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35УДК 1(=161.1)
DOI 10.18101/2306-753X-2016-2-32-42
© Willard Sunderland
Baron Ungern's Eurasia
The article is devoted to problem of nature of the tsarist empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and understands the individuals - and political communities - within it that leaned towards multinational sympathies. This paper takes a small step in these directions by focusing on the Eurasian experience of one revealing tsarist subject - Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885-1921).
Keywords: Baron Ungern, Tsarist Empire, Asia, Mongolia, political communities.
In 1927, Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi offered the following Eurasianist credo: "The only possible basis for the state that was once known as the Russian Empire and is now the USSR is the entire collection of peoples that live within this state. They represent a distinct multinational nation and as such they stand as the bearers of a special nationalism. We call this nation Eurasian, we call its territory Eurasia and we call its nationalism Eurasianism" (1). Trubetskoi, it turned out, was completely wrong. There was never a distinct multinational nation that defined either the tsarist state or the Soviet one that superseded it, and this nonexistent nation was never the bearer of a special Eurasian nationalism. But the Prince was not alone in assuming that there was something special about the multinational combinations of Russian Eurasia. The Bolsheviks entertained similar presumptions (though expressed in a different key), and so did a number of other socialist, anti-socialist, and agnostic thinkers and activists, Russians mostly but also Jews, Poles, Georgians, and representatives of other nationalities within the tsarist world. Eurasian visions - whether called as such or not - were part of the ether encompassing Russian life in the late imperial and early Soviet age. Other empires were coming apart. For many of the world's disgruntled imperial subjects (including weary imperialists), national paths seemed truer and more promising than multinational ones. Why did multinational solutions - relatively speaking - have so much appeal in the Russian empire?
To answer this question requires, on the one hand, thinking about the nature of the tsarist empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and, on the other, trying to understand the individuals - and political communities - within it that leaned towards multinational sympathies. This paper takes a small step in these directions by focusing on the Eurasian experience of one revealing tsarist subject - Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885-1921). Ungern was many things. He was a Baltic German aristocrat, a tsarist military officer, a brutal, anti-Semitic commander of White forces during the Russian Civil War, and, in his last act before being caught and executed by the Reds; he became the invader and conqueror of the quasi-independent formerly Qing-controlled region of Outer Mongolia. Despite his disturbing and far-flung life, Ungern is not widely known today. In many respects, he seems more a second or third - rather than a first-tier - historical fig-
32
ure. But if the goal is to understand the complicated multiethnic and multiconfes-sional social dynamics of the Old Russian Empire in a time of war, revolution, progress, and chaos, Ungern is a remarkable guide. He is a revealing product of Russian Eurasia in the fin-de-siècle period, reflecting at once his society's ingenuity and promise as well as its horrific limitations.
In fact, as I see it, Ungern's life is best understood in terms of two Eurasias: the first was the Eurasia that he lived in - a Eurasia defined by the geographies, cultures, and social and political practices of the late imperial tsarist empire. The second was a Eurasia of his imagination. When Ungern came into his own as the de facto ruler of central and eastern Mongolia in early 1921, he elaborated a plan to build a new "Central State" (sredinnoe gosudarstvo) - a vast warrior's domain stretching from the Kazakh steppe to Manchuria that he imagined as the epicenter of Eurasia's counterrevolution. In Ungern's view, Turks and Mongols would bind together to create this state. They would then ally themselves with likeminded Chinese and Russians to wage war on revolution by marching all the way to Beijing and Moscow, exterminating Bolsheviks, republicans, and Jews in the process. Ungern's central state never came about, obviously. But the vision of Eurasia that informed is worth thinking about. Ungern's imaginary reactionary Eurasia was idiosyncratic. It was all his own. Yet it also grew from the patterns, habits, and presumptions of life in the tsars' fin-de-siècle empire. The real and the imagined are too densely entangled in Ungern's world to be taken apart. To consider them in this paper, I start with a review of the baron's Eurasian biography. I then switch to examine the Eurasia of his political dreams.
