The Bloody White Baron (38 page)

The vast Russian-Mongol border was littered with
ovoos
, Mongolian cairns. Passers-by considered it brought good luck to add a stone or tie a scarf; the oldest had been marked by thousands of cross-border travellers. In the borderlands were dozens of scattered villages, tiny Russian outcrops with a couple of hundred souls at most, scrabbling to eke out a living from the hard Siberian landscape. It was upon these isolated communities that Ungern fell. Hearing of his coming, most of the villagers had already fled. In any village he thought might be ‘Red', which was most of them, he ordered the buildings to be set alight. There was the normal run of wholesale slaughter, directed by Ungern. A typical instance was at Novodmitrievka, where he murdered two whole families, including the children. Asked why he ordered the killing of children, he replied, ‘To leave no tails . . .'
²⁰
- the children,
he thought, would otherwise grow up seeking revenge. The families of commissars were ‘superfluous ballast'. In another village he locked the villagers in a barn and ordered it to be burned, standing and chanting prayers while he watched it blaze.

On 31 July, he came upon the 7th Special Detachment of the Red Army, quartered near the great Buriat Buddhist monastery of Guzino Ozero, situated on the lake of the same name. To many of Ungern's men this was an important sacred site, and its occupation by the Bolsheviks a kind of sacrilege. Taking it would be a boost to morale. The enemy had artillery, and Ungern callously sent the transports and the wounded along the main road to attract the Red artillery fire, while the rest of the men moved in to surround them. They rushed fiercely upon the Reds, battling among the outlying temples of the monastery and the Buriat yurts. Many of the Reds fought to the last. Ungern admired them. ‘Clever,' he remarked, ‘to shoot up to the last moment, and then to shoot yourself.' It was probably his own ideal of death; fighting to the last moment, and then an honourable suicide. It was ‘clever' in another way; captured Red officers and commissars were inevitably tortured to death. In this case Ungern lined up the four hundred prisoners taken during the battle and, using his magic communist-detecting powers, ran his eyes over them and picked out a hundred as either commissars or Jews. They were killed; their comrades were reluctantly mobilised into Ungern's army. The local monks, meanwhile, attempted to steal from Ungern's transports, upon which he had them all flogged. Monastic sanctity, for Ungern, took second place to all-important military discipline.

When word of Ungern's reappearance reached the Soviet commanders they were nonplussed. They had thought his force entirely destroyed during the battles at Kiatkha; now he was raiding Russian soil. Thousands of men were mobilised by train or horse to track and surround Ungern's force. In the early weeks of late July, as Ungern came close to Verkhne-Udinsk, he found himself hemmed in by Soviet forces. There was no final battle, no clash of good and evil, just a series of blockings, skirmishes and retreats, and, for Ungern, the slow, painful realisation that his plans had been based on fantasy. His forces were harassed by Soviet regiments with armoured cars, but were able to evade them by riding through terrain too rough for the vehicles to follow. The worst moment came when his men saw planes in the sky, and rode joyfully towards them, believing them to be Japanese.
Then the bombs started falling, accompanied by rains of sharp nails, shaken out of the planes in boxes by the Soviet aviators.

On 4 August Ungern reluctantly concluded that the people would not rise, and that the Japanese invasion was a fiction. He began to head back towards Mongolia, slipping between the Soviet divisions, despite the pursuing aircraft. They could move only slowly, since both horses and men were worn out. Most of the men who had lost their mounts were left behind, but it still took ten days to ride the hundred miles back to the border, a trip that cavalry would normally expect to do in four. On the 14th he brought his exhausted, tattered force back across the border into Mongolia. Only around five hundred of them were left; the rest had been killed, abandoned or captured, or had deserted. It had been roughly a year since he had first brought his army here to find safe haven from the Bolshevik advance. Now this last bastion was taken, but Ungern was not defeated yet. With Mongolia gone, he would seek a new land of Buddhist purity - whether his men liked it or not.

NINE

The Last Adventurer

With this final defeat, Ungern shed any trace of civilisation. He ‘rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. [He] had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like the reincarnation of a prehistoric ape man. People were afraid to look at him.'
¹
He had been literally stripped of his German and Russian heritage; now only the holy warrior remained. The rest of the division was equally battered; over a hundred were wounded and they had not had rest or proper food in days. Even Ungern now acknowledged that they could not confront the Red Army by themselves. Flight was the only choice.

In the soldiers' view there were just two rational alternatives; they could strike out north-east, attempting to rejoin the remnants of Semenov's forces and the shelter of the Japanese army, or they could head to Manchuria. Predictably, Ungern scorned such tediously rational options and declared instead that they were going to Tibet. There were some minor logistical problems: crossing the Gobi Desert without food or water supplies; the fact that the Reds held much of the territory through which the route passed; the formidable barrier of the Tibetan mountains in winter. There was also no guarantee of a friendly welcome if they reached their destination. When Rezuhin cautiously pointed out that if they attempted to cross the desert, ‘they would be doomed from lack of water and rations', Ungern cynically answered that ‘the loss of human material did not frighten him, and that his decision was final'.
²

Ungern's Tibetan soldiers had been among the most loyal and skilled of his followers, and he seems to have had some tentative
contact with the Dalai Lama, so the plan might not have been utterly lunatic, but the decision to go to Tibet was nevertheless rooted not in logic, but in Ungern's vision of the mystical East. More importantly, Tibet was a holy country, a place of pilgrimage for Mongolian Buddhists, and in the West it was the ultimate land of mystery. Sealed to foreigners and more or less completely uncharted until the British expedition of 1904, it was a perfect blank slate on which Ungern could project his mystical fantasies. Mongolia had failed and been corrupted; Tibet was his last hope that there still existed a place where the old ‘beliefs and customs' had been preserved.

