The World the Baron Broke

The years covered by White Khan are among the most violent and least remembered in modern history. Between the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the fall of Vladivostok in October 1922, the Russian Civil War killed somewhere between seven and twelve million people — most of them civilians, most of them east of the Urals, and most of them from disease and famine caused by the war's disruption of the world they lived in. On the far southern edge of that catastrophe sat a Buddhist theocracy of roughly 600,000 nomads, a caravan capital called Urga, and a quantity of missing imperial gold that no one has ever fully accounted for.

1911: Mongolia declares independence

When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, Outer Mongolia declared its independence and enthroned the Bogd Khan — the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, third in seniority in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama — as both head of state and living god. Tsarist Russia backed the new theocracy just far enough to weaken China, but never far enough to guarantee it: the 1915 Treaty of Kyakhta reduced Mongolia to "autonomy" under nominal Chinese suzerainty. That unresolved bargain — a country too useful to two empires to be left alone, and too poor to defend itself — is the political engine of everything that follows.

The collapse of the Romanovs

In the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918, Yakov Yurovsky led the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children and their four attendants. The killing severed any restoration of the Romanov line and announced a new order that rejected Orthodoxy, monarchy and traditional Russian identity outright. It also cut loose the imperial treasury: the enormous gold reserve seized at Kazan and carried east by Admiral Kolchak's government, of which a substantial portion vanished somewhere between Omsk, Chita and the Mongolian frontier. See the Romanov gold and the missing Kolchak bullion.

The White Armies and the Asiatic Cavalry Division

The counter-revolutionary "White" forces were never a single army. They were a patchwork of monarchists, republicans, regional warlords, Cossack hosts and foreign expeditionary contingents, fatally divided on what should replace communism. In Transbaikal the Japanese-funded Cossack Ataman Grigory Semyonov ran Chita as a personal fief; his deputy, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, broke with the White command to build a multi-ethnic Asiatic Cavalry Division of Russians, Buryats, Mongols, Tatars, Chinese and Japanese, held together by terror and by Ungern's conviction that a restored Buddhist-monarchist Asia would sweep the revolution back into Europe. His most competent field officer was Boris Rezukhin; his most feared was the counter-intelligence chief Leonid Sipailov.

1919: China reoccupies Urga

With Russia consumed by civil war, the Beiyang government sent General Xu Shuzheng north in 1919 to cancel Mongolian autonomy at gunpoint. The Bogd Khan was forced to renounce independence and placed under house arrest; Chinese garrison troops occupied Urga and humiliated the monasteries and the princes. Xu's patron rival, Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique, would soon drive him from power in Beijing — leaving the Urga garrison politically orphaned and badly led at exactly the wrong moment. Background: the Russian Civil War and Mongolia.

February 1921: the liberation of Urga

Ungern crossed the frontier in October 1920 and was beaten back twice from Urga with heavy losses. Through the winter his division camped in the Kerulen valley, resupplied by Mongol princes and lamas who had decided the Baron was the lesser occupier. On the night of 1 February 1921 a small raid extracted the blind Bogd Khan from his palace at Bogd Uul under the noses of the Chinese guard — a theological and psychological blow as much as a military one. Urga fell days later. The Battle of Urga and the Bogd Khan's restoration are covered in full in the archives. On 22 February the Bogd Khan was re-enthroned; Ungern was made a Mongolian khan and given the title Darkhan Khoshoi Chin Wang. Mongols still call the episode a liberation. What followed inside the city was a pogrom.

Zanzer, the Jews of Urga, and the price of the victory

Urga in 1921 held a small, well-established community of foreign merchants — Russian, Chinese, Buryat and Jewish. Among them was Israel-Eli Zanzer, a Jewish businessman with a substantial gold-mining operation and the personal favour of the Bogd Khan. Ungern's obsession with a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy turned the captured city over to Sipailov's men, and most of Urga's Jewish community was murdered in a matter of days. Zanzer's survival, and the shelter given to eleven refugees by the Mongolian national hero Prince Togtokho, form the moral spine of the series. The commercial machinery behind it — how bullion of uncertain origin could be re-declared as Mongolian production — runs through the Mongol'Or concession. See also the Jews of Mongolia. The cabaret singer Masha Sharaban moved between all of these worlds.

Summer 1921: the road to the Selenga and the tribunal

Ungern's victory lasted four months. In May 1921 he rode north into Soviet territory intending to raise the Transbaikal peasantry against the Bolsheviks; the peasantry did not rise. Beaten at the Selenga, his own officers mutinied — Rezukhin was shot by his men — and Ungern was handed to a Red patrol. He was tried in Novonikolaevsk in September 1921 in a show trial lasting a single afternoon and executed the same day: the trial of the Mad Baron. Soviet-backed Mongolian revolutionaries under Sukhbaatar and Choibalsan entered Urga in July 1921 behind the Red Army.

From Urga to Ulaanbaatar

The Bogd Khan was kept as a figurehead until his death in 1924. Mongolia was then declared a People's Republic — the world's second communist state — and Urga was renamed Ulaanbaatar, "Red Hero," after Sukhbaatar. The theocracy Ungern had restored was dismantled within a decade: in the purges of the 1930s, run largely by Choibalsan under Stalin's direction, tens of thousands of lamas were killed and nearly every monastery in the country was destroyed. Mongolia spent seventy years as a Soviet satellite, sealed between the two powers that had fought over it in 1921.

The 1990 democratic revolution ended that. Modern Mongolia is a parliamentary democracy of some 3.5 million people, roughly half of them in Ulaanbaatar, pursuing a "third neighbour" foreign policy to balance the same two states — Russia and China — that determined its fate a century ago. Its economy still turns on what Zanzer was digging for: gold, copper and coal, most of it exported south. The Bogd Khan's winter palace survived as a museum; Sukhbaatar Square sits at the centre of the city; and Chinggis Khan, unmentionable under the Soviets, is again the national symbol on the currency, the airport and the ridgeline outside town.

That is why the events of 1921 are not a curiosity. The Battle of Urga is the hinge on which Mongolia turned from a Buddhist theocracy into a modern state — and the men who forced it were a Baltic German mystic, a blind living god, a Jewish mining engineer and two Chinese generals who never met.