A Eurasian Life
Ungern's early life was that of the highly placed and well connected (2). He was born on December 29, 1885 in Graz, Austria-Hungary, as the first child of two "vons" - Sophie Charlotte von Wimpffen of Wimpffen am Neckar (located in the modern German state of Baden-Württemberg) and Theodor Leonhard Rudolf von Ungern-Sternberg of Estland (roughly equivalent to modern-day Estonia). The Un-gern-Sternberg clan represented the top tier of the Estland nobility, with roots dating back to the age of the Teutonic knights. Their family crest hung from the wall of the Domkirche in Reval (Tallinn), the headquarters of Baltic German Lutheran-ism. The lords and ladies of their various lineages knew the Romanovs and held prominent posts in the tsar's machinery. And their land holdings dotted the Baltic provinces, including virtually the entire island of Dagö (Hiiumaa) off the Estland coast where Ungern's uncle eventually came to own one of the grandest estate houses of the region (Großenhoff; Hiiu-Suuremöisa) and his grandfather directed a prosperous textile works (3). Ungern grew up; it seems, on a number of Baltic estates and lived as a young boy in the Caucasus as the family followed his father on his tours as a gentleman geologist and intermittent inspector for the Ministry of State Domains (4).
In 1891, when Ungern was six years old, his parents divorced (5). Eventually his father was diagnosed as "mentally unsound" (umalishennyi) and interned for a
time in a sanatorium in the Estland seaside town of Hapsal (Haapsalu) (6). In 1894, his mother married a new baron, Oskar von Hoyningen-Huene. Ungern spent the next six years living on his stepfather's estate of Jerwakant (Jarvakandi) in the woodsy countryside sixty eight verstas south of Reval (7). The neoclassical manor house at Jerwakant was German, from the cellars to the piano room and the staff. German overseers also ran a glass works on the estate. The peasants and workers were Estonian. Relations on the estate were not quite feudal, but they were close. (Post-feudal may be the best way to describe them). In the revolution of 1905, local peasants, together (it seems) with outsiders from Reval, burned the Jerwakant manor house (8). It was never rebuilt.
As a boy, Ungern received his education at home in German, which was the norm for Baltic German aristocrats. Then in 1900, at the age of 15, again in keeping with the norm, he left the manor to receive a more worldly education, which in the age of Russification meant entering the Russian system. Ungern's journey towards Russia began at the Nicholas the First Gymnasium (Nikolaevskaia gimna-ziia) in Reval, the oldest high school in the city and the most likely place for blue-blooded Estlanders to send their sons following the closing of the elite German-language middle/high school (the Domschule) roughly a decade earlier. The school was majority German and Estonian (all of them Lutherans) with a smaller contingent of Russian Orthodox students and a few Jews.
Ungern's marks at the gymnasium were terrible, however (9), and by early 1903, his parents transferred him to a finer address, the Naval School (Morskoe uchilishche) in St. Petersburg, which had more Baltic barons in its classes as well as a few Russian and Caucasian princes. There the teenager's grades improved at first, but in the second year, they declined again, precipitously. In February 1905, Ungern was forced to withdraw "on the advice of the academic council" (10). Finding himself out of school, nineteen years old, and (we can assume) on less than fully happy terms with his parents, he enlisted as a volunteer to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. He arrived in the Far East in early June 1905, some two months before the armistice but in enough time to be deployed to the front and stare at enemy positions. By the fall of 1906, he had returned to St. Petersburg from Manchuria to resume his schooling. After a brief flirtation with the Corps of Engineers, he enrolled in the Paul I Military Academy (Pavlovskoe voennoe uchilishche), another elite institution. There he settled down enough to graduate in 1908, with average grades and relatively few demerits. He was interested in a career in the cavalry.
Upon graduation, given his middling class rank, Ungern's best cavalry options were in the Cossack regiments. He was offered a posting near Chimkent in Semi-rech'e (Turkestan) with the Siberian Cossacks. Instead, perhaps because of his war experience in Manchuria, he chose to join the 1st Argun Regiment of the TransBaikal Host, headquartered in the village of Dauria, on the eastern edge of Manchuria, on the train line to Harbin (11). He served with the Arguntsy for two years, until 1910, when he transferred to the 1st Amur Regiment of the Amur Host deployed near Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River, just across the river from the Qing
settlement of Aigun, which later became part of Heihe. Ungern served along the Amur until late 1912.
Life on the Cossack lines consisted of drills, patrols, escort duties (of convicts and settlers), raids (against Chinese bandits), and more drills, punctuated with gambling, drinking, and horse races, in the midst of mostly wilderness and overwhelmingly male company. The officers' libraries had few books. Towns with shops, playhouses, or bordellos could be days away. The Trans-Baikal Cossacks counted a significant minority of Lamaist Buriats on their rolls (12.3 %), plus a handful of Jews and Muslims. The Amur Host, by contrast, had a non-Russian, non-Orthodox population of less than 1%. The residents of both hosts were poor and isolated, with the two lowest literacy rates of the eleven Cossack hosts in the empire (12).
Ungern did tolerably well in his peacetime service and received the normal promotions, though he was also disciplined for various "incidents." In July 1913, following one of these "incidents" (perhaps a duel), he petitioned to resign from active duty (13). Shortly thereafter, for at least a part of 1913, he traveled in the newly declared quasi-independent former Chinese province of Outer Mongolia. Stories later circulated that he had joined the Russian consular guard in the Western Mongolian town of Khovd (Russian: Kobdo) where there were clashes between Mongolian and Qing troops at the time. Baron Wrangel, one of Ungern's commanders during World War I, without any evidence, wrote that Ungern "commanded the Mongolian cavalry and fought for Mongolian independence" (14). It seems more likely that he came to Mongolia "in search of bold accomplishments" (and to see old regiment mates serving with the Russian guard), but then simply returned to Russia, without doing much at all, bold or otherwise (15). At any rate, in the summer of 1914, when "the Great European War" began, he was in Moscow and later Reval.
Ungern was mobilized on July 19th, 1914, and fought in the war for almost three years, mostly with the 1st Nerchinsk Cossack Regiment of his old TransBaikal Host. He served on at least three fronts (Eastern Prussia, the Carpa-thians/Galicia, and the Caucasus), was wounded at least five times, and received at least five commendations, including the St. George's Cross he wore at his trial. From the trench-level view provided by his regiment's "field books" (polevye knizhki), his wartime life consisted of an ebb and flow of shelling, being shelled, raiding, reconnoitering, resting, retreating, taking prisoners, moving guns, shooting horses, and running out of supplies, from one village or geometrically defined copse of woods to another (16). On Ungern's end of "war land," much as in other sectors, merciless slaughter across the front lines was acceptable, while behind the lines equally unsentimental violence, displacement, and deportations - of Jews and others - were commonplace (17). In the swirl of the carnage, junior officers died by the myriad, though Ungern somehow stayed alive, even while charging at the front of assaults or leading reconnaissance sorties behind enemy trenches (18). In recognition of his "selfless bravery," he was promoted to esaul (Cossack captain)
in September 1916, though just two months later, in recognition of his "disorderli-ness," the other side to his bravery; he was sentenced to two months arrest for taking a drunken swipe with his saber at a superior officer (19).
The most important development of the war for Ungern, beyond staying alive, was the February Revolution. Order No.1 eroded discipline, which convinced the baron and his fellow Trans-Baikal Cossack half-Buriat comrade, Grigorii Seme-nov, that the only hope for the army lay in organizing units of zealous "native volunteers" to fight alongside the insufficiently dutiful Slavs (20). Semenov and Ungern began by organizing "native retinues" of this sort in the Caucasus where they were fighting at the time. By summer 1917, in keeping with "the intensification of the ethnic vision" in Petrograd and the stavka (21), Semenov was charged by Minister of War Aleksandr Kerenskii to organize a similar initiative among the Bu-riats. He and Ungern were in Eastern Siberia working on the recruitments when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and everything changed.
