Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal
Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal was the ruler of Mongolia from 1952 to 1984, thirty-two years, the longest of any Soviet-bloc leader, prime minister from Choibalsan's death and head of state from 1974, and party leader from 1940 to 1954 and from 1958. He was removed by his own politburo in August 1984 while he was on holiday in Moscow, with the Soviet Union's consent, on the grounds of his health. That was the Kremlin's word for his drinking and his wife. He was a Dörvöd from the far west. He was educated at the Siberian financial institute in Irkutsk. He was a finance minister at twenty-three and the party's general secretary at twenty-four, whom Choibalsan had chosen as a bookkeeper. He outlasted everyone as one. The thirty-two years were the country's Soviet decades. The herds were collectivised in 1959 with less blood than Choibalsan had used. There were the Erdenet copper mine and the Darkhan industrial town built by the Russians, and the Trans-Mongolian railway. There were the Cyrillic alphabet, the schools and the hospitals that made the country literate and the population double. There were the Soviet divisions stationed on the Chinese frontier from 1966 at his request, and the membership of Comecon from 1962. There were the cosmonaut of 1981, the applications to join the Soviet Union that Moscow, twice, declined, and the de-Stalinisation of Choibalsan in 1962, at Khrushchev's pace. After that he was as Brezhnev's as Brezhnev's own. The wife was Anastasia Filatova, a Russian he had married in 1947, who ran the children's fund and, the country believed, the country. The politburo could not remove her without removing him. He was retired to Moscow, where the party expelled him in 1990 when the democracy came. He died there in April 1991. He was buried in Ulaanbaatar, at Altan-Ölgii. He was rehabilitated in 1997 by a parliament that gave him back his marshal's rank. He was born in Davst, in Uvs. The country he ran is the one in which a third of the people still live in felt tents and every one of them can read. That was his doing and the Russians'.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 1991 CE
- Nationality: Mongolian
- Roles: head of state, party leader, politician
