“Black Baron” is the title that
historiography offered to Roman Fёdorovich Ungern von Sternberg (in Russian Роман Фёдорович Унгерн фон Штернберг),
also known as Ungern Khan, who was born in Graz in January 1886 and died in
Novonikolajevsk (now Novosibisrk) in September 1921. He was a Russian military
of Baltic-German origins. He initially used to be a lieutenant general of the
Russian imperial army and later one of the most charismatic leaders of the
white troops during the Russian Civil War. During his fight against Bolsheviks
in Siberia and the Far East, he tried to create a monarchic Lamaist independent State
in Mongolia and in the territories east of Lake Baikal.
Ungern von Sternberg was born in Graz, Austria, from a
family of Baltic Germans. He was raised in Tallinn (the old city of Reval in
German), the capital of Estonia, that was then part of the Russian Empire.
After attending the military school of Pavlovsk at Saint Petersburg and after
graduating in 1908, he was stationed in Siberia, where he was fascinated by the
lifestyle of the nomadic tribes of the Mongols and the Buryats. He participated
to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, beginning to raise a strong interest for
Asian culture and civilization. During the First World War, joining a Cossack
regiment, Ungern von Sternberg fought in Polish Galicia, where he earned a
reputation as brave officer although, at the same time, his superior officers
and comrades started to depict him as a dangerous fighter, distinguished by a
reckless and unstable behavior. Thanks to his heroic deeds, he was decorated
with the St. George’s Cross. His commander, General Wrangel, affirmed he was
the type of soldier who was invaluable in wartime, but impossible to deal with
in peacetime. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was sent by the Russian
Provisional Government into the Russian Far East, under the command of Grigori Semёnov.
After the Bolshevik October Revolution, Semёnov and Ungern von Sternberg
decided to resist the advance of the Red Army: his hatred of Bolshevism and all
it stood for knew no bounds. The noble Estonian began his fight against the
reds, commanding white pro-tsarist units during the long and gruesome Russian
civil war, and in the following months was noted for the cruelties that he
perpetrated against the Jewish-communist foe, earning among the Bolsheviks the
epithet of "Bloody Baron". Due to his eccentric behavior, he was soon
known among his enemies as the "Mad Baron." Though fighting against
the Bolsheviks, both Ungern Sternberg and Semёnov never recognized the
authority of Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak, the commander of the white troops.
On the contrary, they found a foreign support in the Japanese, who supplied
them with weapons and money. Indeed, it was the intention of Japan to create a
puppet state led by Semёnov in the Russian Far East, which would follow the
name of State of the Transbaikal Cossacks. Precisely for this reason, the
commanders of the white troops, who fostered the idea of a strong and
indivisible Russia, considered Semёnov a traitor.
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| Ungern von Sternberg |
Eventually, Ungern Sternberg forged a proper army,
known as the Asian cavalry division, which included a multiethnic contingent:
Russians, Cossacks, Tatars, Buryats, Yakuts, Tibetans, Mongols, Japanese and
even Chinese joined in the military detachment, which attacked ruthlessly all opponents,
primarily Bolsheviks and Chinese.
Hence, during the civil war, whereas Admiral Kolchak
had placed his headquarters in Central Siberia, Semёnov and Ungern Sternberg were
operating in the eastern front, precisely in the Transbaikal region: their
strategic position allowed them to control all the communication lines travelling
westward from Vladivostok to the Urals through the Trans-Siberian railway.
In 1920, Ungern Sternberg decided to emancipate from
Semёnov, gaining full command over his contingent. Convinced that monarchy
was the only political system able to save the Western world from its liberal
and communist corruption, he began to think of being able to restore the Qing
dynasty on the throne of China and put all of the Far East under her control.