Semenov and Ungern opposed the Bolshevik takeover from the start and took charge of the vacuum of power to gather as many guns and men as they could find in the hills and valleys between Chita and China. Though too late to save the Provisional Government, the Mongol-Buriat regiment was formed in mid-November 1917. By January 1918, the regiment was rolled into the Special Manchurian Brigade (Osobyi man'chzhurskii otriad) named after the Manchurian railroad town of Manchuria (Chinese: Manzhouli) (22). Semenov took over nominal command of the brigade, awarded himself the title of Ataman (Cossack host commander), and set up shop in Chita to focus on the higher cause of restoring "order and respect for law" and getting rid of "the destroyers of the fatherland" (23). Ungern became the ataman's man in Dauria, his old home, just one railway stop away from Manchuria on the Russian side. He became Major General, then Lieutenant General. And in February 1920, Dauria became the headquarters of his own command, the Asiatic Mounted Division (Aziatskaia konnaia diviziia), organized by Semenov's decree into Tatar, Buriat, and Mongolian regiments though with a majority roster of ethnically Russian Trans-Baikal Cossacks, some of the nominal national groups of the regiments, and a dusting of other nationalities: German and Ottoman P.O.W.'s, Chinese, Ukrainians, some Japanese (24). In the spring of 1920, the Division counted 105 officers, 1233 cavalry, and 365 infantry (25).
Ungern saw his war against the Reds as of a piece with the war against Germany. The same sacrifices were required, the same discipline. "The war now continues," he wrote in 1920 to a civilian official concerned over illegal and abusive labor mobilization "methods" at the Dauria station (26). Yet the war was also different, operationally and ideologically. The enemy was no longer a foreign army and the battles were not fought by roaring out of trenches. The front was everywhere and the foe was an insidious anti-national, anti-God, Jew-ridden conspiracy that needed to be destroyed, not just defeated (27). The Red-White conflict in the hills and steppes of Ungern's corner of the Ataman's domain saw more identity checks, detentions, beatings, executions, and requisitions than pitched battles. Spies
crossed one way and the other, along with rumors, broadsheets, gun-runners, deserters, and armored trains. There were outbreaks of typhus, surges of refugees, spirals of inflation, and constant concerns with "the popular mood," summarized in the weekly district reports (svodki) and "information bulletins" submitted to Chita (28). Ungern ran his war zone with a principled disdain for bureaucratic and civil procedure, which, as he saw it, slowed things down and appeared in any case irrelevant since law had been replaced by war as the basic organizer of identity, purpose, and communal obligations (29).
By the summer of 1920, the war had turned definitively against the Whites in Eastern Siberia. Chita came under pressure from the Red Army and the Semeno-vites had begun to look for ways out of their predicament. For Ungern, the way out became Outer Mongolia, which by 1919 had been reoccupied by a Chinese republican garrison centered in the head town of Ikh Huree (Urga, later Ulaanbaatar) that had arrested the Mongolian ruler Bogd Khan (Bogda), considered the Living Buddha and unrivalled symbol of Mongolian independence. Ungern knew from "contacts" and his own experience that anti-Chinese resentment among the Khalka Mongols was strong. He could thus move to central Mongolia with the support of the Mongolian clans, chase out the Chinese, reestablish the rule of the Bogda, and then use the country as a base for taking the fight back to the Reds.
It is not clear how much more of a plan there was than this in the early fall of 1920. It is also not clear how much Ungern had coordinated the plan with Seme-nov. But in September 1920, Ungern's Asiatic Division moved into Mongolia. In February 1921, the Division, along with various Mongolian allies and fellow travelers, captured Huree, forcing out the Chinese. And at this point the relatively simple idea of crossing into Mongolia to get away from the Reds turned into something more involved. Once in charge in Mongolia, Ungern began to pursue his Eurasian dream. This dream, and the politics supporting it, then remained an active cause for the baron until his capture by the Red Army approximately six months later.
The Eurasian Dream
The grip of the dream could be seen - to a point - in Ungern's appearance. By the time the baron took hold of Huree in early 1921, his uniform was a faded yellow Mongolian cloak (deel) specially outfitted with tsarist-style officer's epaulettes and adorned with the St. George's Cross, the highest Russian military order, which he had received for valor during the war with Germany. Beyond his dress, Ungern was a Russian Eurasian hybrid in other ways. He spoke fluent Russian and French, in addition to his native German, while knowing decent English and some Chinese and Mongolian. He was a Lutheran who prayed in Buddhist temples and consulted Mongolian soothsayers yet married a Chinese convert to Orthodoxy in a Russian church in Harbin. He knew European ways of war and Inner Asian ones, both intimately. He read Western philosophers, while knowing that "the light that will bring happiness to all mankind shall come from the East" (30). And he had no trouble combining the open toleration of ethnic difference that was a longstanding element
of the Russian imperial system with the most virulent of ethnic prejudices - anti-Semitism - also part of the system.
