His death under suspicious circumstances in 1937 allowed his rival Khorloogiin Choibalsan to consolidate power and subsequently launch the Great Terror during which 30,000 to 35,000 Mongolians died.

[1] In 1930 he was elected as member of the Presidium (or Politburo) of the Central Committee of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and named army commander-in-chief.

Choibalsan, tapped by Joseph Stalin and the NKVD to be the next leader of the Mongolian People's Republic, had always resented Demid's popularity.

[1] By the end of August, Stalin had ordered the stationing of 30,000 Red Army troops in Mongolia to counter Japanese military movements in Manchuria.

Stalin also dispatched Soviet Deputy NKVD Commissar Mikhail Frinovsky to Ulaanbaatar to launch sweeping and violent purges against Buddhist clergy, intelligentsia, political dissidents, ethnic Buryats and Khazaks, and other "enemies of the revolution", similar to the purges he had so effectively managed in the Soviet Union under NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov.