Review: The Bloody White Baron

PALMER, James, The Bloody White Baron, Basic Books / Perseus Books Group, New York, NY, USA, 2009

English; octavo; hardback, quarter-bound in papered boards with gilt spine-titling; 274pp., with two monochrome maps. Near fine in like dustwrapper.

As often as I read about China in the Republican period (1911-1949), I am repeatedly left gob-smacked by the truly weird and awful things that took place during that time. In the years that followed the deposing of the Last Emperor, there was a vicious tussle to claim power that involved the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, the rising Communist Party and the remnants of the Imperial Army which had factionalised and split off into discrete military forces referred to as warlord cliques. The struggle for power involved the Russians, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Mongols and, by extension, the rest of the world which nervously awaited an outcome. The Warlords and their armies comprised some of the most bizarre personalities ever to put on a military uniform, including Christian leaders who baptised their armies with a firehose and a strategist who never went anywhere without his own ornate coffin. However, this particular individual I’ve been reading about was not Chinese, but Russian, and was only tangentially part of the Warlord ructions, angling to join the Fengtian Clique under Zhang Zuolin during his greatest trials. Arguably though, he was as mad and weird as anything the Warlord Era coughed up. Let me introduce you to Baron von Ungern Sternberg.

Born in Estonia to German parents, he grew up in privilege, surrounded by servants and wealth. His father became mentally-ill and was consigned to a sanatorium when his son was six and his mother successfully sued for divorce and re-married. Her new husband held vast estates in Russia and it was in one of these grand houses that Roman von Ungern Sternberg grew up.

From the Victorian period, Germany had established many familial links with Russia, fuelled by the marriage of Nikolas II to Princess Alexandra, herself German by birth. A coterie of her countrymen infiltrated the Royal Court and the German aristocrats became an elite social strata of Russian society, with a huge attitude of entitlement. The presence of the peasant society of Tsarist Russia suited their sense of self-importance and they settled in for a long duration as the overlords of a “lesser people”. As an example, Ungern’s step-father, in managing his household, would have each member of his staff beaten with ten strokes of a birch rod every day, on the off-chance that they might have done something wrong.

Throughout his development, Ungern Sternberg refused to acknowledge authority. He was insolent and disruptive at school and deliberately so, knowing that his step-father’s connexions would smooth over any difficulties. In desperation he was sent to a military academy in the hope that this sense of personal superiority would be beaten out of him. It wasn’t; rather, exposure to military life only instilled in him a yearning for both glory and brutality, and a sadistic delight in issuing and watching punishments.

In due course he was sent to the army and posted to the Transbaikal area of Central Russia, there to help defend the Trans-Siberian Express and its infrastructure. He was constantly insubordinate, considering himself to be the superior of everybody around him and instilled with an instinctive comprehension of military procedure. Consequently, he was expelled and, yet again, his parents’ string-pulling saw him accepted elsewhere in militaria, even further east to even more dire surroundings.

Here he discovered Mongolia, the Mongolian people and the peculiarly savage form of Buddhism that prevailed there. In lamaseries decorated with sprawling murals of the punishments of the dead in a multitude of Buddhist hells, he discovered a kind of monstrous inner calm and came to think of the Mongols as a steadfast, monarchical race, untainted by and immune to the ideological ructions that were tearing at Russian society.

Recalled to fight in the Great War, he performed adequately, earning himself the Cross of St. George (Fourth Class), a trinket he was never afterwards without, somewhere on his person amongst a clutter of other Buddhist and Mongolian charms. After the fighting died down, he was put in charge of a fortress in an area named Dauria, and he began to rule it with an iron fist. In tandem with another young officer, Captain Grigori Michaelovich Semenov based at the town of Chita, he conspired to unify the Buriat Mongolians (Semenov was part Buriat) as a provincial army to target against the rising Bolshevik might. Semenov, the more socially-skilled of the pair, began networking; Ungern, on the other hand began to consolidate his hold over his territory.

This involved issuing and watching punishments and executions which he did with a religious zealotry. No punishment was final if he didn’t personally supervise it and his notes brim with statements of regret where he was not able to observe his will being enacted. In time, responding to waves of Red Army incursions onto his lands, the rolling hills around Dauria became littered with the shattered remains of the dead and dying, a landscape which horrified visitors to the region but amongst which Ungern would stroll to soothe himself.

As the Bolshevik Revolution rolled unstoppably onwards, Ungern saw his roots chopped brutally away: his family fled to Europe leaving the estate on which he grew up to be burnt to the ground; then Tsar Nikolas and the Royal Family were imprisoned and executed. Ungern had no viable connexions left to support his worldview: he became convinced that Communism equated with evil and was somehow infectious; his mind reeled against any expression of anti-monarchist ideals as ludicrous and unreal; finally, he bought into the propaganda that Jews were somehow behind the spread of this disease, having read the widely-circulated copies of the fictitious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that abounded in White Russian circles at the time. He sought solace amongst the Mongolians, a people he saw as pure and untainted by Red thinking, faithfully devoted to their theocratic rulers and untouched by Jewish culture.

He focussed on a Buddhist ruler, the Bogd Khan, one of the khutukhu, or reincarnated, lines of kings, who exercised almost absolute power amongst their Mongol subjects. Based in the Mongolian town of Urga, the Bogd Khan (“Holy Emperor”) became emblematic to Ungern as lineal ruler, a leader of a holy faith (as Nikolas II was of Russian Orthodoxy) and a figure of nobility to rally around in defense of his nation (Urga had been occupied by the Chinese at the time). In actual fact, the Bogd Khan was a drug-addled alcoholic and a shrewd political opportunist: his government policies were set over drinking bouts at his palace and his political appointees were chosen on the basis of their party skills – and poisoned subsequently if their points of view varied from his own.

