as had the rest of the town's riches. Like Urga, it had a Chinese section known as Maimaichen, walled and isolated. A trading centre for two hundred years, a place where Chinese and Russian and Mongol could mix and do deals, it was a fitting target for Ungern's Russian-Mongol army.

They were facing a similar mix of Russian and Mongolian soldiers, assembled around Kiatkha in the last couple of months. The core was the 35th Division of the Fifth Red Army, experienced fighters toughened, like so many of Ungern's men, by seven years of continuous fighting. They were under the command of the Latvian soldier Konstantin Neumann, a skilful veteran of both the Imperial and Red armies, with a small auxiliary cavalry force led by Konstantin Rokossovskii, later one of the great generals of the Second World War. They had been in the most tumultuous battles of the civil war, taking on the vast White armies which had come close to crushing the Bolsheviks entirely in 1919. Now, with the Whites defeated and exiled, and Soviet power hardening across the country, this was mopping-up work for them; bandit-crushing, not battle. Many of them were reservists, who had been called up when the division was reactivated in March. The sooner this was finished, the sooner they could go home.

There were around eight thousand of them, outnumbering Ungern's main force by two to one, in defensive positions, with better artillery and considerably more machine-guns. They were supplemented by around two thousand Mongolians. The Russian soldiers had been ordered to hang back for the moment and engage Ungern's men only when they actually crossed the border. This thwarted Ungern's best chance of success; he had hoped for a major Red incursion, which would have given him the opportunity to use his superior knowledge of the terrain and the mobility of his cavalry to harass, encircle and destroy the enemy. Now the fight was on the enemy's terms.

The battle began with an impulsive disaster. The forces of Bayar Gun, a noted Inner Mongolian prince and anti-Chinese guerrilla fighter, were ahead of the main body of troops, eager to clash with their treacherous countrymen. On the morning of 1 June, they destroyed themselves in a heroic, spontaneous charge against the fortified revolutionary positions; Bayar Gun himself was mortally wounded and died in hospital the next
day. Both Ribo and Alioshin recorded that the news sent Ungern into a wild rage; he seized, beat and tied up Dr Klingenberg, presumably blaming him for Bayar Gun's death. He replaced Bayar with another Mongolian prince, who was foolish enough to express doubts about whether the operation could succeed. Ungern had him buried alive.

Ungern's men called, according to their memoirs, for him to move immediately upon the city, but he tarried. The omens were not yet right, and the artillery and machine-guns were kept behind. (One sometimes wonders whether Ungern's fortune-tellers weren't deliberately trying to sabotage his efforts.) He was confident; according to him his army was well-fed, supplied with ammunition (two hundred bullets a man), and ‘as strong as the army of Genghis Khan'.
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The delay gave the Reds time to plan their attack, moving men and artillery up into position. Around Kiatkha were low hills, covered with woods, some of the most beautiful territory in the region, but also ideal ambush country. The heat was sweltering; Mongolia turns from freezer in the winter to oven in the summer. In these bucolic surroundings, Ungern brought his army against his true enemy for the first time - and was shattered.

After some skirmishing, fighting began in earnest on 11 June. Ironically, the Red cavalry used the oldest of Mongolian tactics, engaging Ungern's forces in battle for six hours, then staging a mock retreat. Ungern's soldiers rushed after them only to find themselves trapped in a ravine, whereupon they were pounded with artillery and enfiladed by machine-gun fire from all sides. They ‘were swept from their feet like grass before a scythe. Men and horses were piled together in bloody heaps.'
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Two days of chaotic fighting ensued. Ungern's army was caught in the woods, surrounded and forced into a panicked retreat. Their own heavy equipment, with the exception of a couple of guns, was abandoned as they dashed back through the hills, seeking safety beyond the river.

They could have been annihilated then, but the Red commanders were relying on forty-year-old maps of no great accuracy, and misread the course of the Iro river. Ungern brought the remnants of his force together there, and drove them across. Even today many Mongolians not only cannot swim, but are distinctly afraid of water. Back then, when fear of vengeful water spirits was far more potent, the idea of plunging into the raging river on horseback must have terrified Ungern's Mongolians. Fortunately, some of the Chinese soldiers found boats, but
Ungern disapproved of this slow and unmanly method, which would also mean abandoning good horses. He discouraged them in the only way he knew; anyone who took the boat was to receive ten strokes on the back when they reached the other side. Some troops were lost in the river, but most made it across.

As Ungern tried to regroup his scattered forces, the Soviets openly entered Mongolia on 28 June. The decision to ‘liberate' the country had formally been made on 14 June, and confirmed by Lenin and the Politburo two days later, but it was an inevitable consequence of the decision to mobilise the troops and support the Mongolian revolutionaries months beforehand. The official reason was to pursue and destroy Ungern, ‘the common enemy of both the Russian and the Chinese people', but there were other motivations. Control of Mongolia would prevent it falling into permanent warlord-anarchy, becoming a border-land state from which White guerrillas could raid into Soviet territory. It would give Russia a buffer zone against Chinese chaos and Japanese expansionism. It was part of the final chapter of the civil war, the last stomping-out of territory controlled by the enemies of the people - but it was also the completion of an age-old imperial dream.

There was nobody left to stand in the way of the Red Army. Ten thousand men marched slowly across the hills to Urga, wilting in the summer heat. They were preceded by armoured cars and reconnaissance planes, sending a shock wave of alarm through the country. The Bogd Khan's court panicked, alternately threatening the revolutionaries and pleading with them to retreat. They turned to prayer and sorcery, invoking the wrath of Mongolia's divine protectors against the Red plague. The last god they had called upon, however, was currently hiding in the hills. There would be no more saviours from the north.

There was only a paltry garrison left in the city, under the command of Sipailov. It put up a token resistance, easily brushed aside by the advancing enemy, and then fled, escaping to Manchuria. A few messengers rode north to find Ungern. The revolutionaries and their Russian comrades entered the capital in triumph, greeted by rapturous crowds. Despite the imprecations of the lamas, the Reds still declared
their commitment to Buddhism. ‘Everything, except religion, must be subject to gradual change,'
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they stated in a letter given to the Bogd's court. The chief sin of the old regime, the invaders claimed, had been its wounding of the spirit of the faith. The Bogd had only been an unwitting tool of evil forces, and bore no blame for what had occurred, either during the White occupation or during the calamitous years of independence, when he had been beguiled and misguided by wicked aristocratic advisers. He, of course, was only too eager to embrace this version of events. He might have lost his political power, but his life of privilege remained untouched.