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elite, he felt uprooted, blaming international i nanciers, Jews, and Bolsheviks for all his troubles. From then on, Ungern would devote his life to eradicating this evil and to bringing monarchy back. For him, only kings and emperors were capable of providing order and stability. All other forms of government were unequivocally wicked and immoral.
In the beginning of the Civil War between Red Bolsheviks and White counterrevolutionaries, Ungern rose as a powerful warlord in the Far East, controlling a leg of the Trans-Siberian railroad. In charge of a wild bunch of over six hundred Russian and Buryat Cossacks, drit ers, and bandits, who tenderly called him Grandpa, Ungern robbed passing trains, murdered Bolsheviks, and sabotaged supply lines of White colleagues he considered too liberal. By the end of 1920, when his fortunes were at low ebb, Ungern was l eeing southward from the advancing Red army. Searching for a sanctuary, his hungry and freezing Asian Cavalry Division rolled into Mongolia. For him, this nomadic country was a Figure 5.5. Ragtag members of Ungern’s Asian Cavarly Division.
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natural choice: by this time, he had become totally disgusted with the corrupt West and had fallen in love with Asia: “I am i rmly convinced that the light comes from the East, where people are not yet spoiled by the West and where in a holy manner the foundations of goodness and honor, which were granted to us by Heaven, are still preserved untouched.” 23 Ungern dreamed that from the heart of Asia, uncorrupted by modern life, he would advance westward, restoring monarchies all over Eurasia, i rst in China, then in Russia, and i nally going farther to Central Europe.
In the meantime, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the 1917
Russian Revolution, Chinese warlord general Hsü Shu-cheng (Little Hsü) recaptured Mongolia, taking away the sovereignty the Mongols had enjoyed since 1913. In Urga, the Mongol capitol, Chinese troops drat ed from the dregs of society lived by marauding the local population. h e Bogdo-gegen, leader of Mongol Tibetan Buddhists, was put under house arrest and publicly humiliated, and religious festivals were disrupted. h e descendants of Genghis Khan came to hate the Chinese and were a gunpowder keg ready to explode. 24
Into this explosive world rode Ungern with his hungry and freezing gang, eager to seize Chinese food supplies and ammunition. Storming into Mongolia, Ungern pledged to liberate it from the Chinese, and at i rst nomads cheered him as a redeemer who, as if by magic, descended upon them from the north, captured Urga, and squashed the despised aliens. h e baron was pleased to observe how his cavalry unit became swollen with Mongol volunteers who l ocked to join him.
h e grateful Bogdo-gegen granted Ungern the title of Prince, and monks declared him a manifestation of Mahakala, one of the ferocious deities that protected the Buddhist faith. h e clerics also interpreted
Ungern’s victory over the Chinese as the fuli llment of the Shambhala prophecy. Later, at er the baron’s demise, the Bolsheviks uncovered among his personal papers a Russian translation of a Tibetan text containing the Shambhala prophecy. 25 Ungern, who was always interested in occult things, gladly embraced his role as a legendary redeemer, 120
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Figure 5.6. h e eighth Bogdo-gegen, leader of Mongol Tibetan Buddhists and head of the Mongol state from 1911 to 1924. Although considered a reincarnation of the great Tibetan scholar Taranatha, he was a heavy drinker and notorious womanizer, which seemed not to match his past life.
trying to act in an appropriate manner. He began wearing a long red-and-blue silk Mongol robe over his Russian oi cer uniform. In this outi t, with the Order of St. George received for his daring deeds during World War I and numerous Tibetan Buddhist amulets hanging on his chest, this descendant of Teutonic knights produced quite an impression on all who ran across him.
So Mongol independence was won. What was next? h at was when
the baron got into serious trouble and eventually lost the country. As it turned out, Ungern had nothing to of er the nomads, who wanted to see him not only as protector of the faith, but also as guardian of their national independence. First of all, the Mongols were greatly dismayed with the magnitude of the brutalities he committed. h is is not to say that his nomadic colleagues acted nobly: the Mongols could be 121
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quite ruthless and brutal to their enemies. Yet some of Ungern’s cruel-ties seemed too bizarre, excessive, and unnecessary; his nomadic allies could not understand why he punished his own oi cers by putting them on ice, burning them alive, or feeding them to wild beasts.
What especially puzzled the nomads was his pathological hatred of the “black Russians,” the Mongols’ expression for Jews. h ey could accept the massacre of some Chinese prisoners, enemies of their country and faith, but it was hard for them to rationalize the butchering of Jews, with whom the nomads never had any problems. h ere were not many of them in Urga anyway, no more than one hundred people, yet Ungern specially targeted all of them for annihilation. Before storming Urga, the baron gathered his oi cers and gave them an explicit order: “Upon taking Urga, all Jews should be destroyed, I mean slaughtered.” 26 Back in Europe, budding German national socialists inspired by Alfred Rosen-berg, a fellow Baltic German expatriate, would have certainly applauded these words. Yet such scapegoating customized exclusively for the Europeans who were eager to build up their anger and hatred did not make any sense on the vast plains of Mongolia. In hindsight, Ungern would have made a better “national socialist” case by milking Mongol dislike of local Chinese merchants and the Chinese in general. Still, despite this opportunity, the baron was hopelessly trapped in the web of his European phobias, which he was determined to live by in Mongolia. It was certainly not the type of behavior the local people expected from Mahakala. In fact, some of them began to question Ungern’s sanity.
However, this pathological anti-Semitism was not so much what alienated Ungern’s nomadic allies. What really upset them was the future he envisioned for Mongols. At er handing over power to the Bogdo-gegen, the baron began to pursue his most cherished dream—restoring monarchies. He would begin by resurrecting the Manchu dynasty that had controlled China along with Mongolia and Tibet for centuries before it was toppled by the 1911 revolution. h en he would proceed to Russia, bringing back the Romanovs’ dynasty, and farther into Central Europe, restoring the Hapsburgs and their German cousins. As his short-term 122
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goal, Ungern set out to build a vast pan-Asian empire under the Manchu dynasty that would unite all people of Mongol stock, from China to Kazakhstan and from Mongolia to Tibet. It was hard to imagine a more senseless act than asking the Mongols who had just won their independence from the Chinese to go back under the Manchu-Chinese yoke.
Although he had some knowledge of the Mongols’ culture, memo-rized several phrases in their language, and acquired at least a superi cial knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, Ungern did not grasp a simple thing: the nomads were craving for independence. h ey were interested neither in building up a grand pan-Mongol state nor in restoring the Chinese Empire. Yet the eyes of the baron, with his medieval reverence for monarchies, remained blind. h e borders he drew were between monarchs and their subjects, not between ethnic groups and nations.
With his mind set in the glorious feudal past, Ungern could not comprehend what the Bolsheviks already grasped: the power of modern nationalism. h at is why he lost Mongolia. h e baron’s faith in the divine power of kings and his obsession with feudal order, knighthood, and honor put him in the traditionalist camp—a motley group of like-minded contemporary Europeans who lamented the bygone aristocratic legacy and looked toward the Orient for inspiration.
General M. G. Tornovsky, one of Ungern’s former oi cers, explained well why the Mongols gave up on Ungern so easily and switched to Red Russia: “h e world of Buddhism will not say a good word about General Ungern. He was not committed to the Mongol national cause, being involved in correspondence with Chinese generals and aristocrats, trying to plot something with them. h
e Mongols could not forgive this
and betrayed him. h ey realized that for General Ungern, Mongolia was not the goal but the tool to pursue his own goals, which were alien to the Mongols.” 27
Unaware that he was setting himself up for failure, Ungern wrote letters to various Mongol princes, chiefs of the Kazakhs in Soviet Central Asia, Moslems in western China, and even the Dalai Lama, asking them to join his grand enterprise of restoring the Chinese Middle 123
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Kingdom. 28 Nobody replied to his messages, and the attempt to build up multinational coalition forces miserably failed. Even his clumsy attempt to invoke the Mongols’ love for prophecies was so shallow and so Eurocentric that it did not resonate at all with the traditional oral culture of the nomads, not say to inspire them. Here is a revealing passage from his address to the Mongols:
Not many people know the essence and principles of the Red Party but many believe in them. h is is a secret Jewish party created three thousand years ago specially to seize power in all countries, and its goals are now being fuli lled. All European states secretly or openly followed this party, only Japan remains free now. Our god, who hears the torments and suf erings of people, guides us to crush the head of this poisonous snake. h is must happen in the third month of this winter. h is prophecy had been given more than two thousand years ago. So the Mongol people do not have to wait for too long. 29
In desperation and losing the support of his Mongol hosts, Ungern decided to quickly boost his prestige through a military victory over the Red Russians in the summer of 1921. His plan was to thrust suddenly into Siberia and raise local Russians and indigenous folk against the Bolsheviks. Still, as always, Ungern could not overcome his virulent phobias. Before his suicidal leap into the Bolshevik trap, the baron released his notorious Order No. 15. h is morbid l yer of ered the Siberian populace only the familiar calls: restore monarchy and “murder all Communists, commissars, and Jews along with their families.” 30 Refusing to i ght for an alien cause on alien soil, his Mongol allies quickly deserted Ungern and scattered. In Siberia, nobody wanted to join him either. As a result, the Red army quickly crushed his anti-Bolshevik crusade, and in June 1921 the baron found himself captured by a Red guerilla unit.
Ungern’s Bolshevik opponents sincerely wondered why he disregarded a force as powerful and visible as nationalism. Shumatsky, the 124
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Comintern boss in Siberia who personally interrogated the White general, asked him how on earth he planned to reconcile his support of Mongol independence with an alliance with Chinese monarchists, the baron frankly responded: “I did not think about the sovereignty of Mongolia, and talked about her independence in another sense, treating it simply as a slogan. I thought of the future fate of Mongolia only as subject of the Manchu khan.” 31 h e Bolsheviks brought the failed Mahakala to public trial in Siberia and counted a big propaganda coup: his brutal actions and medieval political philosophy helped the Bolsheviks compromise the entire White cause. Condemned to death, the Bloody Baron, who never cared about anybody’s life including his own, calmly and with no visible emotions exposed the back of his head to the gun of a Bolshevik secret police oi cer.
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Two kinds of medicinal herbs grow on the mountains there. One, called tu-janaya, is very sweet and has sharp thorns, leaves like the teeth of a battle-ax, and red l owers the color of sunset. It always grows on rocks that face toward the south.
—Taranatha, description of a route to Shambhala In concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must cover ourselves in the name of another society. Do you realize sui ciently
what it means to rule—to rule in a secret society? Not only over the more important of the populace, but over the best men, over men of all races, nations and religions.