Moreover, he started to depict the idea of restoring a pan-Asian monarchy,
including Mongolia, Tibet, China and Siberia upon which he would rule as an
absolute sovereign, a worthy descendent of Genghis Khan, whose swastika ring he
always wore on his finger. Despite not being a Christian, but a Buddhist, he
still believed that the Russian tsarism was to be restored under the authority
of the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, brother of Nicholas II. The
new pan-Mongol State should have launched a holy war against Bolshevism,
restoring pure and sacred values in the doomed West and reintroducing the idea
of monarchism. Indeed, he was a staunch anti-Semitic and considered the
necessity to slaughter mercilessly all the Jews and the Bolshevik communist
commissars: he methodically punished his opponents by hanging, mutilating and
chopping them. This mass murderer used the most brutal methods both to maintain
the order in his military division and to annihilate what he considered the
Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik scum.
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| The Bogdo Khan |
In 1919,
Chinese republican forces occupied Mongolia. Accordingly, in 1921, Ungern
Sternberg decided to create a Lamaist theocracy in Asia. His troops entered
Mongolia at the request of the eighth Bogdo Khan, the religious and political
leader of the country, second in importance for Lamaists only to the Dalai
Lama. In January, Ungern Sternberg’s cavalry division launched several attacks
on the Mongolian capital of Urga (now Ulan Bator), but was repeatedly repulsed
reporting huge losses. Conseqnetly, Ungern ordered his troops to set fire to
the fields in the hills around Urga, so that the defenders of the city thought
that overwhelming superior forces were surrounding them. The Black Baron
succeeded with his stratagem and in February he managed to conquer the city
without having to launch a new attack. On the 13th of March 1921
Mongolia was proclaimed an independent monarchy under the rule of the Bogdo
Khan and Ungern Sternberg became the military dictator of the new country.
Tending to mysticism and fascinated by the beliefs and religions of the Far
East (especially Buddhism), Ungern von Sternberg, in his philosophy, mingled
exceptional Russian nationalism with the Mongolian and Chinese beliefs,
believing he truly was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan: Bogdo Khan himself,
as well as the thirteenth Dalai Lama, dared to consider Ungern as the
incarnation of the Mahakala (or “Great Black”), a semblance of the god Shiva. By
now, everyone of his entourage started to call him the “God of War”. In
Ungern’s plans, Mongolia would be his base from which he would restore the Qing
dynasty, ally with imperial Japan and free Russia from communist rule: striking
out from Mongolia, he would invade Russia, rally the tsarists and wipe out
communism from the Russian Motherland.
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| Ungern's fighting flag |
Later, a Bolshevik contingent sent to rescue the
pro-Soviet Mongolian leader Sukhe-Bator decreed the defeat of the forces of
Ungern Sternberg in Mongolia. In May, he attempted to invade the Russian
territory at Troitskosavsk (Kyakhta today, in the Republic of Buryatia). After
some early successes in May and June, Bolshevik overwhelming forces finally
defeated Ungern Sternberg in July and August. Ungern was convinced that the
only escape would be reaching Tibet. Howhever, a portion of his army mutinied,
and on the 21st of August, host of the Kalmyk Ja Lama, Ungern was
betrayed and delivered to general Bljucher, commander of the revolutionary
army of the people of the Republic of the Far East and future USSR Marshal, who
tried in vain to convince him to join the Soviet army.
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| The Mahakala |
On the 15th of September 1921, Ungern was
tried in Novonikolaevsk by a special Siberian military court. He was found guilty
of having wanted to create an Asian vassal state of the Japanese Empire, to
prepare the overthrow of the Soviet power and to restore the monarchy of the
Romanovs. The judging committee also considered him to be completely insane.
Thus, he was sentenced to death and shot by a firing squad. According to
tradition, Ungern von Sternberg swallowed his medal depicting the St. George
Cross to prevent it falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks. The ring with the
swastika would come into possession of General Bljucher and, it is said, that,
after the death of the latter, which occurred in 1938 during the era of the
Great Purges, it has passed into the hands of Marshal Zhukov.
During his military and political career, the Black
Baron affirmed as following:
“They cannot understand as yet that we are not
fighting a political party [the Bolsheviks], but a sect of murderers of all
contemporary spiritual culture”.
References:
Mabire, J., Ungern.
Le dieu de la guerre, 1987.
Pozner, V., Il
Barone Sanguinario, 2012.
Ossendowski, F., Beasts,
Men and Gods, 1922.
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