Setting the East Ablaze by Hopkirk Peter

Author:Hopkirk, Peter [Hopkirk, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848547254
Publisher: John Murray
Published: 2012-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

9 The Bloody Baron

While Roy was planning the downfall of the British in India, elsewhere in Asia agents of the Comintern were already busy spreading the heady new revolutionary gospel. Early in 1920, Ivan Maisky, later to become the Soviet ambassador in London, had made a secret visit to Mongolia, then in the tyrannical grip of a Chinese general known as ‘Little Hsu’, where he established contact with a small group of Mongolian revolutionaries determined to rid their country of alien rule. A return visit to Moscow by the Mongolians – carrying a message for Lenin in the hollowed-out handle of a riding whip – had led to the setting up of a Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Government in exile, just across the Soviet frontier. But how, without dragging the Red Army into an unwanted war with China, were a handful of Mongolian revolutionaries to drive out a greatly superior force of Chinese? It was at this moment that fate played into the hands of the Comintern, delivering Mongolia to them on a plate as the first country, after their own, to turn Communist. It happened like this.

In the tumultuous times which followed the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, Lenin was not the only one who dreamed of setting Asia ablaze. In the ancient caravan cities of Central Asia lesser messiahs were at work preaching rival creeds. In the early 1920s, two such visionaries appeared, each aspiring to found a great post-war empire in Asia. One was a Russian, a Buddhist, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. The other was a Turkish general who saw himself as heir to Napoleon. Both were virulently anti-Bolshevik.

The first to try his luck was the Russian, a madman named Baron Ungern-Sternberg. Today he would simply have been certified as a psychopath and locked up. But in the desperate days of the Civil War he had won renown among the White armies as a soldier of extraordinary – if reckless – courage, as well as ferocious cruelty. Truth and legend about the ‘Mad Baron’ are so inextricably mixed that it is difficult to be sure where one ends and the other begins. So much so, that one would-be biographer in the 1930s was forced to admit defeat after months of research and settle for a fictionalised account of the Baron’s unsavoury life. Even his physical appearance presents problems. One contemporary remembers him with blue eyes, another with grey. One describes his hair as being red, another as yellow. One insists that he was tall, another that he was of average height. A fellow White Russian who met him in Mongolia in 1920 describes his appearance thus:

‘A small head on wide shoulders, blond hair in disorder, a reddish bristling moustache, a skinny exhausted face like those on the old Byzantine ikons. Then everything else faded from view save a big, protruding forehead overhanging steely sharp eyes. These eyes were fixed on me like those of an animal from a cave.’

One officer who served under him recalls: ‘He was tall and slim, with the lean white face of an ascetic.

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