The Russians under Ungern, justly known as the “Mad Baron,” entered Urga in October, 1920, and with the aid of Mongol troops chased the disorganized Chinese corps over the southern border of Outer Mongolia. It was then that the Paris-to-Peking telegraph line ceased to function for lack of poles. Bleached Chinese skeletons still lay scattered along the road to Kalgan when I made the journey to Urga. Ungern was one of those products of generations of Russian brutality who seem to find their keenest pleasure in bloodthirsty acts. In Urga he grew more and more mad, indiscriminately killing Mongols and Russians suspected of “Red” sympathies, and topping this off one February day in 1921 by a general slaughter of the Jewish inhabitants. Every Russian, he explained, hates a Jew; besides, the Bolshevik régime with which he was at swords’ points was and is still mainly in the hands of Jews, a fact not fully realized in our land because of the muffling Jewish hand on our press, but which it is essential to keep in mind in any study of present Russian problems. So deep was his hatred of these people that he refused to waste ammunition on them; they were despatched instead by splitting open their skulls with sabers. Foreigners still living in Urga describe the streets as shambles, strewn everywhere with the corpses of Jewish men, women, and children, even of babies with their brains oozing out amid the dust and rubbish. All speak of the curious fact that many bodies lay for days where they had fallen, without a dog’s coming near them, as if even these brutes had been frightened by the madness of the baron—or had eaten to satiety. As the soldiers reveling in the pogrom depended mainly on a hasty glance to identify their victims, not a few foreigners whose physiognomy was deceiving passed some very unpleasant moments. Such sights as two Mongols and a white woman hanging from the same gatepost, the woman a poor part-witted creature who maintained even in death a ludicrous expression of inane hauteur, are still recalled by the surviving foreign residents.
At length the Bolsheviks, having first, according to their own assertions, pleaded with the Chinese for several months to join them in the expedition and catch the “Mad Baron” between them, sent an army into Mongolia. The personal amusements of the baron do not seem to have had much weight in bringing about this decision, for the “Reds” themselves have a well developed taste for flowing blood; but they had begun to worry lest the Ungern group become the nucleus of a “White” force large enough to jeopardize their own security. Moreover, being true fanatics, they were eager to bring Mongolia the dismal gospel of their strange faith. The “Reds” entered Urga in July, 1921, and have been there ever since. In those notes for publication with which governments of all colors attempt to fool their neighbors, their own people, and even themselves, the present rulers of Russia assure us that they have only a corporal’s guard in Urga, merely as a protection against a new “White” gathering, and that the Mongols rule themselves without outside interference. Even the handsome and polished Jewish gentleman who under the title of Russian consul represents the Soviet in Urga, will tell you in any one of half a dozen languages, if you take the trouble to call at his perfectly consular office adorned with a large signed portrait of Lenin in a building flaunting a faded red flag, that he is only a lone foreigner in town, like you, and that he has little influence with the Mongol Government. But if he keeps from visibly smiling as he makes this assertion, it is a sign that the urbanity which he displayed at the time of his expulsion from the United States has improved rather than diminished.