Mongolia's Communist Leader Refused to Order the Crackdown

On 7 March 1990, ten members of the Mongolian Democratic Union sat down on Sükhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar and stopped eating. The thermometer was below freezing. The crowd around them grew through the day. They had a single demand: the Politburo had to resign.

The Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party had run the country for nearly 70 years as a Soviet satellite. The protests had been building since December 1989, organized by a group of young intellectuals — Sanjaasürengiin Zorig, Erdeniin Bat-Üül, Davaadorjiin Ganbold, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, Bat-Erdeniin Batbayar — most of them under 35, most of them watching the same East European footage on smuggled tapes. By 4 March 1990, the gathering at the square had hit 100,000 people in a country of two million.

What made the next two days different from Beijing the previous June was a single decision. The Politburo prepared an order authorizing force, and party chairman Jambyn Batmönkh refused to sign it. "I will never sign this," he said, according to colleagues present. "We few Mongols have not yet come to the point that we will make each other's noses bleed." On 9 March, the Politburo resigned en masse.

Mongolia held its first multi-party election that June. A new constitution took effect on 12 February 1992, establishing a parliamentary republic. The country has rotated parties peacefully ever since — the only post-Soviet Asian state to manage it without a relapse, and the only one whose pivotal hour turned on a refusal to issue an order.