A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Republic of Mongolia 301
(Ulaanbaatar in Mongolian, “Red Hero”), the Mongol capital has since
then become a sprawling modern city and an industrial center;
Choibalsan, Darkhan, and Erden are the other most prominent examples.Administrative
structure and population increase have also contributed
to the appearance of an urban center in each of the eighteen
(eventually twenty-one) aimags, the administrative provinces of
Mongolia.In 1949, Ulan Bator was linked to the Transsiberian railroad
by a branch built from Ulan-Ude, and in 1955 this line was extended to
link up with the Chinese network, thus producing the shortest rail connection
between Moscow and Beijing.
Until the early 1960s, Mongolia’s only diplomatic and economic partners
were the Soviet Union and its satellites, and China.We have said
that Mongolia was Russia’s only willing satellite.This resulted from
several factors, the foremost being the country’s Chinese experience: the
danger of being overwhelmed by China just as Inner Mongolia had
been, first militarily and then demographically (this situation presented
an analogy to that of northern Kazakhstan with respect to Russia, where
the Kazakhs faced a similar danger from their Slavic neighbor; unlike
there and elsewhere, however, Russia never invaded Mongolia against
her will, and there had never been any influx of Russian settlers);
another reason was a relatively fair economic cooperation and assistance,
again in contrast to the Soviet Union’s other dependencies and
satellites, where the relationship often included a hefty dose of colonial
exploitation; and finally, it was Soviet troops that helped the Mongol
army repel a Japanese attempt to invade the eastern tip of the country
in 1939.
Mongolia thus benefited from the new political and social order introduced
in 1921, and from the support that saved her from absorption by
China, but the price she paid was high.It included the familiar evils of
an enforced monolithic ideology and the suppression of freedom.The
harm that such systems can do by forcing the human spirit into artificial
molds is well known, and it did not spare Mongolia either.Another
development was the now commonly observed fact that beyond a
certain point, the initially remarkable economic growth and social
progress directed from a rigid center begin to lose their momentum and
to give place to increasing contradictions, corruption, and stagnation.
Many Mongol leaders seem to have been aware of these problems by
the time Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms made it possible for the Soviet
Union’s satellites to launch their own reforms, and this led to the aforementioned
changes that by 1992 had transformed Mongolia into a