The Bloody White Baron (43 page)

Ungern's legacy emerged in odd ways in the West. In the murky world of post-war rightist occultism he was remembered as a precursor figure of the weirder fringes of Nazism. They were right, but only indirectly. Ungern's mixture of esoteric beliefs and anti-Semitism shared some common roots with the Thule Society and other minor occult groups involved in the early days of the Nazi Party, and the eccentric obsessions of Himmler and others sprang from the same sources. His particular brand of eliminationist anti-Semitism, transferred to Germany by his former White comrades, and especially by the Baltic Germans, was also a major influence on the German right in the 1920s. As ever with Ungern, he foreshadowed a worse madness. He was even the subject of a trashy novel published in Germany in 1938,
I Order! The Struggle and Tragedy of Baron Ungern-Sternberg
,
⁹
which portrayed him as a heroic precursor of the Führer, struggling against Judaism, communism and betrayal within his own ranks. Meanwhile, he remains, along with Ossendowski's fantasies of hidden underground realms, a minor part of the mythology of the modern extreme right, still given to occult conspiracies.

Ungern did better in literature, where the bizarre nature of his legend attracted Russian and Western writers alike. He turns up in everything from serious philosophical novels to comic books. (My own favourite
Ungern cameo is in
Corto Maltese in Siberia
, a graphic novel by the Italian writer Hugo Pratt.) The surrealist modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin includes him in several books, most notably in
Buddha's Little Finger,
which contains a brilliant, haunting scene in which Ungern and his companions are gathered around a campfire, seemingly together but separated by aeons of space-time. He crops up in other places; the Spanish thriller writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte squeezes a reference to him into several of his books, and an entire (and rather mediocre) computer game,
Iron Storm
, featured an Ungern avatar as the villain.

Many of these depictions draw on the most popular and enduring book about Ungern, Ossendowski's
Beasts, Men, and Gods
. Ossendowski wrote one of Ungern's better epitaphs, towards the end of that book:

Quite how Ossendowski could have known this, given that he left Mongolia before Ungern's death, he never revealed. New York was clearly very well connected to the Mongolian campfire grapevine. It was typical hyperbolic Ossendowski - but he had tapped into something real nevertheless. As the revolt showed in the 1930s, the hope of a foreign messiah remained vibrant for a decade or more after Ungern's death. There were rumours of the return of the Bogd Khan, the Panchen Lama and other messianic figures recorded as recently as the early 1960s, although they never reached the same pitch of apocalyptic intensity.

And in a typically perverse way, Ungern did, indeed, prove to be Mongolia's saviour. Even after being driven out, the Chinese never gave up their ambitions towards Mongolia. The Republic of China, on Taiwan, despite nominally recognising Mongolia in 1946, soon changed its tune and refused to acknowledge Mongolia as a separate country until 2002, drawing it as part of China on official maps. They
maintained the post of provincial governor of Mongolia for eighty years after the territory was lost, which must have been one of the great sinecures of all time. Taiwan still nominally claims both Mongolia and the formerly Soviet territory of Tuva, and has not yet established any diplomatic relations with the country. The post-war communist government in Beijing, meanwhile, reluctantly acquiesced in their Soviet patrons' takeover of Mongolia, although Mao's private rhetoric inevitably included Mongolia in his listing of Chinese territory,
¹¹
and the Sino-Soviet split ended all diplomatic relations between the two nations, which were not renewed until 1997. Tellingly, the Chinese state firewall continues to block many internet sites related to Mongolian culture and identity, even those related chiefly to Mongols in Russia.
¹²

Without Ungern, the Chinese would have remained in Mongolia, the Soviets would never have taken over the country, and it would have remained a part of Chinese territory. From the point of view of anybody in Mongolia in the 1930s, Chinese oppression, however petty and brutal, would have been infinitely superior to the Soviet version. In the long run, though, Mongolia would have gone through exactly the same collectivisation, cultural destruction and mass homicide, only twenty years delayed. Both Inner Mongolia and Tibet, respectively inherited and invaded by the Chinese communists, suffered terribly in the 1950s. In Inner Mongolia, Mao first promised independence and then betrayed and brutally murdered Mongol leaders, including fighters against the Japanese, when he came to power. And finally, with the fall of the USSR, Mongolia experienced a new freedom. It kept its own culture and its own religion, however damaged by seventy years of Russian occupation. The People's Republic would have flooded Mongolia with Han settlers, as happened in the other non-Chinese provinces of the new communist empire, leaving the Mongolians a minority in their own lands, culturally and economically marginalised.
¹³

As it was, after the collapse of communism, Mongolian traditions returned. It was a formidable task. An entire world of belief had been wiped out in a single generation, leaving only oral tradition and a few determined individuals to help rebuild it. The old world was just about within living memory, but reconstructing it, lacking the religious ceremonies, buildings and lineages of the pre-communist era,
was never going to be easy. Scraps survived - boxes of artefacts, books of herbal medicine - but their uses had been lost.

Although everything was stripped away from them, right down to their own Mongolian names, the people still strive to remember their past. Family names traditionally had Buddhist connotations, so under communism they were banned, and only a personal name permitted. By the 1990s most families had forgotten their original names, so chose new ones from a list of possible Buddhist alternatives, or else named themselves after their professions; Mongolia's only astronaut, for example, rejoices in the name of Kosmos.

Yet even under the worst of communist oppression, Mongolian religion survived. The oldest Mongolian I met was a 102-year-old woman, lost in a blissful religious senility, who spent her days turning a prayer wheel. She had kept the faith throughout the years of persecution; she, and many others, had hidden holy books, preserved statues in caves in the hills, and maintained in secret the worship of the gods. Veneration of popular figures of the Bogd Khan era survived, including of the Bogd himself, despite all the vilification heaped on him by communist propaganda. Worship continued in less obvious ways. For instance, even in the 1970s people in Ulaanbaatar ‘remembered a certain freshwater spring where the Bogd's wife, the Ekh Dagina, used to go to worship. A visit to this spring, which officially could be described as “medicinal”, could also be privately interpreted as a commemoration of the Eke Dagini.'
¹⁴
The vagaries and sins of the real person could be forgotten this way, as they became increasingly depersonalised, remembered instead as incarnations of gods or as local spirits.

I wondered whether the same process had transformed folk memory of Ungern. Personally, I thought there was little chance that any trace of such worship had survived, until I attended a dinner at a friend's home in Ulaanbaatar. My friend was a product of bizarre regional politics himself, an ethnic Tibetan who had been brought to Japan as a teenager in the 1950s as part of a programme set up by former members of the Japanese government guilty about their involvement with Tibet during the war, and wanting to do something for the country. Now he worked to strengthen Japanese-Mongolian relations, and was in the country buttering up various Mongolian university deans. I was sitting next to his translator, a charming multilingual Mongolian
woman in her thirties, chatting in slightly broken English and occasionally very broken Russian. I mentioned that I was working on a book about Baron Ungern, and she said words I almost didn't believe at first. ‘Oh, Baron Ungern? In my family, he is a god.'

I asked her for details. Her grandfather had been a prominent lama at the time of the Bogd Khan government, and he had spent time with Ungern - enough to ensure he was persecuted in the 1930s, and eventually shot. Before he died, however, he had given her grandmother a box containing pieces of Ungern's clothing and hair, which was supposed to have magical powers. Buried in a piece of barren land near Karakorum, where Ungern had regrouped his forces after his first defeat by the Soviets, it had caused the land to spring up green and fertile, good for grazing. The family had worshipped Ungern himself as a personal protector, naming him in prayers even when she was a child in the 1970s.

In at least one family, then, Ungern was more than just a man. Two generations had preserved his memory; there must have been others, scraps of tradition, that remembered him in the same way. It would have pleased him to be known as a protector of Buddhism, deified among those bloody-handed gods.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1
Technically, the Whites - never a formal movement - were only one faction among many opposed to the Bolsheviks, and tended to represent the most reactionary of their opponents, but the term was often used to cover all anti-Bolshevik opposition.

2
Transliteration from Mongolian and Tibetan is not standardised, and spellings, especially of pre-modern figures, are extremely varied; when a name, such as Genghis, has a familiar Western form, I have therefore preferred to use that.

3
The Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin applied a similar description to Stalin in the 1930s, describing him as ‘Genghis Khan with the telephone'.

4
The Lama Temple, damaged in the Cultural Revolution, stripped of monks and now with bright electric lights, is a very different experience nowadays. It feels like a tamed, Sinified, acceptable version of Lamaism; noticeably, the more gory or sexually explicit statues are now covered up.

5
Vladimir Pozner,
Bloody Baron: The Story of Ungern-Sternberg
, trans. Warre Bradley Wells (London, 1938), p. 7.

6
My first Chinese girlfriend's family exemplified this. Her grandmother had a mincing and useless walk thanks to her feet being bound as a child, and her mother was four inches shorter than she should have been, thanks to malnutrition suffered as a child during the famines caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward.

ONE - a SON OF CRUSADERS AND PRIVATEERS

1
Ferdinand Ossendowski,
Beasts, Men, and Gods
(New York, 1922), p. 248.

2
The long-term success of which is dubious, given that the Estonians took the first opportunity to break away from Russia after the 1917 revolution. After being snapped up by Stalin again in 1940 (in an agreement concluded in, literally, about five minutes just before lunch) most of the population welcomed the ‘liberators' of the Wehrmacht with much enthusiasm. The Germans were the happiest; they had been evacuated by Hitler just before the Soviet takeover and were restored as soon as the Wehrmacht rolled in again. Even the Baltic peasantry initially preferred the Nazis to the Soviets, not least because the Germans gave them an opportunity to express bloodily their long-standing anti-Semitism. The Nazis handled the situation with their typical lack of grace, looking to banish the Slavic population and ‘turn the Baltic into a German lake'. The Germans were driven out again in 1945, part of the great forced exodus from the newly Russian territories.

3
Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current
(London, 1980), p. 258.

4
Sovetskaya Sibir
(Novonikolaevsk), no. 200 (560), 17 September, 1921.

5
A simple practical experiment to demonstrate this: go to a typical Wiccan coven and see how long it is before somebody tells you how they were initiated into the Craft by their grandmother, who was part of an ancient line of witches.

6
Eesti Ajalooarhiiv [Estonian National Archives], f. 860, n. 1, s. 1672, leht [list], 1.

7
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota [State Archive of the Russian Navy] (RGAVMF), f. 432, op. 1, d. 2162, 11.