The Bloody Baron, anti-Bolshevik

An adventure story, published in 1922, tells the tale of a German-Russian aristocrat who fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia. He was revered as a god by the locals for his bravery and ruthlessness. He took his army to Mongolia, where he was blessed as a holy warrior. Fighting under a Buddhist flag beside Tibetan cavalry, he defeated Red Russians and Chinese occupiers before he was betrayed and martyred. The oddest aspect of this story, Beasts, Men and Gods, was that it was true.

The Mongolian struggle for independence from China lasted from 1911 to 1924. Following the Russian Revolution, a Buddhist theocracy headed by Tibetan-born Bogdo Khan (c. 1869-1924) called upon the help of White Russian officers to form a Mongol army. The leader of the combined Mongol-White Russian army was General Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (1886-1921), a mysterious figure of legendary ruthlessness.

The “Bloody Baron”

The “Bloody Baron”, as he was called, was a descendant of the Germanic aristocracy located in Estonia, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He became a cavalry officer who saw active service in the Russo-Japanese War and later in World War I, where ‘Baron Ungern’ served with distinction, becoming a decorated war veteran. Naturally, after the Russian Revolution, he aligned with the White Russian opponents of the Red Bolsheviks.

The Mongolian-White Russian force captured Urga (Ulan Bator) by defeating a larger Chinese garrison. Just as noteworthy was the savagery directed by Ungern towards European merchants and Jews, many of whom were killed, and their property looted. The disciplining of soldiers and criminals was harsh but explicable; burning villagers alive and massacring farming families seems to be the product of fury or sadism.

In his book Beasts, Men, and Gods, author Ferdynand Ossendowski (1876-1945) conveys something of the Bloody Baron’s remarkable aura. He describes his encounter with Ungern in a Mongolian yurt; he is summoned to meet the Baron, who stares intently at Ossendowski across a pool of fresh blood at his feet, his face disfigured by duelling scars. The Baron is a paranoid mystic addled by opium visions, ordering the execution of envoys and divining men’s qualities by communing with their spirits. He inspired superstitious fear among Mongols because 74 bullets passed through his greatcoat during battle without causing a wound.

The Baron saw himself as a holy warrior fighting against the depravity of revolution. “Revolution is an infectious disease and Europe making the treaty with Moscow [the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, 1918] deceived itself and the other parts of the world. The Great Spirit put at the threshold of our lives Karma, who knows neither anger nor pardon. He will reckon the account, whose toll will be famine, destruction, the death of culture, of glory, of honour and of spirit, the death of peoples. I see already this horror, this dark, mad destruction of humanity.” He was a fatalist who, like his forefathers, saw his destiny in fighting and dying in a foreign land. 

Ossendowski, anti-Bolshevik Adventurer

Ossendowski was born in the Russian Empire and trained in the sciences of chemistry and physics in Russia and Paris. When the October Revolution came, he served as an advisor to the White Russian counterrevolutionaries and fled to the Far East. This became his novel Beasts, Men, and Gods, written after Ossendowski had arrived in New York in 1922. Ossendowski describes how the rapes, pillaging, and executions turned the local population against the Bolsheviks. In his account, Ossendowski underplays the White terror that paralleled the Red one.

It is difficult to know how much of the account we should take literally, as Ossendowski was an experienced journalist and writer of fiction, propaganda, travel reportage, and adventure stories. Over his lifetime Ossendowski was the author of 77 books, of which he sold 80 million copies, making him one of the most famous writers of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Ossendowski carefully covered his tracks, possibly because he worked as a spy. His private papers were destroyed days before his death in January 1945, just as Poland was exchanging German occupation for Soviet occupation. The NKVD were anxious to arrest and interrogate the notorious anti-Bolshevik, who—through death—eluded the Reds one last time.

Another account that readers should treat with caution is James Palmer’s account, The Bloody White Baron (2008). Palmer makes much of Ungern’s anti-Semitism, which was linked to the common perception that Bolshevism was a Jewish-led project, earning the religion implacable hatred. Ungern saw Jews as natural merchants, nomadic and ready to undermine traditions and civic unity in pursuit of profit, as well as natural allies of Bolsheviks; therefore, Ungern decreed Jews to be executed following his capture of Urga and in a later order. The author is so intent on criticising Ungern—the “monster”—that he has difficulty presenting the perspective of the upper class of the Russian Empire.

The Bloody Baron’s Legacy

The Baron’s rule over Mongolia was brief, as was the government of Bogdo Khan. Food and materiel dwindled as the Reds advanced. The White Russian remnants clinging on in the Far East were mopped up by the Red Army in the next few years.

An ambitious attack on a fortified border position, in July 1921, proved Ungern’s undoing. The Red Army regiment there was battle-hardened and well-supplied, much tougher fare than the Chinese troops at Urga. Ungern’s decisive defeat sent his army of disparate nationalities into retreat, harried by aeroplanes dropping grenades. Although the much-reduced army gained one more victory, Ungern and his men read the writing on the wall. Ungern stated that his men must retreat to Tibet, neglecting the practicality of crossing the Gobi Desert without supplies and facing Chinese resistance. This prospect alarmed his men. The retreat turned into desertion, then mutiny. The Baron was restrained, and his loyalist lieutenants were dispatched. He was handed over to the Reds by Mongolian soldiers from his army. Ungern was tried and executed by firing squad in September 1921. It was a result that apparently satisfied Lenin and Trotsky.

Ungern’s prophecies were fulfilled in the 1930s when Communist Mongolia (by then a satellite state of the USSR) collectivised farming and extirpated Buddhism by massacring monks and lamas, burning holy books and statues, and demolishing temples, with the precious metals being melted down for the state treasury. Communist ideology demanded the destruction of the holy and traditional, and the Mongolians experienced the cultural holocaust that the Russians had already undergone and which the Chinese and Tibetans would soon endure.

The Bloody Baron lives on as a villain in video games (Iron Storm), graphic novels, and literature, where he is a larger-than-life figure who can be used to symbolise the depravities of nationalism, monarchism, and religious fervour. He is a bloodthirsty avatar of all the retrogressive forces of the past. Yet his appeal lingers. However shocking Ungern’s actions are judged to be, his warnings about the unnatural effects of imposed secularism and materialism continue to strike a chord today and make his story a subject of persistent fascination.