The Bloody White Baron, by James Palmer
I do believe this is the book RCTFI read:
SETTING THE EAST ABLAZE
Review by Joseph T Major of
THE BLOODY WHITE BARON:
The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
by James Palmer
(Basic Books; 2008, 2009; ISBN 978-0-465-01448-4; $26.95)
From a great distance away, a slow thudding sound began to intrude itself. Yarblek’s eyes narrowed with hate. “It looks like Silk left just in time,” he growled.
The thudding became louder and turned into a hollow, booming sound. Dimly, behind the booming, they could hear a kind of groaning chant of hundreds of voices in a deep, minor key.
“What’s that?” Durnik asked.
“Taur Urgas,” Yarblek answered and spat. “That’s the war song of the king of the Murgos. . . Taur Urgas is always at war,” Yarblek replied with heavy contempt. “Even when there isn’t anybody to be at war with. He sleeps in his armor, even in his own palace. It makes him smelly, but all Murgos stink anyway, so it really doesn’t make any difference . . .”
The chanting and the measured drumbeats grew louder. Shrill fifes picked up a discordant, almost jigging accompaniment, and then there was a sudden blaring of deep-throated horns.
A steady stream of grim-faced Murgo soldiers marched eight abreast into the makeshift fair to the cadenced beat of great drums. In their midst, astride a black horse and under a flapping black banner, rode Taur Urgas. He was a tall man with heavy, sloping shoulders and an angular, merciless face. The thick links of his mail shirt had been dipped in molten red gold, making it almost appear as if he were covered in blood. A thick metal belt encircled his waist, and the scabbard of the sword he wore on his left hip was jewel-encrusted. A pointed steel helmet sat low over his black eyebrows, and the bloodied crown of Cthol Murgos was riveted to it. A kind of chain-mail hood covered the back and sides of the king’s neck and spread out over his shoulders.
— David Eddings, Magician’s Gambit
The story of Baron Nikolai Roman Maximilian Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg is in itself only a tale of human cruelty. In its ramifications, it stretches across half a world, affecting even today, touching peoples across the steppe. Most of them fatally, but cruelty was the issue here.
In the vaster canvas of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Mad Baron was only an afterthought, a feudal aberration made even more feudal by the range and diversity of his beliefs and influences. He was born in Austria no less, to a noble Baltic German family. Palmer makes the interesting point that, due to the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian Calendars, Ungern-Sternberg was born in two different years: December 29, 1885 (o.s.) = January 10, 1886 (n.s.). And somehow, through the rest of his life, he always seemed to be between cultures.
His parents divorced, his mother went back to Estonia and remarried, and he grew up to be the terror of the educational system; a discipline problem, dismissed from school. Then came the Russo-Japanese war, and Ungern-Sternberg’s aggressive nature found a place; he was enlisted into the army and served briefly at the front.
Then, he signed up as a regular, first going to a military academy, then gaining a commission (first soldier, then officer, where have we heard that before). While learning the essentials of military administration (which he seems to have shed quickly enough when the opportunity came) he also encountered occultism.
Palmer discusses how, even in eras of overt and thoroughgoing rationalism, outside religious beliefs creep in to replace the discredited native ones. As in the New Age of the eighties, so in Russia a century ago the young and spiritually impoverished studied Buddhism, graduated to Theosophy, and then tacked on their own additions.
Ungern-Sternberg was assigned to the Transbaikal Cossacks, right across the border from Mongolia, home of a lamastic Buddhism. Palmer argues that Buddhism is so broad that just about any belief can be fitted into it; he compares it to the Church of England (but maybe not, since Ann Holmes Redding, the Episcopal priest who says she is simultaneously a Muslim, has been ordered to apostatize). In Mongolia and Tibet (and the Mongolian Buddhists derive from Tibet) the beliefs are pretty gory.
A few years later, German explorers seeking the Ancient Aryan Roots of Tibet would observe how un-monastic the monasteries of Tibet were; many of the lamas were armed, the use of prostitutes was so prevalent that gonorrhea was endemic, and so on. (See Himmler’s Crusade by Christopher Hale (2003; reviewed in Alexiad V. 4 #4) for more on this.) Their northern brothers were even more like this. Tibetan and Mongolian monasteries portrayed the wars of the gods and the torments of the damned in grisly and explicit detail, along with how they relieved their emotions afterwards. These matters have been cleaned up for foreign consumption, but not when Ungern-Sternberg came by.
All too soon, the Great War came. Whatever his other lapses, Ungern-Sternberg was lucky. He served in Samsonov’s army, and if you know the history, you will be properly amazed when you hear that Ungern-Sternburg escaped unharmed. (The destruction of Samsonov’s army by the dynamic duo of Hindenburg and Ludendorff is properly renowned as an example of great skill on one side facing utter incompetence on the other.)
He continued to serve on the German front for the next three years, building a reputation for reckless assaults. One of which earned him a brief spell in the guardhouse, followed by a transfer to the Persian front. Then there came the two revolutions, and all his life came apart.
Other officers noticed that Ungern-Sternberg was an anti-Semite. That should indicate how far out he was, in a mileu where The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was known to be the way things really were. And here the neocons, sorry for the anachronism, the Zhids had overthrown the Little Father.
Going east as one of a handful of men, he did his part in winning Siberia for the Bolsheviks. Since he was a White officer, that may give you an idea of the success of his efforts. Ungern-Sternburg organized a military force (to use the terms very loosely) that was kept together by terror, and dominated its enemies by even more terror.
Having eroded support in his political home, Ungern-Sternberg withdrew to his spiritual home, where he made common cause with the Bogd Lama, the then-current incarnation of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the ruler of Mongolia under the Chinese dominion. Which was itself coming apart. The Bogd Lama had a wife, and apparently a harem.
Terror can only go so far before it runs out of victims and has to find a new field of action. Ungern-Sternberg had killed all the Jews he could find in Mongolia, driven the Chinese out of the country, and had to find something to do. So he attacked Russia.
As a result, his army was destroyed, rather like how Pancho Villa’s División del Norte disintegrated when it attacked Obregón’s better-organized forces at Agua Prieta. The Red Army “liberated” Mongolia and Ungern-Sternberg became a fugitive. One of the more striking images of that time in his life is the portrayal of him become Mongolian shaman, bare-chested, wearing amulets, riding aimlessly across the steppes, seeking . . .
And before long the Bolsheviks got him. He was brought to book for his crimes and received the supreme measure of punishment, passing into oblivion and history. In fiction, the ruthless, brutal ruler progresses from success to success until the lone scorned hero makes a lucky shot; or now, more so, the ruthless, brutal ruling class dominate the world by dint of their superior nature. Reality is less accommodating of such dreams.
The sources for the “Mad Baron” are slender and contradictory. Palmer discusses how the best-known contemporary work about him is full of errors and misstatements.
Yet . . . one of his informants told Palmer that his family regarded Ungern-Sternberg as a god, in the Buddhist way. His actions moved Mongolia into the Soviet adit, and Palmer points out that either way, Communist rule meant the destruction of lives and ways of living.
. . . One Mongolian may be worth eight Chinese, but there are five hundred Chinese for every Mongolian. They only have to look at Inner Mongolia, where ethnic Mongols, once the majority, now make up less than 5 per cent of the population, to see their likely fate if swallowed by the new Chinese imperium; reduced to a colourful sideshow in dancing displays staged to demonstrate the wonderful diversity of China while their children study Mandarin in school.
— The Bloody White Baron, Page 120