Red Dawn

Robert Service: Spies and Commissars - The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

The Weekly Standard, February 4, 2013

Russian Civil War Monument, Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

When everything changes, what should be done?

Over 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini lit the Islamic fire, the West is still fumbling its way to a proper response. Imagine, then, the challenge posed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. A key partner in the Allied war against Germany had just been hijacked by a fanatical cult intent on remaking the world, and the world had no clue what to do in reply.

That’s the background to this fine new work by Robert Service, a distinguished historian of Soviet communism perhaps best known for his biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, two monsters brought to unusually vivid life in these pages. Here’s Trotsky, flirting with Clare Sheridan (Winston Churchill’s embarrassing first cousin, as it happens) as she sculpts his bust in the Kremlin, and there’s Lenin, “shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher.”

This is a deftly drawn book, illuminated by the author’s eye for detail, ear for a good quote, and nose for a ripping yarn.

And what a yarn it is. The ancien régime is no more. We are given a quick look at the deposed and imprisoned Czar Nicholas, the most prominent, if far from the most important, of all the “former people” (to borrow the chilling Bolshevik phrase), reading “Turgenev .  .  . [and] anti-Semitic tracts.” Meanwhile, the armies of his kinsman, the Kaiser, are tearing chunks off what once was the Russian Empire, before dissolving into confusion after defeat on the Western Front.

All is flux. The territory controlled by the Bolsheviks shrinks and grows in a mirror image of the tides of a vast, bloody, and chaotic civil war, and the Kremlin’s efforts to export its revolution to Warsaw and beyond. National independence movements rise and fall. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania get clean away (for now), Ukraine and Georgia are not so lucky. Hovering uncertainly on the fringes are troops dispatched to Russia by its erstwhile allies in the hope that they might somehow reverse the worst of the revolution. They were never able to do so.

Service gives an excellent overview of this bewildering series of conflicts, and of the dawn of revolution as a whole, but this is just the frame for his picture of a country where nothing was as it had been and everything was up for grabs. Older, more genteel techniques of influencing events no longer worked. Traditional diplomacy was dead.

But both Russia and its revolution were too big to ignore. Although foreign governments may have dithered, some of their citizens did not. It is around their stories that Service shapes his narrative. The Bolsheviks might have thought that they were steering immense, impersonal, and unstoppable historical forces, but the new world that they created was so fluid and so fragile that the individual could, and did, make a difference.

There were the true believers—early fellow travelers not just along for the ride but eager to speed it on its way—such as the American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and, more equivocally, the Briton Arthur Ransome. Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, ended up an honored corpse beneath the Kremlin walls; Bryant, his widow, was subsequently married (for a while) to the man later appointed the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Ransome became a much-loved children’s writer (Swallows and Amazons and similarly wholesome fare) and a less-loved husband of one of Trotsky’s former secretaries.

Not so idealistic, but in some ways no less credulous, were the prospectors among the rubble, the entrepreneurs and con men who saw the collapse of Russian capitalism as a business opportunity. And then there are the real heroes of this book, the remarkable band of (mainly) British or British-sponsored adventurers who did what they could to overturn Bolshevik rule.

While a small British expeditionary force gathered in the far north, His Majesty’s irregulars set to work in Moscow. At least three of them—Sidney Reilly, Paul Dukes, and George Hill—could, notes Service, “have supplied inspiration for James Bond.” No martinis, but in just one paragraph we read about Reilly’s involvement with Yelizaveta. And Dagmara. And Olga. We also read about that clever and unconventional thrill-seeker, Robert Bruce Lockhart, designated “Head of the British Mission” and the ideal agent-diplomat for a place where the rules of diplomacy had broken down. Between romances, Bruce Lockhart plotted coups. And the Britons were not alone: Uncle Sam was represented by the more staid, but not ineffective, “Information” Service, run by the marvelously named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano, a one-man tribute both to American’s melting pot and its enterprise.

If all this sounds like the stuff of John Buchan, only more so, that’s because it is. This is a story with room for Latvian riflemen, Czech Legionnaires, and a Polish Women’s Death Battalion; for failed revolutions across Europe, for conspiracies and spies, and for the daredevil aviator Merian Cooper, one of the American volunteers in an air squadron that helped Poland beat off Bolshevik invasion. (“Coop” was shot down but escaped after 10 months of Soviet captivity. A decade-and-a-half later, he coproduced, cowrote, and codirected King Kong.)

