The world’s second socialist revolution — how Marxist-Leninists liberated a feudal theocracy and built a modern nation from the steppes
Before 1921, Mongolia was one of the most backward countries on Earth. It had no industry, no roads, no railways, no modern schools, and no hospitals. The population of roughly 650,000 was overwhelmingly nomadic, herding livestock across the vast Central Asian steppe. Literacy was confined to the Buddhist monastic clergy, who read Tibetan script for religious purposes only. Average life expectancy was estimated at 30 years.
Mongolia was ruled by a feudal theocracy. The Bogd Khan — the “Living Buddha” — combined secular and religious authority. Below him, a hierarchy of princes (noyon) and monasteries (khiid) owned the land, the herds, and the people. Roughly one-third of the male population were monks, bound to monasteries that functioned as feudal estates. The serfs (arat) who worked the land owed corvée labour, taxes in livestock, and personal obedience to their prince or monastery.
Chinese merchants and moneylenders had penetrated deeply into the Mongolian economy. Through usurious lending — often at 100% annual interest — Chinese trading firms had reduced much of the population to permanent debt bondage. A herder who borrowed one sheep might owe ten within a few years. The entire surplus of Mongolian pastoral production was extracted by a combination of feudal lords, monastic parasites, and Chinese commercial capital.
Feudal theocracy combines religious and secular authority in a single ruling system. In Mongolia, Buddhism was not merely a belief system but the organisational framework of exploitation. Monasteries were landlords, monks were an unproductive class sustained by serf labour, and religious ideology justified the entire arrangement as karma. The material analysis of religion as a tool of class rule — as Marx and Lenin argued — finds one of its clearest historical examples here.
The Mongolian revolutionary movement emerged from the convergence of two forces: national liberation against Chinese domination and class struggle against the feudal-theocratic order. The catalyst was the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which demonstrated to the oppressed peoples of Asia that the old order could be overthrown.
In 1919, two underground revolutionary circles formed in Urga (now Ulaanbaatar). One was led by Damdin Sükhbaatar, a soldier and postal worker of humble arat origin, who had witnessed both Chinese oppression and the possibility of resistance. The other was led by Khorloogiin Choibalsan, who had studied at a Russian school in Irkutsk and absorbed Bolshevik ideas. In 1920, these two circles merged to form the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) — later renamed the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP).
The immediate trigger for revolution was the invasion of Mongolia by the White Russian warlord Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg in October 1920. Ungern-Sternberg, a fanatical anti-Bolshevik and self-proclaimed reincarnation of Genghis Khan, seized Urga and imposed a reign of terror — mass executions, pogroms against Chinese residents, and forced conscription. His brutality united the Mongolian population against him and created the conditions for revolutionary action.
Sükhbaatar travelled to Soviet Russia to request assistance. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, recognising Mongolia’s strategic importance and the justice of its national liberation struggle, agreed to support the Mongolian revolutionaries. The Comintern helped organise the founding congress of the MPP, which took place at Kyakhta on the Russian-Mongolian border on 1 March 1921.
“If the peoples of the East were to remain merely as spectators of the great struggle unfolding before them, they would never achieve their liberation. The revolution must become the cause of the oppressed peoples themselves.”
— V. I. Lenin, Report to the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920)On 18 March 1921, Sükhbaatar led a partisan force of 400 Mongolian revolutionaries across the border and liberated the town of Kyakhta (Altanbulag) from Chinese garrison troops. This was the first military victory of the revolution.
In June 1921, a combined force of Mongolian partisans and Soviet Red Army units advanced on Urga to drive out Ungern-Sternberg. The White Russian forces, already weakened by desertions and Mongolian guerrilla attacks, were defeated in a series of engagements. On 6 July 1921, the revolutionary forces entered Urga. Ungern-Sternberg was captured by Red Army units in August and executed after trial.
The People’s Government was established on 11 July 1921, a date that became Mongolia’s national day. Sükhbaatar was appointed commander-in-chief and minister of war. The Bogd Khan was initially retained as a constitutional monarch with no real power — a tactical concession to religious sentiment that the revolutionaries knew would be temporary. When the Bogd Khan died in May 1924, no successor was appointed, and the Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed on 26 November 1924 — the world’s second socialist state after the Soviet Union.
