This three-part study will concern Roman von Ungern-Sternberg who represents a revealing illustration of what was at stake in the re‑conquest and stabilization of Central Eurasia. Whereby we also will see that what challenged the rule of the Bolsheviks most vehemently was not the credo of the state nationalists under the Russian White generals, who aspired to nothing other than the immediate restoration of the “one and indivisible Russia”, but rather the plans of a warlord, which in regard to the prevailing realities were equally as daring as their own. The difference was not about megalomaniac delusions of grandeur but lay rather in the totally different political goal envisioned. Ungern‘s obsession, namely to be able to establish a Greater Mongolian Empire, entailed turning away from the center; it meant drawing the borders entirely anew in the East.

But first, a few oddities I came across in the course of researching Unger who among his present-day admirers is dubbed the Got of War which in its initial historical context, of course, was a reference to Genghis Khan.

 

The myth and reality of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg

Eurasianism, a nearly century-old ideology, has taken hold in the region following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with Putin a strong proponent. Originally formulated as a counter to Communism, Eurasianism posits a Russian national identity based not on politics but on geography and ethnicity, and it portends a stark and troubling future reality for Eastern Europe. Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianism, in turn, is best understood as an offshoot of the European Far Right, and not a product of Russia’s distinctive cultural heritage.

Published in December 2007 “The Last Wargod” (Der letzte Kriegsgott) the nouvelle droite publication in question contains among others a leading article, by Eurasianist Alexander Dugin, which titles Ungern von Sternberg  "the Got of War" (Der Gott Des Krieges).

Alexander Dugin even went as far as to claim that there existed a secret order named “Agharta” among the Russian Military Intelligence Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije -GRU. (For this reference see: http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/MEDIA/00747.pdf)

Connecting Robert von Ungern-Sternberg born in Austria,to some form of Agartha myth—was initially invented by Ossendowski in Beasts, Men and Gods (1922).

This wasn’t Ossendowski’s first literary fraud, as historian Gearge F. Kennan has pointed out he was also co- creator of the so called “Sisson documents”.

Here Ossendowski wrote, that he convinced Ungern of his story and that subsequently, Ungern sent missions to seek Agharta. Selling three hundred thousand copies within a year of its initial publication, Sven Hedin however, discovered that the source of three of Ossendowski’s chapters could be found within the pages of the occultist Saint Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde en Europe. (Sven Hedin, Ossendowski and the Truth,1925).

Sable, further contends that Ungern designed his  war plans, based on astrological charts that local Buddhist monks made for him. When Ungern realized however that the charts in question showed a heaven as seen from Tibet yet did not depict the physical  stars as seen from Mongolia-- Unger started to experience doubt. Whereby in Mongolia itself, some people are said to be still looking for the “ treasure” Ungern is believed to have stolen--and secretly buried.

Ossendowski wrote in, Beasts, Men and Gods, that he had heard tell in Mongolia of a subterranean realm of 800 million inhabitants called "Agharti"; of its triple spiritual authority "Brahytma the King of the World," "Mahytma," and "Mahynga," its sacred language "Vattanan," and many other things that seemed to corroborate Saint-Yves. The book ended on a somber note of prophecy from one of Os send ow ski's informants; that one day (the year 2029, to be exact) the people of Aghardi [sic] would issue forth from their caverns and appear on the surface of the earth. (Ossendowski, 1922, p.314).

Although Buddhist’s texts never described Shambhala as an underground kingdom, the portrayal by Saint-Yves and Ossendowski, clearly parallel the Kalachakra account of the Kalki ruler of Shambhala coming to the aid of the world to end an apocalyptic war.

In 1927 French traditionalist Rene Guonon published a description of “Agarttha” in Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World).  In 1929 the Russian Nicholas Roerich published an account of Agharti in the book, Altai Himalaya: A Travel Diary.

Note that Although Buddhist’s texts never described Shambhala as an underground kingdom, the portrayal by Saint-Yves and Ossendowski, clearly parallel the Kalachakra account of the Kalki ruler of Shambhala coming to the aid of the world to end an apocalyptic war.

Ungern occupies the central section of Ossendowki’s book-one of the "men" described after the "beasts" (the Reds from whom Ossendowski had escaped), who come before the "gods" (otherwise the Mongolian lamas with their peculiar variant of Budhism--see below). It also remains probable that Ossendowski indeed, met Ungern-Sternberg.

Ossendowski writes that it is a hidden land somewhere in the East, below the surface of the earth, where a population of millions is ruled by a "Sovereign Pontiff" of Ethiopian race, styled the Brahmatma. This almost superhuman figure is assisted by two colleagues, the "Mahatma" and the "Mahanga". His realm, Saint-Yves had explained, was transferred underground and concealed from the surface-dwellers at the start of the Kali- Yuga, which he dates around 3200 BCE. Agartha has long enjoyed the benefits of a technology advanced far beyond our own: gas lighting, railways, air travel, and the like. Its government is the ideal one of "Synarchy" (sometimes erroneously confused with Fascism) which the surface races have lost since the schism that broke the Universal Empire in the fourth millenium BCE, and which Moses, Jesus, and Saint-Yves strove to reinstate. Now and then Agartha sends emissaries to the upper world, of which it has perfect knowledge. Not only the latest discoveries of modern man, but the whole wisdom of the ages is enshrined in its libraries, engraved on stone in Vattanian characters. Among its secrets are those of the relationship of soul to body, and of the means to keep departed souls in communication with incarnate ones. When our world adopts Synarchical government, the time will be ripe for Agartha to reveal itself and to shower its spiritual and temporal benefits on us. To further this, Saint-Yves includes in the book open letters to the Queen of England, the Emperor of Russia, and the Pope, inviting them to use their power to hasten the event.

It was however Olivier Dard, who pointed out the term synarchy was actually borrowed from J. A. Vaillant's: work The Magic Key of Fiction and Fact (Clef magique de la fiction du fait), Vaillant, just like Saint-Yves would later do, defined synarchie in opposition to anarchy, arguing that the principles of synarchie must shape the social," which in turn would shape the “religion of the future.” Another favored term of Saint-Yves, Agharta, he borrowed from the fantasist writings by Louis Jacolliot.

Any unprejudiced reader, finding in three chapters of Ossendowski's book a virtual precis of the "Agarttha" described in Mission de l'Inde-not omitting the most improbable details-would conclude that he simple capped an already good story by altering the spellings-- so as to make his version, if challenged-- seem informed by an independent source. But Ossendowski denied this indignantly, asserting in the presence of Rene Guenon that he had never even heard of Saint-Yves d'Aiveydre before 1924. Guenon's interest was kindled, and in 1925 he wrote that he had no reason to doubt Ossendowski's sincerity. (Guenon,  Le Roi du Monde. Les Cahiers du Mois 9/10: Les Appels de I'Orient, Paris: Emile Paul Freres, 1925,p. 210).

More than that, Guenon was moved to write his own book on the subject and its ramifications, which appeared in 192 7 as Le Roi du Monde (The king of the world). He began by saying that "independently of Ossendowski's testimony, we know from quite different sources that tales of this kind are current in Mongolia and all of Central Asia." (Guenon, Symbolism of the Cross. Trans. Angus Macnab. London: Luzac, 1958,p.9).

Thus in 1927, Guenon lend his support to a the so called “Polaires” They had a so called ‘oracle’ (meaning a spiritualist medium) and in Bulletin des Polaires, 9 June 1930, they explained:

The Polaires take this name because from all time the Sacred Mountain, that is, the symbolic location of the Initiatic Centers, has always been qualified by different traditions as "polar." And it may very well be that this Mountain was once really polar, in the geographical sense of the word, since it is stated everywhere that the Boreal Tradition (or the Primordial Tradition, source of all Traditions) originally had its seat in the Hyperborean regions. (Jean Parvulesco, Les mysteres de la villa "Atlantis." Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1989, p.83).

For a mouthpiece of the spiritual center of the whole earth, associated if not identified with Agartha, the Oracle fell sadly short of expectations. Its answers were elaborate, but not always conclusive. For example:

Q. Do the Three Supreme Sages and Agarttha exist?

A. The Three Sages exist and are the Guardians of the Mysteries of Life and Death. After forty winters passed in penitence for sinful humanity and in sacrifices for suffering humanity, one may have special missions which permit one to enter into the Garden, in preparation for the final selection which opens the Gate of Agarttha. (Zam Bhotiva [Cesare Accomani] “Asia Mysteriosa” Paris: Dorbon Aine, 1929, p.86).

Guenon wrote that he had been interested, because he had tested the medium in question, by posing certain doctrinal questions. (Guenon in Le Voile d'Isis, February 1931).

Others who accepted the oracle's authenticity are Arturo Reghini and Julius Evola. In fact the  December 2007 “The Last Wargod” mentioned at the start, also contains a (re-published) article by Julius Evola.

Oliver Dard also aptly points out that the term Agharta it self might go back to the inspirations Ernest Renan caused, when he wrote about “Asgaard” in central Asia.

Ernest Renan, whose book Life of Jesus 1863 (said to have inspired Notovich’s Eurasian version) wrote elsewhere:

A factory of Ases [Scandinavian heroes], an Asgaard, might be reconstituted in the center of Asia. If one dislikes such myths, one should consider how bees and ants breed individuals for certain functions, or how botanists make hybrids. One could concentrate all the nervous energy in the brain. It seems that if such a solution should be at all realizable on the planet Earth, it is through Germany that it will come." (Renan, Dialogues et fragments philosophiques. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1876, P.117,120).

If this is the independent source Guenon and Ossendowski might have discussed together is an open question, however it would not impossible to have impressed Julius Evola when he gave Ossendowski and Ungern-Sternberg a second look (published in the above mentioned Dec.2007 “Junges Forum”).

Evola in fact  took Geunon's "King of the World" thesis one step further by producing his own "Revolt Against The Modern World"(1934). Evola ellaborated on the same topic in an article that was translated in German and published there in 1934/35 titled" The Swastika as a Polar Symbol" (Evola, Das Hakenkreuz als polares Symbol, in "Hochschule und Ausland" 1934/35).

Repeating what he explained in Revolt Against The Modern, now in German translation, that the polar star ("Polarstern") is the Budhist Chakravartin (meaning "King of the World").

Incidently Evola who proposed an Italian SS based on "The Legion of the Archangel Michael " (Iron Guard) in Rumania which Evola admired, briefly drew the attention of Heinrich Himmler.  
 

But what else do we know about Unger himself?

His relative-bymarriage Hermann Keyserling, later to become an important figure in European occultism, observed that even as a young man Ungern was interested in 'Tibetan and Hindu philosophy' and spoke of 'geometrical symbols'.Keyserling thought him 'one of the most metaphysically and occultly gifted men I have met'. (Hermann Keyserling, Reise durch die Zeit [A Journey through Time], vol. II ,Vaduz, I948, p. 53).

During the time Ungern lived in St Petersburg, there were thirty-five officially registered occult groups in this one city alone. Then, as now, alternative medicine was a mainstay of such movements, including a school of 'Tibetan medicine', frequented by the rich and gullible. And  St Petersburg bookstores (displaying  windows, at the train stations) at the time, contained  books about spiritualism, chiromancy, and occultism. Also The Theosophical Society after H.P.Blavatsky was in Adyar is claimed to have  had many thousands of followers in Russia that time-- mostly from the upper classes. In fact where an interest in both Eastern religion and the occult tends today to be associated with a broad range of 'alternative' thought, and in general with radical, or at least mildly left-wing, politics. This was not the case in Ungern's time.

Among the Russian and German aristocracy, belief in clairvoyance, poltergeists, telepathy, spiritualism, astrology and the like were as common as belief in homeopathy among the English middle classes today. Come the revolution, interest had reached such a level among the White diaspora that priests in the Russian-Chinese city of Harbin complained of being overwhelmed by Theosophists.

Blavatsky's books occasionally leap into vivid, poetic passages, but exhibit for the most part a tedious, prolix quality, replete with a high degree of pseudo-scholarship. A touch of irony may be found where she writes of one of her invented verses of the 'Secret Doctrine' that 'this is, perhaps, the most difficult of the stanzas to explain. Its language is comprehensible only to him who is well versed in Eastern allegory and purportedly obscure phraseology'.

But Theosophy was normally presented in Russia as a form of Buddhism - Theosophical circles frequently opened 'Buddhist temples' - and Ungern certainly perceived it as such. His term for his own faith, 'esoteric Buddhism', echoed a phrase which recurs throughout Blavatsky's writings, and was a standard description for Theosophy in Russia. The influence of Theosophical language and ideas is evident whenever Ungern discusses religion. Of particular importance to Theosophists was a belief in the 'Hidden Masters of the World' - great spiritual figures who influenced the world through their mystical powers, and whose benevolent teachings and guidance could aid the West. They communicated through Madame Blavatsky, apparently by dropping envelopes in the corners of rooms while nobody was looking through a sort of mystical postal service.

Tied into the notion of the positive conspiracy of the Hidden Masters was its inverse; the negative, manipulating, corrupting influence of evil forces. The notion of a conspiratorial elite could be traced back, in part, to a confused misinterpretation of the Jewish belief in thirty-six 'righteous men', living and suffering saints for whom God continued to spare the universe from destruction. Unsurprisingly, this rapidly became tied in with the conspiratorial anti-Semitism of Jewish well-poisoners, bankers and revolutionary masterminds. Western occultism had often exhibited a traditionally philo semitic streak, but now it was almost as though the Wisdom of the East had come to replace the Wisdom of the Jews, the Kabbalah swapped for Tibetan magic.

Although mainstream Theosophy was not obsessed by conspiratorial anti-Semitism, Blavatsky was never averse to taking occasional sideswipes at Judaism. She wrote of it as 'theologically a religion of hate and malice towards everyone and everything about it'. In contrast to Aryan religion, 'the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were pre-eminently those of a small tribe, thus marking [ ... ] the idiosyncratic defects that characterise many of the Jews to this day - gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality'. Not to mention that 'while the Egyptian emblem was spiritual, that of the Jews was purely materialistic'.

Theosophical ideas of the rise and fall of races and peoples meshed well with another popular Russian mystic and philosopher, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the 'Russian Nietzsche'. Although he died when Ungern was five, his books, particularly Russia and Europe, were still popular. They were exaltations of Russian character and will, in contrast to the weakness and softness of the West. Cultures began in simplicity and purity, became more intricate and entangled, and finally, burdened by their own complexities, decayed and died. Western society, with its unnatural commitment to egalitarianism rather than natural, healthy difference, was doomed. Leontiev praised the East, particularly its nomadic peoples, and felt that Russia's destiny lay with expansion into Asia. For now, Russia could be preserved by keeping everything exactly as it was - 'frozen so it doesn't stink' - and by the vigorous power of the tsar's will. Monarchy-dictatorship was the way forward. Ungern absorbed his ideas, and would regurgitate some of them later, along with those of other mystical and reactionary thinkers.

Combined with this was a sense of the slow sinking of the 'Evening Land' of the West. This would be put most powerfully by thinkers such as Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1917) and the Prussian philosopher Moeller van den Bruck, a Russian-speaker obsessed with the coming rise of the East. Both called for Germany to join the 'young nations' of Asia - through the adoption of such supposedly Asiatic practices as collectivism, 'inner barbarism' and despotic leadership. The identification of Russia with Asia would eventually overwhelm any such sympathies, instead leading to a more-or-less straightforward association of Germany with the values of 'the West', against the 'Asiatic barbarism' of Russia. This was most obvious during the Nazi era, when virtually every piece of anti-Russian propaganda talked of the 'Asiatic millions' or 'Mongolian hordes' which threatened to overrun Europe, but identification of the Russians as Asian - and especially as Mongolian - continued well into the Cold War era.

It was not an identity that most Russians shared. The East was the other, the opposite of civilised, Westernised Russia, and the Mongols the epitome of the Asian bogeyman. Nikolas II was just as concerned about the threat of the 'yellow' peoples as his cousin, and it had shaped Russia's actions during the war with the Japanese. Nevertheless, some Russians, particularly artists, were becoming increasingly interested in the Mongolian heritage of the country. Russian intellectual identity was continually torn between Asia and Europe, both wanting to be part of European, 'civilised' culture and feeling the call of 'wild Asian blood'. Most of the time the first view prevailed, and the whole history of Russian-Mongol relations was rewritten into a myth of heroic resistance, the extensive collaboration between Russian kingdoms and the Mongols forgotten. The Mongols became the enemy - but at the same time they represented something heroic and wild, a romantic part of the Russians' self-image and yearning.

As a result, in the nineteenth century there was an increasing trend in Russia towards 'pan-Mongolism', a search for the origins of Russian customs and folk beliefs in Asiatic legend. This rested mainly upon a nebulous and romanticised image of Mongolia in which Mongols, Tatars and Scythians were bundled together into a vision of untamed and savage natural life. Serious interest in the cultures and religions of the Far East was limited to a tiny minority of ethnologists, linguists and hobbyists. There were also those who needed practical knowledge, the soldiers and bureaucrats who protected and governed Russia's far-flung eastern provinces, although they often arrived with a pre-forged image of the peoples and territories they were about to encounter. Ungern was soon to be numbered among them.

His was a romantic version of what was, in fact, an entirely pragmatic approach towards the Russian borderlands. Like most imperial peoples, the Russians soon realised that it was easier to co-opt than coerce. They lacked the numbers to try the Chinese or American approach to dealing with areas dominated by minority ethnic groups; open up the borders, encourage (or coerce) hundreds of thousands of your own people to settle the region and outnumber the locals within a generation or two. With the borderlands so strategically crucial, they had to be secured another way. Membership in the Russian Empire had to be made attractive, particularly to the local elites. Old tribal structures and religious hierarchies were maintained, but were incorporated into the imperial bureaucracy. As a result Russian officials found themselves deciding obscure questions of tribal inheritance, or determining whether a new visionary religion among the Oirat Mongols threatened imperial stability, or funding the construction of Buddhist temples. Local leaders or priests were paid off with lucrative government jobs or posts in the army. If these tactics failed, though, imperial policy could demonstrate a Roman ruthlessness, crushing rebellious tribes and salting their fields.