For all the tales of derring-do, however, it’s impossible to read this book without sadness and frustration. This was a tragedy that could have been cut short. Winston Churchill, a minister in the British government during this period, argued for more to be done against the Reds. He understood what his cousin Clare Sheridan did not: that this terrible infant revolution needed to be “strangled in its cradle.” Not for the last time in his career, too few listened until it was too late.

To some Western leaders, Bolshevism was a spasm that would pass. Russia’s counterrevolutionary armies—the Whites—would prevail with just a little support from the West; or maybe Bolshevism, an onslaught on human nature itself, would simply collapse, or be overthrown in its own heartlands. Others, not unreasonably, feared that their own, already war-weary peoples would be driven to revolt by the prospect of participating in what many were bound to see as a bosses’ crusade against a bright, brave experiment. So, denied the outside assistance that might have made a difference, the Whites were overwhelmed, beaten by an enemy that, in the end, proved more cohesive and determined than they were. The undersized and ultimately irrelevant Allied detachments—primarily French, Japanese, American, and British—slunk home from their beachheads, but the Western statesmen told themselves not to worry: Trade would blunt Leninist rigor, and a cordon sanitaire of new East-Central European states would keep Bolshevism confined to its birthplace.

Less than a quarter of a century later, the Red Army was in Berlin. As for His Majesty’s irregulars, most resumed lives of quieter distinction, but the (probably) Ukrainian-born Sidney Reilly (né Rosenblum) continued to fight. Lured back to the Soviet Union in an elaborate sting operation, he fell into the hands of the secret police, and, like millions to come, was killed.

Heart of Darkness

James Palmer: The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

National Review, June 18, 2009

To find even a quick allusion to the White Russian civil-war commander Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1886–1921) is to be pulled into a past too strange to be believable and too terrible not to be. Three years ago, I was working on an article on Mongolia for National Review. When the text I’d submitted for editing was returned, a reference to the country’s “brief, brutal, and bizarre rule [by] a crazed Baltic baron” was questioned: “Are you certain about this?” As James Palmer’s absorbing, wonderfully written new biography of this gargoyle khan, exterminationist anti-Semite, paranoid mystic, and (some thought) reincarnated god shows, when it comes to Ungern, certainty has a way of vanishing into myth, rumor, and whispered campfire tale: There is much about the baron that remains, in Palmer’s perfect adjective, “elusive.”

An earlier, and profoundly influential, biographer (of sorts), the Franco-Russian Communist Vladimir Pozner, came to the same conclusion (Ungern “kept on escaping me”) but took a different tack in response. His Bloody Baron (1938) openly blended fact with fiction and, more surreptitiously, well-crafted Soviet propaganda, to recreate the baroquely cruel baron of legend — but not just legend. There was indeed an Ungern, a killer, a torturer, a burner-alive, who battled the Bolsheviks with a heedless bravery and primitive ferocity so devastating that he was able to turn a corner of Siberia into a charnel-house realm all his own. And yes, he later did the same with a swathe of Mongolia that he transformed into an anticipation of Babi Yar and a reminder of Genghis.

But that was not enough for Pozner. His baron is, almost, a creature of nightmare seemingly lurking in the thin space between reality and the darker side of the human imagination, yet not without a certain atavistic grandeur that was, in fact, entirely lacking from Ungern’s shabby, psychotic, ragtag crusade: “From a distance came a call of trumpets. The street filled with Ungern’s squadrons, riding slowly. The Baron leant out of the window. A stream of horsemen flowed along the roadway. On their shoulder-straps two-headed eagles were foreshortened: legions of silver eagles ready to wing northwards.”

This is the baron who can be glimpsed in comic book (in one of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series), in video game (Iron Storm), and even in the lyrics of “Ungern-Sternberg,” a song by French punk rockers Paris Violence: “Ungern-Sternberg, chevalier romantique / Tu attends la mort comme un amant sa promise . . .” (“Ungern-Sternberg, romantic knight / You wait for death like a lover . . .”)

Faced with, and fascinated by, epic monstrosity, we — as a species — seem disturbingly willing to keep ourselves at a comfortable emotional and intellectual distance from its deeper, even more hideous implications. In The Bloody White Baron, Palmer does not hold back from detailing the horrors (this is not a book for the faint-hearted) for which that chevalier romantique was responsible, but he does so clinically, analytically, immune to their dark spell: “Ungern’s sadism . . . was appalling and inexcusable, but also explicable. The obsession with . . . whipping was an exaggerated version of the discipline of the old Russian imperial army, where fifty lashes were considered a light punishment. Ungern favored ‘a hundred blows to each part of the body.’ . . . ‘Did you know,’ he mused, ‘that men can still walk when the flesh and bone are separated?’”

