The Bloody White Baron (4 page)

Sophie Charlotte remarried in 1894 and the family moved to his step-father's estate at Jerwakant (Järvakandi in Estonian), around forty miles from Reval, the Estonian capital. There they occupied a substantial
manor house, set back in the woods and deep in snow in the winter like something from a fairy tale. Hoyningen-Huene owned the land and controlled the rents for miles around, like any good German lordling. Most of the staff on the estate were German, most of the workers and peasants Estonian. The impact of the divorce on Ungern can, perhaps, be best gauged through silence; despite acting in loco parentis for all but his first six years, Ungern's stepfather receives no mention in any of his later letters or recorded conversations. A hint of their relationship is given from Ungern's school records, which note ‘a bad attitude towards his stepfather'.
⁷

Like the majority of the Baltic Germans, the family were Protestant Lutherans, but Ungern was inevitably exposed to Eastern Orthodoxy, the state religion of Russia which the Russian authorities were making strong efforts to press upon the Germans. The Lutheran cathedral in Reval was festooned with the heraldry of the Baltic German noble families, including the Ungern-Sternberg coat of arms: quartered roses and fleurs-de-lis. It was also full of images of death, plague and doom; one wall was hung with a
danse macabre
and carved skulls could be found among the coats of arms.

Young Roman's world was as multilingual as it was multicultural. His parents probably spoke German at home, but he was surrounded by Russian speakers and soon became fluent in both. In addition, he spoke French, required of any Russian with aspirations to culture, and English, also common among the Russian aristocracy. He may have spoken Estonian, perhaps learnt from servants or nurses. If so, it may have helped him with his later language acquisition. Estonian is distantly related to the Mongolian languages, and shares several characteristics with them, chief of which are agglutination
⁸
and an alarming number of cases.

Ungern holidayed with his relatives on Hiiumaa (Dago to the Germans), an isolated, beautiful Baltic island which the Ungern-Sternberg clan had ruled for two hundred years. It could be a disturbing place for outsiders. Two generations later, under Soviet rule, it would be garrisoned by Kazakh soldiers who lived in fear of the dark woods, the bitter cold and the tall blond ‘fascists' around them. It was here that his infamous wrecker of a great-great-grandfather, Otto, had plied his grisly trade. Legends about him were still common on the island, and Ungern stayed in his forebear's vast, echoing manor, Suuremõisa,
where, it was said, Otto would daily line up his servants and give them ten strokes of the rod apiece, just in case they had done something to deserve it.

Contemplating a monster as a child is always a difficult business. Children are innocent, likeable creatures, full of hope. Picture the little Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (floppy hair, skinned knees, clear blue eyes, schoolbag) and within him there are wound-up futures: burnt villages, skinned bodies, lynched Jews. Such images are not irreconcilable; as anybody with an unclouded memory of their own childhood knows, children are frequently uncaring, sadistic, vicious and prejudiced, and readily absorb the various bigotries of schoolmates and parents.

We have no strong evidence of Ungern's childhood character. What fragments we do have indicate a violent and impulsive child. One of his neighbours, for instance, had a pet owl, which Ungern, for no good reason, tried to strangle when he was twelve. He was educated at home in German until he was fifteen, and then sent to the Nicholas Gymnasium in Reval, the school of choice for the upper class. It had a slight majority of Russians, a lot of Germans, and a few Estonians and Jews.

The school was a military-orientated, Russian version of
Stalky & Co.
, designed to prepare its charges for the burdens of empire, but Ungern did not take well to being taught. By the time he went to school he was a strong-willed young man, tall and athletic, unwilling to bend to school rules or obey teachers he saw as inferiors. He was naturally intelligent, but his grades were atrocious. In class he was obstinate and violent; I imagine him not to have been a bully as such, but, as his later behaviour suggests, rather one of those pupils of whom even the bullies are afraid, the kind who violate the unwritten rules of childhood fights, whom nobody wants to sit near, and who cannot be trusted with compasses or scissors. According to friends of his parents interviewed in exile in Paris, ‘Roman was a terror to his fellow-pupils and his masters. Several of the pupils' mothers forbade their sons to speak to him. Roman took his revenge. He got into the habit of throwing his school-books out of the window in the middle of
lessons, running out after them, and never coming back. His masters didn't dare to complain.'
⁹
They may not have complained directly, but they did take discreet action, and Ungern's mother was asked to withdraw him from the school.

Despite this humiliation, his family came through for him. His stepfather, Baron Hoyningen-Huene, wrote a letter to the heads of the Marine Academy at St Petersburg, asking for him to be admitted and including - presumably somewhat reluctantly - his previous grade record. He resignedly noted that, ‘If you feel it necessary to exclude him, [. . .] I undertake to take him back under my care without delay.'
¹⁰
Clearly the family expected trouble.

It was an even higher-class school, full of the children of the empire's nobility, but Ungern did not take well to its strict military routine. His disciplinary record shows constant skirmishes with authority. Among his offences were returning from the holidays with long hair, smoking in bed, smoking on duty, fighting with his classmates, talking back to his teachers, standing in church, and skipping gymnastics. Told that his answer in an exam on naval architecture was unclear, he replied, ‘Oh, what a shame!'
¹¹
- typical of his sense of humour, which even as an adult remained limited to brutal sarcasm. Locked up in detention, he compounded the original offence by escaping and stealing his supper from the kitchens.

For the first year his grades were passable, but in the second they had sunk to new depths. The only thing he consistently excelled in was physical exercise, including some forms peculiar to the naval academy, such as manoeuvring around masts and topstays. Humiliatingly, he was held back a year in May 1904, forced to study alongside younger boys. He showed no academic improvement. Combined with his lack of discipline, it was too much for the school, and his parents were asked to withdraw him the following February. From the tone of his long-suffering stepfather's reply to the school's letter, Ungern received a formidable rollicking.