The Buriat provide a good example of the ambiguous attitude of the Russian Empire towards its ethnic minorities. On the one hand, it had conquered and (theoretically) subjugated them, and the majority of ethnic Russians maintained profoundly racist attitudes towards the various Asian peoples. Russian settlement had driven some, particularly the various Siberian tribes, away from their traditional territories, brought disease and stripped them of their traditional independence. On the other hand, the empire had a vested interest in keeping the Buriat and other large groups happy. In many ways they had more rights than the average Russian - they paid less tax, they were exempt from conscription, IS they were able to keep their traditional leadership. Many of the Asiatic minorities were actually more privileged than the Ukrainians and Poles, who were forbidden even from using their own languages. The Asiatic minorities benefited from their very foreignness. The Western minorities were seen as a plausible target for JZussification, but the Mongol-descended peoples, far more ethnically and religiously distant, were left to their own devices.

The empire remained focused around its Great Russian and religiously Orthodox core, but at the same time was able to embrace numerous diverse groups at its edges. Sometimes members of these groups could be the most ardent proponents of imperial expansion. For instance, the Buriats' place within the empire was made even more secure by the rise to power and influence of one of their compatriots, Piotr Badmaev. A convert to Orthodoxy and practitioner of Tibetan medicine, he had the ear of both Alexandr III and Nikolas II, and considered himself the protector of the Buriats. He also pushed for plans, never realised, to expand the empire yet further, annexing Tibet and parts of western China.

With the exception of his time in St Petersburg, Ungern's whole life was spent on the fringes of the empire. They would come to define the Russian Empire for him, even when its core was abandoned, but his idealistic vision of it didn't make the mundane work of guarding its frontiers any less boring.

He had chosen to join a cavalry division not onJy for its glamour but also because he loved horses. The Buriat, like their Mongolian cousins, were excellent riders and good judges of horseflesh. Ungern was already a talented rider, but under the tutelage of more experienced officers his skills improved further. He soon mastered the art of mounted combat and became respected in the regiment for his riding skills. Warfare on horseback has a romanticism which has not quite disappeared from the Western consciousness, and Ungern would remain  enthusiastic, to his later tactical disadvantage, about the possibilities of the cavalry charge and the lightning raid. He had other diversions too; one report mentions his interest in 'general' as well as 'military' literature and European philosophy.

Again it was Hermann Keyserling, a fellow Baltic noble, who wrote that he had a strong impression of Ungern:
certainly the most remarkable person I have ever had the good fortune to meet. One day I said to his grandmother, Baroness Wimpfen, 'He is a creature whom one might call suspended between Heaven and Hell, without the least understanding of the laws of this world.' He presented a really extraordinary mixture of the most profound aptitude for metaphysics and of cruelty. So he was positively predestined for Mongolia (where such discord in a man is the rule), and there, in fact, his fate led him. [ ... ] He was not of this world, and I cannot help thinking that on this earth he was only a passing guest.1

As Ungern passed into Mongolia he was riding through an otherworldly environment. Sometimes on the grasslands he could look in any direction and see no human sign all the way to the horizon, the blue of the sky like a vast ocean above him, broken only by the flicker of a bird of prey. Unless he ran across herders, or saw a marmot scurrying briefly above ground, the world would seem entirely devoid of life. The empty landscape was similar to that of Siberia. Perhaps he even found comfort in being only a speck on a vast expanse of nothingness - he never had great need of any company other than his own.

Not all of Mongolia is flat, particularly in the north-east, and much of the time he would have been travelling through long stretches of hills, rising sometimes into mountains, across swamps, or between thick forests where humans rarely intruded. Small clusters of rocky hills broke up the open countryside, as though the earth had been punched from beneath. Ungern regarded the landscape with a tactician's trained eye, looking for routes that a cavalry army could take; he could still remember them a decade later. Such terrain was also attractive to the builders of monasteries, the only permanent structures in most parts of Mongolia, the steep slopes and commanding views being excellent defensive features. Here travellers could find rest and safety; the monks were often trained fighters and the monastery walls thickly reinforced. Ungern would have been made welcome, for the monks paid little heed to race or religion and usually accepted Chinese, Russian and Mongolian visitors alike - a laudable generosity given the fact that the preceding few hundred years had seen several Chinese invasions of Mongolia, and many monastery-fortresses, which had been centres of resistance, had been either burnt down or stuffed with gunpowder and blown up. Destroyed monasteries were not the only ruins Ungern would have encountered; he might have stumbled upon remnants of pre-Mongol civilisations, perhaps the Ozymandian palace of a long-forgotten Turkic king. In the summer heat herds of horses pressed themselves against the old walls, or gathered under the rare bridges, desperate for shade.

Ungern could not have carried enough food and water to survive the entire journey self-sufficiently, so must have relied upon the everyday hospitality of the Mongolians. Mongolia's harsh terrain and climate, particularly in the winter, meant that feeding and housing travellers was considered a duty by every household. Even a foreigner would be given shelter for the night unquestioningly, and food for the next day. Ungern must have spent many nights in the cramped and dark interior of a Mongolian tent, with a barrel of fermented mare's milk by the door and the family sleeping on cushions inside. He must also have seen the regular devotions of the Mongols, sprinkling offerings to the spirits and praying to the gods and Buddhas.

As a foreigner travelling alone he would have drawn special attention from the locals. Many European visitors to Asia liked to wear traditional dress, often writing self-flatteringly that they were indistinguishable from the locals. This seems hard to believe. Even today, any European male in rural China, regardless of dress, draws a crowd of openmouthed children, middle-aged women cheerfully assessing his looks and young men shouting 'Hello!' There were only a few hundred Europeans in the whole country at the time, among perhaps a million Mongolians; apart from the small Russian settlement around the consulate in Urga, which was the sole foreign enclave, they were guaranteed to attract attention from the locals, curious as to what exotic items or powerful magic they might possess. (Europeans were seen by many Mongols as being potentially powerful sorcerers. The explorer Henning Haslund described how a young woman had come to him and begged him to symbolically 'adopt' her sick baby, since his powerful 'white man's magic' would be able to drive away the spirits that plagued the child. He went through the ritual, and the child promptly recovered.) A traveller would never be without company, however unwelcome.

Ungem would certainly have stood out among the Mongolians, with his bullet-shaped head, stage-villain moustache and tufts of reddishblond hair. He was in first-rate physical condition, lean and hard, but when he spoke his voice varied wildly in pitch, like that of a teenager, although he was almost thirty. Aleksei Burdukov, a Russian merchant, fell in with Ungem for a while. He left an unforgettable picture of him: 'a scrawny, ragged, droopy man; on his face had grown a wispy blond beard, he had faded, blank blue eyes, and he looked about thirty years old. His military uniform was in abnormally poor condition, the trousers being considerably worn and torn at the knees. He carried a sword by his hip and a gun at his belt.'2 Ungern rode alongside Burdukov's coaches, a skilled, tireless horseman, shouting at the coachmen when he felt they were slacking and striking them with his whip. When the group stumbled into a swamp, Ungern 'laid on the ground and refused to move, listening'. Then, going forward and ordering the others to follow, he led them from patch to patch through the bog, 'finding the most convenient solid places with surprising dexterity and often getting into knee-deep water'. Eventually he sniffed at the air, 'seeking the smell of smoke to find nearby settlements. At last he told us one was nearby. We followed him, and he was right - in the distance we heard the bark of dogs. This unusual persistence, cruelty, instinctive feelings amazed me.' Burdukov despaired of the quality of young Russian officers in the country, if Ungern's bad manners and cruelty were typical of the breed.

The first thing Ungern possibly would have noticed about Urga, Mongolia's most populous settlement, was the smell. Sewers were as unheard of as electricity, and human waste was simply thrown into the streets to be devoured by the packs of scavenging dogs that roamed the city. Anybody venturing outdoors at night took a stick to beat off the animals, but their main enemies were the hordes of beggars, mostly old women no longer able to bear the rigours of steppe life, driven to the town to live a few last miserable years fighting with the dogs for scraps. To add to the stench, the Mongolians were a notoriously unwashed people, believing the rare springs and streams in the country were home to territorial spirits who would inflict dreadful illness on trespassers.

Ungern arrived there in the autumn of 1913, but it was a strangely timeless city; apart from the rifles sometimes carried by hunters and soldiers, and the very occasional European motor car, it would have been hard to tell whether it was 1913 or 1193. Merchants rode in on camel or horse from China, bearing silks, drugs and teas; trappers hawked furs that would eventually be sold for a thousand times their initial price when they reached Moscow or London; fortune-tellers cast oracle bones on the street to determine the fates of young nobles.