In the shatter zone of the Sino-Russian-Mongolian frontier in 1921, Ungern melded his Eurasian contradictions and abiding hatred of Bolshevism into an ideology of imperial restoration that was itself premised on Eurasian combinations. The key elements of the ideology were eliminationist anti-Semitism, monarchism, militarism, mystical Christianity and Buddhism, a variety of tsarist/western Asian-ism, and an imperialism that drew at once on eastern and western/tsarist traditions. All of the elements worked together with a predictable logic. As Ungern saw it, Jews were socialists. They had caused the revolution. Therefore, they had to be destroyed. Monarchy was the source of all order. It had been undone. Therefore, it had to be reestablished. The West had been corroded by socialism and Jewry. Therefore, the peoples of the East would have to save the world. War was the surest means for "cleansing" the population and separating the corrupt from the righteous - that is, distinguishing "the criminals" from those "loyal to the principles of spiritual truth and honesty" (istina i pravda). Therefore, war had to be embraced (31). Empire - the "combination of the peoples" - was a God-given natural form that had been debased and destroyed by the forces of communism and republicanism. Therefore, empire had to be reconstituted and bolstered through modern methods of military organization and economic development (32).
Ungern elaborated these positions in his political correspondence and proclamations during the Mongolian campaign, and he also pursued them in practice. He sponsored wholesale killings of Jews and socialists. He restored the Bogda to the Mongolian throne, while reinstating former tsarist advisors to help rationalize the Bogda's domains. And he busily pursued using the pivot of his power in Huree to cobble together a vast political union of Turks and Mongols from the Kazakh steppe to Inner Mongolia, Khalka, and Manchuria. In part, this geopolitical plan was a reprise of pan-Mongolian ideas that flowed within the Mongolian Revolution of 1911 and later influenced Semenov's Japanese-sponsored pan-Mongolian aspirations of 1919 and 1920. But the baron's plan was also different. As a devoted monarchist, he called for the new Mongol union to place itself under the power of a restored Manchu emperor in Beijing. And he saw the Mongol nexus as the heart of a much broader undertaking - "the unification of autonomous Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang within a mighty federation." "Only this way," he wrote to a Mongol leader in the Tarbagatai region in April 1921, "can the great traditions.. .of the East be preserved, as well as the honor and virtue of its people, its traditions, legends, and prophecies (zavety)" (33). As Ungern put it in another missive sent slightly later to the "leaders of the Kazakh people": "The coming task is the gathering of all the tribes and faiths of the people of Mongol descent within a single powerful, independent Central State that, like the branch of a colossal tree, will draw its strength from the ancient and faithful trunk of the Middle Kingdom, ruled by an emperor of the dynasty of the nomadic Manchus, the bearers of faith, loyalty, and love towards all the peoples of the Great Mongol" (34).
Ungem's Eurasian vision was rooted in this ideal of the Central State. The geography of the new state was to be centered on the steppe - the great highway that linked the ends of the continent. The virtues that bound its peoples were the bravery of the nomadic warrior and the steadfastness of the loyal imperial subject, committed to emperor, tradition, and God. The emperor was to be Manchu, for continuity's sake. But Ungern was careful to stress that tradition and God were open to interpretation. The new state as he described it in his political letters would combine Muslims and Buddhists, nomads and farmers, and the overriding characteristic of the new/old order was social harmony - the kind of social harmony that the revolutionaries, republicans, and Jews were busily destroying with their anti-monarchism and irreligion. As such, the true content of Ungern's Eurasia was as moral as it was physical and political - even more so. Ungern's Eurasian world had no clear geographical limits. The formal relationship binding its various territorial parts was fuzzy, and its blueprint resembled more a tribal confederation than an institutionalized state. But it was almost wholly ecumenical in its toleration of cultural diversity (the Mongols provided the core, but no peoples except the Jews were excluded). And it was premised on the unassailable virtue of imperial tradition.
The Reds were proposing a multicultural anti-imperial innovation, which eventually became the USSR. The baron imagined a multicultural pro-imperial restoration, though not a slavish copy of the tsarist or Manchu orders but rather a new Eurasian empire designed to make up for the deficiencies of the old.
