Mongolia was Moscow's first satellite state and stayed one the longest
Wedged between the Soviet Union and China, the Mongolian People's Republic became the world's second communist state in 1924 and remained a Soviet satellite for its entire 68 years, longer than any other. It turned a nomadic herding society into an industrialising one before a peaceful revolution in 1990.
Qing rule from 1691 had split the Mongols into Outer and Inner Mongolia. When the dynasty fell in 1911, Outer Mongolia declared independence under the Buddhist leader known as the Bogd Khan. Chinese troops deposed him in 1919, a White Russian baron restored him in 1921, and that July Damdin Sükhbaatar's cavalry, backed by Soviet soldiers, took the capital. After the Bogd Khan died in 1924, the search for his reincarnation was banned, the party became the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, and the capital was renamed Ulaanbaatar, red hero.
Politics lurched as in Stalin's Soviet Union. Early nationalists urged people to get rich; later congresses attacked private property, seized monastery wealth and pushed herders into collectives, provoking lama-led revolts in the early 1930s. From 1937 to 1939, purges run by Soviet security officials and Khorloogiin Choibalsan killed some 20,000 to 35,000 people, and Buddhist institutions were almost entirely wiped out. Choibalsan became premier in 1939 and ruled as a Stalinist dictator.
War shaped its borders. In 1939 Mongolian and Soviet forces under Georgy Zhukov defeated Japan at Khalkhin Gol. At Yalta in 1945 the Allies accepted Mongolia's status quo, and Chiang Kai-shek's government recognised independence after Stalin promised not to back the Chinese communists; a referendum confirmed it that October. Mao later hoped to reclaim the territory but was rebuffed. Taiwan's veto kept Mongolia out of the United Nations until 1961, and ties with the United States came only in 1987.
Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal took over after Choibalsan died in 1952 and even proposed joining the Soviet Union outright, an idea his colleagues killed. He sided with Moscow in the Sino-Soviet split, and a 1966 treaty let Soviet troops and missiles be based in the country. Inspired by Gorbachev's reforms, the 1990 revolution legalised opposition parties, and a 1992 constitution replaced the communist state with today's parliamentary republic.
Source: Mongolian People's Republic