It was a trading city, where Mongols, Chinese and Russians met to exchange goods worth over a million dollars a year. Its Chinese and Russian enclaves were well established, almost entirely separate from the Mongolian one. Urga lay at the centre of the Tea Road, the overland route to Russia, and originally the local currency had been bricks of tea, but now most traders preferred the brass cash of the Chinese, or even Mexican dollars (a common trading currency at the time). The markets were full of livestock, enlivened by the occasional Western wonder such as a gramophone or a camera, normally brought for the amusement of the ]ebtsundamba Khutuktu, also known as the Bogd Gegen, Holy Shining One, Holy King or Living Buddha: the ever-reincarnating head of the Mongolian Buddhist orders and one of the very few Mongols who could afford such toys) It was the closest that Mongolia had to a capital, being the nominal centre of the most dominant Mongolian group, the Khalkha,4 but the real power lay in foreign hands. Mongolia had been under Chinese control for three centuries, and the Chinese administration, including a small garrison, was based in Urga.

Primarily, it was a city of religion. Out of the roughly twenty-five thousand permanent Mongolian residents, an estimated ten thousand were either monks or had some sort of affiliation with the monasteries. There were a hundred and three reincarnated lamas in Mongolia, returning life after life, and many of them lived there. Urga had been founded in the seventeenth century as the Ikh Khuree, or 'great monastery', to serve as the residence of the Bogd Gegen, and that remained its Mongolian name; 'Urga' was used only by Russians and other foreigners. Temples were everywhere, dark and smoky, statues of their gods concealed in numerous alcoves. The gods were usually depicted in a warlike stance, brandishing weapons and trampling on corpses, but some were joined together in elaborate and implausibly athletic couplings, no doubt to the ribald amusement of the more elderly and worldly-wise female pilgrims) The statues were dressed by the temple's monks, some of whom would climb, agile as monkeys, over the larger examples, sometimes twenty metres tall, in order to change a goddess's scarf or repaint a cracked face. Most of the monks wore the conventional saffron robes of Buddhism, but some wore heavy wooden masks depicting the angry or ecstatic faces of the gods, dancing and singing in their honour. Yellow silk banners fluttered in the breeze outside the temples, emblazoned with the swastika, an ancient symbol of Buddhism and one particularly venerated by the Mongolians.

Being a monk was a relatively good life, compared with that of herder, scratching out a bare subsistence and ever fearful of a bad zud, a peculiar local combination of hard winter and quick-melting frost that could kill a quarter of the country's livestock. The vast majority of Mongolians lived as nomads, moving between camps according to the seasons and relying on their animals to survive. Monks were certain of a full bowl and a comfortable place to sleep, if nothing else, and the temples were major money makers, storing most of what wealth there was in Mongolia. The temples were visible for miles, since they were the only large buildings in Urga; most of the population lived in gers (felt tents). Important gers were surrounded by walled compounds, marking an uneasy compromise between settled and nomadic life. Only in the Russian compound and the Chinese trading town of Maimaichen, a few miles from the main city, were permanent buildings common.

Throughout the year the population of the city would be bolstered by pious pilgrims, bringing offerings of food, money and incense. By local standards, Urga was a major site of religious tourism, sometimes drawing Buddhists from China and Tibet as well as from all the Mongol tribes. The Gandan Temple, the residence of the chief Mongolian oracles, was the most visited location, a steep and shadowy building designed to induce a suitable degree of fear and trembling in the approaching supplicant. The Bogd Khan's own palace, a couple of miles away, was a two-storeyed European-style affair, painted in lurid shades of green and yellow and greatly venerated. Today it seems a modest building, on the same scale as a decent sized English farmhouse, but it was the first building in Mongolia to have more than one floor, and pilgrims would come to see the miracle of its staircase, treading gingerly upon each step.

Religion was not the only amusement. The 'three manly sports' of wrestling, horse-riding and archery, the foundations of the Mongolian's old military might, were hugely popular. Men of all ages would come to compete against each other at tournaments, and informal matches were common; travellers reported young men racing on horseback through the city, or two bear-like amateur wrestlers grunting and shoving against each other in the street as their wives watched and cheered. The 'three manly sports' were really five; drinking and boasting were considered equally important.6 The Mongolian assertion that 'every man is Genghis Khan in his own tent' was surely heard as widely then as today, and if all the drunken claims of beasts slain, Chinese humiliated and women wooed were true, Mongolia was a nation of heroes.

Religious ceremonies, frequent and extravagant, were at the core of life in the city. At festival times the perimeter could expand to four or five times its normal size, acquiring a huge outer ring of gers and becoming a great campground with the city at its centre. New buildings would be hastily constructed to bear enormous statues or prayer-flags; rows of lamas danced through the streets; crowds cheered and clapped and prayed. Festivals were times of masks: skull-masks for the dancers of death, demon-masks stuck on poles to grin eerily in the sunlight like from Chinese control, and proudly proclaimed Mongolia free, strong and Buddhist.

The revolution had been a painful affair. In China, the Qing dynasty was finally collapsing after a drawn-out agony of more than a century during which China's rulers had proven woefully unprepared to deal with Western guns, opium or ideas. The few Chinese remaining in Mongolia, mostly officials and merchants, had no stomach for a fight, especially in the name of a foreign dynasty. There were just over a hundred Chinese troops in Urga facing four thousand Mongolian soldiers and perhaps a thousand Russians. The worst fighting had been in the west, around the city of Khobdo, where Mongol forces stormed the Chinese compounds and slaughtered the garrison. Other resistance leaders led small bands against the Chinese elsewhere in the country; one of the most successful was formed by Togtokh, a Mongolian prince and long-standing opponent of the Chinese, who headed a group of warriors equipped with Russian rifles.

The Qing themselves were not Chinese but Manchu. A nomadic and warlike group of northern clans unified under the charismatic leadership of Nurhaci, much as the Mongols had been under Genghis Khan, they had conquered China in I644, driving out the reigning Ming dynasty. The Mongol leaders loathed the Ming, who were descended from the leaders of the original Chinese rebellion against the Mongols, and were only too happy to see the Qing take the throne, swiftly sealing deals whereby the leaders of each Mongol clan effectively accepted Manchu rule. (So happy, in fact, that the southern Mongol tribes of modern Inner Mongolia acknowledged the first Qing emperor as the 'great khan' in 1636, eight years before the final conquest of China, although it took another sixty years for the northern Mongols to accept Qing leadership.) The early Qing emperors took wives from among the Mongols, particularly those who could prove direct descent from Genghis, in order both to strengthen their ties to Mongolia and bolster their claim to be the true heirs of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and so the legitimate rulers of China. They also spread rumours that they had discovered the legendary Great Seal of Genghis Khan, legitimising their reign through prophecy.9

The greatest challenge to the Qing came from the Zunghar kingdom of western Mongolia, led by the powerful and charismatic leader Galdan Khan, who also made claims to legitimacy through descent from Genghis. Its power was destroyed by a century of Qing campaigns, combined with outbreaks of smallpox which killed 40 per cent of the population. Continued Mongolian resistance resulted in the Chinese adopting a policy of genocide in the I750s, effected by starvation tactics and an imperial order 'to take the young and strong and massacre them'. Siberian governors reported refugees' stories of Manchu troops massacring entire settlements. Roughly one hundred and eighty thousand people were killed, and the survivors fled to join the Kazakhs and Buriats in Russia. 'For several thousand Ii [around 600 miles],' reported one historian, 'there was not one single Zungharian tent'.10

Despite the devastation wrought by the Qing in the west, many Mongolians were content to live under Manchu rule. The Manchu were determined to keep their original homelands in the north free from corrupting Chinese influence, and so banned all settlement in both Manchuria and northern Mongolia. They issued a series of decrees in the nineteenth century which forbade Mongols from learning the Chinese language, taking Chinese names, adopting Chinese clothing and habits, or even eating Chinese food. Population pressures resulted in widespread settlement by Han Chinese in southern Mongolia, which had effectively been absorbed into China by the beginning of the twentieth century and today is the modern-day province of Inner Mongolia. The breakdown of the non-settlement policy, combined with incompetent administration and the stranglehold that Chinese traders had on the Mongolian economy, kindled anti-Qing feelings among the Mongols. By 1911 demonstrations, rebellions and attacks on Qing officials were becoming increasingly common. Debt and natural disaster drove a growing number of former nomads into a pitiful life as beggars on the edge of the towns.

The communist regime was later to claim the 1911 rebellion as a precursor to Mongolia's glorious Marxist uprising. That the Mongols had petitioned Russia for support in their revolution made good communist propaganda, and it has been called Asia's first modern revolution. In truth there was very little modern about it. Democratic ideals were current among a tiny fraction of the Mongolian population, mostly those lucky few who had worked or been educated in Russia or China and who had picked up ideas from reformers there. The instigators of the petition to Moscow comprised a small circle of young hereditary nobles, determined to regain some measure of their ancient power. The heads of each Mongol tribe had been obliged, under the Qing, to visit Peking to make obeisance to the emperor, and any who failed to do so were forced to pay tribute in sheep to his representatives in Mongolia.

