The Bloody White Baron Read Free Page A

previously realised. The story often seems medieval, but Ungern’s campaign is not even a century removed from us. In Asia the events of the twentieth century are written in the landscape and on the bodies of the people. 6 In China I met ancient communists who could just remember when China was an empire, and Mongolia a mere vassal state. I met, too, young nationalists who were all too eager to retake, even settle, Mongolia - and Mongolians who were keen to fight them.
    In telling the story of Ungern’s short life and brutal death, then, and of the consequences of his actions, I have drawn from many different sources. Some are accounts by his contemporaries, some are later works or my own impressions of a country or its culture. Much of the documentation concerning Ungern is clustered in the last three years of his life, and at times, when describing his early career and beliefs, I have projected later statements backward in time. I also had to make some difficult choices about what to believe; Ungern became a legendary figure even when alive, and his myth grew even more after his death. His own beliefs and actions were deeply bizarre, but so were those of his contemporaries, and often it was difficult to tell whether a particular story was a fantasy of Ungern’s or of the witness reporting it. As it happened, I began the book in a greater spirit of scepticism than when I finished it; too many of the oddest stories turned out to be confirmed by reliable witnesses, often more than one. Who would have thought, after all, that Ungern really did keep wolves in his house? Or marry a Chinese princess? Or pause on a reconnaissance mission, in the middle of a hostile city, to chastise an enemy soldier for being asleep on duty?
    There is very little to like about Ungern himself. He was an appalling human being in almost every way; virtually his only admirable characteristic was his fierce physical bravery, and perhaps parts of his fascination with the East. There seemed to be very few aspects of ordinary life which could please him; his pleasures were violent and he lived in a world increasingly - and rightfully - hostile to the values he believed in.

    Yet he remains fascinating. His voice - strident, sarcastic, vicious - dominates his story. Other voices are absent, or at least muted: those of Ungern’s victims and his communist successors’. Peasants, widows, nomads, and monks, they have left almost no accounts of the events of the year in which Ungern’s horde tortured and murdered so many of them, or of the terrible years that followed. In the writings of Western or Chinese travellers, the Mongolians, with the exception of a few nobles or high-ranking lamas, are often ignored; it seems hideously appropriate that virtually the only accounts we have from ordinary Mongolians are the interrogation records of the old communist regime, voices bent by torture and distorted for propaganda.
    The Mongolians were the tools, and the victims, of a delusional psychopath driven by a fusion of religious, imperial and reactionary ideology. Ungern’s atrocities were a foreshadowing of worse things to come for the world, and both his life and the suffering he caused have been eclipsed by the greater horrors that followed. I hope that in this book I have, at least in part, given some accounting of his victims together with their - and his - place in history.

ONE
    A Son of Crusaders and Privateers
    Ungern was born in Graz, Austria, in 1885 to an Estonian father of German blood and a German mother. Within a few years of his birth his parents had divorced, his mother had remarried and he had moved back to Reval, Estonia (now Tallinn), where he was to spend the rest of his childhood. His sense of family and place was uncertain from his very birth, something reflected in his name. ‘Sternberg’, ‘star mountain’, an archetypal Jewish name, has an epic ring on its own, but its coupling with ‘Ungern’,