Palmer The Bloody White Baron

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32147-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Roman Ungern von Sternberg was a Baltic aristocrat, a violent, headstrong youth posted to the wilds of Siberia and Mongolia before the First World War. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Baron - now in command of a lethally effective rabble of cavalrymen - conquered Mongolia, the last time in history a country was seized by an army mounted on horses. He was a Kurtz-like figure, slaughtering everyone he suspected of irreligion or of being a Jew. And his is a story that rehearses later horrors in Russia and elsewhere. James Palmer's book is an epic recreation of a forgotten episode and will establish him as a brilliant popular historian.

James Palmer lives in Beijing. He has interviewed many survivors of the Tangshan earthquake and of the Communist Party struggles of that crucial year.His books include The Bloody White Baron, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2008, and The Death of Mao, which John Simpson called 'The best account of Mao's last year that we have.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Palmer, James

Leseproben

Introduction

My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.

BARON UNGERN-STERNBERG, 1921

I imagine that he would like to be remembered riding through a horde of terrified revolutionary soldiers, scything them down with his sabre as bullets whizzed around him, passing through his cloak, but never so much as scraping him; the warrior-king of Mongolia, receiving reports, tribute and prisoners, like his hero Genghis Khan, in a hastily pitched campaign tent. My chief image of him, though, is less heroic; I picture him on the steps of a temple, hearing – and believing – that he has only a hundred and thirty days left to live, his mutilated face suddenly contorted by terror.

This book tells the story of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, the last khan of Mongolia, who in one short year rose from being a Russian nobleman to incarnate God of War and returned Khan. In Mongolia he was lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god.

I first stumbled upon his story in one of Peter Hopkirk’s brilliant accounts of central Asian espionage, . In late 1920 a White Russian baron and cavalry major-general, thin, intense and hideously scarred, had cut his way into Mongolia, defeated the Chinese occupiers, taken over the country, ruled it briefly and brutally, and raised a Mongolian army to lead back against Russia.

It could have been just another bloody episode in the long horror of the Russian Civil War, but what made it unusual was the sheer oddness of Ungern-Sternberg. Most of the Russian leaders, whether the Bolshevik Reds or their opponents the Whites,1 were a vicious bunch who were not averse to the slaughter of a few thousand citizens, the Reds in the name of the people, the Whites in the name of the tsar, but none of the others did it in the name of Buddha. According to his Russian companions, Ungern-Sternberg was a pious, if unorthodox, Buddhist, and he lived in a world of gods and prophecies that contrasted starkly with the one inhabited by most of his contemporaries. He had not seized Mongolia out of a grand strategic plan, but because, it was claimed, he believed himself to be the returned Genghis Khan, flail of the Bolshevik unbelievers and head of an empire that would stretch from China to the Urals.

It was an almost unbelievable story. One of his chief war aims was to free the Bogd Khan, the huge, blind Living Buddha who had been imprisoned by the Chinese, so that he could act as a rallying point for his crusade. Like all good conquerors, he was rumoured to have left hidden treasure behind him, plundered from monasteries and buried somewhere on the steppe. Ungern-Sternberg did not seem to belong to a century of tanks and telephones but to an earlier, cruder age. Like his Baltic forefathers, he was a lost crusader, a bloody-handed pillager driven by both an intense religious fanaticism and devotion to the joy of slaughter. His hatred was focused, though: Jews and Bolsheviks were killed by his troops on sight, presaging a later, greater evil.

His adventures were made all the stranger by their location. Mongolia can sometimes seem half-imaginary, a storybook country that has no business being real. Most countries project their own mental image, however muddle-headed or stereotypical: skyscrapers and hamburgers, berets and the Eiffel Tower, the willow pattern and the Great Wall, bowler hats and big red buses. Mongolia’s popular images are emptiness and exile; Outer Mongolia is a metaphor for as far from anywhere as you can be. When the current president of Mongolia, Enkhbayar, came to England to study as a young man, he was detained by a sceptical immigration official who refused to believe that Mongolia was a real country – ‘You’re having me on, son’ – until Enkhbayar produced an atlas to prove his homeland’s reality.

There was a time, though, when the Mongols ruled the world, or at least a substantial chunk of it. Under Genghis Khan (1162–1227), arguably the most successful conqueror in history,2 the Mongols were transformed from a group of infighting backward steppe tribes to become the masters of Asia, a ruthless, streamlined war machine whose speed, force and flexibility massively outclassed any other army of the era. By the time of Ungern’s invasion, however, the Mongol Empire had long collapsed, swallowed up by Russia and China, once again a collection of scattered and feuding clans. They left behind them deep cultural memories of massacred peoples and burnt-out cities.