This rankled the nobles, whose ancestral memories of the mighty Yuan dynasty of Genghis Khan were still vivid. Back then the 'proper' order of things had been established and the Chinese had paid tribute to the Mongols, not the other way round. Life had at least been tolerable so long as the Qing had maintained their distinctly Manchu, nomadic identity, but resentment against them increased as they became more Sinicised. The Manchu language, which bore some similarity to Mongolian, had been almost completely abandoned by the Qing except for ceremonial purposes and they had become virtually indistinguishable from the Han Chinese. Even their hairstyles were identical, for the Han had been forced to adopt the pigtail among several other Manchu customs.

The rebellion mustered considerable popular support, not so much from any great liking for the nobles as from distaste for the Chinese. In order to placate dissenters at home and defend against Russian expansionism, the Chinese authorities had begun allowing much greater colonisation in Mongolia. They stationed two regiments in Inner Mongolia in 1906 and began the construction of a railway to compete directly with the Russian line. Over twenty thousand square miles of land had been taken away from the Mongols for the Chinese settlers to farm, and three hundred and fifty thousand Chinese settlers had moved into Inner Mongolia.

All these measures were resented by the Mongols, especially Chinese colonisation. The Mongolians, still almost entirely herders and nomads, valued their land and their space more than anything else, and saw urban life as essentially soft, fit only for beggars and monks. The Chinese merchants and bankers were resented most of all; the Mongols, increasingly impoverished by colonisation and Qing taxation, were forced to buy on credit, often at crippling rates of interest. Chinese merchants were the main target of the outbreaks of violence during the revolution; over three hundred of them were murdered and their debt records burned in ceremonial pyres on the streets.

Anti-Chinese feelings were even more intense in Inner Mongolia, where the call for Mongolian independence was eagerly taken up by the eight Mongol clans there, all of whom were suffering badly from Chinese expansionism. One of the largest groups was the Chahars - so prominent, in fact, that one province, which encompassed much of modern Inner Mongolia, was named after them. They held territory around the Chinese city of Chengde and were particularly fierce in their opposition to Chinese rule, but Han settlers outnumbered them by a ratio of nearly I9 to I and many Mongols were driven over the border into northern Mongolia or Russia.

The superior attitude of the Chinese towards the Mongolians didn't help matters. In the Chinese suburb of Urga, Maimaichen, the people lived in wooden buildings instead of gers and kept their distance from the Mongolian city. Mongolia was the edge of the Chinese Empire, and the colonists harboured the usual prejudices against the natives. Themselves stereotyped by the British and Japanese as lazy, backward, cruel and ignorant, the Han Chinese applied their own sets of prejudices to the northern barbarians. Nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Chinese accounts consistently portray the Mongols as scurrilous, lazy and drunken - sometimes accurately, especially in respect of the town-dwelling Mongols they encountered most often - and this attitude seems to have carried over into everyday dealings between the two groupings.

The Mongolian reputation for cruelty, insensibility and stupidity, a legacy of the ruthless conquests of the hordes, still survived in both Asia and Europe. Chinese popular dramas featured Mongolian henchmen, often Oddjob to Japanese Blofeld, who habitually threatened the hero or heroine with sadistic tortureY A later but telling example comes from the Second World War, where one French doctor, witnessing the execution of a Mongolian prisoner, a member of a German repression unit (perhaps lent by the Japanese; perhaps drafted by the Russians, then captured and drafted again12) spoke of how 'he had no thoughts at all about what was happening to him. He had died as an animal does'.13

Medically speaking, Down's syndrome children were 'mongoloid', a term originally intended to reference not only their epicanthic eyes, but also their diminished mental capacity. Western visitors remarked upon the Mongolians' 'remarkable naivety' or 'child-like attitudes'. The Chinese mocked them as dumb, smelly barbarians, and took remorseless advantage of their (quite genuine) gullibility in matters of trade. One Briton commentated sniffily, 'Ch'ou Monks who preached against him rarely survived their dinner invitations. According to Ossendowski, 'The Bogd Khan knows every thought, every movement of the Princes and Khans, the slightest conspiracy against himself, and the offender is usually kindly invited to Urga, from where he does not return alive.'17 Those who declined were usually later found strangled. One notable banquet, given for a group of Tibetan emissaries from the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who, no political slouch himself, was uncomfortable with his supposed underling's debauchery and independence, ended with all the representatives perishing that very night. He could be more direct: a monk who drunkenly wondered aloud, 'Is that miserable old blind Tibetan still alive? What do we call him our king for? I don't care a fig for his orders and admonitions' was executed for blasphemy. 18 To us it might seem that the spirit of an especially degenerate Borgia had entered the Bogd in some kind of terrible metaphysical mix-up, but in fact such murderous tactics were hardly unusual in the cut-throat politics of Buddhism.

The Bogd was the son of a monastic Tibetan administrator in Mongolia. Recognised at four as the new incarnation of the Bogd Khan, he would have been all too aware of being surrounded by enemies. Reincarnated lamas retained their possessions between lives, but until they came of age these were in the hands of their regents. Consequently, many met with fatal accidents before they reached adulthood - the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Bogd Khan's contemporary, was the first to make it to his thirties in nearly a century.

Those who did survive faced a lethal combination of Buddhist theological and temporal politics. The history of Tibetan Buddhism is a corrupt and Byzantine affair, seemingly tailor made to suit old-fashioned anti-clericalism. It is like I, Claudius with silk scarves: in every scene somebody is either poisoned, stabbed, caught in flagrante or shoved over a cliff. The Fifth, or Great, Dalai Lama established himself as the ruler of Tibet chiefly through the exile, disgrace or murder of most of his opponents, and some of the Bogd Khan's previous selves had shown a similarly direct approach to their opposition.

His paranoia and taste for power went along with a desire to add to the material possessions he had accumulated over the course of several lives. In this incarnation they were frequently supplemented by expensive imports from America, Britain and China. 'Motorcars, gramophones, telephones, crystals, porcelains, pictures, perfumes, musical instruments, rare animals and birds; elephants, Himalayan bears, monkeys, Indian snakes and parrots - all these were in the palace of "the god" but all were soon cast aside and forgotten.'I9 His macabre collection of stuffed animals; puffer-fish and penguins and elephant seals may still be viewed, laid out in a back room of his palace. Sadly, the mirrors with 'intricate drawings of a most grossly obscene character'20 have been removed. His zoo was particularly infamous, including giraffes, tigers and chimpanzees preserved in a miserable half-life of cruel teasing and desperate cold. One unfortunate elephant had to walk to Urga from the Russian border, a three-month tramp. He valued human oddities, too; the elephant was looked after by Gongor, a seven foot six inch giant from northern Mongolia.

Despite the Bogd's dubious ethics and repellent appearance, most European visitors were rather charmed by him. Some claimed to find in him a true example of the duality of Buddhism, embracing both good and evil. Others found him an amusing and witty conversationalist, knowledgeable about political dealings in China and Russia. Ungern's relationship with him would be half-wary, half-worshipful, although in 1913 he had no inkling that his path would eventually bring him into the closest contact with the 'great, good Buddha'.

Soviet accounts would later claim that after Ungern was 'cashiered from the army' he was driven to a life of crime, forming a group of brigands that preyed on Russian and Chinese alike. This was certainly not the case - apart from the lack of any evidence, it was the kind of thing Ungern would have boasted about, or at least used to enhance his credibility with the Mongols. Among the Russians, claims of Ungern's achievements became equally exaggerated. He was 'the commander of the whole cavalry force of Mongolia', 21 claimed one of his later superiors. In fact, his journey in 1913 left little trace in the historical record. And he was not the only Russian interested in the country.

The Russian government was only too happy to provide aid to the new Mongolian government, which had approached them as early as July 1911, six months before the actual expulsion of the Chinese. By December 1912 there were treaties of mutual aid and support in place. The humiliation of the Russo-Japanese war still smarted, and Korea and Manchuria were, at least for the moment, outside the Russian sphere of influence, but Mongolia was a perfectly plausible option. China, weak and backward, was a much easier target than Japan, and Mongolia, while neither rich nor populous, was a perfect location for a base to exert further influence on the region. Relations between China and Russia were customarily peaceful, thanks to the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1687, which had ended twenty years of border conflicts and neatly divvied up north-east Asia between them. Yet the opportunities for expansion as China's border territories started to fall apart had been too good to miss, and Russia had extorted considerable land concessions in the nineteenth century. Mongolia was merely an extension of this policy.

Consequently Mongolian independence, while given no outright backing from Moscow, was tacitly encouraged from 1905 onwards. The Russians began to compete in earnest against the Chinese, building their own railway through Mongolia and dropping none-too-subtle hints to the nascent independence movement that they might find Russian aid in their time of need. A small-scale trade war began between Russian and Chinese merchants, both competing to offer the most favourable terms to their Mongolian suppliers. Although they rejected an initial approach by the Mongolians, their policy soon changed when it became apparent that the Chinese had neither the power nor the troops to keep control of Mongolia.

