Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  But where is Shambhala? It was long said vaguely to be somewhere in the north. In the early part of the twentieth century, Western mystics scoured Central Asia for clues. Among the explorers was Nicholas Roerich, a painter and theosophist who when it suited him passed himself off as a reincarnation of the 5th Dalai Lama. A disciple was Henry A. Wallace, then United States secretary of agriculture, later vice president, who addressed Roerich as “guru” and spoke warmly of the “breaking of the New Day” when the people of “northern Shambhala” would bring peace and prosperity. Wallace helped pay Roerich to mount an expedition into the Altai mountains, but later took against him with the fury of one who has been duped. Roerich had not even bothered with a request to bring back a few samples of drought-resistant grass.

  As for Dorzhiev, he was specific about the location of the northern Shambhala. It was none other than Russia itself. Dorzhiev also said that Czar Nicholas II—the White Czar—was the reincarnation of a great lama who would rule over the world, founding a great Buddhist empire. Dorzhiev’s abiding hope was for a confederation of all lamaist peoples—Tibetans, Mongols, Buryats, Kalmyks—to be led by the Dalai Lama, all under the loving protection of the Russian czar. In the end, when Soviet Marxists wreaked havoc on Buddhists in Russia, and Tibet came under the heel of China’s Communist rulers, things turned out differently.

  • • •

  But that was in the future. Once Russia had subjugated the Buryats by the nineteenth century, its policies were conciliatory at first. Taishas, the clan leaders, kept their titles and land and were exempt from tribute—provided they showed loyalty to the czar. Those clans historically considered to be “friendly” were rewarded with the honor of raising native regiments to guard the new frontiers. These were the new “Buryat Cossacks.” For the rest, Buryats were exempt from military service. Certain Buryat groups turned Russian. Western travelers found smug amusement in the Russian-style houses of rich Buryats, crammed with gaudy carpets and silver-plate samovars while the family squatted in a felt ger in the yard. Yet there was peace, and even prosperity. The Buryat population grew at a time when the population of other native groups standing in the Russians’ way was falling precipitously.

  The relatively enlightened order ended abruptly toward the end of the century. The old indulgences were scrapped, recognition of Buryat clans and titles was withdrawn, and natives were no longer exempted from military service. Assimilation into the imperium was now the watchword. Driving the change was a new burst of Russian expansion eastward, this time propelled by the Trans-Siberian Railway and a new, aggressive nationalism. General Alexei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin came to Chita in 1903 to emphasize the change. In a cloak blazing with stars and ribbons, according to a Buryat in the audience, Kuropatkin brandished his fist and decried resistance; “for the slightest manifestation of opposition, for any disobedience to the authorities, for expressing any demands, the Buryats would be wiped off the face of the earth, and there would remain neither trace nor particle!”

  The Orthodox Church was a crucial tool of Russification, and forced conversion the technique. But hardest of all, for Buryats, was that Russian peasants were flooding in by rail to settle and farm Buryat lands. The government did everything to assist them. Communal lands were transferred to individual ownership, destroying the social basis for herding. Much Buryat land was simply taken and distributed to peasants from European Russia and Ukraine.

  And so, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Buryatia bubbled with political ferment. A Buryat intelligentsia of Europeanized writers, doctors, and merchants already existed. Now such men turned increasingly to Buryat nationalism and found common cause with Russian progressives as well as with Siberia’s regionalists railing against St. Petersburg’s iron hand. Tsyben Zhamtsarano, the Buryat who had been in the audience for General Kuropatkin’s speech, was a classic case of a hybrid man who hewed to a Buryat identity yet who swam as easily in a Russian milieu. Zhamtsarano was a lecturer in ethnography at St. Petersburg University. Russian colleagues could not fathom him. One noted that, though educated, Zhamtsarano was highly superstitious, believing “in the most impossible things: Amazons, dwarfs, man-eaters, dragons living in wells, oxen living in lakes.” Whenever he fell ill, Zhamtsarano called in lamas, shamans, Russian doctors, and quacks, taking all their cures at once.

  Zhamtsarano came to articulate Buryats’ concerns over Russian repression, leading both a cultural and political renaissance. Buryat intellectuals studied and described the Buryat nomadism that was under such threat. Passionately, they debated the relative merits of Buryat dialects. And they wrote reams and reams of verse that sang of the steppe and of a fast-vanishing life.

  Give me the steppe, limitless, windswept,

  Its vastness stretching on each side,

  Where free from order and surveillance,

  Man’s goodness is his only guide.

  The intellectuals also engaged in the Russian debates of the day: over the desire for a duma (an elective assembly), universal suffrage, women’s rights, and the merits of socialism. Their resistance to Russification from 1901 to 1904 led to arrests, imprisonment, exile. But the experience reenergized a people. Their new nationalism sought a mild form of pan-Mongolism, in the sense of closer ties with Mongolia proper, but a desire for autonomy fired them more than independence. The outbreak of the first Russian Revolution in 1905, which followed the humiliation of Russia’s defeat by Japan in the Far East, seemed to offer more opportunities to Buryats than to anyone. In Chita, Buryat congresses briefly multiplied. A dozen years later, on news of Czar Nicholas II’s abdication, Chita again became the focus of Buryat national aspirations. There, Zhamtsarano and other Buryat leaders formed the Buryat National Committee, or BurNatsKom, espousing a center-left agenda for what in those days was called “bourgeois national autonomy”: a regional parliament, education in the Buryat tongue, a harmless pan-Mongolism.

  In early 1918, when the civil war broke out following the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of the provisional government in St. Petersburg, Transbaikalia pitched into chaos. Over four years no fewer than fourteen different governments claimed to rule the region. Chita was wrenched by forces beyond its control. One factor was the existence in Russia of 45,000 Czech prisoners of war, the so-called Czech Legion, armed to the teeth. During the First World War, these men, fighting Russia on the Eastern Front as soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, either had been captured or had deserted to the Russian side. They then turned and fought alongside the Russian army against their Austro-Hungarian overlords, in hopes of securing an independent homeland after the war. When Russia pulled out of the war following the revolution, the Czechs were promised safe passage by train to Vladivostok, where Allied ships would take them to the Western Front. But under German pressure, the Bolsheviks reneged on the promise, at which point the Czech Legion, fired by Wilsonian notions of self-determination to return home and fight for independence, fought their way east through Siberia along the railway, overthrowing Soviet rule as they passed.

  From the other direction came the murderous army of the Bloody White Baron, Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Russian officer of Baltic origins. He hated red commissars as much as he hated Jews and believed himself to be a Buddhist reincarnation of Genghis Khan—a Shambhala king of the vengeful kind rampaging through the borderlands. He briefly overran and ruled all of Mongolia, cutting throats and turning human skins into embellishments for his riding saddle. His friend and fellow officer was Grigory Semenov, a half-Buryat Cossack. Having reveled in all the bloodiness of the First World War, he now also had an army, in the Buryat borderlands. It was underwritten by the Japanese, who had landed 70,000 troops in Vladivostok and were using the chaos in the Russian Far East as a pretext for spreading their influence. Semenov terrorized life along the railway tracks with his two armored trains, Merciless and Destroyer. His men were Cossacks, White Russians, Chinese brigands, and Japanese mercenaries. Once, they shot ten carloads of prisoners
mainly to show that Sunday was as good a day for executions as any other. At Adrianovka, they raped and murdered their way through 1,600 victims in a single day. When Semenov was feeling productive, he held up trains, ransacked the customs post at Manzhouli, and robbed banks.

  From his base in Manchuria, Semenov set out to destroy the fragile coalition of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries, backed by poor peasants, railroad workers, and demobilized troops, which then held Chita. At first, Semenov’s presence suited not only the Japanese but also France and Britain, which had both sent a number of troops (and spies) to Siberia in 1918. It was the aim of these countries, once Russia had concluded a peace with Germany following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, to prevent Russian weapons falling into German hands on the Western Front. Soon, the United States joined the “Siberian Intervention.” These outside countries committed to helping the Czech legionnaires leave Russia. But as civil war chaos spread, the aims of the intervention grew confused. At best, the countries of the intervention shared a general anti-Bolshevism. The British and the French hoped that Semenov would unite White Russian and anti-Bolshevik forces and move west to retake the Russian heartland from the revolutionaries. Soon, however, Semenov’s brutality was acceptable only to the Japanese.

  • • •

  The Japanese presence at this point was part of a much longer, and ultimately more brutal, game of overlordship in East Asia. It had its roots in the tumultuous decades following the Meiji Restoration, during which Japan, abandoning its old feudal isolation, threw itself white-hot into a frenzy of industrial expansion and militarization. In this crucible, notions of a modern state and of empire were fused. Japan’s defeat of Russia at sea and on land in 1904–5—the first defeat of a European power by an Asian one since Genghis Khan—suggested to many Japanese that their country had a claim to join the ranks of the great Western powers. Japan’s presence at Versailles in 1919 seemed to confirm this. Yet many Japanese, feeding on then-fashionable notions that Darwinism worked as much as a contest among nations as among species, believed in an inevitable showdown with Western powers, and that Japan should race to secure the raw materials of East Asia for that eventual crisis.

  That was the material justification for this island nation to move into other parts of Asia, including on the continent. The expansion began first on Taiwan (1895) and proceeded to Manchuria (1905) and Korea (1905–10). Later, from the 1930s, Japan spread conflagration across much of China and Southeast Asia, provoking the showdown that had so long been predicted, and ending in Japan’s utter defeat. Today, the aggression is put down to Japan’s military commanders overruling weak civilian leaders. Yet at least at first, expansionism was wildly popular. Industrial conglomerates lobbied for access to new resources and new markets. Meanwhile, a fast-urbanizing population at home transformed a society formerly deferential to the old oligarchy. The new urban classes were highly nationalistic, quick to perceive slights from outside powers. Riots erupted on news of the terms concluding the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

  In the early years, the moral or even spiritual justification for Japan’s expansion was supplied by intellectuals, political activists, and mystics who made common cause with individuals in government and Japan’s big businesses, and who helped the new urban classes onto the political stage. Secret societies flourished. They founded language schools teaching Chinese, Korean, and Russian. They sent spies abroad to gather intelligence. And in the Russian Far East they intrigued with the help of Japanese who had settled there—typically, barbers, photographers, or prostitutes.

  The grandfather of these expansionist, ultranationalist societies was the Kokuryukai, the Black Dragon or Amur River Society, founded in 1901 by Uchida Ryohei. The name hints at the members’ anti-Russian stance. From the first, the society agitated for war with Russia. In Tokyo it ran a language school. It drew up maps of Siberia and the Russian Far East. It established a network of agents, Japanese residents in Transbaikalia and along the Amur, as well as recruiting Chinese honghuzi, brigands in Manchuria. And it encouraged Japanese adventurers in Manchuria and the Far East who came to be dubbed “continental ronin,” named after the masterless samurai of the feudal era that had ended only a few decades earlier. At the time of the Siberian Intervention, all the good work paid off as Japanese residents in Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok organized against the Bolsheviks.

  Underpinning the Black Dragon Society’s chauvinism was an explosive mix of ultranationalism and perceived foreign hostility, for which a strong, aggressive foreign policy was the appropriate response. It was a long way from the peaceable intellectual roots of the society and other ultranationalist groups, which lay in gentler notions of “pan-Asianism.” Marking themselves as wholly different from encroaching Western colonialists, early Japanese idealists emphasized their country’s commonalities with the rest of Asia. Yet the contradictions were there from the start. The West in the nineteenth century had forced both China and Japan to break out of their centuries of seclusion, but Japan had responded better to the shock. Western intrusions upended the Sinocentric world in East Asia, leaving China stricken. Japan’s more successful modernization led Japanese scholars to challenge the centuries-old claim by China to be at the center of the East Asian order, the Middle Kingdom. (It helped to be able to boast an unbroken imperial line: Japan’s emperors claim to be direct descendants of Amaterasu, the sun goddess.) Soon Japanese protestations of solidarity morphed into assertions of superiority. A pan-Asian “new order” would have to come about under Japanese direction. It was, later, but a small step to Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the grotesque intellectual justification in the 1940s for Japanese imperial conquest that has no doubt discredited notions of pan-Asianism for good.

