Earlier this summer, Mongolian protesters used old tyres to block the highway across the Gobi Desert from the vast Rio Tinto copper mine at Oyu Tolgoi, halting the stream of trucks that carry copper concentrate to China’s smelting plants and demanding a larger share of mining revenues. This was not the first wave of protests to be fuelled by claims for resource sovereignty, or anger over living standards, pollution or the corruption of the governing elite; Mongolia has seen multiple demonstrations over the past five years. But if these rumblings of discontent resonate with similar movements in Latin America and Southeast Asia, in Mongolia they are coloured by a unique national imaginary, informed by a history of nomadic production patterns for much of the twentieth century, under a modernizing developmentalist Soviet-model state.footnote1 
In 1921, barely a decade after their country had won independence from the collapsing Qing Empire, Mongolian revolutionaries overthrew their aristocratic rulers and proceeded to construct a people’s republic. Yet although Mongolia was the second-oldest state-socialist polity, and the first wholly in Asia, it is almost entirely absent from comparative accounts of twentieth-century state socialism. It is routinely relegated by historians to the backwater of inter-imperial competition and Cold War geopolitical intrigue; a satellite reflecting the glow or glare of the Soviet Union rather than emitting any light of its own. This marginalization reflects the persistent difficulty of imagining socialist modernity outside the familiar cartographies of Europe, China and the Soviet core. Mongolia is also typically omitted from comparative surveys of post-communist trajectories, although it offers a pointed record of what capitalist transition has meant in practice.footnote2 It has always been a flickering presence on the periphery of different transnational constellations which it may help illuminate: the Qing empire, Inner Asian Buddhist cosmology, the Soviet Union, post-communist parliamentary democracy.
As a socialist state, Mongolia performed impressively according to modernity’s metrics, with high human development indicators—education, public health and life expectancy—relative to both its own pastoral past and other developing countries. Although by the 1980s, Mongolia had a relatively low gdp per capita, it achieved a level of material well-being comparable to other states on the periphery of the Soviet world. In fact, Mongolia’s hdi rankings were close to those of Cuba and Eastern European states, and well above those of China and Vietnam. Capitalist transition would tell a different story: its first decade after 1990, referred to in Mongolia as zerleg kapitalizm (wild capitalism), ushered in a world of vast inequality and debt.
Within the first three years of transition, approximately 27 per cent of the population fell into poverty. In the first decade, unemployment rose sharply, though official statistics systematically understated its scale. By the early 2000s, Mongolians faced difficulties obtaining adequate food: staple goods cost more than they had at the end of socialism, and new luxury imports were out of reach—a kilo of oranges cost 5 per cent of a worker’s monthly salary.footnote3 This followed similar patterns of industrial collapse, wage depression and halted economic recovery in the post-Soviet Baltic states and Eastern Europe.footnote4 The mineral boom would rescue the economy, but not the people. Less an outlier than an indicator, Mongolia exemplifies the logic of late-capitalist transition at the periphery: extraction without the promise of a future.
We will argue here that Mongolia represented a significant experiment in the Leninist mode of ‘non-capitalist development’, proletarian internationalism and the scaled coordination of pastoral political economy. That experiment should be more than a footnote in the theoretical reckoning with state socialism and its afterlives. We proceed in four sections, beginning with the making of the Mongolian nation—an improbable formation, initially forged not from popular national consciousness but aristocratic genealogy, Buddhist authority and the strategic calculations of external powers, above all Russia. We then turn to the construction of socialism on the steppe: its heterodox foundations in pastoral collectivization, insertion into the international socialist division of labour and the material world it built. From there we trace the violent dismantling of that world in the shock-therapy decade of the 1990s and the emergence of a mineral-dependent, debt-ridden post-socialist order. We close with the contradictions of Mongolian democracy—a political form that has delivered elections without self-determination and development without collective prosperity.
Mongolia is vast, roughly the size of Western and Central Europe combined, yet home to fewer than four million people. Its terrain resists the cartographic imagination of bounded statehood: no natural frontiers mark its edges and the steppe itself expands across what are now international borders, shading in the south into the Gobi Desert and in the north into forest and mountain. Yet the Western conception of the open steppe as a smooth nomadic space obscures the sovereign relations that long governed the rotation of pastures, land access and usage, while Mongolia’s apparent openness is composed of distinct ecological zones—desert, semi-arid grassland, mountain steppe, taiga—and, increasingly, cities: the capital Ulaanbaatar, the mining city Erdenet and the industrial centre Darkhan among the largest. The country’s northern borders were contoured through treaties with Tsarist Russia and finalized with the proclamation of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924, whereas the southern border with China was not officially demarcated until 1962. The nation-state form here is essentially a twentieth-century development, but its history remains obscured by the mythologies of the post-communist present. In Mongolia, national independence is the supreme political value, but the Mongolian nation was, historically, an unlikely construct, geopolitically fraught in its making, and still shadowed by existential uncertainty.
At the start of the twentieth century, political authority on the steppe did not rest on a shared national consciousness, but flowed through aristocratic genealogies, houses and lineages. Mongol commoners did not share ancestry with the nobility, since aristocratic status depended on exclusive claims of descent from royal ancestors. The Mongolian term for nation, ulus, once referred to the people, animals and movable goods apportioned to a Mongol prince; common origin was not at stake. In the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols, Chinggis Khan was praised for having unified the ulus, ‘the people of the felt-walled tents’.footnote5 Today, this passage is often read retrospectively, as if it named Chinggis as the first lawgiver and founder of the Mongolian nation. But this is a nationalist anachronism. What it described was the formation of an empire out of contending pastoral aristocracies. Chinggis Khan ruled over an imperial sea of peoples, not a nation in the contemporary sense. The political grammar of the steppe is preserved, in distorted form, in one of the few Mongolian words absorbed into English: ‘horde’. Derived from ordon, the term referred not to a chaotic mass but a mobile royal court—a form of sovereignty in motion. Authority inhered not in bounded territory but in the dynastic household and its retinue; it was ordered through genealogy, rank and itinerant kingship. When no single sovereign prevailed, power was exercised through a ‘headless state’ of aristocratic elites.footnote6