Despite the advances in armour technology that had emerged from the First World War, and the effective use to which tanks, armoured vehicles and armoured trains were put to use by the Red Army, Ungern was hidebound in his views concerning military tactics. He used cavalry forces: one, it suited his self-image of travelling in the footsteps of Genghis Khan; two, he felt that horse troops were somehow more manoeuvrable in the Mongolian wilds than any other form of transport. In some senses he was right, but he typically ignored the fact that most armies were now using machine guns, against which horses were as vulnerable as any soldier. He deliberately tied his military strategies to accommodating and feeding thousands of horses in a time when they were considered militarily obsolete.

This was typical of his thinking: he believed what suited his already crystallised worldview and rejected everything else. He was obsessed with esoteric lore: access to such material was considered an elite privilege during the Nineteenth Century, which explains in part the fascination that Madame Blavatsky had over her followers; however, Ungern was not intellectually-gifted enough to read deeply of his texts. Of the Bible, which he claimed gave him tacit permission to perform some of his cruellest and most sadistic exploits, he was unable to reference it exactly, casually saying that he had ‘read it in there somewhere’; it’s likely that, apart from the lurid sensations of Revelations, the Bible was a closed book to him. Almost certainly Buddhist theology was something he had also only vaguely skimmed, but the savage and garish Mongol style of the religion definitely suited his warped aesthetics.

At the height of his endeavours, he successfully – although ‘accidentally’ is probably a better term – liberated Urga from the Chinese and freed the Bogd Khan. He established a new political order with the Khan at its head and then purged the city of ‘infected’ agents. He had developed a notion that, by staring intensely at a prisoner, he could discern whether or not they were Jewish; this based on one episode in which, trying this out for the first time, he managed to get it 100% right. Known Jews were brutally tortured, raped and killed – men, women and children. Other citizens were ‘examined’ and their fates decided. Rumours followed the brutality and the local Mongols decided that Ungern was the reincarnation of an ancient savage deity – possibly even the Palden Lhamo, a “defender of the faith” - and accorded him the deference due to such an individual: Ungern took to wearing Mongol garb (Russian reports are full of descriptions of him wearing a ‘dressing gown’) and consolidating his power as a god.

But taking a city and holding it are two different things. Ungern’s paranoia regarding the ‘Bolshevik disease’ made him wary of opposition on any field. Those who chose to desert from his forces were considered to have turned Red and were given short shrift. His efforts to force the citizens to conform to his ideal as saviours of the new Mongolian nation drove him to fits of shrill, ranting outrage and even further demonstrations of sadism: burning people in haystacks or hanging them and leaving their bodies to rot at the town gates became common-place. All the while, the Bogd Khan was issuing letters to other powers asking for assistance in consolidating his own reign, claiming that Ungern had divested him of all authority and responsibility in ruling his country; Ungern, when tasked by these same factions as to the state of play, claimed that he had handed over all power to the Khan, as the monarchical leader.

Things got bad and things got worse. Ungern decided to take on the Reds directly, consulting soothsayers as to the most favourable days (they inevitably turned out to dictate the worst possible timing). He drove his rag-tag outfit into the wilderness, only to be sharply rebuffed by machine-guns and tanks. Outraged, his forces in disarray, he returned to his base camp only to be met by a full-scale mutiny: an assassination attempt failed and Ungern fled. It is a testament to his personal magnetism that the mutineers rallied to catch him again, not because they sought vengeance, but because they feared what he would do to them if he got away. They set up an ambush which he rode into: however, none of them, burnt by his withering glare, had the bottle to shoot. Finally, Ungern’s horse bumped one of the turncoats and, startled, he accidentally pulled his trigger: this set off a fusillade of gunfire, including that from some captured machine-guns; however, not a single bullet hit its target or the horse on which he sat. He made good his escape.

Seeking refuge amongst his beloved Mongols, one of them asked him for a match: as he put his hands in his pockets, they grabbed him by the elbows, took hold of his arms and bound him tightly before handing him over to the Red Army. After months of interrogation during which he sat patiently and spoke directly, he was taken out and executed by a firing squad.

Ungern’s obsessive nature is clear from his actions and appearance: he never slept on a bed, preferring to sleep on the floor and choosing to bunk down with his soldiers without ceremony when in the field. Like the Mongols, who feared bathing because of the possible assault by water spirits such activity occasioned, Ungern also refused to dwell upon matters of personal hygiene. His conversation lingered upon topics of obscure esoteric lore, as pertinent to himself or his activities: rambling, it seemed to most who talked with him, an attempt to demonstrate his erudition, or to gauge their own knowledge of matters arcane. His manner was tightly-wound, and although thoroughly addicted to opium due to its ability to open his mind to the supernatural, he deplored anything to do with alcohol and sex in himself or others, often relentlessly beating his soldiers for their indulgences. Those setting their Call of Cthulhu adventures in the Central Asian wilds will find endless types of crazy to expose their players to if they choose to stage an encounter with this maniac.

Readers will notice that this is less of a review and more of a precis; I guess that's because a lot of the allure of this subject is its sheer unbelievability. I found the book very enlightening and its subject fascinating (and, of course, horrifying!). At times there is a palpable tension in the writer, a feeling that he is occasionally torn between the need for historical accuracy and a desire to be a little sensationalist. This tends to make the reading a little dry in places as he overdoes the nods to academia. I wondered about the lack of images in the book (most of the ones here, I’ve culled from teh Interwebz) but that’s possibly a decision by the publisher and not the author. Still the odd picture might have grounded the exposition a bit more firmly. Nevertheless, Palmer gives us a piercing insight into this monster and deftly dissects his psychosis for our perusal.

Three tentacled horrors from me.