Ungern, however, found a way out. The Russo-Japanese war was in full swing and, quixotically, he decided to volunteer as an ordinary soldier. The nominal cause of hostilities had been a dispute about forestry concessions, but the war released decades of pent-up Japanese resentment against Russia, which had become especially strong after the Russians pressured Japan out of the valuable Liaotung peninsula
in 1895. Despite its name, the war was fought almost entirely on the territory of the collapsing Chinese Empire. The Russians had long been keen to extend their influence into Manchuria and the Pacific, and with China's weakness in the nineteenth century their time seemed to have come. Unfortunately, Russia's opportunity coincided with the rise of a new regional hegemony. The Japanese were radically transforming their nation into a modern power - and that meant an imperialistic one, with the crumbling Chinese Empire as their target. Korea and Manchuria would make ideal first colonies, since both were ethnically and culturally separate from most of China, close to Japan, and had many natural harbours.

A series of small conflicts, starting with the reckless Russian seizure of Japan's island naval base of Tsushima in 1861, had built inevitably into war. The Russians bullied the Japanese out of Manchuria in 1895, after the first Sino-Japanese war had left the Japanese in control of Korea, formerly a Chinese tributary. The Japanese resented it, and they felt that the rest of the developed world, to which they badly wanted to belong, had backed the Russians out of racial empathy. A clique of Russian officers around General Alexsei Kuropatkin, meanwhile, saw the Japanese advance as part of the rise of the Asian peoples, a ‘Yellow Peril' against which Russia had to stand firm.

When the two sides mutually declared war in February 1904, the Russians were still in control of most of Manchuria, outnumbered the Japanese, and were confident of an easy victory against soldiers many of them referred to as ‘yellow monkeys'. By the time Ungern arrived at the front, the Russian army had suffered a series of humiliating defeats. The Japanese had outmanoeuvred them at every turn, cracking them out of established defensive positions, mauling them with superior artillery and inflicting terrible casualties. At school, Ungern would have heard of a series of shocking losses: Yalu, Mukden, Liaoyang, the fall of Port Arthur. For a young man steeped in Russian military tradition, with a strong sense of national pride, each new loss must have been a terrible shock. Perhaps, as nineteen-year-old boys tend to, he fantasised that he could somehow reverse the situation by some act of bravery or leadership that would turn the tide and bring Russian victory.

There would be no chance for heroism by the time Ungern arrived at the front, however. The Japanese were at the limits of their supply
lines and their manpower. The Russians couldn't afford to reinforce failure, since any extra men would have to be drawn from regions which, rural and urban alike, were already brimming with unrest and bitterness, caused both by a long history of inequality and by a new wave of intellectual agitators. Conscription, always unpopular, could prove explosive. Neither side could cope with another of the hideous, slaughterhouse battles which had characterised the war so far, and so they had settled down along an extended line of trenches in exhausted stalemate to wait for their navies to decide things. The Baltic fleet had been dispatched at almost exactly the same time as Ungern had left Estonia, but it was still steaming around the world to its final reversal at Tsushima which would seal Russia's defeat.

Ungern's time as an ordinary soldier passed without great incident. Like many Russian officers, Japanese skill and courage made a considerable impression on him. Good relations with the Japanese army would be crucially important to him in the future, and he spoke of them in admiring terms. He learnt military routine and discipline himself, and took to it better than he had at the Marine Academy. The teachers there had been mere petty autocrats, but this was
war
, and it had to be treated seriously. By the end of the conflict he was a corporal, and had been awarded a service medal. It was not a heroic distinction, but impressive enough; he had certainly proved his dedication to the motherland. And he had seen the Far East for the first time, the region where he would later serve an empire - and attempt to carve out his own.

TWO

The Ends of the World

Back in Russia, the system that Ungern had volunteered to defend was falling apart. Under pressures from urbanisation, secularisation and radicalism, the old imperial order was beginning to crack. For many reactionaries this was a sign of the forthcoming End of Days, and their writings and meetings began to be filled with talk of the Apocalypse. In the Byzantine era the Eastern Orthodox Church considered the Book of Revelation semi-canonical at best, and tried to restrict it from being too widely circulated, rightfully fearful of the consequences. It was a restriction that went unheeded by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, where imagery drawn from Revelation was common in both art and diatribe. Scenes of the Apocalypse were blazoned on the porticoes of their churches, burning themselves into the conscience of the laity.

As the imperial forces in the East stumbled from disaster to disaster, the authorities back home proved equally incapable of coping with social unrest. On Sunday 22 January, 1905, in St Petersburg, a huge demonstration assembled to present workers' grievances and petition for democratic representation. The petition was written in deferential terms, drawing upon old images of the ‘Father-Tsar', deeply concerned for his people, and the marchers sung hymns and carried icons as they headed towards the Winter Palace. Piety was met with violence, as the army opened fire, heedless of the women and children in the front lines. Cossack troops charged down the survivors, sparking panic in the crowd. In a few minutes around a thousand people were killed, and any belief in the essential benevolence of the tsarist system shattered.

‘Bloody Sunday' sparked dissent throughout Russia. In the countryside, groups of peasants seized land and burnt down manor houses as
terrified nobles fled in fear of their lives. In the cities, workers downed tools and formed unions, calling for an elected parliament and a legal system that would guarantee their civil rights. For Ungern this was appalling, a breakdown of the natural order. As he put it later, ‘the classes cannot exist by themselves, but are connected'. His vision of society was like the medieval Great Chain of Being, in which everyone from noble to peasant had their place, and to disturb one element was to disrupt the whole hierarchy.