  • • •

  Somewhere in the early thinking among Japan’s pan-Asianists, Mongolia and its Manchurian borderlands took on an elemental role. Perhaps it was because of a shared religion, Buddhism. Perhaps the expanse of Mongolia and an utter lack of knowledge about it offered a limitless canvas on which to paint fantasies. At any rate, Mongolia began to assume among mystically minded Japanese a role as the “cradle of Asia,” the essential site for the idealistic project of bringing East Asians together into a peaceable brotherhood and, later, even of unifying the world.

  Such idealizing was easily manipulated by militarists, as happened now in Buryatia. The Japanese aimed to use Semenov to help carve out a buffer state and a vast Japanese sphere of interest in the inner Asia heartlands. Long after Semenov’s pathological violence had revolted Western powers, the Japanese continued to find him useful. In the summer of 1918, as soon as Semenov was installed as leader of a “Dauria Government” in Chita, the Japanese began sponsoring a pan-Mongol movement, with Semenov as the figurehead. Khalkha Mongols in Mongolia proper (Outer Mongolia, as it was called in those days); Burga Mongols in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia; and Buryats in Russian territory with unmet aspirations for autonomy: by bringing these ethnically and culturally related groups together, Japan’s cynical and ambitious plan was to create out of the region’s political chaos nothing less than a Greater Mongolia, under Japanese protection, that would stretch from Lake Baikal in the north to Tibet far to the south, and from Xinjiang in the far west to the Yellow Sea. Such a project would also have the benefit of cutting Russia off from the Pacific, allowing the whole of the Russian Far East to fall under Japanese control as well.

  In the following months, Japan set a pan-Mongol movement in motion. Under Japanese tutelage a group of Buryat Cossacks oversaw a covert campaign to foster political chaos in Outer Mongolia, hoping to set the desperately poor common people against the Buddhist theocracy. Some forty thousand Buryats slipped into Mongolia to spread pro-Japanese propaganda. It was something, two decades later, for which Stalin and his stooges never forgave the Buryats, tens of thousands of whom disappeared in purges.

  The pan-Mongol movement reached its high-water mark wi
th conferences held in Chita in early 1919, attended even by Tibetan and Kyrgyz representatives. Two “observers,” Japanese officers, looked on as Semenov oversaw proceedings. Yet already the tide was on the turn. The lamas and princes of Outer Mongolia had sent no representative: the “autonomy” Japan was offering seemed a poor second best to the true independence from China and Russia to which they aspired. Semenov and his Japanese sponsors were minded to invade Mongolia and teach it to understand where its best interests lay. But the moment had passed. Mongols at the conference began to learn how limited was Semenov’s influence with the Japanese, and how violence and plunder, not Wilsonian self-determination, were what fired him. Their hopes for a Mongol representation at the Paris Peace Conference came to nothing. A few months later, Semenov’s bloodthirstiness led even the Japanese army, cynical and brutal though it was, to withdraw its patronage.

  It took until the end of 1922 for the Bolsheviks at last to establish their grip on this chaotic region, long after they had European Russia in their hands. They made Dorzhiev, now old, the Buryats’ Khambo Lama. Dorzhiev was no Bolshevik, but he attempted a synthesis between Buddha and Marx. Because Buddhism, he said, did not proclaim a universal God, it was, therefore, a “religion of atheism.” At first, the Bolsheviks were prepared to accept this, as well as the notion that Siberia’s native populations were primitive Communists, and therefore worthy of protection. They took to suggesting that Lenin was in fact Buddha’s reincarnation.