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MongoliaPostwar Developments
In early 1946, Mongolia and the Soviet Union renewed the 1936
Protocol Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance for another
ten years, this time making it extendable. Although the
provisions remained essentially the same, what had been a
protocol treaty became a formal treaty to signify that, because
China had relinquished claims of suzerainty, Mongolia was legally
competent to handle its own foreign affairs. Thus Mongolia's
close defense ties with the Soviet Union continued, as did Soviet
military assistance in the form of training and matériel. This
treaty encouraged Ulaanbaatar's intransigence against Guomindang
(Kuomintang in Wade-Giles romanization), or Chinese Nationalist
Party, troops in 1947, when violence flared along the ill-defined
and disputed Mongolian-Chinese border in the Altai Mountain
region. Indigenous Kazakhs and Mongols had been grazing their
herds indiscriminately throughout the entire area, and the
Soviets had developed gold and tungsten mines in areas the
Chinese considered part of Xinjiang. Kazakh rebels opposed to the
Chinese regime had declared their autonomy in 1944, probably with
Soviet encouragement; however, when China reestablished control
over Xinjiang in 1946, some of the Kazakh leaders redefected to
China.
In June 1947, Mongolian cavalry with tank and air support
attacked the Kazakh and Chinese troops, apparently in an attempt
to take over the disputed territory. The Soviet Union and
Mongolia denied that they were aggressors and claimed that the
Chinese were 15 kilometers inside Mongolia; the Chinese countered
that the Mongolian army had driven 200 kilometers into Xinjiang.
The Chinese were driven back, and the Soviets continued to
operate the mines despite a further outbreak of fighting in early
1948
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 4).
The Mongolian armed forces, with the close and continuous
collaboration of the Soviet Red Army, came of age in the years
after 1929. It had survived and had helped to suppress internal
revolts, had successfully fought the Japanese and the Chinese,
and had played a major role in the education, training, and
indoctrination of the Mongolian people. The 1949 communist
victory in the Chinese civil war eliminated the threat on
Mongolia's southern border for the next decade. This development
permitted Mongolia to begin reducing its 80,000-troop army, which
had been maintained at about that level for 10 years.
During the 1950s, Mongolia was able to deemphasize defense.
Defense expenditures dropped from 33 percent of the total budget
in 1948 to 15 percent in 1952. Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal became
premier after the death of Choybalsan in 1952. Although he had
been a lieutenant general and chief political commissar of the
army during World War II, Tsedenbal was an economist, and he was
less inclined to maintain a large army without a definite need.
Thus, defense expenditures continued their steady drop in the
next few years; soldiers went into the labor force and defense
funds were diverted into neglected economic development and
social services.
The nation's economic and social development required an
infrastructure: public buildings, housing, factories, roads, and
power plants. The army formed a mobile, disciplined, and
partially skilled work force in a country that was short of
labor. Units were apprenticed to construction gangs made up of
technicians and workers from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe,
and China. By the late 1950s, the army's Military Construction
Administration was building workers' apartments and public
buildings, and it was in charge of constructing a large part of
the industry around Darhan
(see Labor Force
, ch. 3).
The army continued to develop and modernize during the 1950s.
It continued to use the two years' compulsory military training
to provide Mongolian youth with Marxist-Leninist indoctrination,
to ensure their literacy, and to teach them a variety of useful
technical skills. Soviet troops continued to be garrisoned in
Mongolia until 1956, at first to ensure against Chinese
irredentist moves and later, probably, to discourage any
deviation that might have resulted from the post-Stalin and postChoybalsan thaw. The combat elements of the now- smaller army
were modernized; tanks, self-propelled guns, armored infantry,
jet fighters, and surface-to-air missiles replaced the last of
the cavalry. Soviet instructors and advisers served with the
Mongolian army, but more and more, the Mongolian People's Army
was standing on its own, except in the production of arms and
heavy equipment.
The 1960s saw quite altered prospects for the army. The SinoSoviet rift occurred in 1960, and China adopted an increasingly
hostile policy toward the Soviet Union and Mongolia. As the new
threat from China was perceived and then grew more ominous, the
Soviet Union and Mongolia again became militarily close. Soviet
troops once more entered Mongolia in strength. Military, and
other, national celebrations provided opportunities for the
exchange of top-level military delegations, for consultations on
defense matters, and for public hymns of praise, loyalty, eternal
friendship, and cooperation. Marshal Rodion Yakovlevich
Malinovskiy and other top Soviet military leaders, together with
senior Chinese generals, visited Ulaanbaatar on People's Army
Day, March 18, 1961. The Soviets were honored with high Mongolian
decorations, whereas the Chinese were snubbed, receiving none.
Significantly, while Mongolia and the Soviet Union reacted to
the perceived Chinese threat much as they had to the Japanese
threat in the 1930s--that is, by deploying Soviet troops and
strengthening Mongolia's defenses--the magnitude of the measures
taken in the 1960s was not so great. This circumspection probably
reflected the policies of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and
Tsedenbal, versus those of Stalin and Choybalsan, as well as the
strengthened internal and global positions of Mongolia and the
Soviet Union. Soviet assistance enabled the Mongolian army, while
continuing to equip and train for modern war, to carry on with
its construction projects at Darhan and elsewhere.
Chinggis and ancient Mongol warriors were used as symbols to
inculcate patriotism and a military tradition as early as 1927.
Feeling pride and confidence in their new national viability,
Mongolian leaders, despite Soviet disapproval, celebrated the
800th anniversary of the birth of Chinggis on May 31, 1962, with
ceremonies and the unveiling of a monument at his purported
birthplace. The Soviet Union took exception to this display of
nationalism with its pan-Mongol overtones, and the Soviet press
vehemently attacked Chinggis as a reactionary and an evil person.
Whether connected or not with this demonstration of independent
thought and the Sino-Soviet rift, a bloodless purge of a number
of top Mongolian defense officials took place. Those replaced
were the commandant of Ulaanbaatar, the minister of public
security, the chief of the general staff, and the head of the
army's political department. Just as past purges had missed
Choybalsan, this one passed by Colonel General Jamyangiyn
Lhagbasuren, longtime minister of people's army affairs and
commander in chief of the army. Again, suspected nationalists and
those with pro-Chinese leanings were purged. The military
tradition to be fostered was not that of ancient Mongol military
heroes, but that of the 1921 revolution and the battles against
the Japanese in the 1930s and the 1940s. These events always
stressed the cooperation and close comradeship in arms of the
Soviet army.
Chinese border incidents, though not serious, continued
through the 1960s, and they were accompanied by a strengthening
of the Mongolian troop presence in border areas. China, in turn,
charged that reconnaissance flights from Mongolia and Siberia had
violated its airspace. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and Mongolia
continued their public display of political and military
affinity. In 1966 the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and
Mutual Assistance was renewed for another twenty years; it was
extendable for an additional ten. It included a clause permitting
the stationing of Soviet troops in Mongolia. A parade in
Ulaanbaatar in 1967 honored the fiftieth anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and showed off new weapons,
including Mongolian army-manned SA-2 surface-to-air and SNAPPER
antitank guided missiles. In his address, Lhagbasuren gave high
praise to Soviet military aid. In May 1968, at the forty-seventh
anniversary of the founding of the Mongolian People's Army,
Lhagbasuren spoke similarly of the "fraternal disinterested" aid
of the Soviet Union. These panegyrics, while intended to instruct
Mongolians in the current policy and to reassure the Soviets of
Mongolian solidarity, nevertheless amply demonstrated the degree
of Soviet influence and the subordinate Mongolian position in the
Soviet mutual defense agreement.
Data as of June 1989
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