A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

300 A history of Inner Asia
1940 in Soviet Central Asia, where all the five republics switched from
the Arabic or Roman alphabet to Cyrillic; a related aspect of this process
was the study of Russian, which became an integral part of education.
Public health was improved by phasing out the traditional native or
Tibetan medicine and replacing it with modern medicine made freely
accessible, like education, to all citizens.
As in Kazakhstan, collectivization caused great hardships during its
initial phase between 1930 and 1932, but unlike there it was suspended,
and it then proceeded more cautiously while retaining some aspects
specific to Mongolia.Thus even in 1959, a law promulgating the function
of the goskhoz (state-owned livestock or agricultural enterprise, an
approximate imitation of the Soviet sovkhoz) and the negdel (its cooperative
counterpart, an imitation of the Soviet kolkhoz) as the obligatory
establishments to which citizens engaged in herding or agriculture had
to belong, allowed a family to own a certain number of beasts: up to fifty
in the north, up to seventy-five in the Gobi.These steps were accompanied
by further measures leading to specialization of herders according
to the livestock species, improvement of the livestock’s quality, and other
factors; especially beneficial was the building of winter shelters stocked
with fodder, a measure that reduced the ravages of weather, especially
of dzut.The importance of the livestock economy for Mongolia is illustrated
by the number of animals: by 1965, it reached 24 million (the role
of herding in Mongolia is illustrated by this number, when we compare
it with the number of inhabitants, which by that year had barely risen
above 2 million).Agriculture, previously marginal, made great strides
during this period.Its relative novelty is illustrated by the fact that in
1965, 70 percent of the harvest was produced by newly developed goskhozes
and negdels.Cereals, fodder plants, potatoes, and legumes have
been the principal crops.
Even newer than agriculture was industry.Planned and fostered centrally
by the government, it drew chiefly on the two main local resources
– livestock and mineral wealth.Its growth in turn stimulated the appearance
of another new feature, urbanization.Besides Urga, Uliasutai, and
Kobdo, there were virtually no towns before the period under discussion.
Urga owed its prominence to the fact that the Jebtsundamba-qutuqtu,
the chief lama, had resided there since 1779, and that in 1911 the last
incumbent was proclaimed head of state; yet it was still little more than
an agglomeration of yurts around the “Living Buddha’s” residence and
a few other official buildings when Mongolia became a People’s
Republic after the last lama’s death in 1924.Renamed as Ulan Bator