"Mongol-Dressed Mad Baron"
"Mad Baron" - so called contemporaries of Baron Ungern-Sternberg. The white commander was accused of mass terror, which the commander of the Asian division used against everyone who did not accept the white idea. Historian, leader of the Cadets, one of the leaders of the February Revolution P.N. Milyukov called the activities of the baron
“The most depressing page in stories White movement ".
Representatives of the liberal, "white" intelligentsia spread rumors about "mass murders", "murder of children", "baiting by wolves", etc.
Many representatives of the white officers and generals hated Ungern no less, if not more, than the Bolsheviks. The Kappelevites dreamed of hanging him. They seized the chief of staff of the Asian division, General Yevseyev, at the Dauria station and sentenced him to death. Yevseyev was saved only by the intervention of Ataman Semyonov, who at that time was the head of the entire White movement in the Far East. The death sentence was commuted to hard labor. Without a doubt, if the Kappelites had seized Ungern, they would have treated him like the Bolsheviks - they would have executed him.
Indeed, in the territory controlled by Roman Ungern, an iron order was immediately established, which was maintained by the most brutal methods. IN AND. Shaiditsky recalled that at the Dauria station (Semyonov's mutiny and the "mad baron") cruel punishment could befall:
"All persons convicted of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks, taking away state property and state sums of money under the guise of their property, dragging deserters, all kinds of" socialists "- they all covered the hills to the north of the station."
However, all this is not surprising.
During the First World War, courts martial could sentence marauders and deserters to death. During the Revolution and the Civil War, the brutality of the opposing sides became commonplace. The Februaryist revolutionaries killed policemen and gendarmes. The anarchist sailors dealt with their officers. Reds, whites, and nationalists of all stripes have made terror a part of their politics.
Finnish whites "cleaned out" the country from the Finnish Reds and Russians in general, including an absolutely neutral part (or even hostile to the Bolsheviks) of the Russian community. Polish Nazis killed tens of thousands of Russian Red Army prisoners in concentration camps. Estonian nationalists did the same with the White Guards, their family members and Russian refugees.
The Petliurites deliberately exterminated the Bolsheviks, Jews and, in general, "Muscovites" (immigrants from the Great Russian provinces of Russia). The Kolchakites staged such a terror on their territory that they caused a whole peasant war in their rear.
Rebel peasants smashed and plundered trains on the Siberian Railway, and attacked cities. Basmachi in Central Asia completely massacred Russian villages. The highlanders in the Caucasus destroyed the Cossack villages, the Cossacks responded by destroying the auls.
The "greens" staged their terror. And the bandits, without any high ideas, exterminated thousands of people. Most often unarmed, civilian, defenseless people. For the sake of any good, or simply from impunity and the complete loss of humanity.
Examples of darkness. It was hell on earth.
Ungern in this picture stood out only for his openness and honesty. He exterminated those whom he considered to be the culprits of the revolution and turmoil, the "socialists". Robbers, deserters. There was order on its territory. He also hated the liberal wing of the White movement (Februaryists, democrats), which, in fact, destroyed the autocracy and organized a revolution. They were in the majority in the White Army. They responded in kind, with a fierce hatred of the "mad baron."
The baron retained a type of medieval thinking that was rare in this era. Therefore, Ungern highly placed such Russian princes as Paul I and Nicholas I, Frederick of Prussia. He was a real knight, straightforward, honest, noble. Tough, not compromising his principles. Therefore, traders, bourgeois, liberals, people with "flexible" thinking did not understand him. It was easier for them to declare him "insane" than delve into his military, knightly code.
Fight against thieves
One of the worst crimes for Ungern was theft and bribery. Many white leaders recalled that the life of the white armies represented complete devastation, the apogee of decay. The rear was full of quartermaster generals, generals on duty, supply chiefs, generals for assignments, and other useless staff.
The embezzlement and corruption flourished. The intendants and tax farmers, assuming an imminent defeat, did not hesitate. The Daurian baron did not stand on ceremony with swindlers and thieves. He said:
"While you steal - I will hang!"
Ungern hated "his" thieves, civil and military, who tried to cash in on the war, perhaps more than the Bolsheviks.
Roman Fedorovich also hated traitors. He even wanted to destroy the echelon of the commander of the allied forces in Siberia, French General Janin, who, together with the Czechs, betrayed Admiral Kolchak. Only ataman Semyonov kept the baron from an act of revenge.
Ungern was disgusted with the values of the Western world. The world that seduced most of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, including the leaders of the White movement. In this world, the principles of a healthy hierarchy were abandoned, and society began to decline and decay. The rich used ochlos to dominate the people and called it democracy. In essence, it was plutocracy, the rule of the rich. The process of involution of mankind begins, the internal degeneration of man, which was expressed in the domination of materialism, a consumer society.
It is interesting that it was the Red Project (Soviet civilization) that stopped the degradation of mankind for several generations. The man again rushed up to the stars. And after the death of the USSR, mankind quickly rolled downhill, partly returning to the past, partly rapidly decaying, losing its human face.
