The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer

Author:James Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

Ungern spoke of the necessity of the ‘discipline of the rod’ which had served his military heroes, Frederick the Great and Nikolas I. Nobody was immune from being seized and beaten; Rezuhin, Klingenberg, Sipailov - all of them were publicly and humiliatingly beaten by Ungern at one time or another. These beatings, interspersed with sporadic praise, seemed only to increase their loyalty to him.

Flogging was the most straightforward of Ungern’s punishment techniques. His cruelty took on much more varied forms, such as a peculiar fascination with torments involving trees. One punishment involved forcing the offender up to the top of a tall tree and making him remain there all night. Those who faltered in this ‘acrobatic farce’ and fell broke their arms or legs and were shot as useless mouths. For executions, he sometimes ordered his men to bend back a tree, then bound the victim to it to be ripped apart by the branches when it was released. He also employed execution by fire, particularly of deserters or recalcitrant recruits. They were tied to a tree, or herded into barns or houses, then burnt alive.

Some of the stories are so extreme that they have sometimes been attributed to Red propaganda. However, many contemporary accounts, whatever their writers’ feelings about Ungern, agree on the range and inventiveness of his sadistic discipline. Red propaganda about Ungern inevitably concentrated on the atrocities committed against loyal Soviet citizens, not reactionary Whites. Nor did Ungern, when questioned, ever deny any of these cruelties. He was not the only perpetuator by any means, but he was the prime mover.

A culture of cruelty evolved around Ungern whereby officers, both fascinated by and terrified of him, would attempt to imitate and impress him by devising increasingly horrific punishments. Rezuhin, Ungern’s shadow, was particularly keen to copy his master. The physical and cultural isolation of being in the wilderness, surrounded by strange ‘Asiatics’, made the Russians behave even more badly than their contemporaries in the civil war back home. After the war Russian memoirists preferred to blame the majority of the horrors either on the dead or on the ‘Mongolian cruelty’ of Ungern’s non-Russian troops. When they did admit to their own involvement in murder and torture, they found excuses in the madness of war, pressure from their comrades or an understandable terror of Ungern. ‘It was kill or be killed in those days,’ wrote Alioshin, ‘and we fought like demons from hell.’

Ungern used a small group of executioners to enforce his punishments. These were hated by even his most dedicated followers, and all witnesses write about them in dramatic and unflattering terms. One particularly loathed figure was Evgenie Burdokovskii, his Cossack ensign. He was

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