Conclusion
Ungern's attempts to assemble the Central State did get very far. He complained of resistance from Khalka notables and the Bogda, and he received no answers to his missives to the Kazakhs and only lukewarm support from the western Mongols. And at any rate, supplies and time were short, and he was restless. In May 1921, even without having a coalition behind him, Ungern decided to lead his division on an invasion of Red Siberia. His forces were seriously outnumbered and, as a result, the invasion (such as it was) was undone almost as soon as it began. In August 1921, Ungern was captured by a Red Army special expeditionary force operating in Mongolia, and on September 15 th, he was tried and sentenced to death "before a crowded hall of workers and Red Army soldiers" in the western Siberian town of Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk) (35). He was shot immediately thereafter.
In executing Ungern, the Bolsheviks were confident they were getting rid of yet another avatar of the Old Regime. And they were, but they were also eliminating a rival Eurasian vision. Though rarely seen as such, Ungern the Germano-Russian Mongolian-Siberian baron was a product of the far-flung geographical experiences and multicultural combinations made possible by life in the late tsarist empire. Influenced by the empire and by the habits of his age, he was inclined, like his ideological opponents, to perceive solutions to the crisis of his society in terms of expansive combinations - of peoples as well as territories. Imperial life encouraged the cosmopolitanism that he represented. War, revolution, and imperial col-
lapse then transformed his particular variant of imperial cosmopolitanism into the basis for a reactionary and murderous ideology. Ungern's life thus offers a guide both to what the empire produced as well as to what flowed from its unraveling. His story reminds us of the need to make sense of how this cosmopolitan predisposition was built into the habits and presumptions of Russian Eurasian life in the fin-de-siècle, creating constituencies of imperial individuals, on the left and the right, who rejected the narrow worldviews of the communitarians and, well before the coming of the polycultural, transnational postmodern "cosmocrats," placed their faith in the radiant future of "cultural multiplicity" (36).
References
1. N.S. Trubetskoi, ""Obshcheevraziiskii natsionalizm [1927]," in E.A. Vasil'ev (ed.), Russ-kaia ideia: sbornikproizvedenii russkikh myslitelei (Moscow, 2002). pp. 379-380.
2. The scholarly literature on Ungern is sizeable, though there are no comprehensive biographies and almost no reconstructions of his life prior to the revolution and civil war. The fullest studies are Evgenii Belov, Baron Ungern fon Shternberg: biografiia, ideologiia, voennye pokhody 1920-1921 (Moscow, 2003); and two volumes of annotated documents and memoirs edited by S. L. Kuz'min: Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh (Moscow, 2004) and Legendarnyi baron: neizvestnye stranitsy grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow, 2004). See also Sergei Khatuntsev, "Buddist s mechom: strannaia sud'ba barona Ungerna," Rodina, 2004, n.9, pp.51-57; Paul du Quenoy, "Warlordism à la russe: Baron von Ungern-Sternberg's Anti-Bolshevik Crusade, 1917-1921," Revolutionary Russia, 2003, v.16, n.2, pp.1-27; Leonid Iuzefovich, Samoderzhetspustyni: fenomen sud'by barona RF. Un-gern-Shternberga (Moscow, 1993); Jean Mabire, Ungern, le dieu de la guerre: la chevauchée du général-baron Roman Feodorovitch von Ungern-Sternberg, du Golfe de Finlande au désert de Gobi (Paris, 1987).
3. On the grand estate house, see Eesti moisad: 250 fotot aastaist 1860-1939 / Herrenhäuser in Estland: 250 Ansichten aus den Jahren 1860-1939/Estonian Manor Houses: 250 Photos from 1860-1939 (Tallinn, 2004) p.44. For information on the Ungern-Sternberg family, its most illustrious representatives, and its various genealogical lines, see Rudolf von Ungern-Sternberg, Nachtrichten über das Geschlect der Ungern-Sternberg aus autentischen Quellen gesammelt (Breslau, 1875) 2 vols.; O.M. von Stackelberg, Genealogisches Handbuch der estländischen Ritterschaft (Görlitz, 1931), pp.439-475; Michael von Taube, "Die soziale und politische Stellung des Geschlechts von Ungern in Altlivland," Baltische Hefte, 1959/60, v.3, pp.187-192 and v.4, pp.246-256; Wilhelm Lenz (ed.), Deutschbaltisches biographisches lexikon 1710-1860 (Cologne and Vienna, 1970). pp.821-829; and Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Neue Nachtrichten über das Geschlect Ungern-Sternberg (12512001) (Basel, 2001). There is also considerable unpublished genealogical material in the Ungern-Sternberg family holding in the Eesti Ajalooarhiiv (EA), f.1423, nimistu [opis'] 1. See also the full genealogy compiled for the Estland Registry Commission (Estlandische Matrikelkommission) in 1926: EA, f.1674, n.2, säilik [delo] 207.