By contrast, when Ungern makes an appearance in Buddha’s Little Finger, a 1996 novel by the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, it is as the stern, laconic guardian of an infinite, coldly beautiful Valhalla, and if anything, an oddly admirable figure. Of the maniac there is barely a suggestion; of the chevalier romantique, there is all too much.

It’s no surprise that the other two best-known biographical accounts of the baron are themselves “elusive.” In Beasts, Men and Gods (1922), Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Polish adventurer, writer, and Munchausen detained by the baron in Urga (today’s Ulaanbaatar), paints a vivid portrait of a soldier lost to mysticism, madness, and massacre, a warlord startlingly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. Ossendowski’s accuracy is as disputed as the role he came to play in Ungern’s entourage, and Palmer jeers that the Pole “was not always the most reliable of storytellers.” No, he was not; but — notwithstanding Palmer’s use of an impressive range of archival material — Ossendowski’s flawed, sometimes fantastical yarn remains a significant, and unavoidable, influence on this latest biography of a man who seemed to relish the speculation he provoked: “My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.” Naturally, the source for that quotation is Ossendowski.

There’s more than a trace of Ossendowski in Dmitri Alioshin’s Asian Odyssey (1940), a memoir by one of Ungern’s veterans, and another major (possibly even reasonably accurate) resource for Palmer. Typically for some of Ungern’s earlier chroniclers, little is known about Alioshin: We cannot even be sure that that was his real name. This lurid, frequently stomach-churning volume is also, if unintentionally, a revealing account of its author’s own moral disintegration: “A few days later we caught a Bolshevik commissar, a former army officer. We tied him to a pole and marched a detachment past him. Each man struck him as hard as he could in the face. He died in fifteen minutes. The next commissar we caught was beaten to death with a nagaika, a strong army whip which tears the flesh from the bones.”

Note the echo of Ungern’s obsessions. Note too that “we”: The once-idealistic officer was descending into barbarism, a process that ground on as the young Russian’s odyssey unfolded on its dreadful course. Tragically, his was a story not so different from that of many others swept into the maelstrom of an empire collapsing into revolution, ruin, and civil war of an atrocity that might have shocked even Hobbes. It’s also a story that helps us peer deeper into the abyss into which Ungern so ecstatically jumped.

But unlike Alioshin, Ungern did not have to fall so very far to leave civilization behind. The baron may have been the scion of one of those ancient German families that retained their hold over Russia’s Baltic provinces until almost the last days of the czars, but arguably the most important thing he inherited from his forebears was a streak of insanity. Violent, charmless, impulsive, and uncontrollable, the baron, as Palmer demonstrates, was from the beginning a Junker amok, noblesse with no hint of oblige. He made a nonsense of his education, and his career in the imperial army was a stop-go fiasco redeemed, and then only partly, by World War I.

It was the Bolshevik revolution that finally gave Ungern his chance to shine, if that’s the word. Within months of Lenin’s coup, the baron’s bravery, energy, and fanatical opposition to a new order that he believed to be literally demonic had allowed him to carve out a prominent role in the White forces ranged against the Red Army in Siberia’s Transbaikalia. Russia’s Calvary was Ungern’s opportunity. Like Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness on which Apocalypse Now was modeled, the baron had “immense plans”: He dreamt of building a great Asiatic empire as bulwark and spearhead against the revolutionaries (and anyone else) who “threaten[ed] the Divine Spirit” in mankind. And like Conrad’s Kurtz, Ungern appears to have been beguiled, emboldened, and inspired by the wilderness in which he found himself, far from home, far from convention, far from conscience.

Palmer deftly and briskly (this is not a long book) guides his readers through a conflict that raged throughout southeast Siberia and, ultimately, Mongolia. Given the remoteness of time and place, not to mention the bewildering range of characters, factions, and causes, Palmer’s success in telling this tale as clearly as he does is no small achievement. More than that, he brilliantly conveys a sense of the savagery, scope, and strangeness of this war, a war of telegraphy and sorcery, a war at the intersection of ancient and modern, of European and Asian, a war fought in a distant ghastly nowhere, a blood-drenched free-for-all where the most effective forces included huge armored trains, mounted cavalry, and lethal squads of Tibetan dobdobs, “monk-enforcers, their clothes lightly smeared with butter and their faces painted with soot to strike fear into the enemies of the faith.”

But of all the images that crowd this evocative book, there is none more haunting than one that Palmer borrows from Alioshin, a description of Ungern leading his troops during their final retreat: “[He] rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. [He] had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like the reincarnation of a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.”

And so they should have been — but as much for what Ungern says about all of us as for what he might have done to them.