Mongolia was drawn into a number of Stalin’s campaigns such as “collectivization”, “industrialization”, “neutralize” the kulaks and class enemies,” and the “fight against right-wing deviants.” Immediately after the Seventh Congress, the newly-appointed leaders of Mongolia received a “top secret” Comintern letter, number 2452, addressed to the MPRP Central Committee and the government. The letter demanded that Mongolia imitate the Soviet’s version of collectivization, it criticized the Mongol leaders for their failure to alienate the lamas from the people, it gave instruction on how to “confiscate the property of monasteries and feudal and how to fight them,” and it also instructed the Mongols to “postpone the Party’s Plenary Meeting until the Comintern [sent] detailed instructions”.
These “detailed instructions” were a “technological procedure”, brought by the new commissioner of the Comintern, Kuchumov. The Second Plenary Meeting of the MPRP Central Committee, held in summer 1929, officially introduced the term “public enemy”, a translation of Stalin’s term “people’s enemy”. The meeting outlined the plan of communist hysteria under the pretext of implementing the decisions of the Seventh Congress. Kuchumov passed these “detailed instructions” to Shijee, Badrah, Genden, and Laagan, whom they included in the MPRP leadership. This instruction said:
- Transfer livestock to state ownership;
- Intensify the struggle against feudal. Make them jobless in order to exert pressure;
- Exert all kinds of pressure on the kulaks, as they are petty feuds, and gradually overthrow them;
- Apply the most aggressive methods in the struggle against religion.
The communist hysteria which swept Mongolia in 1929-1932 was later downplayed and referred to as a “leftist deviation. “Indeed it was not a deviation but was, from the very beginning, a well-planned communist project, in theory, and in practice.
The first act was to expel rightists from society. The leaders of the rightists, Jamsrano, Dambadorj and Jadamba, were summoned to Moscow at that time to write confessions addressed to the Central Committee, who pretended to discuss them and then dismissed all three from the Party. Shimendamdin, whom Tserendorj had used as a spy in China in 1931, was executed for the crime of spreading rumors. The ex-Chairman of the MPRP Central Committee, known as “Japanese Danzan,” was also found to be a right-winger, and in the summer of 1932, he was arrested and soon after died in prison.
So began a campaign of hysteria described as a “Party purge”. The campaign was launched immediately and within half a year 5,306 of the 18,000 Party members were dismissed from the Party meant being expelled from society. Even until 1990, those who were dismissed from the Party were regarded as suspect.
A Commoner (ard) or a Nobleman?
A nation-wide campaign to drive monks, rich people, and nobility out of society was launched. At that time, a person’s fate depended on the answer to one question: “Is he an ard [a commoner] or a nobleman?” The most widespread motto at that time was the aphorism, “The power of our people is the power of genuinely poor people; It is the poor people who must hold the power.”
One life story which was published in the Mongolian newspaper Unen gives an example of the new policy. A nobleman called Yundensambuugin Gongor of Jargalant sum in Dornod aimag was called into the army to drive away Baron Urgem’s soldiers. He served in the army for seven years and after demobilization, he worked as a stoker in his native area, but all of a sudden he was deprived of his job and the right to vote because he was considered to be of feudal origin. When trying to put food on his table by means of hunting, dome people came and confiscated his gun and his army medal, he was told to live in a particular valley and was prohibited to move anywhere. Also, two of his horses were confiscated to be used in the horse relay service. When he again started hunting after exchanging another horse for a flintlock, the flintlock was also confiscated, because ” a feudal has no right to hunt.”
In order to survive, he went to work at the collective sheep farm; he was told that ards were paid ten mongo and noblemen three mongo (Mongolian pennies). He agreed and started working but soon he was told from above, “No animal is sinful enough to be tended tax, which was sixty togrogs if we didn’t pay it in time he faced imprisonment. He had one ox and when he wanted to sell it to a shop he had told that they paid seventy togrogs to ard and fifty to a nobleman, and so he had to sell his only horse to pay the remaining ten togrogs of his tax. Later, a deer hunting campaign was launched in his valley and Gongor asked if he might join the party and take some meat as payment. The response he heard was, “No deer in our country is sinful enough to be killed by a feudal.”
At the time of hysteria, one new term nudargan was introduced into the Mongolian language. Nudargan is the Mongol word for “fist” which is the same as the Russian word kulak. These were not the same kulaks, or rich peasants, whom Stalin planned to destroy as a class, but they were ordinally livestock breeders or petty and annual per-family income of over nine hundred togrogs. People classified as nudargan had their property confiscated if they had any and were alienated from the rest of society. Camel caravanners and private traders all fell under the designation nudargan and they were considered the refuse of society.
Chronology
- 1926: A law on the ration of church and state was issued.
- 1927: The Supreme Court was established.
- 1928: Prime Minister Tserendorj dies. The 7th Congress of the MPRP held. The Leftists took power with the support of the Comintern. The Policy of overthrowing foreign capital began. Foreign investors, merchants, and a businessman were driven out of Mongolia.
- 1929: A campaign to seize people’s property (which was considered as a form of feudalism) was initiated.
- 1930: The exclusive right of foreign trade was set. The Yegizer Hutagt Galdandash and Count Gombo-Idshin were executed.