The non-capitalist path of development was the theory, developed by Lenin, that colonial and semi-feudal countries could bypass the capitalist stage of development with the assistance of the socialist camp. Mongolia was the first practical test of this theory. With Soviet aid, Mongolia would leap from feudalism to socialism without passing through a prolonged period of capitalist development — proving that backward countries need not wait for capitalism to “mature” before building socialism.
The transformation of Mongolia from a feudal theocracy into a modern socialist state was one of the most remarkable achievements in twentieth-century history. Starting from conditions of near-total backwardness, the Mongolian People’s Republic, with Soviet fraternal assistance, achieved the following:
The feudal estates of the princes and monasteries were confiscated. Corvée labour was abolished. The debts owed by herders to Chinese moneylenders — estimated at 14 million silver dollars — were annulled. The arat, for the first time in history, owned their own livestock and could graze freely without paying tribute to a lord.
The monasteries, which had served as the institutional basis of feudal exploitation, were gradually secularised. At the time of the revolution, there were over 700 monasteries and approximately 100,000 monks in a population of 650,000 — an extraordinary parasitic burden. Through a combination of education, voluntary secularisation, and ultimately the suppression of counter-revolutionary monastic resistance in the late 1930s, the theocratic system was dismantled. Former monks were integrated into productive labour — herding, construction, and industry.
Before 1921, less than 1% of the population was literate in any practical sense. By 1940, a network of schools had been established across the country. By 1968, UNESCO declared Mongolia to have achieved virtually universal adult literacy — a rate of 97%. The country developed a modern Cyrillic script, a complete education system from primary school to university, and sent thousands of students to study in the Soviet Union. The Mongolian State University, founded in 1942, became a centre of learning in Central Asia.
Mongolia had no modern healthcare before the revolution. Illness was treated by monastic lamas using prayer and traditional remedies, with predictable results. The socialist state built a comprehensive healthcare system: hospitals, clinics, mobile medical units for nomadic communities, vaccination programmes, and training of Mongolian doctors. Life expectancy rose from approximately 30 years in 1921 to 64 years by 1980. Infant mortality fell from over 300 per 1,000 to under 60 per 1,000. Diseases such as smallpox, plague, and syphilis — which had been endemic — were eradicated or brought under control.
With Soviet technical and financial assistance, Mongolia built its first industrial enterprises: mining (copper, molybdenum, coal, fluorspar), food processing, textiles, construction materials, and power generation. The Trans-Mongolian Railway, connecting Ulaanbaatar to the Trans-Siberian and Chinese rail networks, was completed in 1961. By the 1980s, industry accounted for over 30% of GDP — a complete transformation for a country that had possessed no industry whatsoever in 1921.
Under feudal theocracy, Mongolian women had no rights. They could not own property, could not divorce, and were subject to arranged marriage. Buddhism taught that women were spiritually inferior and could only achieve enlightenment by being reborn as men. The revolution transformed the position of women: equal legal rights, access to education and employment, maternity protection, and full participation in political life. By the 1980s, women constituted over 60% of university graduates and held significant positions in government, medicine, and education.
“The peoples of the East must understand that the question of their liberation is not simply a national question, but a social question — it is the question of the destruction of feudal and capitalist exploitation.”
— J. V. Stalin, The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East (1925)Damdin Sükhbaatar (1893–1923) was the founder and first military leader of the revolution. A man of the people — born to a poor arat family — he embodied the alliance between the national liberation struggle and the class struggle of the oppressed. He died on 20 February 1923, at the age of 30, possibly of tuberculosis, though poisoning by counter-revolutionary elements has long been suspected. The central square of Ulaanbaatar bears his name to this day.
Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895–1952) became the dominant figure in Mongolian politics from the late 1930s until his death. Under his leadership, Mongolia completed the destruction of feudalism, suppressed counter-revolutionary uprisings backed by Japanese imperialism, and joined the Soviet Union in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 — a decisive defeat of Japanese forces that prevented the invasion of Mongolia and eastern Siberia. Mongolia later declared war on Japan in August 1945 and participated in the liberation of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria.
Choibalsan’s period also saw the repressions of the late 1930s, in which thousands of monks and suspected counter-revolutionaries were arrested. This remains controversial, but must be understood in context: Japanese imperialism was actively organising counter-revolution through the monasteries and the remnants of the feudal aristocracy. The choice facing the revolution was not between repression and liberal tolerance, but between the survival of the revolutionary state and its destruction by feudal-imperialist reaction. The parallel with the Soviet Union’s own struggle against internal enemies during the same period is clear.
The Mongolian revolution has several lessons of enduring importance for Marxist-Leninists:
Mongolia demonstrated that a feudal country could advance to socialism without passing through a prolonged capitalist stage. This was only possible because of the existence of the Soviet Union and the fraternal assistance it provided. The lesson is clear: proletarian internationalism is not a slogan but a material condition of revolutionary success for oppressed nations. The theory of “socialism in one country” does not mean isolation — it means building socialism while extending solidarity to revolutionary movements worldwide.
Mongolia’s revolution combined national liberation (against Chinese domination and White Russian occupation) with social revolution (against feudalism and theocracy). This confirmed Lenin’s thesis that in the epoch of imperialism, national liberation struggles are an integral part of the world proletarian revolution. The Mongolian revolution was not a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution led by a national bourgeoisie — it was led from the beginning by a revolutionary party aligned with the Comintern and the Soviet state.
Without Soviet military, economic, and technical assistance, the Mongolian revolution would not have survived its first year. This is not a weakness — it is a confirmation that revolution in backward countries requires the support of the socialist camp. The Soviet Union provided Mongolia with doctors, teachers, engineers, military equipment, industrial plant, and financial aid for decades. This was proletarian internationalism in practice, not charity — the Soviet Union and Mongolia were bound by common class interests against imperialism.
The joint Soviet-Mongolian victory over Japanese forces at Khalkhin Gol in May–September 1939 was one of the most significant but least-known battles of the twentieth century. Under the command of Georgy Zhukov, Soviet and Mongolian forces decisively defeated Japan’s Kwantung Army, killing or wounding over 18,000 Japanese troops. This defeat was a major factor in Japan’s decision to expand southward into Southeast Asia rather than northward into Siberia — a strategic shift that profoundly affected the course of the Second World War. Mongolia’s role in this victory is a testament to the strength of proletarian internationalism.
In 1990, following the counter-revolutionary events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Mongolia underwent a so-called “democratic transition.” The MPRP abandoned Marxism-Leninism, the planned economy was dismantled, and Mongolia was subjected to IMF-imposed “shock therapy” — mass privatisation, deregulation, and the destruction of the social welfare system.
The results were catastrophic. Industrial output collapsed. Unemployment soared. The livestock herds, now in private hands without collective infrastructure, were devastated by harsh winters (dzud) that the planned economy had been able to mitigate. Poverty increased from virtually zero under socialism to over 36% by the mid-1990s. The healthcare and education systems deteriorated sharply. Mining concessions were handed to foreign corporations — Canadian, Australian, and Chinese — which extracted Mongolia’s mineral wealth with minimal benefit to the population.
Today, Mongolia is a textbook case of neo-colonial dependence. Its economy is dominated by foreign mining capital. Its political system is a corrupt parliamentary facade. The achievements of seventy years of socialist construction — universal education, healthcare, industrialisation, women’s equality — are being systematically eroded. The contrast between what was built under socialism and what has been destroyed under capitalism could not be more stark.
Shock therapy is the imperialist prescription for dismantling socialist economies: rapid privatisation, removal of price controls, slashing of social spending, and opening to foreign capital. In every country where it has been applied — Russia, Mongolia, Poland, the former GDR — it has produced mass poverty, inequality, and the transfer of public wealth into the hands of a comprador bourgeoisie and foreign corporations. It is not a policy mistake but a deliberate programme of class war.
The Mongolian People’s Revolution provides several crucial lessons:
“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”
— Ernesto “Che” GuevaraFrom the steppes of Mongolia to the streets of Petrograd — every socialist revolution teaches us how to fight for a better world.