Mongolia's Democratic Revolution
Mongolia ended sixty-nine years of one-party rule in the spring of 1990 without a shot being fired. The country had been the second communist state in the world after the Soviet Union, had followed Moscow's line in everything including the purges of the 1930s, in which some 20,000 people were shot and most of the Buddhist monasteries destroyed, and had been economically dependent on Soviet subsidies amounting to about a third of its national income. Gorbachev's reforms removed both the model and the guarantee. The Mongolian Democratic Union announced itself on 10 December 1989, the international day of human rights, with a demonstration of a few hundred people outside the Youth Cultural Centre in Ulaanbaatar. The gatherings grew through the winter in temperatures of minus thirty, and in March 1990 ten activists began a hunger strike in Sükhbaatar Square. The politburo resigned on 9 March rather than order force. The constitution was amended, opposition parties were legalised, and multiparty elections were held in July, which the reformed communist party won and then governed in coalition. A new constitution followed in 1992, guaranteeing private property and religious freedom, and the Soviet troops left the same year. The transition to a market economy was brutal — output fell by a third and the subsidies stopped overnight — and the democracy has survived every subsequent election, which almost nowhere else in the former bloc's Asian territory has managed. The country's position is also unusual and unchanged. It has 3.4 million people, two neighbours and no third, and its foreign policy since 1990 has been to cultivate distant partners as what it calls a third neighbour while keeping both of the real ones content.
- Year: 1990 CE
- Category: Political