4. For the father's activities, see F.R. Ungern-Sternberg, O vinodelii na iuzhnom beregu Kry-ma (St. Petersburg, 1888); and his Die Orographie des Kaukasus in Beziehung zur alten Kultur in Vorder-Asien (St. Petersburg, 1891). See also the father's doctoral dissertation in geology: Untersuchungen über den Finnlaendischen Rapawiki-Granit (Leipzig, 1882). His vita is appended to the back, pp.45-46.
5. EA, f.1187, n.2, s.1801. The dissolution of the marriage appears to have been a mutual decision, though the reasons are unclear. While far from the norm, divorce was "not rare" among the Lutheran Baltic German nobility in the late 19th century. See Heide W. Whelan, Adapting to Modernity: Family, Caste, and Capitalism among the Baltic German Nobility (Cologne, 1999) pp. 122-123.
6. EA, f.860, n. 1, s.1672, leht [list], 1.
7. For a photo of the manor house, see Eesti moisad, p.176. For a description of the locality in 1912, with the count of verstas, see Spisok naselennykh mest estliandskoi gubernii k 1912-mu godu
(Revel', 1913) p.14. Prior to the turn in his health, Ungem's father also remarried. His second wife, Maria Pearce, was a British woman, fifteen years his junior. See Stackelberg, Genealogisches Handbuch der estländischen Ritterschaft, p.465.
8. EA, f.3654, n. 1, s.54, 1.246-252. By 1913, Ungern's stepfather had sold the estate and was living on the nearby but much humbler property of Wahhakant (Vahakonnu).
9. For Ungern's personal file and grades for part of the 1901-1902 academic year, see Eesti Ajalooarhiiv, f.101, n.1, s.1266.
10. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota (RGAVMF), f.432, op.1, d.7260, l.13. For Ungern's grade and conduct book, see RGAVMF, f.432, op.2, d.2162.
11. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGVIA), f.319, op.1, d.630, 1.144,
233.
12. Otchet glavnogo upravleniia kazach 'ikh voisk za 1908 god (St. Petersburg, 1909) pp.21, 23,
61.
13. Kuz'min (ed.) Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p.49.
14. P.N. Vrangel', Zapiski (noiabr' 1916 g. - noiabr' 1920 g.) (Moscow, 1991) v.1, p.13. The first English translation of Wrangel's memoirs puts it even more evocatively: "and there he was [Ungern], commander of the whole cavalry force of Mongolia!" The Memoirs of Count Wrangel: The Last Commander-in-Chief of the Russian National Army (Sophie Goulston, trans.) (London, 1929) p.7.
15. This is the view suggested by Aleksei Burdukov, a Russian merchant from western Mongolia, who met Ungern in Mongolia at the time. See A.V. Burdukov, V staroi i novoi Mongolii: vospo-minaniia, pis'ma (Moscow, 1969) pp.100-102.
16. See, for example, the descriptions in RGVIA, f.5281, op.1, d.1, 2, 25, 26, 59.
17. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloo-mington, Ind., 1999) pp.16-18, passim; Erich Lohr, "The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I," Russian Review, 2001, v.60, n.3, pp.404-419; Alexander V. Prusin, "The Russian Military and the Jews in Galicia, 1914-1915," in Erich Lohr and Marshall Poe (eds.), The Military and Society in Russia, 1450-1917 (Leiden, 2002) pp.525-544; Joshua A. Sanborn, "Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I," Journal of Modern History, 2005, v.77, n.2, pp.290-325. The term "war land" is drawn from Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (New York, 2000).
