For the other prosecutor, Ivan Maisky, the Siberian steppe was a source of communist inspiration. In his memoir Before the Storm (written in London, it was the only book I found in the libraries of both Sands and Molotov) the Soviet ambassador to the court of St James recalls how, in Mongolia after the Revolution, he found himself overwhelmed by a sense of the possibilities of Siberia and wrote a poem which began, ‘I believe in man! Mother Nature bore him in inspired passion as the pearl of creation and gave him immortal reason and power over himself …’ Through the darkness of the centuries, mankind had been marching towards communism. Man would even change the climate. ‘There is no limit to his imperial will!’
Evgeny Belov, author of the book I had bought in the Univermag, suggests that there was far more at stake in Ungern’s cruelties than Yaroslavsky touched in his crude Marxist prosecution speech. Belov took a ‘revisionist’ view of Ungern, traditionally dubbed ‘Dictator of Mongolia’ and an agent of the Japanese. (As Molotov said of Hitler, Baron Ungern was not a maniac, he was ‘an idealistic man’.) Belov argues, citing previously unused letters from Ungern to his supporters in Mongolia, that he was not a degenerate lunatic nor a dictator, and that, contrary to the claims of the Comintern, he had no connections with the Japanese. For all his sadism and ultimate failure, Ungern was a brilliant man, Belov writes, whom the Mongolians looked to as a genuine national leader. The Baron was erudite. He knew several European languages well and learned Chinese and Mongolian. He was conversant with contemporary scholarship and science, and could quote at will from Buddhist sacred writings and from Scripture. His ideas were based on deep comparative study of religion. He knew a great deal about Christianity and Buddhism, as well as communism and Judaism, which he hated, believing that the Talmud contained a plan for the destruction of nations and states.
Ungern divided the world into East and West, ‘yellow’ and ‘white’ races, fated to clash. The sacred culture of the East had been preserved untouched for three thousand years; therein lay its power over the culture of the West which had declined, leading to the downfall of the aristocracy, bourgeois democracy and finally workers’ revolution. He hated bankers and financiers as the greatest abomination of all. He revered the rigid hierarchies of Eastern cultures, and their conceptions of racial superiority. The phrases ‘light from the East’ and ‘the rotten West’ occur in almost all the letters he wrote to Mongolian princes, monarchist Chinese generals and his agents in Manchuria and Peking. ‘My conviction has always been to await light and salvation which can only come from the East, not from Europeans who are corrupted down to the very roots.’ Ungern’s ‘Middle Kingdom’ would defend the East against the evil of the West; it would include the Mongol tribes and the nomads of Siberia and Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Tibet. One day, he promised, a new conqueror would arise, greater than Genghis Khan, who would rule until ‘from his subterranean capital, the King of the World arises’, bringing happiness to all humanity.
On the belt-clasps and strap-buckles of the ancient Huns, wild horses are often fastened in struggling pairs, their necks locked in a single taut curve of bronze. The living horses feeding now on the dry grasses of the Selenga River Basin reached into each other’s hollows without the stylised passion of the zoomorphic ornaments that connoisseurs characterise as ‘steppe baroque’; at the crack of our tread the lazy intimacy of the grazing huddles among the spindly trees broke up, and the horses cantered out of sight across the plain.
We had been tempted to digress and delay on the southbound road to Kyakhta. Our Buryat driver, Protas, was tired of our forever ‘seeing beauty’, as he said, and asking him to pull over so that I could gaze and take pictures and my companion could smoke and make quick sketches of the landscape; he was anxious that the best highway shack-cafe this side of Mongolia would close before he got to his plate of steamed meat pozy. Just south of Ulan Ude, to save time, he boldly drove across a potato-field whose soil conceals an ancient settlement of the Hsiung-nu; and then on, with a few shrieking revs of the Zhiguli, up the arid hill where royal members of this nomad people were buried with their treasure. The Hsiung-nu, pronounced Sunnu or Khunnu, are the Huns who crossed the Gobi desert from northern China three thousand years ago to extend their empire across the Siberian steppe. By the third century BC the colonising Hsiung-nu tribes had united under a royal clan. They traded in furs from the Siberian forests and metals, taking tribute and controlling trade routes.
While we walked among the flat unhewn rocks that sealed the emptied tombs in this wild garden of the dead, Protas left an offering of kopecks at an upright shaman stone. The wind was so loud that our voices barely carried. Before we left, he tied a scrap of polythene to an outer twig of the solitary ‘old man tree’. It would flutter, he said, with the other rags on its branches, and the friendly spirits of the place would hear of all his fears and wishes.
Before the discovery by Russian archaeologists in the 1890s of the cache of ‘Scythian-Siberian’ bronze animals in the burial mounds around Kyakhta, these Huns were known only from Chinese written sources. The Han Chinese hoped that they would eventually soften the tough pastoralist nomads with the luxuries in which they traded. They sold them silk in the hope that their skills on horseback would decline if they no longer dressed in felt and leather. They treated the Hsiung-nu who surrendered to them to fine clothes and carriages, delicacies to eat and soothing music. The findings in the tombs in Buryatia support the claim of Herodotus that the Scythians came from east to west across the steppe to settle north of the Azov and in the delta of the Don.
Since these discoveries, the prestige of this extinct people has been in steady ascent. In 1938, at the height of Stalin’s Terror, the twenty-six-year-old Lev Gumilev, only child of Akhmatova and her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was arrested for a second time and sent to Siberia. He had worked on geographical expeditions from Leningrad University in the western Sayan mountains as a student in the early 1930s. He laboured in the Gulag mines at Norilsk as a technical geologist, contemplating the punishment systems of the ancient world, and secretly working on a history of the Hun people.
Meanwhile, in Leningrad, Akhmatova continued her own secret work on Requiem, the cycle of poems she had begun after her son’s first arrest in 1935, in which private maternal loss is crafted into a monument to collective anguish. The secret police file on Lev Gumilev had apparently been opened after Mandelstam recited his satirical anti-Stalin poem to him and Akhmatova in 1934. It was in the Stalin epigram that Mandelstam made his allusion to Molotov’s neck, and called him a ‘half-person’: