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

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 2 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

Her eyes wandered back to the screen of a television set on the other side of the landing. It was surrounded by a dozen or so students, all in track suits and all from North Korea. They were engrossed in what I assumed to be a comedy programme, judging from the laughter and chuckles coming from their ranks. I followed the floor hostess’s gaze and looked at the TV set. The programme was showing graphic footage of a seal cull in the Arctic.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘Listen to this for a reasoned explanation of why the socialists did away with the Mongolian alphabet: “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.”

‘Life demonstrated the expediency?’ I repeated.

‘Sure,’ replied Bulcsu. ‘What he means is that if you didn’t change to Cyrillic they shot you. Really very simple.’

We both laughed but Bulcsu had not been joking.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

We chatted in English about the Russian influence in Mongolia. Norbu told us he could take us to see the Russian military camp, tucked away up a side valley, and there was a gold mine on the outskirts of Ulan Bator from which the refined gold was flown out to the Soviet Union every night on a special jet.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

To say that Mongolian Buddhism has taken a bit of a pasting in the years after the Revolution is an understatement: it was almost totally annihilated.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The march of time would sort everything out. Once the Revolution had taken place, once Communist parties were in power, once collectivisation had been accomplished, once the means of production were in the hands of the self-appointed representatives of the people, then religion would disappear of its own accord. The fact that this train of events simply didn’t happen threw the Communists into disarray. Their reaction to the obvious failure of their ideology was predictable. They couldn’t admit failure, so they resorted to violence.’

‘Reach for the revolver,’ I chipped in.

‘Well, reach for the armoured cars, the high explosives and the entire Soviet Army if necessary, more like,’ Bulcsu replied. ‘Of course the Mongolians never acted without good advice from Moscow, but the ultimate fate of Buddhism in Mongolia was sealed because the theory that said it would disappear was wrong, and yet it had to be proved right.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

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

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 4 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

When they had finished their lunch the two pilots left abruptly and hurried across the dusty courtyard to a couple of aircraft that had just been refuelled by a man with a lighted cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

How could it possibly be, I wondered, that the Soviet Union, which was responsible for all this, had managed to send manned rockets into space?
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Jim was a Scotsman, whose job it was to get the first satellite ground station installed. He was a sort of telecommunications troubleshooter, who sat at home in Milton Keynes waiting for the phone to ring and tell him where he was off to next. He thought Mongolia was about the weirdest place he had been in, and Jim had been in a few weird places which he was apt to tell you about.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The trouble here was that hard currency did not buy a lot. No currency did. There simply was not much available in Mongolia.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

These tantric practices were accepted without much comment by the practitioners of the dominant religion of the time, Shamanism. Shamans were a laidback pantheistic lot who simply interpreted these new Buddhist deities as special manifestations of Shamanic gods.

The net effects of the two approaches were very similar. Both aimed to put the practitioner in touch with the gods by inducing a state of trance. The Shamanic path to assimilation with a deity was usually to get high on hallucinogens whereas the Buddhist reached the same state through meditation and reciting holy texts.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 5 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

I told her that the British Embassy in Ulan Bator seemed to do very little as far as I could see. Four men and their wives to look after British interests in Mongolia? What British interests?
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

So while Lamujab carried on, the rest of us all lined up across the railway track and ceremoniously pissed in the direction of the Soviet Union.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Lamujab was looking noticeably less perplexed and may even have been enjoying herself. She asked Bulcsu and me continual questions about life in the West. What sort of food we ate, how big our flats were, which type of books did we like reading, did we travel about in England, what did the countryside look like, and what about the shops. But each one of our answers seemed to drive another nail into the coffin of her life in Mongolia, although we were trying hard to give her as unglossy an account as possible.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Three years later when I returned to Ulan Bator, the discotheque had been closed down and the party was over. In Moscow President Gorbachev was gallantly trying to dismantle the beast that had emerged from the ideological test-tube some seventy years before. In Ulan Bator the disco-dancing advisers were packing their bags and heading for home. For them it was truly the last disco in Outer Mongolia.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Behind us the Gobi plains were laid out flat and dark like the ocean.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

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

Snow leopards are internationally endangered as a species. No one really knows how many there are lurking in the mountains of the Gobi-Altai and Khangai ranges, but it is feared that their numbers are declining to the point of no return. They are magnificent creatures, with tails up to three feet long. Mongolia lost a good deal of sympathy in the international conservation world in the mid-1980s when a BBC correspondent from Beijing interviewed the then Environment Minister, who rather proudly declared that anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could come to Mongolia and shoot a snow leopard.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

A camel, pulling a cart, ambled by en route from nowhere to nowhere else as we entered the small hotel building.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The Shah of Iran also enjoyed hunting in Mongolia formerly. His son who was in the army died here in a hunting accident. They made up another story to explain his death, but he fell from his horse and broke his head.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is a big noise in the dinosaur world. Back in the 1920s a young curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York led several very large scientific expeditions to the Mongolian Gobi Desert. His name was Roy Chapman Andrews. He was an explorer and a scientist, a man of bluff, bravado and drawn guns, the only approach possible in a land of nomads and brigands which had just come under Soviet control after a decade of uncertainty ruled by characters such as the Bloody Baron.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Many of the show trials were admitted to have been just that, and a number of the offenders were slowly revealed to be victims of unfortunate events. But that was as far as that first re-examination of the time went. The fact that Choilbalsan was responsible for exterminating fellow Mongolians, most of whom were members of Mongolia’s inadequate reserve of educated and experienced men, was not dwelt on. It is still one of the extraordinary enigmas of modern Mongolian history that an underdeveloped country could rip itself apart in the service of an imported ideology, supporting its brutality with wholly fabricated evidence, and continue the self-deception until the political climate in another country allowed it to begin a partial refurbishment of the truth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia