Khorloogiin Choibalsan

Khorloogiin Choibalsan was the ruler of Mongolia from 1939 until he died in a Moscow hospital in January 1952, prime minister, war minister, interior minister and marshal at once, the Stalin of the steppe. He was the man who carried out Stalin's purge of his own country and was rewarded with it. He was one of the seven founders of the People's Party of 1921, the revolutionaries who took Urga with the Red Army from the White baron Ungern-Sternberg. He was a former lama's pupil from the eastern border who had been to school in Irkutsk and spoke Russian, which was the qualification. He rose through the army and the party as the others were shot. He did the shooting from 1937, when Stalin's man Frinovsky arrived from the NKVD with the lists. The purge was the largest in proportion of any in the Soviet world. There were between twenty and thirty-five thousand killed in a population of seven hundred thousand. There was the prime minister Genden, who had refused Stalin's order to destroy the monasteries, shot in Moscow in 1937, and the marshal Demid poisoned on a train. There were seventeen thousand lamas executed, seven hundred and fifty monasteries of the seven hundred and sixty-seven destroyed, the Buryats and the Kazakhs and the intellectuals. The lists were signed by him. It was a country where he then had the streets and the city of Bayan Tumen named for him. The war was his good year. The Japanese Kwantung army came over the eastern border in May 1939 and was destroyed by Zhukov at Khalkhin Gol in August, with Mongolian cavalry on the flank. That was the battle that kept Japan out of Siberia. The country's horses and sheepskins went to the Red Army through the war. In August 1945 the Mongolian army rode into Inner Mongolia with the Soviets. The independence that China had never accepted was confirmed by the plebiscite of October 1945, in which every vote was yes, and by Chiang's recognition in 1946. He wanted Inner Mongolia joined to his republic and Stalin said no. That was the one quarrel he had. He was in Moscow for kidney cancer when he died, at fifty-six. He was born in Achit Beysiyn, in Dornod. He was embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum on Sükhbaatar square that was demolished in 2005. His statue still stands outside the national university. The democracy has argued about it for thirty years and not moved it.

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