Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 1 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

The country has developed quickly since 1921, when the revolutionary leader Sukhe Bator rode into Mongolia with a Soviet Red Army back-up. From that date the country has embraced Communism, and in doing so has necessitated a rewrite of the Marxist-Leninist textbooks, because the pre-revolutionary country had never left the ‘feudal’ state. Thus, the phrase that lingers on the tip of every Mongolian interpreter was born: Mongolia had ‘bypassed capitalism’. It is this rapid shift from old to new that gives today’s Mongolia its mystical air as a sort of People’s Republic of Shangri-La.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Just outside the airport a Chinese-looking gateway straddles the road and the Cyrillic script on the large hoarding beside it proclaims the entrance to the city. But as we drove through the arch the view all around was the same one of grassy treeless hills with not a soul in sight.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

I opened the windows, double frames against the bitter continental winter, and surveyed the city. Across the park outside the hotel the valley hills were fading fast at the end of the day. The neon sign on the building opposite flickered into life. In my Western ignorance I imagined it to be advertising a shop. Later I discovered it said: ‘Let’s make our capital a good socialist city.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is waking up from its long history of domination by foreign powers. It is probably fair to say that today the country is looking forward to a future which will be more autonomous than at any time in the seven centuries since Genghis Khan, their national hero who has been resurrected from a shady Communist past, to be revered once more as a symbol of truly Mongolian independence.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The declaration of Mongolia’s independence in 1911 had encountered a problem: it was ignored.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia