Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat
Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat was the last communist head of Mongolia and the first freely elected one, in the same year. Mongolia had been a Soviet satellite since 1924 - the second communist country in the world after the USSR itself - governed by one party, policed by the same methods, and garrisoned by Soviet divisions facing China. Purges in the 1930s killed tens of thousands, including most of the Buddhist clergy, and monasteries were destroyed almost to the last. The change came in the winter of 1989. Demonstrations in Ulaanbaatar through the coldest months, and a hunger strike in the main square in March 1990, brought the politburo to resign in a body rather than clear the square - a decision without parallel in the Asian communist states, and taken in the year Tiananmen had shown the alternative. He was a mining engineer who became head of state that March and won the presidency in a direct election in 1993. The transition was fast: multi-party elections, a new constitution in 1992, freedom of religion, and privatisation carried out by issuing vouchers to every citizen. It was also brutally expensive. Soviet aid had been about a third of national income and it stopped, industry collapsed, and there were shortages of bread and of fuel in a country where winter kills livestock in the hundreds of thousands. Mongolia stayed democratic anyway, alternating governments by election ever since, which makes it the outlier among the post-communist states of Asia. He lost the 1997 election and accepted the result, and later served on the constitutional court.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mongolian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
