The Bloody White Baron (37 page)

Public opinion was squarely in favour of the new rulers, for the moment. The corruption and incompetence of the old regime had been clear to see for the last decade, and Ungern's tyranny had permanently discredited the White cause. His enemies could only be good. There was the exciting possibility of real change, but with the reassuring continuity of Buddhism and the Bogd. The new state would be a people's republic, but the Bogd would remain the ceremonial monarch, and Buddhism the state religion. The presence of the Russians was a worry, but not a huge one; Mongolians were used to surviving with foreign patronage from one or another of their great neighbours. They had no way of knowing that within the next two decades the monasteries would be burnt, the statues melted down, the lamas murdered and the rituals proscribed, all under the auspices of their new comrades.

When I visited Ulaanbaatar in 2005 I found the buildings covered with pictures of a portly, genial-looking Russian actor in imperial dress. He was clearly trying to act ‘mad' but came across more as an eccentric grandfather. Across the posters were the words ‘BARON UNGERN! WHERE DID YOU HIDE YOUR GOLD?' This was a reference to what remains in Mongolia the most enduring aspect of Ungern's legend. After his defeat at Kiatkha, Ungern had retreated deep into the Mongolian hills, eventually gathering his forces near Karakorum, which had once been the great capital of Genghis Khan's empire. It had been a city of gers, like old Urga, but all that remained now were two giant stone turtles, glumly facing the desert. The magnificent
monastery of Erdene Zuu, one of the largest in Mongolia, was close by, and his beleaguered army had received food and succour there.

Not wanting his personal treasure to fall into Soviet hands, Ungern ordered it to be thrown into the nearby Orkhon river. Stories claim the treasure-bearers were then disposed of, like the coffin-bearers of Genghis Khan. This was untrue, but the exact location of his loot remains unknown, creating a mystery that puzzles acquisitive Mongolian fortune-hunters to this day. This was the message behind the posters; they reassured their readers that Ungern's gold would not have been lost had he invested it in Ulaanbaatar Savings and Loan.

From Erdene Zuu the army moved up to the Selenge river, huddling in the hills to evade the Red Army. They had retreated into a particularly vile part of the countryside, covered in stinking bogs and swarming with poisonous serpents. The horses proved more vulnerable than the soldiers; snake venom left men suffering from inflammations and fever, but it was fatal to horses. On the prompting of his fortune-tellers, Ungern prohibited the soldiers from killing the snakes, since it would bring bad luck. Trapped in mud, running from the enemy and hundreds of miles from home, most of them reasoned that their luck could hardly be any worse, and began a campaign of ‘ruthless extermination' against their reptilian enemy. At least they could kill the snakes. Enemy planes buzzed them from the air, scouting their positions and occasionally dropping bombs by hand on the hapless troops. They were only ancient reconnaissance aircraft, borrowed from the Far Eastern Republic, but there was nothing the men on the ground could do against them.

They were joined by other White forces, some of whom had successfully penetrated the border and terrorised the Russian inhabitants. Dr Ribo, who had been threatened with death as a possible socialist when he returned to Urga a couple of months beforehand, had been travelling with Ungern's secondary regiment, led by the notorious ‘Cutter' Rezuhin. They had sliced over the border, taking tiny towns and looking for communists to lynch. Upon learning in one village that every local Bolshevik had taken off on hearing of his coming, he was furious and ordered a randomly chosen old man to be hanged instead. The only communist left in town was the village schoolmistress, who was raped by the counter-intelligence officers and then shot. Ribo
observed in horror as Rezuhin did his best to imitate Ungern, torturing and executing seemingly at random and copying Ungern's lunatic disciplinary techniques. After fierce battles with the Reds, in which they had some success, they received word of Ungern's defeat and returned to reinforce him, carrying with them over a hundred wounded men.

Another force of mostly Buriat Cossacks had been sent to Urianhai in western Mongolia; they had had little luck, and on 21 July many were beaten to death by their Mongolian comrades during the evening prayers. Many of the Mongolian auxiliary units, in the meantime, had surrendered to the Red Army, seeing no reason to stay with Ungern's doomed crusade. Around this time Ungern decided that Colonel Kazagrandi, who was leading a group of three or four hundred Whites elsewhere, was a ‘robber', and dispatched another Cossack leader, Suharev, and a few dozen men with orders to find Kazagrandi's group, kill him and any officers loyal to him and take command. Suharev disobeyed and instead, along with Kazagrandi, tried to lead the group to China, but most of the men, along with Suharev and Kazagrandi, were lost in fighting with the Reds or the Chinese army.

On 15 July they received word of the fall of Urga. Many men had homes and families there; when they asked Urgen to discover the fate of their relatives they were brutally informed that ‘a good soldier should have no family', because worrying about them would sap their own courage. Ungern wrote a letter to the Bogd Khan four days after he heard the news, addressing him in the deferential third person, and saying that Urga's fall made him feel ‘ashamed not only before the Bogd Khan, but before every last simple Mongol, and it would be better if the ground swallows me up'.
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Deferentially, emphasising that he ‘was only a man, and it is not given to me to know the behaviour of a god [such as the Bogd]', he stated that ‘thinking with a simple mind' he could see that the Reds would ‘plunder everything and leave only beggars behind. So they have done not only in Russia, but also in other states. That is why it would be better, in my opinion, if the Bogd Khan would move to Uliassutai for a while.' Uliassutai was a region of western Mongolia not yet in Soviet hands, where Dambijantsan had previously held power. From there the Bogd could, in Ungern's view, direct resistance against the Red invaders and wait for Ungern to rescue him. In the meantime, he should trust to prophecy, and remember that this was all the fault of ‘the secret Jewish party'. As long as the Mongolian
people ‘kept their beliefs and customs, God will take pity on them and not allow violence and robberies by the Reds'.

The Bogd probably never received the letter, unless Ungern sent multiple copies, since it was intercepted by the Reds. Even if he did, he was canny enough to know that Ungern's cause was sinking fast. The capture of Urga by the Reds finally extinguished Ungern's dreams of empire. He now had no territory, few allies and was facing massively overwhelming Soviet forces. Now, more than ever, the only thing left to do was to run to Manchuria. Yet he resolved that he ‘could not approach the Chinese. Though I was at war with the Chinese revolutionaries, all the same I could not do it, and without the consent of Zhang Zuolin it would be impossible. The Chinese were arresting everyone who came across.'
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There was a certain truth in this; the Chinese authorities were making some attempts to prosecute various White arrivals, particularly Semenovites, for their actions in Siberia. Given the breakdown of law and order elsewhere in China, this effort to punish crimes committed abroad was strange. It reflected the political clout of the White exiles in Manchuria and elsewhere, many of whom were outraged at the misdeeds of Semenov's men. After the mass Russian exodus from Mongolia, reports of the atrocities had caused Ungern's property in Harbin and Khailar to be seized and auctioned, with the profits being distributed among the families of his victims. There was a serious risk of his facing trial and jail if he returned to Manchuria, no matter how good his previous connections among the Chinese officials.

More than that, though, becoming a skulking exile was not his vision of his own destiny. Even in the swamps word was still filtering in of the wider world, transmitted by messengers from the other scattered White groups. False rumour and wild hopes were endemic among the Whites in the Far East, beaten and despairing as they were. Ungern became convinced that the Japanese had launched a new counter-attack on the Far Eastern Republic, which had been so successful that they had retaken Chita, along with Semenov's men, and were even now pressing further into Russian territory. He probably believed this was the ‘blessing' that would come with the ‘thousand three hundred and five and thirty days'. The timing was about right, after all, and Ungern's interpretation of prophecy was always flexible. It was a sign that ‘God will hear the tortures and sufferings of the people and break the
head of this poisonous snake. It will happen in the third month of this winter.'
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His path was clear; he would lead his men into Russia again, where he could link up with the Japanese and Semenov and begin the struggle once more. Or, as he claimed to the Bogd, ‘the Reds [in Urga], being afraid of being cut off, will return back. The government of Suhbaatar and others will be easily liquidated without help from the Reds.'

Despite being beaten and pursued, he still believed he held the military advantage. Ungern's faith in the mobility of cavalry, who could ‘strike from any direction and at any time',
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remained unshaken. He was convinced that no infantry force could ever match or surround cavalry, and envisaged himself striking into Soviet territory yet again, terrifying and impossible to capture. ‘Cavalry is not afraid of infantry,' he declared later, ‘even of a million infantry!' His strategy also included that mainstay of disastrous military expeditions from Harpers Ferry to the Bay of Pigs: ‘The people will rise and join us!' He still trusted in the essential fealty of the Russian peasantry to the monarch, and believed that with his arrival the people would rise up against the Bolsheviks as though at the return of some prophesied king, sparking a counter-revolutionary wave; the uncorrupted Asian heart of Russia throwing off the decadence of the West. He based this upon the information he received from Russian refugees, the babblings of tortured Red prisoners, telegrams from the remaining White forces, and émigré rumour. Russia, he declared, was ‘a powder keg'.

His men were not as optimistic about their chances, nor happy about this plan. Ribo reported that ‘the mood in the regiment was suppressed and embittered. Everywhere grumbles were heard, threats to finish with “this unbearable experience” were distributed. Everyone who still had self-respect and the ability to protest gathered near my hospital tent for confidential conversations.'
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Only a few close lieutenants among the Russians, like Rezuhin, remained constant. Ungern's Mongol troops, particularly the Buriat, were still loyal, and the soldiers were still paralysed with fear. Horsemen patrolled the edges of the camp each night, hunting for deserters.

Punishments were as rigidly insane as ever; men were perched in the trees overnight, flogged to death, forced to run miles in full gear. As before, Ungern's followers from Dauria received kinder treatment than the
kolchakovec
; they were merely beaten for an offence that
would normally warrant execution. The paranoia about revolutionary spies continued; a young medic sent from Urga by Sipailov was burnt alive because Sipailov included a letter noting that he had allegedly been a Soviet public health commissioner. The few men who did escape still had to travel hundreds of miles across country, dodging revolutionary horsemen and vengeful Mongolians, until they arrived at safety in Manchuria.

According to Ungern there were ‘no signs of collapse' in the army and, indeed, it held together well enough as Ungern brought it across the border, evading the Red patrols by taking the narrow paths through the mountains. He was proud of this achievement, claiming that there were ‘tracks everywhere in Mongolia. Nowhere is impossible to pass, all it takes is energy', and that he had been able to lead his men despite ‘only having ever seen the area from a steamship' before.
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He had lost many men, but he still had around two thousand troops; enough, he hoped, to link up with his imagined Japanese expedition. He was striking for Verkhne-Udinsk (modern day Ulan-Ude), the capital of the Far Eastern Republic, but also the heartland of the Buriats. The army roughly followed the route of the Selenge river, which flows from the Mongolian mountains to Lake Baikal. This was the area where the ‘true Cossacks' lived, who, Ungern thought, would already be chomping at the bit of Soviet oppression.