The Case of Ataman Semenov

Excerpted from article pertaining to the personage Grigorii Semenov

Semenov was an admirer of the archetypal Mongolian skill, horse-riding, and he was a warm advocate of the flexibility of cavalry in modern warfare (Semenov 2002: 47–52). But more important was the moral example he believed would be shown by his Mongol units (ibid.: 74). This conviction was linked to his own unusually open religiosity, which incorporated awe for Buddhist spirituality. Early in his autobiography Semenov recounts the eventful time he spent in Mongolia in 1911–1912 as a youthful captain. He does not mention the prophesy described by Kaigorodov, which may well be a legend, but he does recall other prophesies made to him by a different high lama, the Choijin Gegen, who was the official state oracle. According to Semenov, the Gegen foresaw the World War, the fall of the Tsar, and the Civil War (ibid.: 22–23). Semenov believed in the ability of certain rare spiritually gifted people to see what ordinary mortals could not and foretell the future. Referring to his own lesser powers, he wrote that the spiritual foreseeing of things to come had nothing in common with the intuition of the political leader, who having studied a tactical situation carefully with regard to his own competence, can give a correct prognosis of the immediate future (ibid.: 22). In this respect Semenov was unlike the mystic Baron Ungern, who never regarded himself as an ordinary mortal and adopted the notion that he was himself a Buddhist reincarnation. 14 In comparison, Semenov was a realist about himself—and about his Mongol troops. He admired their humane religion (Buddhism), their purity, honesty, hardiness, and daring, but wrote that as soldiers you have to use them right away: if they are subjected to hindrances and delay, they easily lose interest and give up (ibid.: 23).

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