The Bloody White Baron
James Palmer Faber & Faber, 272pp, £18.99
Recently, a German businessman, finding himself in China, consulted a leading member of the EU Chamber of Commerce in Beijing for advice. He had noticed, he said, that whenever he introduced himself in Asia, his name seemed to provoke a negative reaction. He was sure that he had done nothing to offend and had no previous personal history in China. His name was Ungern-Sternberg.
Unfortunately for the distant (and, no doubt, blameless) relative, James Palmer's new biography of Nikolai Roman Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, the man he calls the bloody white baron and the source of the horror that lingers over the name, can only make matters worse. It is the vividly told tale of a man whose cruelty and fanaticism have indelibly stained the Mongolian steppe. On the scale of mass murderers, Ungern-Sternberg could not compete with the real luminaries - Stalin or Mao, for instance - who harnessed state power to their killing machines, but he made up for his relative lack of reach with the intensity and artisan refinement of his cruelty.
Ungern-Sternberg was born in Austria in 1885, son of an Estonian father of German descent and a German mother. Despite the family origins, he himself was more Russian than German in his passions. He was brought up on the family estate in Estonia where, even as a child, he showed disturbing signs of the homicidal tendencies that were to become his most marked adult characteristics. He did not flourish at school (Palmer mildly imagines him as a boy who could not "be trusted with scissors"). He beat up the family serfs and was eventually sent to the imperial army, where he served briefly in the Russo-Japanese War. He fought with the suicidal bravery that characterised his later exploits.
For Ungern-Sternberg, monarchical hierarchy was the natural order of things and its destruction by the Russian Revolution provoked in him a fierce reaction, part anti-Semitic and part restorationist. Nominally Lutheran, he was also a mystic who sought for a common core to religious beliefs (with the notable exception of Judaism, which he saw as the evil source of Bolshevism). He became a fierce fighter with the White resistance, dreaming of putting the tsar's younger brother Prince Michael on a restored throne and recovering the Russian territories ceded to Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. These, like most of his dreams, would end in ruins.
He fought the Bolshevik forces in Transbaikalia, commanding an armoured train on the Trans-Siberian railway, but the Bolshevik advance eventually drove him into Mongolia, a suitably expansive stage for his particular combination of fanaticism, mysticism and attachment to cavalry warfare. In 1920, when the Whites were in disarray, he invaded Mongolia, where he believed that, in contrast to the chaos of his homeland, he would find a people who had "not forgotten their ancient faiths and customs". Ungern-Sternberg would become, he thought, the new Genghis Khan, restoring the glory of the Mongolian peoples and taking vengeance on the degenerate people to the west.
It was a pivotal moment in Mongolian history: like Tibet, Mongolia had recovered its independence after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, but by 1923 Chinese troops were again a presence. Technically it was by then an autonomous region of a China nominally ruled by the Kuomintang but itself riven by warlordism. The religious ruler of Mongolia, the Bogd Khan, rivalled even Ungern Sternberg in his notoriety: a sexually depraved alcoholic whose habits proved too much for both the 13th Dalai Lama and the 9th Panchen Lama, each of whom was obliged to seek his hospitality. For Ungern-Sternberg, however, the Bogd had an irresistible claim to religious and political authority.
This was to be Ungern-Sternberg's last playground: dressed in a fanciful variety of costumes and leading a ragtag army of White Russian renegades and Mongolian troops, he cut a swath of cruelty across the steppes and fought his way into legend, driving out the Chinese and restoring the Bogd Khan to power. From this beginning, he dreamed of a pan-Asian alliance.
It was his old enemy, Red Russia, that would finally defeat him. In 1921, he was captured, tried and shot by Russian forces. He is remembered today, and not just for his cruelty. By driving Chinese forces out of Mongolia, he opened the path for the Soviet takeover. Though Mongolia could not be said to have fared well under Soviet protection, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union allowed the resurgence of Outer Mongolia as a sovereign political and cultural state. Had it stayed under Chinese domination, it would have suffered the same fate as Inner Mongolia - suffocation under the weight of Chinese colonisation and assimilation. Whichever circle of hell the baron now resides in, in Mongolia, as Palmer discovers, there are still isolated pockets of continued reverence for his memory.
Isabel Hilton is author of "The Search for the Panchen Lama" (W W Norton)
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