Book Extracts
Passages from Ungern: The Dossier — voices on the Baron, and the Baron in his own words.
At the start of the war with Japan, almost still a child, he left school and enlisted as a volunteer in an infantry regiment. Wounded many times over, decorated, he came back to Russia after the war, where his parents had him enter a military academy. With great difficulty he passed his officer's examinations. Restless for adventure, ill at ease in regular service, he set off again for Siberia and joined a Cossack regiment. He did not stay there long. A bad-tempered drinker, he picked a quarrel with one of his comrades and struck him. It earned him a saber blow to the skull, a wound he would feel for the rest of his life. Wanting to return to Russia, he resolved to make the journey from Vladivostok to Kharbin on horseback. He left his regiment, mounted up, whistled to his dog and set out, a hunting rifle in hand, sleeping under the open sky; it took him a full year to reach Kharbin. There he learned that war between the Chinese and the Mongols had just broken out. He climbed back into the saddle, entered Mongolia, offered his services. And there he was, at twenty-six, commander of all the Mongolian cavalry.
At the beginning of the World War he returned to Russia, took rank as a sub-lieutenant in the Nerchinsk regiment, where from the very first days he distinguished himself by his bravery. Wounded many times over, decorated with the Cross of Saint George — the soldier's supreme reward — he was, by the end of the year, captain in chief and squadron commander.
Small, blond, slight, with long ruddy mustaches, he had iron health and a fierce energy; war was his element. He was not an officer in the usual sense of the word; he knew nothing of the regulations, made nothing of discipline, ignored the elements of decorum and propriety. He was a true hero of a Mayne Reid novel. Disheveled and dirty, he slept on the floor among his Cossacks and ate from a mess tin. Raised in a civilized milieu, he seemed a man freed of any external culture. I tried in vain to wake in him the sense of the necessity of at least adopting the outward appearance of an officer. Singular contrasts met in him: an original, perceptive mind and, at the same time, an astonishing want of culture, an extremely narrow horizon, a wild shyness, an unbridled fury, a boundless prodigality, and an exceptional absence of needs.
Descended from the Huns of Attila, my warrior ancestors took part in every European war. They were seen on the Crusades: an Ungern was killed beneath the walls of Jerusalem, fighting in the troops of Richard the Lionheart. The tragic Children's Crusade itself was marked by the death of Raoul Ungern, at the age of eleven.
When, in the twelfth century, the boldest warriors of the country were sent to the eastern marches of the Germanic Empire to fight the Slavs, my ancestor Arthur was among them: this was Baron Halsa von Ungern-Sternberg. These knights of the borderlands formed the Teutonic Order of warrior-monks, who, by fire and sword, imposed Christianity upon the pagan peoples — Lithuanians, Estonians, Livonians, and Slavs. Ever since, the Order of the Teutonic Knights has counted representatives of our family among its ranks. When the Teutonic Order fell at Grunwald, under the blows of the Polish and Lithuanian troops, two barons von Ungern-Sternberg were killed in the battle.
In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several Ungern-Sternberg barons held their castles in Livonia and Estonia. Many legends report their exploits: Heinrich von Ungern-Sternberg, called The Axe, was a knight-errant. The tournaments of France, England, Spain, and Italy knew his fame and his lance, which filled the hearts of his adversaries with terror. He fell at Cádiz beneath the sword of a knight who split his skull. Baron Raoul von Ungern-Sternberg was a knight-brigand who plied his trade between Riga and Reval. Baron Pierre von Ungern-Sternberg held his castle on the island of Dagö, in the open Baltic, where he kept the merchant sailors at his mercy through his exploits as a corsair.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a famous baron, Wilhelm von Ungern-Sternberg, was known as the Brother of Satan for his talents as an alchemist. My own grandfather became a corsair in the Indian Ocean, exacting tribute from English merchant ships and always slipping past their warships. Captured at last, he was handed over to the Russian consul, who had him condemned to exile in Transbaikalia.
From the standpoint of morality, he is indefensible. Indeed, he is incomprehensible. He breaks the law, he kills, he sows vengeance and death. But he also dictates the law, he hunts down and crushes crime, he establishes order everywhere. He is an assassin. He is a dispenser of justice. In the ranks, he would have deserved the rope. At the summit, he is pure; with a firm hand he distributes both reward and punishment. He is a two-faced monster. Like all of us, perhaps. In any case, like God.
Almost no one has seen him. Neither his detractors nor his apologists. It is in the name of morality that all attack him, or defend him. An easy task for the first. Less so for the others. But that is because morality is narrower than life. And less complex. And does not drag along, as life does in its tragic weave, the sublime antinomies whose unceasing opposition makes the substance of the hero — and which forbid the hero from being more, or less, than a man.
The evil that came upon the earth to root out the divine principle in the human soul must be torn out by its root. Place no obstacle in the way of the people's rage against the servants of the Red doctrines. Remember that the people today is asking itself the question to be or not to be. To the plenipotentiary commanders carrying out the punishment of criminals — remember the necessity of rooting out evil to the very end, and remember always that justice lies in firm judgment.
On the flattened grass, the town lay more than half-razed, swept by the winds. Dauria, where, in the chaos of the civil war, Roman von Ungern-Sternberg ruled with an iron hand — a Baltic aristocrat of Teutonic lineage, a White Russian general married to a Chinese princess, a shamanist lord, a bloody ascetic whom the peoples of Asia revered as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, a warrior-monk who dreamed of a Greater Mongolia stretching from Lake Baikal to Tibet and from Manchuria to Eastern Turkestan, a starving wretch hunted by the Bolsheviks to the gates of Novosibirsk, where he was shot — abandoned by everyone, and by Satan himself.
Dauria, where the Mongolian horses of the man whose very name was feared raised the dust beside the railway track where, amid the smell of gunpowder, Ataman Semyonov's armored trains roared. Dauria, town crushed for having dared defy the Red ogre. Dauria, accursed town, where I set down my pack on that grey day of Easter.