The Baron noted that for some time human culture had gone down the wrong and harmful path. The culture of the new time in its main manifestations has ceased to serve the happiness and spiritual elevation of man. Science, technology and new forms of political structure not only did not bring a person closer to happiness, but also alienated him from him. And in the future they will further distance them from him.
Thus, Ungern actually noted that the spiritual development of mankind lags behind the technical one. That in the future can become the root cause of a new catastrophe of mankind (after the legendary death of antediluvian mankind). And at the turn of XX – XXI centuries. humanity has reached a dead end, the way out of which is not yet visible. And transhumanism, which is being offered in the West, can hasten the collapse of humanity.
The mysticism of the Daurian Baron
It must be remembered that Roman Fedorovich considered the Civil War, first of all, not as a class, social struggle, in which various strata of the population and classes opposed each other. For him, this confrontation was, rather, mystical, religious, and not political, military and social. He regarded the revolutionary element that had swept over Russia as the embodiment of the forces of world chaos, decay and evil.
"Against those who destroy the soul of the people, I know only one means - death!"
- said Ungern-Sternberg.
He regarded Bolshevism as a religion without God. He told about this in captivity with the Bolsheviks. He noted that similar religions exist in the East. Religion is the rules that govern the order of life and government. However, they can be without God, like Buddhism or Taoism.
Ungern argued:
"What Lenin founded is religion."
In many ways, he was right.
The red project, communism really carried in itself religious, mystical principles. And the communists were ready to die for their ideas. Therefore, the Bolsheviks won up over the liberal, capitalist White project.
The Daurian baron considered the confrontation between the white and the red as a struggle between two universal principles - God and the devil, light and darkness.
The report, prepared after Ungern's interrogations, noted:
"I saw my main goal in the fight against Sovrussia in the fight against the" evil "expressed in Bolshevism."
The main servants of evil for the baron were professional revolutionaries, Bolsheviks and world Jewry. Bolshevism, according to Ungern-Sternberg, was a conscious service to the "forces of evil" leading to the destruction of the Christian world. Ungern fought mercilessly and uncompromisingly against the bearers of the "unclean spirit", revolutionaries and traders-speculators (representatives of the "golden calf" - the devil).
Baron Ungern was never a sadist. For his own pleasure, he did not execute anyone.
For example, even the Bolshevik investigation did not accuse the Baron of the massacres of prisoners of war. After filtration, ordinary Red Army men were either included in the division of the white general (especially good cavalrymen), or simply went home. The division did not have the means to organize prisoner camps, to maintain them. The "ideological red" commissars and communists were executed. Medical assistance was provided to the wounded Red Army men who were captured. Then they were sent to the nearest settlement.
Thus, the Daurian Baron was not a “mad”, devil and mentally ill sadist.
Ungern's Global Project
Ungern-Sternbern considered the late Middle Ages to be the best era in the history of mankind. In the XX century, the development of technology, progress went to the detriment of man, his spiritual development, inner happiness. The struggle for existence is intensifying. This was reflected in the explosive growth of various social vices. Therefore, Europe needs to return to the shop floor. So that guilds and other communities (including rural ones) directly interested in personal labor, and in production in general, themselves distribute work among members on the basis of justice.
The beginning degradation of human civilization in Europe, the Daurian baron intended to resolve in his own style. He offered to demolish the entire European culture, which went down the wrong path. From Asia to Portugal! On the ruins of old Europe, start new construction, working on the mistakes.
This "recovery" can be carried out by a brave leader. New Genghis Khan. He had to gather under his banner the healthiest nations, horsemen, not spoiled by civilization. Russian Cossacks, Buryats, Tatars, Mongols. Only among the natural horsemen, according to Roman Fedorovich, the spark of the ancient fire still survived, which inspired the ancient Mongols and medieval knights to great deeds. According to the baron, the Mongols were at the stage of cultural development, which was in Europe in the XV-XVI centuries. Thus, not even peoples, civilizations, cultures and religions were opposed, but historical epochs.
One should not think that the Baron was lonely and "mad" in his views.
About the crisis of European culture and civilization, about the wrongly chosen main path of development of technical progress, about the triumph of militant materialism, leading to the death of spirituality and all mankind, at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. wrote many of the best minds in Europe and Russia. The outstanding Russian philosopher and traditionalist Konstantin Leontiev spoke about this. The Russian philosopher and priest Pavel Florensky, the German philosophers O. Spengler and K. Schmitt, the Italian thinker Julius Evola spoke about the death of the medieval civilization of the warrior, hero and thinker and the European triumph of the new mercantile civilization of calculation and hypocrisy.
About "Europe - the island of the dead"
spoke the poet Alexander Blok.
Poets and thinkers have formulated the myth of the "golden age", "great tradition" and "new Middle Ages." Ungern belonged to these great dreamers and idealists. But unlike philosophers, writers and poets, Baron Ungern was a kshatriya warrior. And he was ready to fight.
He was guided by the motto of the medieval knights-crusaders:
"On the other side of the war there is always peace, and if it is necessary to fight for it, we will fight."
С weapons in his hands, he tried to pave the way for a new "golden age", which the thinkers dreamed of.