Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
In August 1922, Dogsomyn Bodoo, the first prime minister of the revolutionary period, and 14 others were executed without trial after confessing under torture by Soviet agents to conspiring to overthrow the government.
[5] In 1928, several prominent MPRP members including Ajvaagiin Danzan, Jamsrangiin Tseveen, Tseren-Ochiryn Dambadorj, and Navaandorjiin Jadambaa, were imprisoned or exiled in a widescale purge of suspected rightwingers as the country launched its "Leftist Period" of more rapid collectivization, land expropriation, and persecution of the Buddhist Church.
After those drastic measures resulted in popular uprisings throughout the country in 1932, several of the MPRP's most hard-line leftists including Zolbingiin Shijee, Ölziin Badrakh, and Prime Minister Tsengeltiin Jigjidjav were blamed, officially expelled from the party,[6] and later executed during the Great Repression.
To defend against possible Japanese military expansion into the Soviet Far East, Stalin sought to stabilize Mongolia politically by eliminating opposition to the Soviet-backed government and securing an agreement to permit the stationing of Red Army troops in the country.
Under the direction of his Soviet handler Matvey Petrovich Chopyak,[7] Choibalsan had Internal Affairs Committee rules amended in May 1936 to facilitate the detention of high ranking politicians without first consulting political superiors.
[13] Working through Soviet advisers already embedded within the Ministry of Interior and with a compliant Choibalsan providing symbolic cover, Frinovsky built the purge framework from behind the scenes.
He produced arrest lists and assembled an Extraordinary Purge Commission, an NKVD-style troika (headed by Choibalsan, with Minister of Justice Tserendorj and former MPRP Secretary Dorjjavyn Luvsansharav).
[18] As the NKVD effectively managed the purge by staging show trials and carrying out executions,[19] a frequently intoxicated[20] Choibalsan was sometimes present during torture[20] and interrogations of suspected counterrevolutionaries, including old friends and comrades.
[21] Racked with stress, Choibalsan spent six months (August 1938 – January 1939) recuperating and consulting with Kliment Voroshilov, Nikolai Yezhov, and Stalin in Moscow and Sochi[22] while NKVD agents and Interior Ministry officials carried on purge operations from Ulaanbaatar.
Secured in his position, Choibalsan brought the terror to an end in April 1939 by declaring that the excesses of the purges had been conducted by overzealous party officials while he was away in the USSR, but that he had overseen the arrests of the real criminals.
By the time the purges ended in early 1939, an entire stratum of Mongolian society[25] had effectively been exterminated while much of Mongolia's cultural heritage lay in ruins.
The old guard revolutionary class, viewed as heavily nationalist, was eliminated; twenty five persons from top positions in the party and government were executed (including former prime ministers Peljidiin Genden and Anandyn Amar), 187 from the military leadership, and 36 of the 51 members of the Central Committee.
[29] Public anger over the violence of the purges falls predominantly on the Soviet Union and the NKVD, with Choibalsan viewed sympathetically (if not pathetically) as a puppet with little choice but to follow Moscow's instructions or else meet the fate of his predecessors Genden and Amar.
With the end of communist rule in 1990, however, re-examination of the Socialist Era, and particularly the Great Repression, has occurred and there does seem to be an attempt by some Mongolians to come to terms the country's past in a more general context.
