*
After the night train from Irkutsk to Ulan Ude, which runs eastward around the southern shores of Lake Baikal, we had breakfasted in the Hotel Geser (the finest example I had yet seen of the morose aesthetic of late communist privilege), and then wandered through the streets of the city in the quiet of Sunday morning. In the main square, a group of Chinese travellers asked if we would allow them to take our picture in front of the massive head of Lenin, the largest representation of the Bolshevik’s cranium in the world. Plaques on the walls of the ‘Red baroque’ government buildings commemorated the hard-fought local victories of the Red Army in the Civil War, which led to the creation of the autonomous republic of Buryatia, with the former Cossack garrison town of Verkhneudinsk as its capital. Living under felt tent roofs was officially regarded as ‘backward’, and Buryats began to flood into Verkhneudinsk to live in buildings. More Russian ‘specialists’ arrived during the first Five-Year Plan, and the construction of the city began to follow the ‘genplan’, with suburbs of apartment buildings appearing around industrial projects. In 1935, as part of the Soviet nationalities policy, which was based on ethnic principles, the name of the city was changed to Ulan Ude, Red Uda, for the wide river Uda that flows here into the southbound Selenga.
We had met Lida in the ethnographic museum. With her witty eyes and her slick red manicure, she stood out vividly from the dozens of eerie Tungus cult objects she was curating: ongons or family spirits, with scratchy hair and crudely carved blank eyes, and no home or property left to protect but their glass cases. When I asked Lida about life in Ulan Ude, she replied with a snoring noise: ‘Ulan Ude is asleep. Always has been, always will be.’
On the far side of the main square, out of sight of Lenin, is the old town, a few streets still laid out on its eighteenth-century grid pattern, with single-storey log houses, trading arcades and fine churches, now in decay. When Kennan came here at the end of the nineteenth century, he found the town little more than a fortress. He had come to study the penal system in Siberia, and found himself admiring the newly built prison in Verkhneudinsk, which convinced him that the Russian government was ‘not entirely indifferent to the sufferings of its exiled criminals’.
Kennan met exiles who had served in the mines and had then been allowed to settle in wretched Siberian towns, living in simple wooden houses, whose stories seemed ‘to furnish a very instructive illustration of the complete disregard of personal rights that characterises the Russian government in its dealings with citizens who happen to be suspected, with or without reason, of political untrustworthiness’. He found his interviews with the political exiles to be a bracing tonic after the illnesses he had suffered on the journey, meeting a Swiss-educated lady exile who declared, ‘We may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last.’
We stopped in the Univermag, the department store that took up one side of the old trading arcades. In a corner that also sold linen and Tungus ornaments made of bone was a shelf of reading matter for the people of the sleeping city: popular histories of the Scythians and ancient Rus; works of Theosophy by Roerich and the Russian-born Madame Blavatsky; an anthology of spiritual masters of the East, and a book called The Secret of Russia. I chose two books by Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, and a new book, published by the Institute of Oriental Studies, which gave a reinterpretation of the story of the ‘mad baron’ Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and brought terror to these parts in the four years after the fall of the Romanovs.
Roman Nicolaus Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, who claimed descent from Attila the Hun and the medieval Teutonic Knights who settled in the Baltics, was a seasoned fighter of thirty at the time of the Revolution. Like Budyonny he had fought with Cossack regiments and had been decorated with the George Cross during the First World War. Fascinated by the Mongols and their landscape, he went east to Baikal after the Tsar’s abdication, and adopted lamaistic Buddhism and the practices of the occult. Across the landscape of the failed empire, new ethnically based polities were being imagined. The Buryat intelligentsia was taken with the idea of a pan-Mongol kingdom. In late 1918, after Trotsky’s Red Army had drawn back, a conference of Buryat-Mongols was held in Verkhneudinsk, financed by the Japanese, with a view to the creation of a Greater Mongolia, independent of both Russia and China. Baron Ungern, who dreamed of recreating the Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan, recruited a volunteer army of many nationalities: Buryats, Mongols, Cossack remnants of the fallen White armies, Tatars, Japanese and Chinese. Qualifications for recruitment were a fur coat, a horse and saddle, ichigi Mongol-Buryat shoes and a papakha hat. His troops were paid through Cossack atamans. The company of men immediately around Ungern was reputedly made up of cocaine addicts and alcoholics. The unlimited use of narcotics and vodka fuelled his army’s spectacular atrocities, rapes and the foullest imaginable mutilations, directed systematically, and with particular cruelty, against Jews, Bolsheviks and any person with a physical defect. (Believing in reincarnation, the baron claimed to be doing such people a favour with his slaughter.) Travelling with his personal Buddhist soothsayers and seventy bodyguards sent by the Dalai Lama, Ungern led an army of six thousand men into Mongolia in the autumn of 1920. ‘The tribes of Genghis Khan’s successors are awakened,’ he said, ‘nobody shall extinguish the fire in the hearts of the Mongols. In Asia there will be a great state from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean to the banks of the Volga … it will be a victory of the spirit’. Promising that he would make an avenue of gallows from Mongolia to Moscow, Ungern declared himself Emperor of Russia.
The Baron’s adventure came apart in May of the following year, when his army was routed by the Bolsheviks near Kyakhta-Troitskosavsk and he was found by a Red Army patrol, alone and wounded, writhing in the dust as ants crawled over his body, screaming, ‘I am Baron Ungern-Sternberg.’ One of the Red Cavalry commanders facing Ungern was Konstantin Rokossovsky, whose horse died under him in the fighting. The report of Ungern’s first interrogation at a barracks in Troitskosavsk was sent immediately to the Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin in Moscow, and became known among scholars as the ‘Ungerniad’. At his second interrogation in Irkutsk, the Baron again expounded his belief in monarchy and aristocracy, describing the authoritarian Nicholas I as the ideal ruler, a tsar who understood perfectly that without the stick people turn into moral and physical rubbish. After a secret trial in a theatre in Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), at which Emilian Yaroslavsky and Ivan Maisky acted as prosecutors, the Baron was shot in September 1921. ‘For thousands of years the Ungerns have given orders,’ the Baron told the court; ‘we have never taken orders from anyone. I refuse to accept the authority of the working class.’ For Yaroslavsky, Ungern epitomised the class enemy who hated Soviet power because all his property had been distributed to the peasants. He described the sentence against the Baron as a sentence against the whole nobility. ‘The tragedy of Baron Ungern’, he said, ‘is that he could not match his feeble powers against the huge strength that he rose against.’
What refined torture, to make the Baron face Emilian Yaroslavsky as his prosecutor. A man of exactly Ungern’s age, Yaroslavsky (born Minei Izrailovich Gubelman into a family of political exiles in Chita), for the Baron, was the worst kind of Bolshevik, a bespectacled Jew with thick hair. The unwitting creator of this piquant ideological mise en scène in the theatre in Novonikolaevsk was Molotov, who had persuaded Lenin to send Yaroslavsky back to Siberia after the Civil War. ‘Of course it was my doing, but I don’t regret that he was sent,’ Molotov said to Chuev many decades later, recalling the events with clarity. Yaroslavsky, who had participated in the difficult Bolshevik takeover of Moscow and been first commissar of the Moscow military district, had become preoccupied with trifles, Molotov said: ‘One moment he would request trousers for one person, another time it would be shoes for someone else …’ After Lenin’s command that he be sent east, Yaroslavsky rushed up to Molotov in their offices opposite what is now the Voentorg, shouting, ‘You careerist! Your hands are all over this affair! You are a schemer!’ ‘What are you scolding me for?’ Molotov replied. ‘I just want you to work somewhere else.’ (Molotov’s driver once amused him by remarking how great it is that Russia has a Siberia to which all the human scum and rubbish can be sent.)