I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they had been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything. They were in the dark. And their conception of communism was very old-fashioned, typified by the thirty-foot bronze statue on the main street, of Joseph Stalin.
I joined the tour to the Mongolian State Museum and saw dinosaurs that looked like none I had ever seen before — with beaks and horns and claws — and huge simple monsters suggested by an eight-foot bone: 'That is its pelvis."
In a room filled with stringed instruments, the Mongolian guide said, "This we call morin huur. Its name comes from a very ancient story about a man who had a wonderful horse. He loved the horse very much. He rode the horse all over Mongolia. He loved the horse more than his family! He treated the horse as you would a loved one or a family. But eventually the horse died. The man was very, very sad. He was so sad he cut the horse to pieces and took out its bones and carved them into a sort of shape like a violin. The horse's tail he made into strings, and he made a bow as well, from bones and from the horse's hair. And he spent the rest of his life playing the violin and thinking of his horse. That is the meaning of morin huur—violin of the horse."
An air of palpable isolation hung over Mongolia. With half the population living in Ulan Bator — the easier for them to be regimented — the countryside was practically empty: it was wilderness, wolves and bears, dinosaur bones and scattered nomads. Ninety percent of the Mongolians outside Ulan Bator lived in tents, and the terrain was so barren — so like the landscape of New Mexico and Arizona — that East European countries made cowboy movies in Mongolia. The Yugoslavs had recently finished shooting Apache—a political cowboy movie, about exploitation.
On May Day, the entire population of Ulan Bator turned out for the parade — not to watch it but to join it. It was a Mongolian custom for everyone to be in the parade. The only spectators were tourists — some Finns and us: Kicker, Bud, Morris, Miss Wilkie, Wilma, Morthole, Ashley, the Gurneys and all the rest. I stood behind Blind Bob.
"Who are those people with the flags?"
They were the round-shouldered wrestlers from the train, but this time wearing their medals. There was something simian in their posture and in the way they walked. It seemed so sad that Blind Bob's last visions on earth should be the messy thaw in Poland, the dreariness of Russia, Siberian hotels and Mongolian wrestlers. Stepping off the sidewalk for a closer look, he tripped and fell.
"I'm all right!" he cried, rubbing his knee. "No harm done! My own darn fault!"
There were thirty people marching in a row, and a row passed me every two seconds. The parade lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. That was 450,000 Mongolians. They carried flags and banners; they dipped these when they passed the mausoleum, like Lenin's, of their leader from the 1920s, Suhe Baator.
There were no soldiers, no uniforms, no weapons at all — how inconvenient it would have been for the Soviets if the Mongolians had had an army. The faces on their banners were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suhe Bator and Gorbachev. There were large banners bearing the likeness of (so I was told) Chairman Batmunkh, of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party, head of the Great People's Assembly.
Over a loudspeaker, a man howled, "May the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party prosper!"
The parading people cheered and repeated this slogan.
Children wearing fur hats marched by, beating drums and singing.May the sun shine in the sky forever
May the sky be blue forever
May my mother live forever
May the world be peaceful forever
A big pictorial banner was paraded past, showing Lenin and Suhe Bator in 1921. Suhe had a big, bony skull and wore a traditional dresslike gown. Lenin wore his train-conductor's cap. The caption on the banner was Unforgettable Meeting.
There was another portrait, of the Mongolian cosmonaut, Gurragchaa who in 1981 went into space in a Soviet rocket and produced a detailed study of Mongolian topography.
Warsaw Pact for Peace, one banner said; and another: We are Followers of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party.
"What does that one say?"
The guide translated the banner, "Congratulations to Workers in Capitalist Countries."
"That's us," Rick Westbetter said.
That was the end of the parade.
At Mongolia's only working monastery the next day, listening to the monks in the watchtowers blowing conch shells as a summons to other monks to pray, I reflected on this country. Once there were 2000 monasteries, the monks all Buddhists of the Yellow Sect. Now there was only this wooden wreck of a place behind an apartment house. Once, Mongol armies had conquered the world. Now there was no army. Mongols had been Chinese emperors — the Manchus were a Mongol dynasty. That had ended. Once, these people had lived on the plains and in the mountains. Now they lived in two-room apartments in this lifeless and stark city. They were in every sense a subject race, and in this — one of the largest and emptiest countries on earth — they lived cheek by jowl. They lived out of the world, almost totally cut off. It had not made them angry. It had kept them innocent in many ways. There was something very sweet about the Mongolians.
Perhaps that was the whole point about Mongolia: that after a Soviet-inspired revolution in which everything was destroyed and swept away — religion, the old economy, the army, the social order — the country was so changed that it could not function without Soviet help. The Mongolians had been reduced to a state of infancy. All their old habits and institutions were gone. The Soviets stepped into this vacuum: they brought Soviet buildings and urban structures, Soviet railways and roads, Soviet schools, and the Soviet ideology displaced Buddhism. The Mongolian script was abolished and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet introduced. The old Mongolian hatred of the Chinese was whipped up, and the Mongolians gladly accepted forts and garrisons and Soviet missile installations until a simple town was practically unknown in Mongolia: every settlement of any size is a military establishment manned by Russian soldiers cursing their luck in having been posted there.
All this Soviet authority, meddling, advice and financial aid had a profound effect: it turned the Mongolians into children. It is hard to imagine a more dependent and helpless people. And they are dependent on the Soviet Union in a sort of frantic way, because they cannot be dependent on anyone else. They have no other friends in the world, no family ties. The very country that turned them into orphans adopted them and — since one of the grimmer features of the country is the permanence of the Soviet presence — won't let them grow up.
All Mongolian aggression is turned against the Chinese. The rockets and tanks and cannons are directed at the Chinese border, and the Chinese are portrayed as torturers and imperialists. (The Chinese reply by calling Mongolia an example of "rampant and reactionary hegemonism.") In its military and political guise this aggression takes the form of Russian divisions patrolling the edges of the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Its simpler expression is stone throwing.
There was one Chinese sleeping car on the train I took from Ulan Bator to the border, and moments after leaving the station an enthusiastic Mongolian standing by the track flung a stone and broke a window. The Chinese — who can be nags and bores about the sanctity of state property — stopped the train, made a scene and demanded immediate restitution. They would not proceed unless the Mongolians swore that they would hand over a window. The Mongolians promised.