Few of the Baron's men shared his fantasies. Tibet was a country of which they knew nothing apart from travellers' tales; it was famously inhospitable to foreigners and offered no easy prospect of escape to the wider world. They might make a new home in Vladivostok or Harbin, but never in Lhasa. Ungern's decision was the final straw. Dissent among the men turned to talk of mutiny and it soon became clear that their predicament had but one practical solution: Ungern had to die.

The extent of the conspiracy to murder Ungern is unclear, but it involved a minimum of fifteen officers, probably more, who acted with the tacit support of most of the Russian soldiers, at least. Among the ringleaders were several high-ranking staff officers including two Russian colonels, Ostrovskii and Evfaritskii, and Ungern's physician, Dr Ribo. Several of the prime movers were, like Ribo, fellow countrymen from Orenberg who had joined Ungern en bloc in Mongolia and so trusted each other, but others, including Makeev, Ungern's ensign, had been with him since Dauria. Success, fear and greed had so far kept them on side - those who had become sick of Ungern's cruelty or madness had simply tried to desert - but with the mood of the division so embittered, they now resolved to demand that the division change direction, and to kill Ungern if he refused.

On 19 August the division camped in a wooded valley, some distance into Mongolia, near the monastery of Khalkkhanzyn Khuree. Makeev wrote of it lyrically: ‘Among the hills, by a cold stream, in a wide green valley, the famous Asian Cavalry Division of Baron Ungern
lived out its last hours.'
³
Ungern had planned to hold hostage some of the Mongolian nobles still with him in order to buy safe passage through the country, but they wisely disappeared before he could do so, taking off into the countryside along with some of their men. Russians, particularly those drafted in the last few months, were also fleeing; the rigorous patrols against deserters could no longer be kept up. Hoping to nip the rebellion in the bud, an outraged Ungern seized Colonel Ostrovskii, and forced him to sit overnight in a tree. Ribo found him the next morning, shaking and exhausted. Many of the conspirators suffered similar punishments, or the threat of them, which both steeled their desire to kill Ungern and increased their terror of the risks of failure. Rezuhin's regiment had been separated from the main group, and Ungern was becoming increasingly concerned that no word from them had been received. He spent the following day in nervous consultation with his fortune-tellers, and sent out messengers to contact Rezuhin.

In fact, the Cutter was already dead. His column had been trailing Ungern's, guarding the rear from the Reds. He had been approached by some in his regiment who supported the conspiracy, but had refused to turn against his old master. Riding before his assembled men, he ordered his counter-intelligence unit to round up the conspirators. In response, several of the soldiers opened fire on him. He fell from the horse, wounded in the leg, and called on anyone still loyal to him to help. No one stepped forward, though nor did anyone else shoot at him. He hobbled over to a Chinese unit, demanding aid. A medical attendant bound his wound, but also his hands.

A crowd of soldiers gathered. With the strange passivity that was to persist throughout the mutiny, they did nothing other than stare at their former tormentor, wounded and bound. Perhaps they were afraid of reprisals from those still loyal to Rezuhin, or perhaps their will had been so broken by his sadistic authority that its sudden disappearance was too much to take in. It was ‘a simple Cossack' who finally took action. He pushed his way through the crowd around the fallen colonel, berating them for their disloyalty, their cowardice, their betrayal, calling out, ‘Oh, what have you done? What have you done to our little father-general?' His apparent concern was either sarcasm, or a ruse to fool loyalists. When he came close to Rezuhin he pulled out a Mauser from his tunic and shouted, ‘You would drink our
blood? Drink this instead!' and emptied the pistol into Rezuhin's head. The mood of the crowd changed from apathy to panic, and half the brigade was on horseback and preparing to ride away into the night, terrified of Ungern's vengeance, before another officer calmed the crowd and took control. They decided to ford the Selenge and head back towards Manchuria as quickly as possible, though not before Rezuhin had been given a shallow grave.

Two messengers were sent to warn the conspirators in the forward brigade to either finish off Ungern as soon as possible, or desert and join the escape to Manchuria. The first, a Tatar, was caught and interrogated by Ungern, but the second, a Cossack officer named Kalinin, made it to Ribo's medical tent and told the conspirators what had happened. They decided that they needed to act that evening, and adopted a plan proposed by Evfaritskii that he and four others would go to Ungern's tent, lure him out and shoot him. If they were successful, they would fire four cannon shots to let the others know. Whatever happened, they would break away from any remaining Ungern loyalists and lead the group to safety.

Evfaritskii and his companions duly made their way to Ungern's tent and waited in ambush outside. They called to their general, and levelled their guns on the opening of the tent. Much to their surprise, however, the head that poked out was Colonel Ostrovskii's. Ungern had forced him to move to his tent earlier that day, probably sensing the mood of the division and fearing that there might be an attempt on his life. Ungern emerged from a tent nearby, where he had been consulting his fortune-tellers. The assassins turned and fired, but he dropped to the ground with razor-sharp reflexes before taking cover in a thicket. Things became confused and chaotic. The assassins continued to fire randomly into the bushes while Ungern crawled around in the scrub like a hunted animal, unsure in the dark who was stalking him and believing that the camp was under attack from the Reds. The fortune-tellers, who presumably knew what was coming, disappeared from the scene.