Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 3 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

All governments are guilty of double standards, but Mongolia was the first country I had seen in any detail where the contradictions of the Soviet system were quite so evident. While the Soviet Union had long championed the cause of anti-Imperialism, and had for decades been issuing venomous statements about the West’s exploitation of their empires, here in Mongolia they had quietly been doing exactly the same thing for the past sixty-nine years.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

For Russian advisers and their families a brand of Soviet apartheid was in force. They lived in separate housing blocks with their own shops, stocked with ‘riches’ unavailable to the average Mongolian. These shops had guards on the door who scrutinized passes before allowing entry. The Russians also had their own bus system, always much less crowded than their Mongolian counterparts, and the wages paid to the Russian advisers were greater than those paid to Mongolians in similar positions.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

While the Central Committee in Ulan Bator could hail the founding of some 400 collectives throughout the country in just two years as a great victory for socialism, in reality the boast meant little more than a collapse of herding, the country’s main source of wealth. By 1932 socialism’s victory had cost Mongolia seven million beasts, or roughly one-third of the national herd. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ had turned into a crippled backward somersault.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The so-called ‘New Turn’ that followed in the second half of the 1930s saw a complete about-face with regard to agriculture. All the collectives were dismantled and private herds were encouraged in a desperate attempt to save the country from disaster.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

When the Revolution came in 1921, Mongolia had few if any of the symptoms of a society ready for development along Marxist lines. ‘It was the antithesis of the industrial society in which the proletariat would be the vanguard of the revolution,’ comments one Western historian of the country’s affairs. Whereas on paper Marxist development should be ignited by a working class revolt, Mongolia bucked the system by not having a working class to do the revolting.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia