A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

298 A history of Inner Asia
the Chinese, White Russian troops led by a Baltic German, Baron
Ungern-Sternberg who assumed the role of a Mongol patriot, and joint
Soviet-Russian and Mongol troops whose native leaders espoused the
Bolshevik cause.The Russo-Mongol forces won, and the new government
proclaimed independence on 11 July 1921.
Although officially Mongolia has been a republic only since 1924,
when the theocratic head of state, the “living Buddha” of Urga died, in
practice the modern state was founded in 1921.The period from 1921
to 1991 can thus be considered that of the Mongolian People’s Republic,
a Communist state closely imitating its Soviet model, and the transformation
of Mongol society during those years was radical.At the inception
of this period the country was home to a confederation of tribal
groups governed by a two-pronged aristocracy of lay tribal and Buddhist
church leaders, and served by several types of commoners (arat) and
semi-serfs (shabit).Property was concentrated in the hands of the elite,
and consisted mainly of livestock and grazing rights, and only secondarily
of land under cultivation; crafts and commerce led a marginal existence
in the few towns that existed, or at the lamaseries.Lamaseries or
monasteries of the Yellow Hat Buddhist church were the centers of economic
power, spiritual and political authority, and cultural life.Both men
and women could enter monastic life, and although celibacy was not as
absolute as claimed by theory, it was important enough to contribute to
a demographic decline which was so serious that some observers were
predicting the extinction of the Mongols as a nation: only about 651,000
souls were estimated to people the country in 1925.This decline was not
caused by monasticism alone; birthrate appears to have been generally
low among Eurasian nomads.The advantage of the sedentary Chinese
and Russians, for example, over their neighbors, the nomadic Mongols
and Turks before the latter’s sedentarization, is striking.Nevertheless, the
rapid rate of this decline, specifically in this increasingly lamaistic
society, has been partly attributed to the exceptionally widespread monasticism,
and to the concomitant spread of syphilis.
Native cadres educated even with a minimum of modern methods
were almost non-existent before 1921; those few who had such education
obtained it mainly through Russian schools or preceptors across the
border in Siberia.Among these were Sükhbaatar (1893–1923) and
Choibalsan (1895–1952), the two founders of modern Mongolia.
Mongolia’s official status as a state changed in the course of the
seventy years between 1921 and 1991 through several stages, the least
real but most curious milestone occurring in 1945.Until that year, the