18. By May 1917, the loss rate for officers in Ungern's division (the Ussurii Mounted Division) was approximately 170%. The rate for enlisted men and Cossacks was 200%. See RGVIA, f.3532, op.2, d.216, l.360. On Ungern's service in special behind-the-lines detachments, see Ol'ga Khoroshi-lova, Voiskovye partizany velikoi voiny (St. Petersburg, 2002) pp.78, 85, 96, 98-101, 103-104, 132, 198.
19. Kuz'min (ed.) Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, pp.55-58.
20. This is Semenov's account. See his O sebe: vospominaniia, mysli i vyvody (Moscow, 1999) pp.64-65.
21. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003) p.80.
22. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv chitinskoi oblasti (GACHO), f.329, op.1, d.78. ll.21(b)-24(b).
23. See the interview with Semenov in L. Kozheurov, "Zadacha momenta: beseda s Atamanom Semenovym," Russkii vostok (Chita), 1919, 5 February, p.2.
24. For Semenov's order creating the division, see GACHO, f.329, op.1, d.13, l.168.
25. Kuz'min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p.14.
26. GACHO, f.329, op.1, d.29, l.46 (b).
27. The precise sources of Ungern's anti-Semitism are not clear, but views of Jews as martially unfit, morally corrupt, and disloyal were prevalent in the tsarist officer corps by World War I. See D. Raskin, "Evrei v sostave rossiiskogo ofitserskogo korpusa v xix - nachale xx veka," in D.A. El'iasevich (ed.), Evrei v Rossii: istoriia i kul'tura; sbornik nauchnykh trudov (St. Petersburg, 1998) pp. 170-174; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, p.137 passim; and I. Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei v
russkoi armii 1827-1914 (Moscow, 2003) pp. 353-356. Ataman Semenov, in contrast to Ungern, took a more ambiguous position on the "Jewish question." See L.V. Kuras, "Ataman Semenov i 'evreiskii vopros'," in Istoriia beloi Sibiri: tezisy vtoroi nauchnoi konferentsii (4-5 fevralia 1997) (Kemerovo, 1997) pp.46-47; S.P. Zviagin, "Evrei v usloviiakh 'Beloi Sibiri' (1918-1920 gg.)," in Istoriia evreiskikh obshchin Sibiri i Dal'nego Vostoka: materially pervoi regional'noi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (4-5 noiabria 2000 goda) (Tomsk, 2000) p.81;
28. For a small sampling of these materials, see GACHO, f.334, op.2, d.138; f.334, op.2, d.154; f.334, op. 1, d.65.
29. For Ungern's dismissive view of law (zakonnost') during wartime, see the additional remarks in his letter mentioned above: GACHO, f.329, op.1, d.29, l.47. In addition to his duties at Dau-ria, Ungern was dispatched at times by Semenov for parlays in Manchuria and was also placed in charge of the mines at Nerchinsk. He also claimed to have spent eight months (probably in 1919) making contacts with monarchists in Beijing. See: "Ob"iavlenie shtaba Otdel'noi Vostochno-Sibirskoi Armii," Russkii vostok (Chita), 1919, 9 February, p.1; "Khronika," Russkii vostok (Chita), 1919, 26 February, p.4; and Kuz'min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p.129
30. Ungern used this phrase in a letter to a leader of the Mongols of Barga in March 1921. See Kuz'min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p. 135.
31. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), f.39454, op.1, d.9, l.55 (b).
32. RGVA, f.39454, op.1, d.9, l.53 (b).
33. Kuz'min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p. 133.
34. That is, the Turkic and Mongol peoples formerly ruled by Chinggis Khan. See Kuz'min, Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh, p. 161.
35. A description and transcript of the trial appears in Sovetskaia Sibir', 1921, n.196 (13 September) p.4; n.197 (14 September) p.1; n.199 (16 September) p.1; n.200 (17 September) p.4; n.201 (18 September) p.3; n.202 (20 September) pp. 2-4.
36. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, "Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism," in their edited volume Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York, 2002) pp.122.
Сандерленд Виллард - профессор исторического факультета, Университет Цинциннати (США)
Willard Sunderland - Professor, Department of History, University of Cincinnati (USA)