In the long run, the Russians had no interest in Mongolian independence. Aleksei Kuropatkin, the general responsible for the farce of the Russo-Japanese war and leader of a clique at court dedicated to Asian expansion, wrote that 'in the future, a major global war could flare up between the yellow race and the white. For this purpose, Russia must occupy north Manchuria and Mongolia. Only then will Mongolia be harmless. '22

Kuropatkin's words perhaps indicate another source of Russian anxiety about Mongolia; a deep-rooted memory of the Mongol conquests that gave this otherwise minor country a greater importance. His real worry, though, concerned the waves of Chinese immigration into Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which he and other military and politicalleaders saw as 'the first blow of the yellow race against the white' the 'Yellow Peril' feared throughout Europe. Indeed, in European eyes the Mongols often stood in for the whole of Asia, over-breeding and posing a constant threat to Western civilisation. In the pseudo-science of racial hierarchies, 'Mongol' was used for the whole of East Asia, and the spectre of Genghis Khan was raised time and time again during the early twentieth century, especially as Japan began its rise to power; convenient shorthand for the 'Yellow Peril' as a whole.

One party in the Russian government seriously considered annexing Mongolia outright in 1912, but more cautious voices prevailed. Instead they would arm and train the new regime as a buffer against China. In the summer of 1912, then, the Russians dispatched a small group of military advisers to train the Mongolian army, some twenty thousand strong but completely unskilled in modern warfare. Many of the troops didn't even have guns, preferring the composite bow, taut and powerful, that dated back to Genghis Khan's mounted archers, and military discipline had become a foreign concept. Under Genghis and his immediate successors, the Mongolians had been a more streamlined, disciplined and deadly war machine than any army until the Second World War, but nothing of this remained; now the emphasis was on individual glory, outdoing rival clans, and plunder. They needed to be licked into shape, and the Russians had the men for the job.

Ungern latched on to them, attempting to get himself a post with the Russian garrisons in Urga and the western city of Khobdo, both of which contained members of his former regiments. He was refused, but found himself attached to the Khobdo guard as a supernumerary captain. With few actual duties, he spent his time studying the language (he would scribble down new words he came across), practising his riding and talking to the lamas and monks who dominated the Mongolian cities. The other officers found him strange and off-putting, and effectively excluded him from their society. One witness remembered him sitting alone in silence much of the time, and on other occasions being seized by a strange spirit and leading whooping Cossacks in wild charges across the plains.

He may have had some contact with one of the most legendary lamas, Dambijantsan, also known as the Ja Lama. This mysterious figure had been fighting against the Chinese for over thirty years; he claimed to be the great-grandson, and later the reincarnation, of Amursana, a famous eighteenth-century fighter against the Manchus who was in turn a purported incarnation of Mahakala, the Great Black God, a ferocious deity who, like the other 'dharma protectors', shielded Buddhists from the enemies of the faith. Popular memory maintained a series of classic 'hidden king' legends around him, and his eventual return to liberate the Western Mongols (the Oirats) from Chinese domination. In reality Amursana had been, at times, a collaborator of the Manchus, but this was conveniently forgotten. Critically, Amursana's place of magical concealment, from which he would soon emerge, was in Russia - the ever-mystical north, where he had died while under Russian protection in 1757. By making his claims, then, Dambijantsan sought to legitimise himself dynastically, through Amursana's nobility, politically, by assuming the mantle of anti-Chinese resistance, and theologically, by claiming the magical inheritance of Amursana and the incarnated power of Mahakala. As an epic poem written in his voice put it:

I am a mendicant monk from the Russian Tsar's kingdom, but I am born of the great Mongols. My herds are on the Volga river, my water source is the Irtysh. There are many hero warriors with me. I have many riches. Now I have come to meet with you beggars, you remnants of the Oirats, in the time when the war for power begins. Will you support the enemy? My homeland is Altai, Irtysh, Khobuk-sari, Emil, Bortala, and Alatai. This is the Oirat mother country. By descent, I am the great-grandson of Amursana, the reincarnation of Mahakala, owning the horse Maralbashi. I am he whom they call the hero Dambijantsan. I came to move my pastures back to my own land, to collect my subject households and bondservants, to give favour, and to move freely.23

These were grand claims for a squat, ugly monk, but his charisma and his military success gathered many followers. Ungern had learnt about him from Russian and Chinese newspapers, and probably from the travelogues of the Russian ethnologist and political agent Aleksei Pozdneiev, who collected stories of him in the 1890s, and hoped to join him to fight against the Chinese, but was forbidden from doing so by his superiors. Khobdo had seen fierce fighting only that year between Mongolian fighters and the Chinese garrison, and the Chinese fortress had fallen in a scene of bloody revenge.

The Ja Lama had been at the forefront, politically and militarily, of these battles; he was, as Ungern aspired to be, a near-legendary figure of militant Buddhism. After he seized western Mongolia, although he claimed to still be loyal to the Bogd Khan, he ruled autocratically for more than two years. The atrocities at Khobdo were typical of his regime. There were plausible accounts, both from his enemies and, later, from former allies, that he conducted a ritual, upon taking the fortress, in which the hearts of two Chinese victims were literally ripped from their chests, like victims of an Aztec sacrifice.24 The rumour that his ger was lined with the skins of his enemies was probably false, but other lamas reported that he used terror ruthlessly. If Ungern met the Ja Lama, he found him a disappointment - he had sung his praises before his arrival in Mongolia, but referred to him only in disparaging terms afterwards - though he must also have drawn many lessons from him.

Throughout his later career in Mongolia, Ungern professed nothing but respect for Buddhism and 'the destiny of the Buddhist peoples'. 25 It was on this trip that he learnt the importance of these beliefs among the Mongolians. It was a strikingly, almost fanatically, Buddhist country, hence the power of the Bogd Khan. No matter what his sins, the Bogd's theological status - and his political clout - were beyond question. What we observe so often, and what seems so strange at first, is the fear and awe that the Mongolian temples created, both in ordinary Mongolians and even in those, like Ungern, raised in an utterly foreign tradition.

Mongolian Buddhism hinged on sacrifice. The Mongolian gods were demanding, and unmoved by anything except offerings. Although the merciful bodhisattvas did feature in Mongolian religion, they could be overshadowed by the more uncaring deities. Offerings were made for the usual reasons: relief of illness, fertility of crops, cursing of enemies. Averting disaster also loomed large as a pious motive. Tibetan Buddhism makes very specific distinctions between offerings for worship, which honour the enlightened gods, and offerings of propitiation, made to keep the unenlightened gods from getting angry. Many Mongolian offerings fell into this second category; payoffs to various malevolent spirits in a divine protection racket.

A cynic might say that this protection racket benefited corporeal lamas more than spiritual gods. Every year, a significant part of the national income drained into the coffers of monasteries already stuffed with the wealth of centuries. Another goodly portion went, quite literally, up in smoke, for holocausts were an integral to Mongolian ritual. Animal sacrifice was common, hecatombs of livestock being offered to the blood-hungry gods. The meat, as with most offerings, ended up feeding the monks - or sometimes the poor.

The lamas were greatly concerned with sacrifice themselves. The Bogd Khan's failing eyesight was a particular worry; ten thousand statues of the Buddha were ordered from Poland, and a gigantic statue of the Buddha brought from Inner Mongolia and placed in a newly built temple. Together these two offerings, both made in I912, cost some 400,000 Chinese silver taels, a vast sum of money. They had no effect on the Bogd's vision.

And behind all this there was always the whiff of something older and perhaps more frightening. Mongolian Buddhism, like Tibetan, drew heavily on older religions, particularly shamanism. The Chinese had their shamanic traditions too, but they were largely corralled and suppressed, surviving only in a few figures such as the ancient Mother Goddess of the West and the shape-shifting heroes of primordial Chinese mythology. They are uncomfortable figures, standing somewhat outside the comfortable domesticity or light bureaucratic satire of most Chinese gods. Even today they have an unnerving power. In Hong Kong I once handled a statue of a snake-god who, in ancient Chinese mythology, shaped the formless chaos of the newly created universe.26 It caught my attention because they are so rarely depicted directly, but it was long and thin and sinuous and seemed to twist oddly in the half-light.

Western writers have been fascinated by shamanism, in Asia and elsewhere, seeing in it the dawn of religion. In Mongolia, it seemed, one barely had to scratch the surface of Buddhism to uncover essentially shamanic beliefs. Indeed, some of the more remote tribal groups still had shamans of their own. In shamanic cosmologies, the spirit world is ever-present, and the rituals and sacrifices needed to deal with it a mainstay of everyday life. The shaman stands between two worlds, pleading or bargaining with the spirits for power for himself and his community. Much of the Mongolian relationship with their gods seemed to be drawn from this worldview, and the gods themselves were, in many cases, of pre-Buddhist origin. The range of gods and spirits was highly varied; broad distinctions could be made between the lu or nagas, spirits of water, the savdag, spirits of land, and dashgid, the Wrathful Ones, spirits of air, but within these there were numerous subcategories - nagas, for instance, could be categorised by colour, origin, caste, intention and sex - and only the lama or shaman could be expected to have the nous to deal with them properly.

Tibetan Buddhism made this explicit in its legends, telling of how early Buddhist saints had wrestled, argued, or, in a few notable cases, seduced the demons of the land into becoming good Buddhists. The myths weren't as explicit in Mongolia, but the links were clear. Some gods were even regarded as having not yet found the true path of Buddhism, and so could not be worshipped, but merely propitiated with offerings, kept sated in order to avoid their vengeance. The bloody iconography of Mongolian deities grew out of this ancient legacy. Buddhist theologians, particularly those trying to promote the religion in the West, have manfully tried to co-opt the corpses and skulls and bloodstained weapons into images of peace and salvation. Their efforts - 'The corpse being trampled beneath his feet represents the death of the material world' are unconvincing.

Gods were frequently taken from Hinduism and turned into demons, a folk memory of old, and often extremely violent, conflicts between Hinduism and Buddhism in India.27 The pleasantly domestic elephant-headed Indian deity Ganesha is depicted in Mongolian art as a hook-tusked, ferociously red demon, often shown crushed beneath the feet of Buddhist warrior deities.

Even the enlightened gods had their dark sides. The gentle female deity Tara had her wrathful aspect of Black Tara, benevolent smile turned to gnashing fangs, long fingernails turned to claws. Even more terrible was Palden Llamo, one of the divine protectors of Buddhism but also a devouring mother who sacrificed her own children. She rode upon a lake of entrails and blood, clutching a cup made from the skull of a child born from incest, her thunderbolt staff ready to smash the unbelievers and her teeth gnawing on a corpse. Her horse's saddle was made from the flayed skin of her own child, who had become an enemy of the faith, and snakes wound through her hair. Like many gods, she bore a crown of five skulls and a necklace of severed heads. Her ostensible purpose was to defend Buddhism against its enemies, and in particular to guard the Dalai Lama, but she must have terrified many true believers as well. The Tibetans considered Queen Victoria to be one of her incarnations. Nicholas II of Russia, in conttrast was considerred to be a reincarnation of Tsongkapa, the reformer and virtual founder of the Geluk school.

One consequence of this pre-Buddhist legacy was a sense of place. Buddhism, in common with most of the major faiths, is a universalist, evangelical religion, intended to be heard and practised worldwide. In Mongolia, however, religious practice was deeply tied to locality, and to a semi-nationalistic, semi-mystical notion of the country. Mongolian rituals were often linked with binding or controlling the spirits of the land, keeping them simultaneously imprisoned and appeased. A typical example could be seen in the scattered ovoos, stone cairns which both paid homage to the spirits of a place and signified the Mongolians' connection to their land. Mongolians travelling abroad, particularly those going on pilgrimage to other holy sites in Tibet or Nepal, would tie blue ribbons or scarves to the ovoos, remembering themselves to their country before leaving. Certain places were to be avoided altogether, for fear of offending the spirits. Lu, the river spirits, were particularly given to entering trespassing swimmers through their urine, poisoning their bodies.

There was a constant sense of the fragility of humanity. The spiritual world was in a state of conflict between malevolent and benevolent spirits, in which humanity played only a small part. Regular intervention with the spirits and gods was necessary in order to ward off catastrophe. The lamas played an intercessory role they had inherited from the shamans, praying to, pleading with, and sometimes commanding other-worldly figures. The difference between the lamas and the beings they interacted with sometimes became blurred; during rituals they could appear to be possessed by the gods themselves, and some of the semi-secret mystical paths involved the merging - or spiritual consumption - of the initiate and his patron deity. In Mongolian popular legend, then, the lamas were sometimes sharpsters and cheats, sometimes wise men, and sometimes threatening, powerful figures in their own right.

In reality, then as now, lamas were equally varied. Mongolian lamas did not reach the same extremes as their Tibetan counterparts, where some monasteries were notorious bandit centres and others famous for their charity and wisdom, but some Mongolian monks were clearly in it for everything they could get, some were just happy to have a relatively secure berth, and some were saintly, generous figures who used their wealth to help the poor.
For ordinary Mongolians, the terrors of the spiritual world were offset by the security it offered. Living on the hard steppe and at themercy of plague, weather and bandits, any form of control, no matter how illusory, was comforting. For the destitute widows and scavengers who made up so much of the population of Urga, the possibility of spiritual salvation was perhaps the only hope left. It could also assert humanity and happiness; the rituals, no matter how menacing, contained an element of celebration and glamour.

It is likely that most Mongolians did not live in the state of spiritual paranoia that a cold reading of their belief system might indicate. Today, after all, we live in a world of invisible, intangible life forms that can, if we fail to observe the proper rites and taboos, strike us down with uncomfortable, agonising or even fatal results. A few people are obsessed and terrified by these beings, but most of us merely make sure we wash our hands and then forget about them most of the time. The Mongolian attitude towards the spirit world was, perhaps, often the same as ours towards bacteria: a fixation for some, a living for others, just part of everyday life for most.

The terrifying nature of some of the images was also somewhat diluted by their entertainment value. The fear they inspired was part of the thrill, and even the most serious rituals could also be an excuse to party. There was aesthetic pleasure there, too; virtually all Mongolian art was religious and much of the more transitory art, such as banners and paper hangings for poles, was produced communally. Although it was usually more vivid than beautiful, it gave people an opportunity to express and enjoy values that didn't otherwise feature on the steppe.

Some of the enj oyment was a little more prurient; the religious art occasionally strayed into outright pornography, and even the most devoutly depicted female deities were often remarkably nubile. The temple of the Mongolian state oracle contained a private building full of images of divine couplings, where, according to the temple records, it was possible to 'meditate upon the secret Tantra'. 28

Such comforting, reassuring, occasionally erotic aspects of Mongolian religion were unfathomable to most Western observers. European visitors to Mongolia regarded its religious medley and semi-theocratic society with a mixture of contempt and fear. On the one hand Mongolians were superstitious, priest-ridden, ignorant, fanatical, classically heathen. Those travellers who had some knowledge of Buddhism tended to look down on the Mongolians as practising a debased version of what they saw as a philosophical and refined religion. On the other hand, Mongolian religion was seen by outsiders as both frightening and powerful. Certain phrases recur in the European accounts: 'hidden powers', 'strange and dreadful things', 'demon-haunted land', 'mysterious abilities' and so on.

These occult fantasies were related to the fear of the rise of the East expressed by so many thinkers of the time. The mirror image of these nightmares of oriental domination was the utopian hope that ran through Tibetan and Mongolian folk legend, focused around the hidden kingdom of Shambhala. Familiar to us as the peaceful retreat of Shangri-La, Shambhala (and probably why Ossendowski in a clever move borrowed the Saint-Yves's story about Agartha) was, to the Mongolians, the hidden kingdom of the Pure Land, containing the unknown King of the World. The myth came from the Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra, traditionally (but falsely) dated to the ninth century BC. Traditional Buddhist interpretations saw it as a metaphorical text, and Shambhala as a state of being rather than an actual location, but many Mongolians were having none of that.

Ideas of Shambhala were common among the Russian occultist intelligentsia. Theosophy drew heavily from second- or third-hand notions of Tibetan theology, especially the mystical Kalachakra scriptures, so the Shambhala legend featured heavily in Blavatsky's writings as one of the Hidden Masters' bases of operation. Importantly, Shambhala was traditionally associated with the north, and so with Russia. The Russians were aware of this, and in the 1900s the Russian secret agent Agvan Dorjiev, a Buriat monk with strong political links to Tibet, attempted to spread the belief among the Tibetans and Mongols that the Romanovs were the descendants of the rulers of Shambhala. Dorjiev claimed that the 'White Tsar' Nicolas II was a reincarnation of Tsongkapa, the founder of the dominant Tibetan Gelugpa tradition, pointing to the tsarist patronage of Buddhism among the Buriats and Kalmyks as evidence. He managed to get a Kalachakra Tibetan temple opened in St Petersburg in 1913, which was inaugurated with a celebration of the Romanovs' 300th anniversary.

One day, according to the legends, the King of the World would burst forth from Shambhala at the head of a conquering army, bringing the world to the true faith - through the sword. Mandalas depicting Shambhala inevitably included scenes of the last King, Rudrachakrin, spearing the barbarian enemies of the faith. The idea of the righteous crusading army was a familiar one in Tibetan Buddhism, where the Indian emperor Ashoka, who is viewed by most Buddhists as heroic for his renunciation of war, was instead lauded for conquering in the name of the Buddha. Provided war helped spread the word of the Buddha, it was deemed entirely acceptable by many Buddhist thinkers.

The mystical Russian artist and orientalist Nicolas Roerich, travelling through Mongolia in 1926-27, heard legends of Shambhala wherever he went. Of course, he was listening for - and occasionally inventing - them, but so was Ungern. The two were connected; Roerich's brother, Vladimir Konstantinovich, had been a supply officer in Ungern's army.29 Roerich drew images of the warrior kings riding forth from Shambhala, modelled on the statues of the Mongolian war gods. He recorded war songs, sung by Buddhist revolutionaries:

We raise the yellow flag For the greatness of Buddhism
We, the pupils of the Living Buddha, Go to battle for Shambhala
The War of Northern Shambhala! Let us die in this war
To be reborn again As Knights of the Ruler of Shambhala

Prophecy was central to Mongolian political activity. There was a long tradition, known as lungdeng, of prophecies being discovered, invented, or reinterpreted as needed. To drive away the 'yellow Chinese population', the Bogd Khan had called for Mongolians to 'read the Mani Megjim [a mystical text] for the sake of supporting the good and make it your protector. Place wind-horses at the door. Women should tie their hair into two tails and wear white on the breast - it is good. Do not eat goat meat, chicken meat, and eggs. Do not buy Chinese tobacco!'30 This combination of magical and economic warfare - goats, chickens and eggs were usually brought from Chinese merchants - was typical of the confusion of political and religious-apocalyptic vision in the period. The Russians had tried to foster these beliefs to their own ends through Dorjiev and others, and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had fled from the British to Mongolia at the beginning of the century, trying to whip up military support through the myth of Shambhala. None of these had worked; the messiah-King had not yet come.
Imagine, then, Ungern, head bent in supplication, in the Choijin Temple in Urga, contemplating the lurid images of the-gods. Above him are severed heads and flayed skins, desecrated corpses blossoming into gardens of blood, eyeballs dangling from sockets, bones poking from mangled limbs. This is only wood and cloth, but in the smoke and the darkness it seems all too real. There are images of the many Buddhist hells, too, pink naked bodies of sinners speared by pendulous-breasted demonesses, frozen in icy lakes, consumed by scorpions.

He is duly afraid, as are the pilgrims milling around him, of the awful forms of the divine. It is frightening and alien to him, but also attractive, the hint of mysterious powers, the echoes of the peasant beliefs of his homeland, the skulls and swords and corpses that call to his urge to battle and the twisted and mangled bodies that tantalise his sadism. They would have reminded him, too, of the scenes of the Apocalypse that traditionally decorated the entrances of Orthodox churches; grislier, certainly, but in the same spirit. There is a cannier, more pragmatic side to his observations; perhaps he senses the power of this faith, the potential for devotion, contained in the crowds around him. They have just cast off one empire and they built one of their own in the past. He sees the potency of the 'militant Buddhism' that he will speak of so often in the future, and, perhaps, he senses the longing for a messiah, for a saviour from a foreign land.

He will remake Vrga in the image of hell; everyone of the tortures shown in miniature in the temple's paintings will be enacted in reality. And it is in this temple that, ten years later, Ungern will learn of his doom - and will do his best to take the rest of the country with him.

The big change for Unger however, took place shortly after the the Bolshevikcoup of November 1917 when "their worst betrayal" was the treaty of Bresk-Livotsk, a peace signed with the Germans. (See: German Complicity in the Russian Revolution)

Most of his relatives however made their way to Germany, where many Baltic Germans schemed for revenge against the Soviets.

To Ungern the revolution was a kind of apocalypse, the end of the world as he knew it. Out of apocalypse, though, could come utopia, Christ's return after Satan's reign, the opening of the pure land of Shambhala after the defeat of the enemies of the faith. But before that could happen the world had to be purged. Only the most stalwart crusader could stand against the black curse of revolution, holding the banner of imperialism, divine religion arid absolute monarchy. This would be Ungern's role.

P.2: Michael and The Swastika

P.3:The ‘White’ Fighter

P.4: Ossendowski Revisited

1 Pozner, Vladimir, Bloody Baron: The Story of Ungern-Sternberg, trans. Warre Bradley Wells, London, I938, p. 82.

2 A. V. Burdukov, V staroi i novoi Mongolii: vospominaniia, pis'ma [Old and New Mongolia: Memoirs, Letters] (Moscow, 1969), pp. 100-102.

3 'Living Buddha' is a general term for any reincarnating lama (tulku) trulku in Tibetan - of which there were some 250 in Mongolia in 1911. Western travellers often used it simply to refer to the most senior of them. Throughout I refer to him as the 'Bogd Khan', or 'Holy King', his most commonly used title in Mongolia, although technically the epithet applied only during the period during which he held secular, as well as religious, power.

4 Within Mongolia there are at least fifteen different Mongol groups, of which the Khalkha make up around 85 per cent of the population. 'Mongolian' in the case of Ungern usually means Khalkha and other small Mongol groups within the borders of Mongolia.

5 At least, if the behaviour of their modern counterparts is anything to go by. Most temples, particularly in China, now cover up the more luridly sexual scenes, such as the yab-yum, or 'divine coupling'.

6 Alcoholism is even more common in modern Mongolia than it was a century ago, with rates among men reaching SO per cent or higher. Foreign businesses generally employ Chinese immigrant workers, because too many of the Mongolians will vanish after the first month to drink their pay.

7 Kam's is one of those head-swapping stories that so often crop up in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. In this case Erlik, a pious monk, was meditating in a cave, an hour away from enlightenment, when two bandits entered to behead a stolen ox. Not men to miss an opportunity, they beheaded Erlik too. His body promptly grabbed the ox-head, put it on and slaughtered the bandits.

8 Rudolf Strasser, The Mongolian Horde (New York, I930), p. 174.

9 The reverse process is taking place today as the Chinese attempt to legitimise their claims to Inner and Outer Mongolia by appropriating the image of Genghis Khan.

10 Peter Perdue, China Marches West (London, 200S), pp. 283, 185.

11The idea of Mongolian cruelty crops up frequently elsewhere; the mute Mongolian human-skinner in Haruki Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (New York, I997), for instance, or Lenin's cold cruelty being attributed to his 'Mongol blood' - he was a quarter Kalmyk.

12 A remarkable number of Mongols seem to have ended up on the Western Front, though surely many of them were other central Asians, misidentified. Eric Newby, imprisoned in Italy, remarked on his guards that 'they were Mongols, apostates from the Russian Army, dressed in German uniform, hideously cruel descendants of Genghis Khan's wild horsemen who, in Italy, had already established a similar reputation to that enjoyed by the Goums, the Moroccans in the Free French army' (A Traveller's Life, London, 1982, p. I30). Central Asian and Mongolian soldiers were also widely blamed by other Russian soldiers for the rapes committed by the Red Army in 1945, in supposed contrast to the heroic - and ethnically Russian - front-line soldiers.

13 Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men at War (Lincoln, NE,  1959), p. 98.

14 C. W. Campbell, Travels in Mongolia (London, I902), p. 9. 15. Hideo Tasuki, A Japanese Agent in Tibet (London, 1990).

16 University Bibliotheca, Oslo, Ethnographical Museum, manuscript 384I6, quoted in Alice Sarkozi, Political Prophecies in Mongolia in the 17th-zoth Centuries (Wiesbaden, I992), p. IZO.

17 Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 293.

18 Caroline Humphrey, 'Remembering an "Enemy"', in Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition Under State Socialism (Santa Fe, I994), p. 31.

19 Ossendowski, Beasts, Men, and Gods, p. 291.

20 Ladislaus Forbath and Joseph Geleta, The New Mongolia (London, I936), p. 261.

21 Karl Gustav Vrangel, The Memoirs of Count Vrangel: The Last Commander-in-Chief of the Russian National Army, trans. Sophie Goulston (London, 1929), p. 7.

22 Quoted in Baabar, History of Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar, I999), p. 144, originally from Aleksei Kuropatkin, What's to be Done with Mongolia and Manchuria (1913).

23 Quoted in Perdue, China Marches West, p. 493.

24 Ripping out the heart of an enemy, however, is a scene occasionally depicted in Mongolian Buddhist art and literature, and there were numerous reports of it from foreign travellers, but always second-hand. It certainly became one of the standard Russian tropes of writing about the Mongols, but may have been actually performed on occasion.

25 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota [State Archive of the Russian Navy] (RGAVMF), f. 9427, Op. I, d. 392, p. 48.

26 The bear cult so strikingly preserved in the Swiss caves, the temptation in Eden, the immortal snakes in Babylonian mythology, the bear-heraldry of King Arthur (whose name in itself means 'bear'), dragons, etc. It crops up in odd places; there is a strong suggestion in Beowulf that the hero can transform himself into the 'beewolf'; the bear - picked up by Tolkien and used for Beorn in The Hobbit. Maybe this is because bears are so striking because they seem so human, and snakes because they are so alien.

27 Something which neither community likes to discuss nowadays, but which is strikingly preserved in images found in many northern Indian temples of an elephant, symbolising Hinduism, crushing a deer, symbolising Buddhism, beneath its foot. Conversely, Mongolian and Tibetan gods are sometimes depicted crushing an elephant.

28 Quoted from the temple's notice to visitors.

29 Which makes it strange that Roerich doesn't mention Ungern at any point in his books. Perhaps he found the similarity between Ungern's mystical beliefs and his own disturbing, given that he was a leftist pacifist.

30 Sarkozi, Alice, Political Prophecies in Mongolia in the 17th-20th Centuries, Wiesbaden, 1992, p. 131.

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