Tolstoy, writing gloomily of the brutalities of the tsarist system in the nineteenth century, feared the onset of ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’,3 and perhaps a greater soldier could have made something of the combination of Mongol ferocity and modern strategy. Ungern was not that man. His agenda was set by the rantings of shamans and his chaotic dreams, not by railway timetables or quartermasters’ reports. How, I thought, do you come to behave like this? How does a Baltic-Russian aristocrat end up a fanatical Buddhist?

And yet, there seemed to be more to his leadership than sheer despotic terror. He was undoubtedly popular among his Mongolian troops, who fought for him with a fury which appeared to some European observers to be close to devil-worship. Everything about the story seemed uncertain, even Ungern’s appearance, tall in some sources, short in others, grey-eyed, green-eyed, blue-eyed – nobody was able to pin him down. In one account he came across as a detached fanatic, willing to muse on philosophy and history, in another as a sadist and butcher, hands steeped in blood. Stories about him were a morass of rumour, myth and supposition. His personal beliefs were murky; his Buddhism might have been inherited from an equally eccentric grandfather, or the result of a personal conversion during his early years in Mongolia, and he seemed happy to use the most respectable, if mystical and apocalyptic, language of Russian Orthodoxy at points, despite his family being Lutheran. The changes in his appearance suggest an atavistic religious progress. In one of the few surviving photographs he appears in Russian army uniform, neatly groomed, but with an intense, monastic appearance, like an Orthodox mountain hermit, but near the end of his campaign he rode bare-chested, ‘like a Neanderthal’, hung with bones and charms, his beard sprouting in all directions and his chest smeared with dirt. He had gone from monk to shaman in a few years.

*

The ferocity of Ungern’s crusade was surprising, given his Buddhist connections. Buddhism has always been one of the most accessible Asian religions to Westerners; appealingly philosophical, pleasantly pacifist and, compared with Hinduism or much of Chinese religion, supposedly free of ‘superstitious’ or ‘primitive’ beliefs in the form of gods or magic. Many writers ignorant of Asian history – particularly, for some reason, anti-religious science writers – also claimed that Buddhism lacked the history of atrocities and intolerance that marked Western religion, despite, for instance, the many Buddhist-inspired messianic revolts in China, or the deep complicity of Zen Buddhism in Japanese militarism during the Second World War. It especially appealed to the English because, like the Church of England, it seemed not to demand that you believe in anything. To be a Westerner and call oneself a Muslim, or even a Hindu, makes some definite statement about your beliefs and perhaps your actions; calling yourself a Buddhist in the West, however, does not define your identity in any fixed way. Western Buddhism resembles Unitarianism without the harsh dogma.

The emphasis on the philosophical aspects of Buddhism in the West also means that the reality of Buddhist religious practice worldwide tends to be eclipsed. For instance, Buddhists are often portrayed in the West as not believing in a God or gods, and most Western Buddhists don’t. The vast majority of Buddhists worldwide, however, are enthusiastic believers in all manner of gods and spirits, often drawn from local traditions or taken from older religions such as Hinduism or Daoism.

At first I found it hard to understand why Mongolian Buddhism made a particularly strong and fearful impact on Westerners such as Ungern. In the Chinese variety with which I was familiar the most ferocious of the gods are the guardians found at every temple entrance. Their expressions of earnest intensity, combined with their elaborate martial stances, make them look like Morris dancers. Temple complexes as a whole feel gentle and benign: quiet gardens, the slow chanting of prayers, the gods and Buddhas set to the back of spacious halls, their hands raised in benediction.

Buddhism in China, introduced by missionaries from India in the first century AD and rapidly incorporated into the happy melange of Chinese folk religion, was part of the mainstream of the Mahayana tradition, the largest school of Buddhism. It focused upon salvation, mercy and release from the wheel of suffering; although there were Buddhist monks and nuns, it remained a populist religion at heart. The chief figures were the various bodhisattvas, beings who had turned back at the threshold of enlightenment in order to work towards redemption for the rest of the world.

However, Chinese Buddhism was – and is – very different from the Mongolian variety. Mongolian Buddhism was an offshoot of the Tibetan religion, also known as Lamaist or Tantric Buddhism. The country had converted as a result of a...